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Howdy everyone! Xanfan here with another edition of Pure Imagination! This time around, I?m going to be discussing another title that was released on the launch of the Atari 2600. Some of the games that were made available at the start of the systems lifespan have gone down in history as some of the best for the console, decades after they were originally released. Combat. Surround. Air-Sea Battle. Even Video Olympics and Indy 500 have their own special places in some of our hearts. But Basic Math? (Or even more basic, just ?Math? when Sears released it?) Seriously? Let?s take a looksie. But before we even begin to examine the box art for this title, let?s take a quick look at the listing in the catalog:

?Do your homework while you?re watching TV? Solve addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems on your own TV. The computer let?s you know if you?re right. If you?re wrong, the correct answer flashes on the screen. Basic Math. The fun way to learn.? Well what are we waiting for? LET?S GO! While you have to give Atari credit for wanting to make at least one educational game for the console, this was going to be a tough sell. (And with what has been said about the work environments at Atari over the course of it?s existence, perhaps Basic Math was a little too difficult even for them at times?) By looking at the image of a somewhat stiff and stuck-up looking Albert Einstein type professor, showing you how to add two and two together, the catalog simply makes it look incredibly boring. One thing that I am noticing is that there is no Atari console hooked up to the TV set, and the TV looks a lot like the kind that you would see in a hotel room back in the day, with it on a pedestal. You know, like the kind that had the cable line built in since there was nothing else to connect to the set like there is today? So we have here, a kid staying in a hotel doing elementary school classes via teleconference? LET?S GO!

Both Atari and Sears did whatever it was that they could do with such a simple, educational title, to make it look like it was going to be one of the best games on the system. Atari makes it look like a magical place with butterflies (and a catcher with a big 2 on his sleeve), dragons with tongues in the shape of a number 3, a creepy looking wizard with a division problem on her gown, and fishes swimming with 92 minus 50. What makes me laugh is that this title is supposed to be targeted at an early elementary student age, yet they are showing math problems like 21?36? I didn?t get into that kinda math until later on in life. (No, not high school!) If nothing else, this game should be a biology lesson! With frogs looking confused, birds flying, even 2 sharks getting ready to eat the little fishes, it?s definitely a story about the food chain! (And if you want to talk about math, I always heard there was a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Money is where my math skills are at their prime, no pun intended. Shouldn?t they have added a leprechaun with a credit card showing the numbers?) And it seems that the Atari Artwork Staff seemed to forget someone? The girl with the ponytail next to the frog? She has a star as a hair clip? A STAR? Why couldn?t it have been like a seven or something? Unless you want to go back to BASIC Programming (the real stuff), and say that the star indicates multiplication. What kid knows that in 1977?

Sears took a very unique approach with it. For some reason, I simply cannot look at the box art for this without beginning to sing the theme to the original version of the PBS show ?The Electric Company?. We have a ginormous hobby horse costume with 4 kids riding on it, a marching band to the side of it, with an incredible amount of mathematical equations and symbols all over the place. Now what exactly does a marching band, with tubas, drums and trumpets have to do with math? What, is this music class now? (I used to love music class!) Digressing, just like the Atari version, there is the arithmetic that makes me shudder for ?basic math? with things like 42X3? But at least Sears remembered that fractions are math too! And there is that damn star again, in between the addition and subtraction words on the top of the horse. Again, everyone just looks so happy to be doing math! I?m not quite sure about the horse though. It?s got this crazy look on it?s face and eyes, as if it?s saying to people, ?Get these kids off me! This isn?t what I had in mind!? Or perhaps he?s trying to say, ?It?s a setup. Combat is right next to me! I mean it! Please put me down!?

So you might be saying to yourself, ?Okay, I know it?s an educational game and that it might be pretty boring. I?ll level with you. But there has to be at least some kind of interesting or fascinating game aspect to the title, right?? ?Wrong.? All it is, is a basic math quiz. That?s all. No game elements whatsoever. Quizzes are not fun. What makes me laugh is that Atari was talking about doing your homework while watching TV. Does that mean that if I played this game for let?s say a full hour, that I would have been exempt from doing my actual homework? If that was the case, then maybe I would have been thrilled with it! But the last time I checked, math homework of that time of your life was questions like, ?If Mary has 4 apples and David has 8 oranges, how many pears does Jackie have?? Or, ?If a train leaves 30th Street Station at 4:13PM and another train leaves Grand Central Station at 4:51PM, and both are traveling 35MPH, how much baggage can you bring with you?? Yeah, remember those? Where they fun?

Even Atari realized that this title was a mistake. So what do they do? They changed the name of the title from ?Basic Math? to ?Fun With Numbers? in 1980. The decided to keep the artwork of the original game, but just changed the title, nothing added (no pun intended), nothing taken away. I guess they figured that people would just think to themselves, ?I wonder what this game is about? Is it a number logic game? I love those!? Then when they took it home, they saw it was just an arithmetic drill. (Or even worse, what if you had the original title from the day of the launch, threw out the box so you forgot what the cover looked like, still had the game, and then re-bought it? I know I for one would be pretty pissed about it!) And if that wasn?t enough, Atari released it AGAIN in 1986 when some of the classic titles were being re-released to compete with Nintendo, after they failed to put the 7800 console on the market fast enough. Seriously? Of the entire Atari 2600 library that was available to them with no rights issues, they publish the game a third time? And they thought that would be a large enough hit that it could compete with Nintendo and Sega? Unreal.

Educational games are a thing that for some reason, just never take off. The only two games that were considered educational that really have a following are Number Munchers for the Apple II and The Oregon Trail. (The latter even just got released in a fresh format for the Nintendo Wii, DS and iOS.) But for the most part, they fail. It could be because video games are supposed to be an alternate reality, to get you away from the true reality of having to do things like homework. Yet, nearly every video game console has had educational games for it. Even the NES had Donkey Kong Junior Math, but at least that had SOME kind of entertainment value with moving Donkey Kong Junior all over the place. Personally, and this is no lie: I would have more fun (even now), learning about math from Sesame Street. Sesame Street was cool back in the day! With numbers, we obviously had Count Von Count! AH AH AH! And don?t forget about the big pinball game with the shiny ball hitting the bumpers with the big number at the end, and the funky music to go with it! And how can we forget that poor baker that announced how many pies he had in his hands, that always managed to slip on the steps and get covered in pie? Now THAT is a way to learn about numbers, not with this title!

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