Letter Tutor

Name:	Letter Tutor
Company:	Atari
Model #:	RX-8071
Programmer:	Stephen De Witt (Edgework Inc.)
Year:	1984
Released?	No
Notes:	One of only two light pen programs for the Atari 8-bit

With a name like Letter Tutor, you know this game is going to be educational.  However while this would normally be a bad thing, this time it's different.  For you see Letter Tutor is an interesting handwriting program where the player must trace or draw letters on the screen using the light pen.

While Letter Tutor can't exactly be called fun, it is interesting.  The player must use the light pen to draw the letters they see on the screen.  While this is an interesting use of the pen, it's not exactly easy to use as the user must be very close to the screen to draw on it.  This gets rather annoying after a short time, and tends to be hard on the eyes.

When Atari released the light pen, they didn't exactly know what to do with it.  There are really only two things that can be done with a light pen, drawing and writing.  While Atari released a drawing program (Atari Graphics) with the light pen, the writing program (Letter Tutor) was never released.  Perhaps Atari felt that the light pen wasn't worth investing any more money in?  The world may never know (or care for that matter). Still, Letter Tutor remains an interesting curiosity of an era when Atari was dabbling in just about everything.

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