Game of the Week: Microsurgeon for Intellivision

During the Golden Age of home video games in the early 1980s, the Atari 2600 was king. But it's main competition, Mattel's Intellivision, was no slouch and even offered better graphics and often better gameplay. Into this mix stepped Imagic, a third-party game maker.

Imagic initially had games mainly for the Atari 2600, and some great games they were. Imagic has often been compared to Activision in its quality of graphics and gameplay for Atari 2600 games. But Imagic also made games for other systems, including the Intellivision.

Of the several Imagic games made for the Intellivision, Microsurgeon was the most unique.

In Microsurgeon, the player operates a tiny ship that flies around inside a human body. The ship's objective is to go around healing the body, but attacks from white blood cells sometimes put a halt to any medicine the ship could deliver. It was generally best to operate within the body's arteries, as the ship was more safe there.

Sort of a maze game, but also an educational game, Microsurgeon is one of the earliest video games with a focus upon health. It was ported to a Texas Instruments computer and a few other systems, and it earned all kinds of awards for innovation back in 1982 and 1983.

Most importantly, it was a lot of fun to play, and still is today.