Every time I found myself steering into Battlezone territory I would purposely turn the other way.”Īsked by VentureBeat about the situation, Atari issued this statement: “Working with the independent developer community is at the heart of Atari’s mobile business model. That’s why I put jeeps in there, helicopters and power-ups – it was not supposed to be Battlezone.

Hirschberg said that he wanted Vector Tanks to be evocative of the 1980 Battlezone arcade game, but deliberately avoided making it a straight clone: “I used to say: They can’t come after me for a game of tanks drawn of lines, because that was the only similarity that I saw. And instead they kicked me out of the show.”

In 2009 Hirschberg created Vector Tanks for the iPhone in the hope of catching Atari’s attention, as he phrased it: “I ran up on stage before the big huge popular band starts playing, grabbed the guitar and did a really awesome lick and I was hoping they’d go: Dude, you’re totally in the band now.

Atari tank battle