Cerise Magazine

The Dreadnaught Factor, Activision, Intellivision Entertainment System, 1983

My mother’s parents lived in a large, straight-out-of-the-70′s house just to the south of Seattle. My sister and I would tag along on trips there every few months, to visit our grandparents and make child smalltalk while they fixed dinner and talked about my aunts and uncle on that side of the family. It was actually a pretty cool house, to be honest, but nothing much for twin girls of nine to occupy themselves with.

Down in the basement, though, my grandmother had hidden away a special treasure: the Intellivision. Built in the early 80′s, along with the Atari 2600 and countless other now-retro gaming platforms, it enjoyed a short life of relative obscurity. My favorite part about it is its controller: reminiscent of a remote for a television, it has numbers and a small metal wheel at the bottom, for controlling movement. A lot of the games came with thin plastic covers that outlined which button did what for that particular game. Most of its games were ports from the Atari, including the one game that stands out for me over all others: The Dreadnaught Factor.

Gameplay

I am not ashamed to say that this game still frightens me, eleven years later. The story involved a planet that looked suspiciously like our own Earth. A group of giant spaceships, known as dreadnaughts, have undertaken a slow march to destroy your planet for reasons that they probably don’t even know. There are eleven in total, and at the starting screen you pick your poison by entering the number (I’m fairly sure it represented difficulty, but that could have just been me – they were all difficult for me) of the dreadnaught you wished to face. You are given a quick shot of your planet, and the dreadnaught slowly approaches. Every time you lose a life or pass by the dreadnaught completely, which is often, the dreadnaught gets a little closer. The point, obviously, is to destroy these dreadnaughts before they can do so. Every one of these gargantuan nightmare machines has vents on the back of the ship, colored red so you can find them easier. You must bomb these beyond all repair, and the worst part is that you can never do it in one pass. See where this can get frustrating? You have to pass by, avoiding guns and bombs, and keep an eye out for the vents, and once you find them you have to remember – your ship can’t go in reverse.

Graphics

The graphics are pretty much on par for the early 80′s. Large, blocky colored pixels fill in the screen, forming crude circles and the foreboding shape of each dreadnaught. Your fighter is orange, sometimes blending in with the greenish browns and greys of the dreadnaughts, proving that the invaders have terrible decoration skills. All of the dreadnaughts have hidden surprises on them, such as guns that fire heat-seeking missiles, large plasma bursts, and good old regular guns that all fire directly at you as your teeny ship passes by. One shot, and you’re dead, and your ship explodes in what looks like orange dust flying by in the vacuum of space. If you do manage to destroy a dreadnaught, the screen explodes in flashing colors which, for some reason, still frightens me to this day; probably because one time the game froze and I was alone in a dark basement with nothing but a frozen game system for company.

The Creepy Soundtrack

But the sound, oh the sound. There’s no music in this game, only the dull hum of your spaceship and a very, very foreboding Jaws-esque dun-dun-dun-dun in the background. Your ship hisses as it gets destroyed, but for some reason none of the dreadnaught guns have any sound. I like it that way, though – all of the other Intellivision games I remember playing had the most annoying bleeps and bloops that were, honestly, really distracting. Without music, I can focus on the thought that a group of ships are hell-bent on destroying my planet and that I am apparently the only person ever who can pilot a ship that can destroy them. Sounds fun, right?

Honestly, I love this game, as much as it scares me. I’ve never beaten it (the circular dreadnaught was always what got me), and someday I’d like to (I haven’t had a chance to get back down to Seattle and visit my grandfather). It has that certain retro charm that few games from that early, pre-Nintendo era have, and the fact that just thinking about it scares me surely adds to the charm.

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