''Arcade Volleyball'' is a

sports video game A sports video game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. Most sports have been recreated with a game, including team sports, track and field, extreme sports, and combat sports. Some games emphasize actually playing the sport (s ...

written by Rhett Anderson for the

Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness ...

and published as a

type-in program A type-in program or type-in listing was computer source code printed in a home computer magazine or book. It was meant to be entered via the keyboard by the reader and then saved to cassette tape or floppy disk. The result was a usable game, ...

in the June 1988 issue of ''

COMPUTE!'s Gazette ''Compute!'s Gazette'' (), stylized as ''COMPUTE!'s Gazette'', was a computer magazine of the 1980s, directed at users of Commodore's 8-bit home computers. Announced as ''The Commodore Gazette'', it was a Commodore-only daughter magazine of the ...

''. It was ported to

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

and

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

by different programmers and was included in a 12-game collection called ''Best Gazette Games''. The author released the game later into the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

Gameplay

The game features teams of one or two players (depending on the platform) shaped like balls with legs who hit the volleyball with their heads. The game is played from a side-view perspective, and the ball can be bounced off of the walls and ceiling without penalty. Scoring is based on the original volleyball scoring rules, where only the serving team can score on each volley, and 15 points are required to win the game. The same head is permitted to hit the ball multiple times, but the team may only hit the ball three times while the ball is on their side.

Development

''Arcade Volleyball'' was originally published as a hexadecimal

for MLX in the June 1988 edition of Commodore 64 magazine ''

''. The article was written by Rhett Anderson and David Hensley, Jr., who had also published a similar game called ''Basketball Sam & Ed'' in the July 1987 issue. The game featured two heads per team, controlled by a single player, which moved and jumped together. It was not necessary to win the game by 2 points; when either side reached 15 points, the game would pause and ask if the user wanted to play again. By default the game was played between two human players, but it was possible to modify the game so that one player could play against the computer by typing "

POKE Poke may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Poke (''Ender's Game''), a fictional character * Poke (game), a two-player card game * Poke, a fictional bar owner in the television series '' Treme'' * The Poke, a British satirical website Fo ...

2065,1" to type the number 1 into the memory address that controlled the number of players. The authors referred to this as an optional practice mode or warm up mode and warned that the computer opponent was not very challenging. The game was inspired by ''

Pong ''Pong'' is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released in 1972. It was one of the earliest arcade video games; it was created by Allan Alcor ...

'' (actually, the two-paddle "Hockey" variant of ''Pong'') and programmed by Rhett Anderson.

Ports

Rhett Anderson and Randy Thompson wrote an

version of ''Arcade Volleyball'' from scratch. It was included as an executable program, with

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

, on the

cover disk Covermount (sometimes written cover mount) is the name given to storage media (containing software and or audiovisual media) or other products (ranging from toys to flip-flops) packaged as part of a magazine or newspaper. The name comes from the ...

of the Fall 1989 edition of ''Compute!'s Amiga Resource''. The Amiga version differs from the Commodore 64 version by only having one player per team (a green head versus a red head), requires a 2-point margin of victory, it is no longer possible for the ball to go under the net, and playing against the computer is a standard option.* The

version was sold in a 9-game collection called ''COMPUTE!'s Best PC Games''. It was written with

Borland Turbo C Turbo C is a discontinued integrated development environment (IDE) and compiler for the C programming language from Borland. First introduced in 1987, it was noted for its integrated development environment, small size, fast compile speed, com ...

and has the same physics and gameplay as the Amiga version, but uses 4-color CGA graphics and PC speaker sound.RGB Classic Games
/ref>

Reception

References

External links

''Arcade Volleyball''
at Gamebase 64 *{{moby game, id=/arcade-volleyball, name=''Arcade Volleyball'' 1988 video games Amiga games Commodore 64 games DOS games Volleyball video games Multiplayer and single-player video games Public-domain software with source code Commercial video games with freely available source code Video games developed in the United States