Crackpots

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Crackpots is a simple Atari 2600 game from 1983, designed by Dan Kitchen and published by Activision. You play as Potsy, a gardener on a Brooklyn rooftop. Bugs try to crawl into six windows, and you drop pots from the roof to stop them. Each level has four waves of twelve bugs. If you beat all waves, the game gets faster and tougher. If six or more bugs get inside, part of the building is eaten away and you must replay the level. Bugs move differently by color: black go straight up, blue wiggle side to side, red move diagonally, and green zig-zag.

Dan Kitchen developed Crackpots after joining Activision with his brother Garry Kitchen in 1982. Dan learned Atari 2600 coding from Garry, who had studied reverse engineering. The idea started as a flowerpot concept and became Crackpots after a lunch conversation. The insects were originally called arachnids, but Activision’s marketing changed them to sewer bugs. Activision also pushed a “no flickering” rule, so Dan spent weeks fixing graphics. The game came out during the 1983 video game crash and sold for about $30, which hurt its success.

Dan even planned a sequel to his brother’s Keystone Kapers with a Western setting, but Crackpots remained his first Atari 2600 game. In 2018 he found a surviving copy of an unfinished sequel called Gold Rush and planned to release it. Critics were mixed: a 1983 review gave it a B; later critics gave it a C, noting good graphics and gameplay but limited depth. Crackpots later appeared in Activision Classics (1998) and Activision Anthology (2002). In 2020 Dan Kitchen said Crackpots is one of his favorite projects.