Jawbreaker (Atari 2600)

Well over 500 games were released for the Atari 2600 during its lifetime. It's still amazing to me that the NES surpassed that at more that 600 releases. Given what had to be a much smaller audience, the Atari 2600 number is still impressive. As you can imagine, with so many titles, some are bound to be relatively obscure. Enter Jawbreaker by TigerVision. Actually, that's not really fair. Jawbreaker was a fairly well known computer game at the time done by Sierra On-Line initially for the Atari 8-bit line and then for the Apple II, Commodore 64, PC (DOS) and finally ported by Tigervision for the Atari 2600. Still, it was a clone of Pac-Man and is very obscure by those standards.

At the time however, Jawbreaker was a hit on the Atari 8-bit line. It was awarded 'Best Computer Action Game' in 1982 and appeared on lists of top games for that system. Unfortunately, because of technical limitation, the Atari 2600 version was really a different game. Still generally maze themed but not the same and not as good. To make matters worse, some of the computer versions, specifically the Commodore 64 version, was actually a port of this version and not the original Pac-Man clone. And to make matters more confusing, this new version was ported to some other computer systems as Jawbreaker II.

Above is a review of Jawbreaker for the Atari 2600 from the Fall 1983 issue of Video & Arcade games. The best praise that they can muster up is that it is "one of the better games for small children". This iteration is not as complex or as difficult as the original and it's a shame the original was never ported to the Commodore 64. Seems like it would have made a good game there, at least comparable to the Atari 8-bit version. In this version, instead of a typical maze like in Pac-Man, you simply have several horizontal corridors to traverse. Grab all the candy, avoid the faces and pop through the entrance to the next corridor. It is simplistic compared to the original and far easier to master, hence the description as being a good game for small children.