Quantum (Arcade)
The limitations of early arcade games sometimes lead to creative concepts being born, the need to work with simple graphics meaning you had to consider what could even be realized visually. While 1982 would see the rise of more recognizable characters and creatures in the arcade, Quantum feels like it’s built from this earlier arcade ethos because you can’t get much simpler than the fundamental building blocks of all matter.
Quantum puts particle physics at the forefront although thankfully not as complex as they are in reality. The player controls a sizzling spark that draws a yellow line behind it as it moves, the goal being to earn a high score by rounding up atomic particles that move about the screen. Your main target are the colorful circles the game calls nuclei, the player needing to encircle one completely to lasso them and redeem them for points. Small electrons are also usually present on screen, looking almost like twinkling stars or dust motes depending on where the solid black backdrop sends your mind wandering to. When a nucleus is caught, it will convert nearby electrons into positrons and send them flying off at speed, the player able to earn extra points if they can quickly snag these before they reach the edge of the screen and disappear. Electrons provide a paltry 20 points each compared to a nucleus granting 300 and a positron 200, but outside some fairly easy early stages, going for positrons is often going to be too dangerous to justify as more dangerous particles and outright fictional concepts are introduced to this sub-atomic score chase.
When the game starts, the first few levels are actually fairly tepid, the player meant to get used to rounding up nuclei in a low pressure environment. The only danger is ramming into a nucleus this early on, and while this initially isn’t much of a threat, the more crowded screens later down the line make an accidental crash into one much more likely. Part of the likelihood for future collisions comes from the game’s sensitive control method, Quantum relying on a trackball that technically allows for greater precision in movement but also comes with the downside of the game expecting a good deal of exceptional control from the player. When you are drawing your yellow lines to snag nuclei, the line will gradually fade, meaning you need to be swift to complete the loop. At the same time, if anything collides with your line, it will snip it, and with particles getting faster as you progress, it becomes increasingly likely you’ll need to completely encircle a target in a split second lest your line get clipped. This need to be so quick means there’s a strong chance you’ll overcompensate or make the loop too tight, accidentally crashing into a target instead of weaving deftly around them. Were the dangers consistently passive like the nuclei then this might not be too demanding, but by level 5, the game puts away the quick and simple early designs and starts introducing you to some real danger.
When photons first appear, they seem like a reasonable complication. Small spinning triangles that rapidly change color, photons twirl across the screen in a set path, meaning as long as you don’t linger at the edges, you can often see them and change your movement to accommodate their travel. The longer you spend in a level though, the quicker photons get, meaning eventually they’ll be zipping across the screen like deadly comets, the player having to devote more time to actively dodging them. Notably, there’s a region at the bottom of the screen below your lives counter and the current level display where you can safely hide from some other dangers that crop up, but photons can enter this safe zone so you can’t just hide and wait for your chance to strike there. Photons don’t feel like too much of a disruption on their own, and they actually feel like they’d pair well with a fundamental change to the nuclei you’re targeting. Nuclei start forming bonds, long lines extending between the colored dots and gradually turning red. When red, a bond is lethal to cross, and this dangerous period does last a fair bit, meaning sometimes you’re left sitting there and waiting for the bonds to turn back to their safer white coloration. If photons were zipping by and you had to weave around red bonds and photons, it would feel like an achievable challenge made a little tougher by the touchy trackball, but there are more dangers in Quantum and they perhaps push the game a bit too far into less enjoyable difficulty.
Splitters are purple stars that will eventually split into more little stars should you fail to capture and eliminate them in time. Splitters don’t just split once however, the three stars they become in turn splitting into three more stars, the screen likely to be filled with splitters if you can’t nip the threat they pose in the bud. While photons become a consistent threat after their debut, not every level has splitters after they show up, but some will start with more than one present and with so many things on screen it becomes fairly unlikely you’re eliminate the threat before it becomes too late to successfully corral them all. On the bright side, if you die in Quantum, the splitters will revert to their initial state while all snagged nuclei remain gone, so a death might be a valid strategy for actually gaining some room to grab your targets properly. You only get three to five lives to a credit depending on the cabinet settings and similarly the point thresholds for extra lives can be altered but still feel a bit tough to reach more than once, but considering the ease with which a mistake can be made, a tactical death is usually not a clever trick so much as the only reasonable way out of a pickle.
