In 1981, Cinematronics moved into a 78,000 sq. ft. facility at
1841 Friendship Drive. That year, they also released another Tim Skelly 
cooperative game, Armor Attack. The idea for the game originated when 
Skelly decided to create an updated version of the 1974 Atari/Kee 
classic Tank.  Originally, Armor Attack was to be another game utilizing 
the mirror techniques use in Warrior – this time to create the game's 
background graphics. The company's money-conscious management, however, 
nixed the idea as too expensive. As Skelly started work on the game, he 
began hearing rumors that Atari was currently testing their own 
vector-graphics tank game. The trouble was, no one at Cinematronics knew 
where they were testing it. A concerned executive (using a phony 
hillbilly accent) soon began calling every arcade in the phone book 
until he located the correct one and a group of company employees 
immediately flew up to take a look. When they arrived, they were 
discovered that, unlike their game, the Atari game (which was called 
Battlezone) would feature a 3-D, first-person perspective. Relieved, 
they decided to continue development on Armor Attack. 
   In the game (which featured yet another color overlay, this time in 
olive drab green), the player (or players) controlled a jeep which 
traveled among a group of buildings trying to destroy enemy tanks and 
helicopters. Buildings were strewn about the playfield and the player 
had to maneuver around them. Tanks required two shots to destroy - the 
first shot only disabled the tank but left its gun turret functional. 
Helicopters were tough foes since, unlike the player, they could ignore 
the buildings by shooting or firing over them. The buildings in Armor 
Attack were not computer generated. The display screen showed only large 
empty areas where there buildings were supposed to be and the actual 
buildings were created with cellophane monitor overlays. The reasons for 
this unusual arrangement were technical in nature and had to do with the 
short-outs that occurred when the beam scanned too close to the edge of 
the screen:

[Tim Skelly] - "Larry Rosenthal build a safeguard into the board. There 
was a watchdog bit that had to be hit every 1/60th of a second of the 
system reset to the top of the program.  If the program went wacky and 
didn't hit the bit, BOOM back to the top and, in theory, the beam would 
again be under control. This alternative was better than frying the 
system, but resetting the game was a bad thing.  Whoever was playing 
lost their game and any credits they may have had. The short version of 
this (and it gets a little technical) is that if I didn't finish drawing 
everything on the screen in that 1/60th of a second, the system reset. 
That meant no skipping frames, no cheats. I had just so much time to 
draw lines. So, on Armor Attack, when faced with all the drawing time 
the buildings would take, I chose to use the overlay instead."

As with the background stars in Star Castle, Armor Attack featured an 
unusual hidden feature. During the game's development, the government 
had re-instituted draft registration. Skelly, a longtime opponent of the 
draft, was incensed. In addition, he had heard rumors that Atari had 
sold a version of its Battlezone to the army for use in training. The 
inventive Skelly soon found a way to voice his opinions. One of Armor 
Attack's features was to be morse-code sound effects. Skelly actually 
knew morse code from his days as a boy scout and decided to include a 
real message. Attentive players of the games would discover the 
morse-code sound effects steadily beeping out the words "don't register".