Scramble never lets the player stop. From the moment the ship takes off the landscape scrolls from right to left, and the only way to keep flying is to destroy the fuel tanks on the ground below. Konami released it in Japan in January 1981 and Stern Electronics sold it in America from March. The attract screen asked players “How far can you invade our Scramble system?”, and within two months Stern had sold about 10,000 machines. The game also left a mark on the law: when a rival company copied it, the court case that followed decided that a video game’s pictures and sounds could be protected by copyright.
Fast facts
- Developer: Konami, 1981.
- American licensee: Stern Electronics, which sold it from 17 March 1981.
- Hardware: a board descended from Namco’s Galaxian, with Konami’s own sound board added.
- Structure: six sections, ending at an enemy base; destroy it and the game starts again, harder.
- Sequel: Super Cobra (1981), with a helicopter in place of the ship.
- Home versions: the Vectrex, a Tomy battery-powered game and, much later, Konami’s compilations and the Arcade Archives series.
Flying the Scramble system
The player’s ship has two weapons. A laser fires straight ahead at anything in the air, and bombs drop in an arc onto targets on the ground. The joystick moves the ship up and down and also sets its speed: Electronic Games explained in March 1982 that pushing right speeds the ship up and pulling left slows it down, but “like a shark, [it] can never stop moving”.
Fuel is what makes the game different. The gauge falls all the time, and it only goes up when the player bombs one of the fuel tanks along the route. “Remember, if you run out of fuel, you crash,” the magazine warned. It told players to go for the tanks first, worth 100 points each, then the “mystery” targets, worth 100 to 300, and to shoot the ground rockets after they had taken off, when they were worth more than twice as much as rockets sitting on the ground. The result is a game of choices: every bomb spent on a rocket is a bomb not spent on fuel.
The flight passes through six sections, which the 1982 court judgment described as “six different scenes in which obstacles are encountered”. A 2025 guide listed them in order:
| Section | What the player meets |
|---|---|
| 1 | Open ground: mountains, missile bases and fuel tanks |
| 2 | Flying saucers, which can be shot |
| 3 | Fireballs, which cannot |
| 4 | A city, whose buildings hide rockets until they launch |
| 5 | Tunnels: a maze of narrow passages |
| 6 | The base, the final target |
Electronic Games found the maze the hardest part. Most players assumed the ship could not drop straight down between passages, and the magazine showed that it could: at full speed, pushing the stick diagonally to the lower left or upper left slows the ship to its minimum speed and lets it drop or rise straight down or up. After the base the game began again, with the enemy “slightly more agile”.
Galaxian underneath
Scramble ran on hardware descended from Namco’s Galaxian of 1979. MAME, whose drivers are built from the boards’ schematics, lists it among the many games on “Galaxian-derived hardware”. The CPU and video are the Galaxian design: a Z80 processor at 3.072 MHz, a screen of 8×8 characters, sprites, hardware bullets and a star generator. In Galaxian each strip of the character screen could be scrolled sideways on its own, which is how its rows of aliens slid across the screen; in Scramble the same scroll registers move the landscape. Konami replaced Galaxian’s simple sound circuits with a separate sound board, on which a second Z80 drives two General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chips, and added two Intel 8255 chips for the controls and for passing commands to the sound board. Super Cobra uses the same arrangement, and MAME also holds Konami’s Amidar in a version labelled “Scramble hardware”.
Stern and the courts
Konami did not sell the game in America itself. Stern Electronics held an exclusive sub-licence for North and South America from Konami’s own licensee, and the American press credited the game to Stern: Electronic Games listed it as “Scramble/Stern/Coin-op”. Looking back in 2009, Retro Gamer described Stern as having the network to “manufacture and place Konami’s machines across the United States”, while Sega handled Konami’s games in Japan.
The figures come from the court record. Stern began selling Scramble on 17 March 1981, and in the first two months sold about 10,000 machines at about $2,000 each, “an initial sales volume of about $20 million”. Konami registered the copyright in the game’s audiovisual display on 14 April 1981.
By then a company called Omni Video Games was selling a game “virtually identical in both sight and sound” under the same name. Stern sued Omni and others, among them Harold Kaufman, trading as Bay Coin, and in May 1981 the federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York granted a preliminary injunction against them. Omni appealed with an argument that mattered to the whole industry: Konami was entitled to copyright “only the written computer program”, it said, and because every game played out differently, the display was “neither ‘fixed in any tangible medium of expression’ nor ‘original’”. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected both arguments on 20 January 1982. Much of what the player sees and hears repeats in every game and in the attract mode, and in Judge Newman’s words, “the repetitive sequence of a substantial portion of the sights and sounds of the game qualifies for copyright protection as an audiovisual work”. The injunction stood, and with it the principle that a game’s screen display, not just its program, was protected. Retro Gamer has written that Konami had left the security out of the board, which is why so many companies were able to copy the game.