There are two more dangers to worry about in Quantum and they almost feel like proper enemies. Pulsars are small white boxes that will extend out a set of “arms” periodically, these looking a bit like wings before they loop around and connect beneath the box. A pulsar’s arms are lethal to the touch and seem designed specifically to curb attempts to encircle them, a player getting 400 points if they can snag one but at the same time you’ll either need to be quick or perfect with your drawing to wind around them in a way that doesn’t lead to your or your line hitting the arms. Their erratic movements also make it a little hard to box them in, but perhaps surprisingly, the final hazard added is a bit of a tamer danger. Diamond shaped triphons will move around a bit slowly and drop tryds, these gradually disappearing but serving as a stationary blocker for as long as they’re around. Snagging a tryd provides a nice 300 points and it seems like there could be a sort of risk versus reward element to trying to grab them amidst the increasing on-screen chaos, but by the time they’re introduced, it’s likely you’ve either become overwhelmed or learned an unfortunate tactic that also saps some of the fun out of the experience.
With decent enough trackball use, the player can eventually come across a bland but effective tactic. Make a large enough circle quickly enough and you can start cleaning up the screen, snagging any stragglers after with more attentive drawing. Even if the initial giant circle draw doesn’t work, you can often just keep winding around the screen as fast as you can manage and potentially encircle a good deal of what’s available. A pulsar or splitter in the right spot can prevent this strategy from doing too much in certain stages and then those come down to peskier attempts to find openings where there are very few, and the speedy photons do make it so if you can’t grab pull off the trick in the opening seconds, you’ll lose your chance to do so safely. This opening encirclement trick can invalidate some levels while making others into actually decent challenges as the wily particles are fewer in number and you can properly respond to them, but it does feel like Quantum’s balance is all over the place and rather dependent on your luck with an opening lasso, those moments where a dangerous few particles keep you moving and adjusting your approach not as common as chaos or low pressure challenges.
Quantum is willing to let you start at later levels, any odd level between 1 and 9 selectable when you put in your credit. This means you can skip the basic beginning once you understand the game, but it’s hard to say there’s a sweet spot to start at since the difficult feels dependent on your openings in each stage. If you do manage to place at the top of the scoreboard though, there is a cute touch where you can write in your name with the trackball, the player encouraged to leave a proper signature rather than the typical three initials still utilized for lower rankings. Whether you can match the smooth calligraphy of the game’s designer Betty Ryan as she sits at the top of the default high score table is another matter, but the game does have fun with the trackball controller, the player even needing to select things by encircling them like when they’re picking their starting level or entering the traditional letters for any rank below first. It’s not the kind of cute touch that really gives the game much personality, but it does make something normally mundane a little bit more interesting.
THE VERDICT: Quantum can’t quite hit the mark between simple and overcomplicated where its play style would be most effective. When the danger’s too low it’s too easy to complete, but too quickly things like the splitter, pulsar, and bonds work together to make cluttered screens where you have little room to operate. A bland tactic of making large swoops at the start of a stage can sometimes thin things down so you can focus on a more manageable handful of concerns, but Quantum expects expert trackball control a good deal of the time but also crumples underneath precise control, it hardly likely the game will find an ideal player who can manage things well while still being meaningfully challenged.
And so, I give Quantum for arcade machines…
A BAD rating. Quantum provides inconsistent entertainment that is contingent mostly on some rapid effective loops at the start of a level, things too easily going awry in later stages as bonds start forming and splitters start filling the screen. Quantum is an arcade game so it doesn’t want you to play too long without needing to put in more quarters, but the shift from the empty early levels to hectic cluttered messes found later on doesn’t really have the kind of entertaining middle ground that would ensure you’re fed enough enjoyable content to come back and see if you can push further into the overly difficult stages. Those moments where some early circle drawing in a level trims down the dangers to a small handful do seem to get closest to where Quantum should have aimed to cultivate interest from the player, but the snowball effect present in most every level be it from speeding up photons or bonds and splitters forming means soon you’ll be shoved out of that sweet spot. Quantum’s trackball controls are definitely an intended part of the appeal, it wouldn’t double down on them and have you using them for menus and signing your name otherwise, but it could be possible the perceived preciseness such a control method affords lead to everything being overtuned. Some skilled players can whip around the screen expertly, but trying to curb the effectiveness of such play styles means there are lean pickings for other types of gamers.
The spark that lead to Quantum being based on atomic particles makes its simple looking action feel a little more creative, but with little visual appeal in the growing arcade scene of 1982, it’s little surprise this Atari venture is mostly forgotten. Other trackball games like Centipede two years earlier not only looked nicer but their precise control didn’t invalidate the difficulty nor lead to the level of danger being tuned too high. Quantum unfortunately lacks any strong reason to drudge it up from the past, this game of electrons and photons barely a blip in Atari’s storied arcade history.