Warning: this review contains explicit, some might say erotic, art. You have been warned.

1977 was a good year for seismic shifts in pop culture; arguably the most important year of the 20th century when it comes to the way that entertainment is now created and consumed even now.

Not only did Star Wars transform the film industry forever (for better or worse), anti-authoritarian weekly kids sci-fi anthology 2000AD also launched, and punk music marked a massive, counter cultural shift too.

The same year, Atari released their first game console with interchangeable cartridges: the Atari VCS, or as it’s now more commonly known, the Atari 2600.

(Oh, and a certain middle aged gamer geek you may be aware of was born in ’77 too!)

Though pre-dating the movie Tron by 5 years, Surround very much feels like the light bike sequence from the film.

Or, if you want a more modern reference point, it basically plays like Snake; you know, the mobile phone game that everyone played on the toilet 20 years ago.

OK, it’s not that modern a reference, I grant you that.

Anyway, Surround is a two player only competition to see who can survive the longest without hitting a wall, or a trail left behind by them or their opponent.

Though you can add diagonal movement and screen wrapping (as in, going off the right side of the screen and entering at the same point on the left, for example) via different variations of the game before you begin, it’s as basic as a game can be, really, both in audiovisual and gameplay terms.

Yet it’s a huge amount of fun with two players; it’s so easy to pick up and play with immediate understanding of what you need to do, and how.

It’s an incredibly addictive, timeless experience, despite being nearly half a century old.

If you keep calm, you can generally outlast a panicky opponent, even if you get yourself trapped in a smaller space than they have available; it’s genuinely hilarious to see an opponent who has the win in the bag suddenly thrust headlong into a wall, or a trail, while you find ways to stay alive in a tiny area.

Surround is featured on the 10-in-1 cartridge that’s bundled with the excellent Atari 2600+ console and unfortunately shows exactly why there should be a second joystick bundled with the console too, especially as Amazon exclusively sell the Atari 2600+ range in the UK, and are frequently out of stock of the official joysticks.

I reviewed a third party Atari 2600+ compatible joystick recently, however, and found it to be a great substitute that even surpasses the official controller in some ways. You can buy that from Amazon here.

But wait, there’s more!

See, hidden in game options 13 and 14 is a completely different experience, called Video Graffiti.

This turns the screen into a completely blank canvas, and instead of using your little square to travel around the screen and trap your opponent, you both move around the screen, making blocky pictures instead.

Holding the fire button erases a square, otherwise you ‘paint’ as you move.

Just like people in the real world who suddenly decide they’re going to graffiti something and can paint anything, absolutely whatever they want at all, naturally the first thing I ended up painting was a penis.

I’ve got standards though; so of course I made sure to place it on a roughly anatomically correct figure.

Oh, and even though you’ve only got one colour to paint with, clever placement of your block can lead to hilarious results.

Hilarious, that is, if you’re as immature as I am.

Anyway, you were promised/threatened with an explicit image at the outset of this article, so please enjoy the work of ‘art’ that I managed to put together, on one side of the screen, using the Video Graffiti mode on Surround.

So, Surround then. Is it worth playing, this many decades after release?

It absolutely is, if you have two joysticks (and an opponent) to play it with.

There’s a fantastic simplicity to Surround that’ll see you play it just one more time, every time.

And then there’s Video Graffiti too…