Cloud 9 – An Unreleased 1983 Atari Arcade Game (Review)

Cloud 9
Platform: Arcade
Unreleased Completed Prototype
Designed by Paul M. Resch
Developed by Atari
Originally Utilized Trackball Controls
NEVER BEEN RELEASED

Originally this was going to be a bonus review for Atari 50, which I’m FINALLY devoting real time to. Part One has been up for a while and covers the original games created specifically for Atari 50, along with Yars’ Revenge for the Atari 2600 since it ties directly to one of those games. While I work on Part Two of the Definitive Review, which covers the special features and the arcade games, I figure I should get some content up, and as far as I can tell, no website has ever done a critical review of this game. So, that’s kind of neat, right?

Digital Eclipse, this is one you really should rethink putting in Atari 50 as a curio. It’s not amazing or anything, but it’s certainly worth a look, and it should not be banished to oblivion like it has been. I’m guessing the hold-up is the art assets like the cabinet, bezel, etc. I have faith you can come up with something, even if you just junk the original 1983 art and create something new. Only one cabinet was made (maybe, I can’t find a lot of info on it) and my argument is since it was technically unreleased, that means technically there’s no “official” art and you can come up with whatever you want.

Cloud 9 is so obscure that it isn’t even mentioned in Atari 50. It was originally intended to be Dona Bailey‘s follow-up to Centipede under the name “Weather War” until Bailey bailed because the tech didn’t allow all her ideas. Paul M. Resch took over, but Cloud 9 was apparently killed in route testing with even worse results than Akka Arrh, and there’s scant information about Cloud 9 out there. From what I could find, Cloud 9 was tested at a single location where the game was met with a disastrous non-response, and that was that. Like Akka Arrh, I get why that happened. It’s a gallery shooter developed long after that genre’s peak, with abstract enemies that just don’t stand out. This thing looks boring, doesn’t it? Here’s the scoresheet. Yawn, right?

“36 year old woman yells at clouds” could be the headline, but really, a game where you shoot clouds that have no personality feels doomed to fail in the wacky world of 1980s arcades, doesn’t it. Would it have killed them to put a frowny face on them? Maybe eyebrows slanted down to make them really angry? It’s just too generic and wouldn’t have stood out.

The gameplay is like Space Invaders where aliens are replaced with aerosol. You have to shoot clouds and avoid their raindrops, lightning strikes that cause fire, plus various generic enemies. Unique to the genre, you start off the game in an entirely enclosed area and have to start each game by creating your own openings to shoot the clouds. My father immediately recognized I would dig this a lot since it means you literally begin each game by creating your own strategy. At first, I thought he was right too, but rain doesn’t kill you. It only stuns you, and you need to clear bricks out to have a chance at killing the basement demon. So really, the bricks are just in the way.

The raindrops don’t kill you but rather just stun you. That becomes a problem when they increase their fire rate. From the fifth wave onward, you sort of have to bob and weave and shoot at their sides because they spew a continuous stream of projectiles with no elegance. Thankfully it’s one of those games where you can walk through one side of the screen and you pop out the other. You’ll need it for both the clouds and to avoid the fire which sometimes chases and sometimes doesn’t.

Cloud 9 went the opposite trajectory of Akka Arrh in that I liked it a lot at first, but the more I played it, the less excited I became, and ultimately the game was clinging onto its YES! for dear life. Each background is broken-up into four different waves, and the problem is once you finish the first round of four waves, the difficulty dramatically spikes, but the fun doesn’t spike with it. There’s a secondary threat in the flooding basement that’s a non-entity in the first four waves, but that water fills up much quicker from wave five onward. When the water passes the basement, you die, and that’s where the game has a big problem. The basement angle feels like a band-aid because the surface hazards don’t provide enough challenge. But jeez, it can flood too quickly. Every drop of rain that reaches the top of the basement causes the flood to go up a tick. You can use your body to intercept the rain (deliberately or otherwise) but eventually waves will start with it flooding up too much.

In addition to the flooding, the clouds are capable of healing. The clouds shrink with every shot, up to three times,

A bigger problem is that the clouds can quickly regain lost size and even respawn after death. It’s the respawning part that really hurt Cloud 9 the most in my eyes and almost dropped this into the NO! pile. There were moments where I killed a cloud only for it to immediately return, with no rhyme or reason why it was happening. Now it’s not a deal breaker by itself. A similar problem is the one blemish on Sega/Gremlin’s unsung classic Carnival, but that game has tons of fun targets and the best scoring system of any shooting gallery game. Cloud 9 isn’t as good or addictive as Carnival, and the fact that a dead target isn’t DEAD-dead if you don’t finish a level fast enough is so annoying. At first I thought maybe there’s actually a set amount of clouds you have to kill since it does seem to eventually stop, but that can’t be it since, when clouds return from the dead, they start as the smallest size. But their contribution to the flood gain in my final run I beat level 13 in just a matter of seconds when I seem to have been possessed by the spirit of a green beret and couldn’t miss.

Having a variety of playfield limitations based on the background is a novel idea. In this stage, you can climb these mountains for closer shots at the clouds. I like the idea, but it does become frustrating when some stages don’t have the climbable backgrounds. Also note that sometimes the character is red and sometimes it’s blue. You can give up one hit point when you’re blue, and you can regain that hit point by submerging yourself in the flooded basement. You DO NOT have time to do this in later levels.

On the other hand, the trackball controls are excellent, the shooting is quick and smooth, and the action is non-stop. It also has one of the most accurate uses of “handicap” for continuing among Atari coin-ops. When I had my (then) best run and ate a game over, the continue system allows you to start at the level before the one you lost on. When I beat that level again, the handicap bonus it gave me put my score where it had previously been, more or less. It’s much closer to being the correct score than any other game that uses this system. So while it did frustrate me quite a bit, Cloud 9 did manage to barely cling onto a YES! But boy, did it fight tooth and nail to ruin itself. But yeah, it’s fine. And I should note that, had this been in Atari 50, I would have awarded bonus value for a rare historic curio, so they really add it to Atari 50 in a future update.

Barely a YES! is still a YES!, though it was close. By level 17, I think it’s safe to say it’s not so much a rain anymore as it is a tropical storm, and the act of digging yourself out of the basement is no longer a cute novelty. It’s now f*cking annoying. Look how high up the water is before I even dug myself out!

Okay, so the characters are generic and forgettable and it becomes maddeningly difficult thanks to the flood increasing at an unreasonable rate. I’d say it makes sense this failed in route testing, except there’s actual fun to still be had here, warts and all and the problem seems to be that nobody even wanted to try it in the first place. That’s understandable, too. Look at those graphics, again. They’re not bad graphics, but by 1983/84, gaming characters had evolved. Personality was now a big part of the arcade game experience, and this is very much lacking in that area. I can’t imagine a game where you fight the weather itself appealing to children of any era without putting in effort to give that weather personality. Again, something as simple as putting faces on the clouds would have done wonders for this, and they needed a new hero sprite. But Atari could have used Cloud 9 as a template and re-sprited it as something else. It doesn’t HAVE to be clouds you fight. I totally get why the route test failed for Cloud 9, but like with Akka Arrh, that one route test shouldn’t have been the forever death of the game.
Verdict: YES!
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