The Story of I Project

Congratulations! Your mission was a success!
You, your helicopter and the other two helicopters of your squadron did very well and fought the enemy's army bravely. Your new objective sounds easy: escape the enemy territory and return to your home carrier.
Due to fuel shortage you have to take the shortest way which follows a river flowing through a long canyon heading directly to the sea. Unfortunately all your ammunition is depleted and so you have to avoid colliding with objects just by your flying skills! Good luck, pilots!

The Introduction Sequence

The cartridge starts up by displaying the titlescreen showing the game name and copyright information. This screen also tells you to press "Fire!" and start the game.

The game name is a reminisence to one of my favorite classic horizontal shooters. "I project" can also be interpreted as a verb expressing my personal VCS development works by meaning "I am developing something.".

The Game

The game starts with the screen showing a canyon from above (top view) while you have to guide your helicopter and avoid colliding with the different obstacles. The display also shows the current level (left), the remaining amount of available helicopters (middle) and the distance to the goal of this level (right). Shown below is the frequency scanner - use it to dismantle the enemy's homing missiles by pressing the fire button while the scanner is at the correct range. A sound will indicate this range, too.

Your helicopter is able to fly at three levels of height. The dangerous objects in your way are fences, bars, homing missiles and columns. You either have to fly aside the columns, above the fences or above or below the bars. The missile can only be disarmed by the frequency scanner and your fire button.

If the three helicopters of your squadron are destroyed, you will come to the flashing Game Over screen.

Scoring

There is no direct score in I Project, but your progress can be judged by the entered zone and remaining distance. The game consists of 31 zones to pass.

The game ends when all three helicopters of your team are destroyed or when you manage to finish the final zone.

General Game Controls

• You play the game using a joystick plugged into the left controller port of your Atari VCS console.
• You move your helicopter with the joystick. Pushing the joystick up and down makes the helicopter move aside.
• Pushing the joystick left lets the helicopter rise and gain height. Pushing the joystick right makes the helicopter lower its flying height.
• If the current level contains homing missiles heading for you, you have to use the fire button at the right time to disable the missiles. The correct position is indicated by the frequency scanner and an according sound.
• The reset switch aborts the current game and resets the game to the introduction sequence.

Technical Details

The game is written in 6507 assembly and consists of 4 KB (4096 Bytes) of coding, graphics, sounds and the level data of all stages.

This game is written for the PAL version of the Atari VCS. Due to the PAL display of 312 scanlines, the game would have to be modified pretty much to receive a comparable NTSC version. Therefore it was decided to keep the game PAL only.

The development was performed on a Pentium-PC using a normal Text-Pad as editor and DASM V2.12 as compiler. Testing was done using the emulators z26 V1.58 and Stella V2.4.2 and finally on real hardware of course.

Download of the Game

The Label and Box Art

The game picture used on the cartridge label, the box and the button is drawn by a very popular graphics designer from the games industry: Celal Kandemiroglu. He created cover art and ingame graphics for a lot of games ranging from classic titles like Katakis, the Turrican series and X-Out to modern games like Sacred 2.

I am very proud to use his great artwork and thank Marc Oberhäuser for supplying the contact.

Production of Original Cartridges

The game is released as a limited edition of 36 copies. The limited edition contains these items: PAL cartridge, plastic box with color cover, color instruction manual, patch, button, serialnumber and signature.

After the limited edition is sold out, AtariAge will supply unlimited cartridges with manual (without all the limited items).

Pictures of the Limited Edition

A complete copy of the limited edition.


All 36 boxes of the limited edition.

Owners of the Limited Edition