Gotcha was an early
Atari arcade game. It was released in 1973, a year after Atari's
Pong. Atari had great, early success with Pong, so great a lot of machines were breaking down because they could not be emptied of quarters fast enough. Pong status as a
cash cow was short lived, however. Atari founder
Nolan Bushnell made a small mistake in releasing Pong. He failed to secure
intellectual property rights to the game. When he finally filed for
patent protection there were some 50 imitators on the scene. Soon, only about 1/3 of pong-style games in public locations were genuine Atari models. Most were knock offs.
Bushnell concluded that Atari's competitors were good at copying but were not innovators. For Atari to make money, it had to release innovative games. The following year it released Gotcha, along with
Space Race,
Pong Doubles, and
Elimination.
Gotcha was a two player
maze game. The
maze was rendered from a top-down perspective. The goal was for one player to chase another player around a blocky maze. Unlike Pong, Gotcha proved some what
boring and wasn't a great success.
Gotcha was a bit ahead of its time in two ways. It was a maze chase game, a theme used with much much greater success by
Pac Man. To add some
visceral appeal to the "thrill of the chase" Gotcha used an electronic
beep that increased in frequency as the pursuer neared his target.
Asteroids would later use simple changing auditory feedback to heighten the player's visceral response to the game.
Gotcha is unique in that few games have ever had such a high "
giggle factor" when it came to cabinet design. Each player used a fleshy pink rubber mound to move his player. To all, the game looked like it was sprouting two
boobs and was quickly dubbed "the
boob game".
While most versions of Gotcha used Pong's grey on black
monitor, Atari released a few experimental versions that used color monitors (
albeit in a
monochrome mode, i.e., green on black). Gotcha has the distinction of being the first arcade game to use color without the aid of a physical over lay.