By May 1982 Electronic Games called Scramble “probably the single most influential wargame in today’s commercial arcade arsenal” and “one of many horizontally-scrolling shoot-out contests”, distinguished by a cavernous maze and by five separate phases, each against “a different defense system”.
Super Cobra
Konami followed Scramble in 1981 with Super Cobra, which Retro Gamer says reached arcades four months later. It kept the formula and replaced the jet with a helicopter. MAME holds versions licensed to both Stern and Sega. Super Cobra went further at home than Scramble did: in 1983 Parker Brothers advertised it for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Atari 5200 and Atari home computers under the line “We made Super Cobra very, very tough to win”, and TV Gamer reviewed it in Britain in July 1984 at £29.95.
At home
Scramble itself had few official home versions in its time. General Consumer Electronics included it in the first range of cartridges for the Vectrex, whose advertisements carried Konami’s and Stern’s licence notices, and Tomy made a battery-powered handheld version, priced at $60 in Video Games in January 1983.
Home computers got imitations instead. On the ZX81 Quicksilva sold QS Scramble, written by Dave Edwards. On the Spectrum Melbourne House’s Scramble-style Penetrator was one of the two best-selling programs of 1983, according to CRASH. On the VIC-20 Terminal Software advertised Super Skramble! in 1983, quoting Computer & Video Games’s verdict that it was “an excellent game”.
Konami brought the original back many times. Konami Arcade Classics for the PlayStation included it in 1999, Retro Gamer found it among the downloadable games on the Xbox 360 in 2007, and Hamster’s Arcade Archives series released it for the PlayStation 4 on 30 June 2015 and for the Nintendo Switch on 23 September 2019. In 2025 Next magazine was printing tips for a new version for the ZX Spectrum Next by Rusty Pixels.
What came after
Scramble and Williams’s Defender, both from 1981, took the shoot ’em up off the single screen (see shoot ’em up). The two games grew up side by side, not one from the other: Defender let the player fly either way over a planet, while Scramble pushed the player forward along a fixed route. Sega’s Zaxxon (1982) took a Scramble-like fortress run and tilted it into three dimensions. Konami’s own Gradius (1985) kept the sideways scroll, the ground targets and the caverns and added its power-up gauge; Retro Gamer says it “doubled the first-year sales of Scramble in just a six-week period”.
Sources
- Stern Electronics, Inc. v. Kaufman, 669 F.2d 852 (2d Cir., decided 20 January 1982), opinion by Circuit Judge Newman (public record): Konami’s development in late 1980, first publication in Japan on 8 January 1981, Stern’s sub-licence and first US sales on 17 March 1981, the 10,000 machines and $20 million, the copyright registration of 14 April 1981, the six scenes, Omni’s copies and the court’s holding. https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/669/669.F2d.852.81-7411.1674.html
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982, p. 64: Scramble strategy guide (controls, fuel, points, the maze, the base). Vol. 1 no. 3, May 1982, p. 40: “the single most influential wargame”.
- Next magazine issue 10, October 2025, p. 46, Ian Osborne’s playing tips: the six stages, the saucers and fireballs, the Rusty Pixels conversion.
- Retro Gamer Collection vol. 3 (2009), pp. 193–195, Konami feature: the Stern and Sega arrangements, the board’s missing security, Super Cobra four months later, the attract-screen question.
- Retro Gamer issue 53 (2008), pp. 24–29: Gradius/Nemesis sales against Scramble (see the Gradius entry).
- Retro Gamer issue 42 (2007), pp. 48–55, “The Complete Guide to Shoot-’em-ups”: Scramble on the Xbox 360 (see the shoot ’em up entry).
- MAME source code,
src/mame/galaxian/galaxian.cppandgalaxian_v.cpp: “Galaxian-derived hardware”, the Z80 clock, the scrolling columns, the Konami 8255 and twin AY-3-8910 sound configuration, the Scramble, Super Cobra and Amidar sets and their licensees. https://github.com/mamedev/mame - Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 9, November 1983, p. 53: Parker Brothers Super Cobra advertisement (formats, “very, very tough to win”).
- TV Gamer, July 1984, p. 27: Super Cobra review (Parker, £29.95).
- Commodore User vol. 1 no. 2, November 1983, p. 15: Vectrex advertisement (“Licensed by Konami Industry”, “Licensed by Stern Electronics”) and Terminal Software’s Super Skramble! advertisement.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 4, January 1983, p. 44: Tomy’s battery-powered Scramble, $60.
- Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 2 no. 10, July 1999, p. 52: Konami Arcade Classics.
- Hamster Corporation, “Arcade Archives Scramble” (web, secondary): PlayStation 4 release 30 June 2015, Nintendo Switch 23 September 2019. https://www.arcadearchives.com/en/title/aca-017/
- For QS Scramble, Penetrator and the Vectrex launch range, see the Quicksilva, Melbourne House and Vectrex entries and their citations.