The A-Team (thing)

Hey Foo! Throw that Super Breakout jibba jabba away and get yoself a real cartridge. I pity the fool who don't play my game. It's A-Team for the Atari 2600! All the butt kicking action of the television show contained on one cartridge.

In this game you control BA Baracus on his mission to save Hannibal from the clutches of some unknown evil. Actually you control Mr. T's disembodied head, with no body to be seen anywhere, although your opponents have bodies oddly enough. On the first screen you are in the center of several vertical rows. You can move left and right, and fire in 4 different directions at your green gangster opponents. On the left of the screen the A-Team Space Shuttle slowly rises, when it gets halfway up you warp to the second screen (yes an A-Team Space Shuttle, apparently the A-Team had their very own space ship that you apparently never got to see on the television show). The second screen is completely open, and it pits you against a single seemingly undefeatable foe that fires bouncing shots at the player. You can move and fire in all directions on this screen, but the bouncing shots and undefeatable enemy are hard to avoid for more than a few seconds.

This may have been the only video game ever made about the A-Team, which is sort of a shame, as the series could really be done some justice with a modern 3-D engine, and a little tongue in cheek humor.

This game is emulated by all the popular Atari 2600 emulators (Z26, Stella, etc), which is your best bet for playing this game, as the actual cartridge is very hard to find.

This game was originally called Saboteur and it had nothing to with the A-Team at all. Atari decided to cash in on the A-Team craze, so they quickly swapped a few graphics and made Saboteur into a whole new game. But the game was never released because of the video game crash of 1983, the price of the A-Team license was too high to make the game profitable.

The value of this game fluctuates quite a bit. $200 is a good starting point. Always be careful when buying prototype cartridges, as they are very easy to bootleg. A real "A-Team" cartridge will be on a plain black cartridge that says


LOANER CARTRIDGE

A-Team

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        ATARI