Dominos
Promotional flyer
Developer(s)	Atari, Inc.
Platform(s)	Arcade
Release	January 1977
Genre(s)	Snake

Atari's Dominos is a one, two or four-player video action game packaged in its own distinctively styled upright cabinet that rest directly on the floor.

Gameplay

Gameplay is a variation of the snake genre, in which players compete by surrounding each other with lines of dominos. Players change direction via a set of four directional buttons representing up, down, right, and left respectively. A player loses when they hit a wall, their own dominos, or their opponent's, at which point all the dominos in their line "fall" down. At the end of each round, a point is awarded to the winner of that round until the end point goal is reached. The point goal can be 3, 4, 5, or 6 points.^[1][2]

Development

Dominoes programmer is listed as Dennis Koble.^[3] He had joined Atari in 1976 and was only the fourth programmer at the company. His first project was Sprint 2 (1976) made with Lyle Rains and Dan Van Elderen.^[4] Koble stated despite being credited as the programmer, Rains was the brains behind the game, stating Rains suggested the concept, drew the graphics and created the AI for the computer controlled player.^[3]

Following the release of Blockade by Gremlin Industries, Atari wanted to make their own version of the game. Koble said the game was not stolen from Blockade, stating that prior to Gremlin's release, he had seen similar snake video games on ARPANET and CompuServe, which made him feel he was not stealing Gremlin's game.^[4] Among the additions made to the game, Koble added a computer-controlled opponent, giving the game a single-player mode.^[3]

Koble claimed it was made in a very short amount of time, estimating about 13 weeks from to complete. He recalled that the game was made when Atari was still a "young company and just trying to survive as they made the transition into using microprocessors. They didn't quite have the standards they developed later."^[4]

Release and reception

Dominos was shipped in January 1977.^[5] Following Dominos, Koble went on to program Avalanche, his final game for Atari.^[6] Atari would release another snake, Surround for the Atari 2600 on September 1977.^[7]

From retrospective reviews, Bret Alan Weiss wrote in Allgame that Dominos was a simple game a simplistic game in terms of both visuals and gameplay and that it was superior as a two-player game, but it was "more fun than it looks, which isn't saying much"^[8]