The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Peter Pack-Rat
You will love this amazingly well-crafted, beautifully animated arcade platformer where you retrieve items from complex vertical levels.
PREFERRED PLATFORM: Arcade
RELEASE DATE: 1985
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Atari Games
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
It was in the mid-1980s at a birthday party at Showbiz Pizza that I first discovered Peter Pack-Rat, an unassuming arcade game with some above-average graphics and a fun premise about retrieving items scattered around a map and bringing them back home. About an hour and a pocketful of tokens later, I was not only trying to get everyone else there to play it, but also found myself desperate to play it some more. Sadly, the cabinet soon disappeared, and it wasn’t until more than a decade later that I was able to play it again thanks to the wonders of emulation. Even today, the game has yet to be re-released in any of the Atari compilations, and that’s a tragedy, because it’s certainly one of the stronger titles produced by Atari Games following their split from the console division, and it holds up very well today.
The basic premise of Peter Pack-Rat is that you start out in your safe house with a collection of silhouettes that need to be filled in by items you’ll collect around each of the game’s three maps: a junkyard, a sewer and a tall tree. Each level has different hazards and enemies to avoid, but each also offers some interesting ways to get around, like climbing through tubes, jumping on diving boards, climbing ladders, sliding down slippery tunnels, swimming or even grabbing ahold of stunned flying creatures to take to the skies.
Peter has to successfully make it home with the missing items (and they can be banked if he brings back an incomplete collection), but he can also throw whatever he’s currently carrying in his backpack to stun enemies. Even better, Peter can throw items in different directions and have them return to him once he hits a foe, allowing him to keep what he has and to attack enemies that are above or below. Because there is a surprisingly high variety of enemies on each stage, you have to learn their individual zones, patterns and timing to successfully avoid them. Flying enemies and spiders are among the most dangerous, but since they can be ridden for a short while once they’ve been stunned, they’re also the most useful. This helps to give Peter Pack-Rat an interesting sense of risk and reward that is surprisingly sophisticated given the game’s seeming simplicity.
Peter Pack-Rat is also made accessible by its beautiful graphics thanks to the skill of veteran animator Debbie Hayes (who’d worked on several feature films prior to the game). Each of the characters moves fluidly and has a distinctively cartoonish presence, and Peter himself looks fantastic as he runs, jumps and crawls through each of the game’s well-crafted environments. Because the game has such a sense of verticality, the levels are given room to have upper and lower regions that are distinctly different but feel like part of a cohesive whole. For example, the sewers level starts out underground with grimy slides, spider webs and a strange concoction of tubes that seem to send Peter to random exits, but there’s also a street above that rests atop dripping pipes and which is patrolled by creatures like cats and snakes. In the Junkyard level, you can climb electrical poles and walk along a wire towards the top of the screen, but you can also descend down into a series of caverns underground. The hectic tree level is patrolled by owls, but there’s also a sense of safety if you’re up in the branches; the ground is a very dangerous place for a packrat to be because there’s little opportunity for escape.
While the early levels of Peter Pack-Rat change and open up as you traverse the earlier difficulty levels and find things growing increasingly more complicated, the game peaks around level 16 or so and continues throwing the same basic challenges at you after awhile, leading to a rather repetitive rotation of the three basic levels. Even so, things move so fast and get so hectic that it’s still fun to play. One minor annoyance is that the collectible items don’t always match their silhouettes in Peter’s nest, and this is apparently due to some last-minute changes that happened to remove potentially objectionable objects from a game targeted at children. This doesn’t impact the experience too strongly, however, and it’s not too hard to figure out that anything that’s shining ought to be picked up regardless of the silhouette it matches.
I’m hopeful we’ll one day get an Atari Games collection that provides legal re-releases of their mid-1980s arcade classics, particularly since some of their less popular titles didn’t receive many cabinets and are hard to track down in their original form today. Until then, your best bet for enjoying Peter Pack-Rat is utilizing an emulator like MAME or locating one of the so-so ports for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC or ZX Spectrum, all of which are inferior to the arcade original.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!
Thanks! Let me know how you like it.
gonna have to track this rat down. love the graphic style. good read!