Stampede is a video game written by Bob Whitehead for the Atari Video Computer System (later called the Atari 2600) and published by Activision in 1981. Stampede is a left-to-right horizontally scrolling action game with a cattle round-up theme. An Intellivision version was released the following year.
An Activision catalog from 1982 advertised Stampede in the following way:
Ready for a little round up? With Stampede by Activision, you’ll have to ride fast and rope even faster. Those little dogies seem to be everywhere, and they’re all worth points. But, be careful! Your ol’ horse can get a little edgy, especially when you take your eyes off the trail. So, head out West for hours of fun with Stampede!
The objective of Stampede is to round up all of the cattle without letting any pass by. To do so, the player must lasso each one in order to capture it. The player is initially only allowed to let two cattle pass; if a third one slips by, the game is over. All of the cattle run in the same direction as the player, albeit slower. The one exception is the Black Angus calf, which is described by the game as “stubborn”, and remains motionless, forcing the player to prioritize the calf.
An important caveat to this is that the player gets one extra free pass for every 1,000 points scored. If a player were at 2,000 points and had not yet let any cattle pass, the player would be allowed to let four cattle pass before the fifth one ended the game (assuming the player did not reach 3,000 points).
