This week’s Games of our Lives is an extremely fun game that never really caught on, called Peter Packrat.

Gameplay: Okay, Peter, there’s a ton of junk scattered around
your neighborhood, just waiting for you to get your disease-ridden
claws on it. You can climb, jump, and crawl your way around your
neighborhood as you fill your nest with bottles, rings, watches, and
cans.

However, you’re a dirty little rat, and you’re at the bottom of the
Flatbush food chain. Enemies like Scrapper the dog, Clawd the cat,
Sticky the spider, and the resident tough guy Riff Rat would love to
make you into a nice snack. You can avoid them with deft footwork and
judicious use of hidden shortcuts, or attack them by throwing some of
your precious junk. If you manage to score a hit, you can turn the
tables and ride them around, with the exception of Riff Rat, who isn’t
anybody’s bitch, in spite of what you may have heard around town.

Could be mistaken for: Cheeky Mouse, Bagman, a walk along the Los Angeles River

It’s a moderately amusing column (the bio is the best part, if you ask me), lacking the rapier-like wit of Jungle King and Triple Punch, but not every at bat can be a home run, you know?

Anyway, WWdN:iX Reader Larry Hastings (who wants you to know that he is so old skool, he remembers
Battlezone when it was on field test as "Future Tank") sent me the following Peter Packrat story, which he’s given me permission to reprint here:

Just a personal story about Peter Packrat… a footnote to history.

At one time in my life I was Intergalactic World High Score Champion at
Peter Packrat.  That’s because there was only one–on field test at
Merlin’s Castle in San Jose right near my house–and I was the main
person playing it.

The game is deterministic; you develop patterns which will work every
time.  I had worked out patterns for, I /think/, the first five levels
or so… that was as far as I generally got.  One day while playing I
discovered a bug: the "spider" in the creepy cavern level would
occasionally stray out of its web, and if you conked it on the noggin
with bric-a-brac you could stun it and ride it around.  Since it wasn’t
on the "spider web" anymore, the game didn’t think it was a spider… so
it decided it was a bat!  It even made the bat sound effect.  This
delighted me, and it actually improved my pattern, so I worked it in.

One day I came in to Merlin’s Castle and Peter Packrat was out of
commission.  Some guy had the back open, where I could clearly see… a
Commodore 1541 floppy drive, like you’d use with a Commodore 64.  After
a minute or two of grinding and buzzing, it finished doing what it was
doing.   He took out the disk and they restored the machine to active
service  I started playing only to discover that the bug was fixed and
my pattern didn’t work anymore.  I think I mostly gave up on the game
after that.

About ten years ago I corresponded a little with Lyle Rains, a
now-ex-Atari guy, and mentioned all this.  He opined that the animations
on Peter Packrat were just fantastic–really cute–and it was an utter
shame that Atari botched it as a product.

And a bit of news that is quite exciting for me: Peter Packrat is internally known as "gool#52", which means that I’ve been writing Games of our Lives for one full year. How much does that rock? The answer is: totally.