Solar Fox

Solar FoxThe Game: Your ship is confined to a grid-like playing field, which isn’t all that bad until you take into account that armed ships are gliding along all four of the “walls” surrounding that grid, blasting away at you like a fish in a barrel. Your job is the clear the grid of the objects filling it, and wherever possible, to fire a well-timed shot at the ships trying to destroy you. Clearing the grid advances you to the next level. (Bally/Midway, 1982)

Memories: Another variation on the clear-the-maze concept, Solar Fox only climbed its way up to “sleeper” status, if even that. I don’t recall any reports about Solar Fox burning up the arcades. It had some fairly nice cabinet artwork, playing on the word play of fox (as in a hunted animal) vs. fox (as in slang for an attractive woman), which featured heavily in the advertising campaign.

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Perhaps surprisingly, CBS Electronics turned out a decent version of Solar Fox for the Atari 2600. (That company wound up with the console rights to Solar Fox as part of an overall deal with Midway that also netted the console rights to 3 quartersBlue Print, Gorf and Omega Race, among others.) It was scaled down graphics-wise, but maintained the game play mechanics of its coin-operated counterpart fairly faithfully.

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