Kaboom! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Activision

Founded in October 1979 in Sunnyvale, California, Activision was the first third-party, independent console video game developer. The company was founded by former developers at Atari who were displeased by their treatment at the company. After the "video game crash" of 1983, Activision diversified, changed its name to Mediagenic, and eventually became Activision Publishing, Inc. "Kaboom!" was released in North America for the Atari 2600 in 1981, for the Atari 5200 in 1983, and for the Atari 8-bit in 1983.

Answer: Larry Caplan

Toru Iwatani was the creator of "Pac-Man", Bill Gates was the founder of Microsoft, and Steve Jobs founded Apple. In 1979, Larry Kaplan co-founded the video game design company Activision. He earned a degree in Computer Science at UC-Berkley. He also wrote "Street Racer" and "Air-Sea Battle".

Answer: paddle

"Kaboom!" is a paddle game. The paddle game control consists of a round wheel and fire buttons. The paddle controller was first used with Atari's "Pong" game in 1972.

Answer: smile

A character called the "Mad Bomber" moves across the top of the screen in "Kaboom!" dropping bombs which must be caught and diffused in buckets of water. He wears a black and white striped shirt and a bandit's mask. The Mad Bomber maintains an unhappy face when dropping bombs but smiles when a player misses a bomb.

The amount of points a player scores for catching bombs depends on the speed of the bomb and which wave of bombs it is in.

Answer: Opens his mouth in surprise

Normally, the Mad Bomber smiles when a bomb is missed, but after a player amasses 10,000 points, he is shocked to see a bomb missed and so opens his mouth in surprise instead. A 10,000 score is, however, highly unlikely, and even 3,000 is considered a triumph.

When the game was first released, as a special promo, players scoring above 3,000 could get a Bucket Brigade patch from Activision by sending in a photograph of their screen.

Answer: He loses 100 points

Each player begins "Kaboom!" with three buckets. Players lose a bucket every time they fail to catch a bomb. The game is over when a player loses all of his buckets. When a bomb is missed, the missed bomb, as well as all the other bombs on screen, explode in a chain reaction. Points are not lost, however, for missing bombs.

A player can increase the difficulty level by pressing the red button on the paddle. This will make the buckets half their original size.

Answer: 1,000

Players earn points for each bomb they catch. When a player has earned 1,000 points, he or she gets another bucket. A player may have a maximum of three buckets at any given time. The longer the game lasts, the faster the bombs fall, making it more difficult to keep up as the game progresses.

The maximum amount of points that could hypothetically be scored in "Kaboom!", with perfect play, is 999,999.

Answer: Best Audio-Visual Effects

"Asteroids" won Videogame of the Year while "Quest for the Rings" won Most Innovative Game. "Missile Command" won Best Solitaire Game. For its explosions and chain reactions, however, "Kaboom!" won in the Best Audio-Visual Effects category. The Arcade ("Arkie") Awards were first handed out in 1980 (for games released in 1979).

Answer: Avalanche

Designed by Dennis Koble, "Avalanche" was released in 1978 land involved catching falling rocks. In an interview with Digit Press, Larry Caplan said, "basically, I just ripped off Avalanche, but I had to fit it into 2048 bytes and limited to VCS graphics. So, unable to display a bunch of rocks on top, I changed it to a single figure dropping bombs."

Answer: Lost Luggage

"Eggomania" was also similar to "Kaboom!" but used chicken and eggs. In "Lost Luggage," the player tries to collect luggage that falls from an overhead luggage carousel by controlling skycaps. The game was programmed by Ed Salvo.