Telepathy

Unreleased prototype.

Telepathy is one of two known prototype games that were developed for Atari's failed Mindlink controller. The Mindlink was a headband that player wore on his head and plugged into the joystick port. The idea was that the Mindlink's sensors would pick up any facial movements or muscle twitches the player would make. Atari actually said that the Mindlink read the player's thoughts. The problem was that the Mindlink didn't work very well in initial test runs, and even when it did work players would complain of headaches and dizziness from twitching their face all day. After disappointing test results, the Mindlink controller was wisely canceled.

Telepathy was actually developed as a demo to show what kind games the Mindlink could do. This demo is made up of seven different action screens held together by a loose mine theme. Thankfully Telepathy is playable without the Mindlink controller (unlike Bionic Breakthrough) by pressing the joystick button. It's unknown if Atari was thinking of releasing Telepathy sans Mindlink or if the joystick code was put in the game for playtesting purposes.

Unlike most games of the time, Telepathy has a demo mode which will run through all the screens if the game is left untouched. Interestingly you can control the player in the demo using the joystick, it's unknown if this was intentional or just a bug.