Akka Arrh was an old arcade game that was developed by Atari Games, but never released. 1982 was a really good year for Atari (arcade division at least), which was why they could afford to toss out fully developed games that were actually better than half the crap that Rockola and other lesser gamemakers were producing.

The name Akka Arrh is an an pseudo acronym for "Also Known As Another Ralston Hally production". It was named after the programmers Dave Ralston and Mike Hally.

There were only two of these produced, both of them currently belong to the same person (the owner of safestuff.com). They are not for sale, and the owner has turned down offers in the five figures range.

The game itself is a spaceship game controlled with a trackball. Your spaceship sits in the center of the screen and you control a cursor which represents the ships weapon systems. The most interesting thing about this game was the fact that it has a zoom button which allows you to zoom in on the area closest to the ship.

Atari went all out designing the dedicated cabinet for this title. Most prototypes just use leftover cabinets from other games, and tend to have hand drawn artwork. But Akka Arrh was not like most games. Akka Arrh used a totally unique cabinet that had a strange tubular marquee, and a bunch of chase lights ringing the monitor area. The game's sideart, marquee and other artwork were of the same high quality as Atari's normal production games. But, apparently it didn't do well in location testing, so all that work went to waste, and the game never went into wide production.

This game is not emulated by any known emulator, nor is it available for any consoles, or in any other format. It will probably never be emulated, as both copies of the machine are owned by the same person, and he isn't making the ROM dumps public, which sucks, but he really has little choice, since he doesn't own the rights to the game, and if the ROMs got out, then the lawyers would know exactly who to sue about all that "lost revenue".

Luckily these machines are often in attendance at various classic arcade shows around the country, so you just might end up getting to play them.

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