Gotcha (video game)

Gotcha is a two-player maze game in which one player attempts to catch the other. The maze is composed of a repeating pattern of elements set in multiple columns on the screen. The "Pursuer" is represented by a square, while the "Pursued" is identified by a plus sign. As the Pursuer gets closer to the Pursued, an electronic beeping sound plays at an increasing rate until the Pursuer reaches the Pursued. Whenever the Pursued is caught, the Pursuer scores a point, the maze disappears for a brief moment, and the Pursuer is moved to a random position on the right side of the screen. There is no score for the Pursued, so determining who won is left to the players. The maze itself is continually changing, with two invisible lines half a screen apart scanning down the maze and overwriting maze elements. Above the maze is the Pursuer's score and the time elapsed in the game. Each game is for a set period of time. When time runs out, the game enters attract mode, where the score resets and the square and plus sign begin bouncing around the maze in a diagonal pattern as the maze continues to change. Each game costs a quarter. The time per round is adjustable per machine over a range from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. ==Development==

Development on Gotcha began in July 1973, as Atari's fourth game after Pong, Space Race, and Pong Doubles. The company was interested in producing a very different game from their previous success of Pong, as they felt that innovative design was what would separate them from their competitors, which they saw as flooding the market with Pong clones rather than making new video games. In an August 3, 1973, memo to the Atari engineering department, co-founder Nolan Bushnell laid out plans for the company to create a prototype 20-player version of Gotcha in time for a trade show later that year, though no such game was ever made. Instead, released at the same time as Gotcha and showcased at the early November 1973 Music Operators of America (MOA) Music & Amusement Machines Exposition were two additional versions of Gotcha: one with a tinted color overlay, and a true multi-color version of Gotcha with red, blue, and green colors. The color version of Gotcha was not widely produced, with between 20 and 100 machines released, but is believed to be the first color arcade game ever made, released over a month before Wimbledon, a color Pong clone. ==Legacy==

Gotcha was not commercially successful; later sources have described it as receiving a "lukewarm reception" and "arousing little more than controversy". Ralph Baer, however, claims it sold 3,000 units, which would make it the seventh best-selling arcade video game of 1973 according to him. Additionally, despite Gotchas prominence as Atari's fourth game and their second game not related to Pong, the 1973 arcade video game market was largely dominated by Pong clones; while Pong was the fourth arcade video game ever produced, Gotcha was approximately the twentieth, with nearly all the other games released before and after Gotcha through the end of the year Pong clones. Gotcha was the first arcade maze video game, though non-commercial maze-based video games had been developed as early as the 1959 Mouse in the Maze computer game. ==References==