Guest Feature: Cosmic Ark

This column is a guest author feature, written by a friend of the site whose work I am thrilled to host at Retro XP. This entry is from Garrett Martin. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Eventually the world's going to die. The goal is to not be on it when that happens.

That's the message of so much entertainment that's been made over the last few years. Everywhere you look people are dying to get off Earth. You see it in games like Aphelion and MIO: Memories In Orbit, in immersive experiences like Vegas's Interstellar Arc, and in the fetid dreams of K-holing billionaire white supremacists like… well, you know who. It's like we've collectively decided the environmental problems facing our planet aren't fixable, or at least aren't worth fixing, and so we've gotta plan to fuck off to outer space instead. Concerning.

It might be ramping up, but none of this is new, of course. All this end-of-everything anxiety recalls any amount of sci-fi made over the last century, including a game that's not well-remembered and wasn't particularly celebrated in its day, but made a deep impression on me when I was five or six years old: Rob Fulop's Cosmic Ark, which Imagic released on one of its signature silver cartridges for the Atari 2600 in those high-rolling, "the wheels are never coming off this gravy train, baby!" days of the summer of 1982.

Cosmic Ark does the two main things a game needed to do in 1982; it's fun to play and looks cool as hell. It's a game of two halves that are both complete enough that they could have been separate games back then, when the bar for what constituted a video game was still basically on the ground. A saucer floats on-screen in the middle of a star-filled sky, and although it's blockier and less ornate than the incredible Star Wars-quality ship on the box art, it's also bigger and more detailed than what you'd normally see on this hardware, putting it near the top of the list of cool 2600 spaceships.

The first half of a level is a simple reflex test, tilting that black joystick right, left, up, or down to shoot asteroids before they hit the ship as they approach from one of those four directions; the second half is a little trickier, controlling a smaller craft as it descends to a planet's surface and tries to, um, "rescue" a pair of its native wildlife while dodging laser blasts. You have to fly your ship over the animals as they scurry quickly and unpredictably on the surface below, and hold down the button to abduct them via tractor beam while avoiding the planet's defenses. And then you have to return to that amazing-looking mothership, all before the main craft runs out of fuel, and then take off to the next planet and level.

Nowhere does the game say you're the last survivors of a destroyed civilization. This is the Atari 2600; games couldn't really say anything outside of gameplay, without the technical capacity to use the kind of words or rudimentary cutscenes you'd see in arcades or the computer games of the time. But the title implies this is set after some kind of apocalypse; like Noah after the deluge, you're off rambling around with your big adult sons, their wives, and your own personal zoo, making sure they all keep existing. (Again, nowhere does Cosmic Ark actually say you've got your own Shem, Ham, and Japheth with you, but, I mean, it's not hard to guess. It's a big mothership, and surely somebody's still manning it while you take the little one out to rustle up some varmints.) Arks are where you hang out when everything else is dead, hence a cosmic ark must come when you can't even hang out on your own planet anymore.

Something that isn't explicitly communicated in the game — but is hinted at in the game’s manual, where stories used to live — is that your ship is the only survivor of the destroyed civilization at the center of another Imagic release, Dennis Koble's Atlantis. These last surviving Atlanteans are forced to wander the stars after the destruction of their home, kidnapping alien animals along the way. If Wikipedia is to be believed, Atlantis and Cosmic Ark came out the same month, and were fully intended to serve as two parts of a story, in a bit of cross-game continuity unusual for the day. If there were plans for a third game in the cycle, the creation after the destruction and the struggle to survive, they don't seem to have ever borne fruit; despite great instant success with their earliest games, Imagic burned out fast, a planned IPO getting shelved amid the crash of '83, and not releasing anything of note afterward.

The game didn't need to outright say it: even as a kindergartener I could tell Cosmic Ark was about surviving extinction. That makes it a very early forebear to that recent wave of eco-crisis jeremiads, and a nice complement to Missile Command, a game about nuclear destruction that many more people played than Atlantis and Cosmic Ark combined, and by a significant margin. And just as the planet was ultimately doomed in Missile Command, so is your space-faring ark, which will never complete its zoological quest or establish a new home for the survivors of Atlantis or their menagerie. Inevitably that fuel runs out, just as inevitably our planet will, just as Imagic inevitably did. 

If you aren't familiar with Imagic or its distinctively contoured cartridges with silver and rainbow-striped labels, it was another attempt at an Activision-type situation, only one that didn't end up creating one of the biggest, most successful, and longest-running game publishers of all time. Frustrated with not receiving any credit, and seeing the success Activision was having, a group of Atari employees broke away in 1981 and started up Imagic. Fulop was probably the biggest name in the group, as he programmed the 2600 ports of Missile Command and Night Driver. His game Demon Attack was Imagic's biggest seller, and a major hit on the 2600 (despite Atari’s efforts to keep it from even being sold, owing to its familiarity to Phoenix, which they had the console rights to).

The company didn't quite reach the level of awareness Activision had even at the time — even five-year-olds knew that Activision label design meant a game was worth playing, no matter what it might look like — but Imagic was clearly a cut above almost every other publisher back then. That's why it's entirely possible one of my brothers specifically asked for Cosmic Ark or even spent their own allowance money on it instead of it just sort of falling into our laps after the world had decided to stop caring about the Atari. Activision fittingly scooped up the rights to Imagic's games in the '80s, while Fulop went on to cocreate a little game called Night Trap.

However Cosmic Ark came into our presence, I'm glad it did. Over 40 years later it stands out as one of the 2600 games I most vividly remember, and one I played perhaps more than any not named Pitfall, Adventure, or Yar's Revenge. And it's one that's retained an uncommon relevance throughout the years, future-proofing itself by focusing on the very end of the future as we can see it. I'm pretty sure there's no pent-up demand for a Cosmic Ark reboot among the gaming audience at large, but I've long called it the one game that most deserves to be revisited today; hey, Activision, give me a call if you ever want to make that happen.

Garrett Martin is an editor and writer from Georgia, and you can find him on Bluesky.

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