This weird version of volleyball is one of the first DOS games that I ever played. Arcade Volleyball was first published as a hexadecimal type-in program for the Commodore 64 on pages 75 through 77 of the June 1988 edition of Compute!'s Gazette (Issue 60, Vol. 6, No. 6). The code was apparently written by Rhett Anderson, while the article about the game on pages 32 and 33 was written by Rhett Anderson and David Hensley, Jr. The game featured two teams of two "mutant heads" (yellow and green versus purple and red) who play volleyball by hitting the ball with their heads. Arcade Volleyball uses a horizontal or side-view, and the ball can be bounced off of the walls and ceiling without penalty. The same head may hit the ball multiple times, but the team can only touch the ball three times while the ball is on their side. Scoring used the old rules, where points can only be scored by the serving team and the winning score is 15, though the game didn't require a 2 point margin of victory. Rhett Anderson later published a version for the Amiga in an early version of Amiga Resource, which was later ported to DOS using Borland Turbo C. The DOS version differs from the C64 version by using 4-color CGA graphics, having only one player per team, requiring the game to be won by two points, the ball can no longer go under the net, and playing against the computer is now a standard option. The three touch rule resets if the ball bounces back onto your side, even without being touched by the opponent. The computer is challenging at first, but is easily beatable once you learn how. The game is good fun if you have a human opponent, and the ball is quite entertaining for cats.
Added by DOSGuy
Screenshots
320×200×4c
Downloads
Complete version history:
| Arcade Volleyball Freeware (24,425 bytes) | 1988-11-18 | DOS | Play online  |
Availability
Author Rhett Anderson has generously released this game to the public domain.