Wabbit (video game)

Players assume the role of Billie Sue, a girl who is tending carrots while warding off rabbits named 'wabbits'. The objective of the game is to throw rotten eggs at the wabbits as they appear onscreen, Wabbits appear from ten burrows placed on either side of ten horizontal rows of carrots, and when hit with an egg, they return to their burrow. ==Development and release==

Wabbit was developed by Van Mai, a Vietnamese-American programmer, credited under her maiden name Van Tran,. Mai's family migrated to Dallas, Texas when she was a teenager, and undertook work in the city's school district teaching computer lessons in BASIC. She began work with Apollo responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking programmers. Apollo colleague Dan Oliver stated that Mai impressed the company at interview by pitching an "extremely intense concept" for a game that he considered "20 years ahead of its time". Wabbit was announced in September 1982, and advertised for release on the Atari VCS in October of that year. In November 1982, Apollo filed for Chapter XI bankruptcy during a crash in video game sales. As a result, the game received a limited release and was one of the last published by the developer, as advertising and distribution of the game ceased from bankruptcy. ==Reception==

Wabbit received mixed reviews upon release. Describing the game as "too deliberate for action fans and too one-dimensional for hardened videogamers", E.C. Meade of Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated critiqued the game for being boring and the egg-throwing to be slow. Jim Clark, also writing for the same magazine, framed the game more favorably, saying that shooting the wabbits involved aiming and timing, but considered these mechanics were too difficult for children. Author Brett Weiss retrospectively stated that "The graphics are very nice, but a sense of inevitability and an uneven level of difficulty make the game less fun than it should be." Interviewed by the Foundation, Mai stated that she was proud of herself for working with the limitations of the VCS and had fond memories of her time in the industry, although the company's bankruptcy meant that it took nearly seven years to receive royalties for the game. ==See also==