How Atari 2600’s Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design
VCS Design Schematic
I’ve been trying to find time to dig into my copy Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s new book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, in the meantime I found that Chris Kohler of Wired’s Game|Life has posted a nice introduction to the work:
As illustrated in this image from Racing the Beam, the electron gun’s movement included three large spaces where it was not drawing on the screen: the vertical and horizontal “blanks” on the top and left, and the “overscan” on the bottom. These blind spots were crucial for Atari programmers, as these were the only times they could do anything that didn’t involve drawing graphics on the screen, such as computing joystick inputs, player movements, scoring, etc.
If you’ve ever seen little black lines appear at the left edge of the screen while you’re playing a VCS game, those are bits of the game’s code where the program is taking too much time doing other calculations, and it can’t draw on the screen, leaving it blank. The black bar on the left-hand side of the Pitfall! screen at top was Activision designers’ solution — they cut out part of the gameplay field in exchange for more processing time.
As if all this weren’t enough, the VCS could only display five interactive objects at any one time: two “player” sprites, two “missile” sprites, and one “ball.” This was more than enough for replicating Pong and Tank, the popular arcade games of 1977. It was useless for anything even slightly more complicated, such as Space Invaders.
Kohler also states that, “The VCS’ unrivaled longevity is all the more astounding when one considers that the hardware itself was nearly obsolete even when it was first released. The VCS’ unique hardware limitations forced game designers to jump through all sorts of hoops to squeeze more complex game designs out of the VCS.”
An interesting parallel that comes to mind with regards to Kohler’s statement on & Bogost’s view that the VCS was technically obsolete upon release is the philosophy employed by Gunpei Yokoi in designing the original Nintendo Game Boy. That philosophy, which he termed Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology, was built upon the belief that true innovation and revolution come from finding radically new ways to repurpose cheap, contempory, and generally understood technologies. One could say that this is the same approach that game designers had to adopt in warping that VCS architecture to support a game like Space Invaders.
This may be why most contemporary game design just dissappoints me. Console creators continue to brag about how powerful their systems are, only to replace them before their potential is truly discovered. Meanwhile a lot of game designers simply sit and complain about how consoles aren’t powerful enough to “bring their true vision to life,” and then pine over wanting to target next-generation consoles.
A little bit sad…don’t you think?
posted by Dakota Brown on March 25th, 2009 at 10:51 am Permanent link to this post
3 Responses to “How Atari 2600’s Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design”
If you want to commemorate the 2600 with some sweet clothing you could buy yourself one of these: http://www.exploded2600.com/
In the hardware emulation scene, there was a time when you could pretty much emulate any hardware you wanted except for the 2600. It wasn’t computationally difficult, but so much of the functionality was hacked together and undocumented (and many later games exploited actual bugs in the hardware to achieve special effects) that emulating every quirk was a monumental effort.
Emulator developers eventually worked it out (they always do), so there are lots of software emulators on a lot of platforms. And good thing, because some of these games really do hold up.