At a glance: Countermeasure · Atari 5200 · Atari, 1982 · Tank strategy-action · Score: 7.0/10
Look down the 5200’s launch list and a pattern jumps out: arcade licence, arcade licence, arcade licence. Countermeasure is the exception — an original game, designed for the console itself, and one of the most ambitious cartridges Atari shipped in the system’s first wave. It is a game about the end of the world conducted at the speed of a tank: a rogue computer has launched nuclear missiles at your cities, the launch silos are hidden across a scrolling countryside, and you have a limited time to find the code that will stop the launches — or, failing that, to fight your way to the silos and do the job personally. In 1982, on a console sold with Super Breakout, this was not a small idea.
Find the code or fight the silos
The structure is genuinely two games bolted together by a clock. Your tank roams a large, scrolling landscape of forests, rivers and installations, viewed from above in the manner of a Combat grown enormously in ambition. Scattered across the map are enemy defences — gun turrets, enemy tanks, jets and helicopters overhead — and, more importantly, terminals and depots where pieces of intelligence live. The core puzzle is the launch code: a three-part code, hidden in the game’s systems, which you can discover by capturing and checking installations in the right way. Enter the correct code before the timer runs out and the missiles never fly: the elegant victory. Fail, and the game demands the other kind — locate each silo and destroy it in direct assault before its missile launches.
This is remarkable scope for a 1982 console cartridge, and most of it works. The map is big enough that recon matters; the timer in the header — the doomsday clock counting against you — gives the roaming a pressure most top-down games of the era never attempt; and the choice between solving the code and shooting your way out is a real strategic fork, with the code route rewarding methodical players and the silo assaults rewarding good tank fighters. Refuelling and rearming at your depots adds a logistics loop. There were not many games like this anywhere in 1982, let alone on a brand-new console.
Where the ambition strains
The seams show in the tank itself. Movement is turret-and-hull work — your tank drives in eight directions and fires in the direction it faces — and the 5200 stick’s vagueness makes fine manoeuvring around rivers and turret fire clumsier than the design wants. Enemy fire is accurate enough that imprecision is punished. The overhead graphics, meanwhile, are serviceable rather than attractive: the countryside is big blocks of green with tree clusters and grey installations, readable at all times but rarely pretty, and the jets and helicopters that harass you are simple sprites. POKEY supplies solid engine and gun noise and the occasional alarm, without ever quite selling the apocalypse.
There is also a learning curve the cartridge does not help you climb. Countermeasure’s rules — how the code is found, what the terminals tell you, when a silo can be rushed — are the kind of thing the original manual explained and a bare cartridge leaves you to discover by expensive experiment. Modern players should expect their first several games to end in nuclear fire while the system reveals itself; once it clicks, the game opens up, but the opacity is real, and it cost the game dearly in an era of pick-up-and-play arcade ports.
The original in a library of ports
That distinctiveness is exactly why it matters now. The 5200 library is dominated by conversions — often excellent ones — of games available in many places. Countermeasure could only be had here: designed in-house, tuned for this hardware, never an arcade game at all. It points at a road not taken, where the SuperSystem might have built an identity on ambitious originals rather than chasing the ColecoVision’s licence list. As a game it is uneven — fascinating structure, ordinary execution, hostile learning curve — but as a piece of the 5200 story it is essential, and score-attack players who master the code hunt will find a genuinely tense, replayable strategy-action hybrid.
It is neither the first cartridge to buy for the system nor one to skip. It is the one you graduate to — the deep cut that rewards the owner who has played the famous names and wants to see what else the big black box was trying to be.
The clock is the enemy
What modern players will notice first — and what deserves real praise — is how completely the timer organises the game. Lots of action games of the era had clocks; Countermeasure’s is a narrative device. The header’s countdown is the launch schedule of a mad computer, and everything you do is triage against it: checking a terminal costs minutes you might need for the silo run; taking the long way around a river costs fuel and time together; a dogfight with a jet is a withdrawal from a bank you cannot see the bottom of. When the code route comes together — when the third element falls into place and you key in the sequence that stands the missiles down — the relief is out of all proportion to the graphics on screen, because the game has made you feel the weight of the alternative. That is sophisticated design for any year. For a launch-window console cartridge, it is close to unique.
The two-player mode is worth a footnote of its own: alternating commanders racing the same apocalypse, comparing code routes and silo strategies, gives the game a parlour-competition life the solo experience only hints at. And the difficulty settings genuinely re-deal the problem — different code placements, denser defences — rather than simply speeding everything up, which keeps the cartridge fresher across repeated campaigns than its contemporaries.
Set against the wider 1982 field — across all systems, not just this one — Countermeasure stands as one of the earliest console games to attempt the strategy-action hybrid that would later become an industry staple: a map, a mission, a clock, and two ways to win. Its execution belongs to its era, with the era’s clunks. Its ambition did not, and ambition is the rarer quality. That is why it anchors the library’s second shelf, and why no account of the 5200 is complete without it.
The silo run, up close
The assault half of the game deserves a closer description, because it is better than its graphics suggest. A silo complex is a defended position, not a sprite: turrets with overlapping fields of fire, patrolling armour, and the silo itself, hardened enough that a frontal rush in a damaged tank is a donation. The correct approach is reconnaissance and patience — probing the perimeter, drawing fire to learn the turret arcs, spending your shots on the defences in the order that opens a lane — with the launch clock converting every second of caution into risk of a different kind. When a silo does go up, the game gives you the full period satisfaction: a fireball, a reprieve, and the map’s remaining problems rearranged by your survival. Win outright, by code or by assault, and the cartridge’s modest presentation cannot disguise the scale of what it just let you do. Games that let you prevent the apocalypse were not thick on the ground in 1982. This one still stands nearly alone on its own system, and for the patient player it is the most thought-provoking cartridge the 5200 ever shipped.
Verdict: An ambitious, flawed original: part tank shooter, part doomsday puzzle, unlike anything else on the system. Clunky in the hands, fascinating in the head. 7.0/10