COURTESY GRAPHITE LAB
Mr. Run and Jump goes through obstacles and challenges to find his dog in a new game from Graphite Lab. This is the modern version, but there's also a version for the Atari VCS.
An independent game studio in St. Louis has created a new game for a very old console.
Graphite Lab, an independent gaming studio headquartered at Maryville University, has a new game, Mr. Run and Jump, coming out at the end of this month. It will be released in all the places you expect — Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and 5 — but you can also pick up an old school cartridge and play it on your Atari 2600 Video Computer System.
The Atari VCS, as it's called, was created in 1977 and was among the first home gaming consoles. At the time, most people went to the arcade to play video games. The VCS was famous for games such as Space Invaders, which look like stone-age technology today. During its heyday in the early ’80s, the company bought Pac-Man, but Atari lost ground to Nintendo and stopped making the console in 1992.
Still, it remains a classic console among gamers, and hobbyists have been making games for it for years. But Mr. Run and Jump is the first official cartridge that Atari will be releasing since 1990. It all started because Graphite Lab engineer John Mikula wanted to see if he could code a game for the old system. It was a passion project, says Matt Raithel, owner of Graphite Lab.
“As an engineer with lots of respect for the craft, he wanted to see what it was like to make games for a console that started our industry,” Raithel explains. “He saw it as a challenge, kind of like climbing … the first mountain ever climbed.”
When Atari saw the game, it liked it so much that it agreed to publish it.
Mikula came up with the characters for Mr. Run and Jump. The main character has to … well, run and jump through obstacles to collect gems and defeat a threat to his hometown called the terrifying void. Raithel says it is akin to a Mario Brothers adventure.
The Atari VCS version will have “80 screens of platforming action across six different worlds,” according to a press release. The scoring for the game starts at 25,000 points and decreases for each second that elapses. Colliding with an enemy drops your score by 100 points. The cartridge will be available for $59.99 on atari.com starting July 31. Only 1,983 copies of the game are being sold.
Courtesy Graphite Lab
Mr. Run and Jump on the Atari 2600 Video Computer System or VCS has toned down graphics.
The only way to play the VCS version is on the Atari console. The version that will be coming out everywhere else is a thoroughly modern game. It has “similar mechanics” but is “way more complex and has a lot more modern features like time trials,” Raithel explains.
Raithel says that this is not the company’s first collaboration with Atari, which still produces modern games for other consoles. They also worked together on the game Kombinera, a puzzle game.
Raithel says it’s a dream to be at Graphite Lab. “I want to make games matter here in my hometown,” he says. “We’ve invested in developing a studio and growing the talent.”
This story has been updated to clarify that this is the first official release from Atari for the VCS console since 1990.
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