1983 SEGA
Platform: Atari 2600 (possibly VIC-20 and others too – unconfirmed)
Team member Fabrizio Bartoloni recently brought to my attention a very intriguing title which SEGA announced as part of their first line up of games for various home platforms, including the Atari 2600. In particular, it was the rather cool game cover artwork that caught my eye.
Simply called Muffett, the game was based around Little Miss Muffet, and was advertised by SEGA in their press kit and at Winter CES in 1983. It showed a slightly darker/creepy variation of the nursery rhyme character, wearing some kind of singular shades and firing a small gun. In the background you can see a series of spiders crawling down in the background.
Gaming historian Ethan Johnson posted a tweet in January 2023, which showed what seems to be a photo from the SEGA booth at the Winter CES 1983 event, where you can see a slightly different version of the Muffett game artwork listed (along with some other intriguing and lost titles including Airplane). It isn’t clear if only an advert for the game was shown, or if there was anything being shown running on an actual machine.
What the game also entailed is at this stage pretty vague too, with Creative Computing magazine reporting the game to be a “Cute cartoon game” and not particularly revealing much at all. SEGA themselves didn’t do much better, stating that the game was a “unique new cartoon game” and “where a pretty young Ms. sitting on a tuffet is attacked by millions of spiders.”
It is early days yet, and more evidence is required – but my own initial thoughts is that this could be some kind of Centipede/Millipede clone with a twist involved. Perhaps if developers from the other titles can be located, they might know more about this title and be able to shed some light.
It is also not known if the game was ever started, along with a number of titles also shown in the advertisements. If the game was indeed started, it may have also been started for other platforms. Tac Scan for instance would see a conversion to the Commodore VIC-20 (although this was unreleased).
If you have any new information (higher quality versions of the artwork or more) about this game, then please do get in touch.
With thanks to Fabrizio Bartoloni for the heads up and links, AtariMania for the SEGA press kitscans, Archive.org for some of the scans and Ethan Johnson (Play History) for the photo from CES 1983.
Gallery
