Dumbo’s Flying Circus

Dumbo’s Flying Circus was scheduled to be part of Atari’s children’s series (which included characters from Peanuts, Sesame Street, Disney, Muppets, and Garfield), but for one reason or another it never saw the light of day. Atari advertised Dumbo in European Atari catalogs and even had a prototype box made, so the decision to shelve it must have been made quite late. Even though Dumbo was developed as a children’s game, the gameplay is quite difficult which may be the reason why it was never released.

The object of the game is to guide Dumbo around the screen and catch or shoot balloons before they reach the top of the screen (sort of like Kaboom in reverse). Some balloons have bombs attached to them and are deadly to the touch, so they must be shot down using peanuts from your trunk. Every now and then you will see a balloon with a clown riding it, you must shoot these balloons and catch the falling clown before he hits the bottom. If the clown makes it to the top of the screen he’ll stay up there and begin to drop things on you. Every time three balloons reach the top of the screen the ceiling gets slightly lower, this gives you less and less room to grab the incoming balloons. The ceiling can be raised a bit by safely catching clowns or by winning the bonus round.

Scoring exactly 10,000 points (or multiples of) causes the balloons to turn into the initials PcN (for Peter C. Niday).