Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In an era when realistic 3-D graphics and sound and complex game play are the norm, the question of why there is still a significant following for the ancient 2600 may strike many gamers as mystifying. Yet to those who keep the faith, interest in the technically simpler Atari 2600 has been growing precisely because gaming technology is now so darn sophisticated. Many 2600 games are simple to learn, which makes them appealing to certain groups, says Bilstein: "People who normally wouldn't touch a video game will play a game of Atari because you don't have to learn a complicated manual in order to play. My mom can play Space Invaders."
Atari's popularity is far from confined to Space Invaders fans, however. What makes the Atari revival unique is the amount of active software and hardware development that continues to this day on the platform. Perhaps most amazing, today's Atari fans can buy a hand-held 2600, the VCSp, that uses the old 2600's game cartridges. Its inventor, Benjamin Heckendorn, builds each unit for his customers by hand, and says he is having difficulty keeping up with demand. Another community effort currently underway is to devise step-by-step building plans so that nostalgic hardware hackers can build their own 2600-compatible game consoles from scratch.
No console can survive without games, however, and it is in the software arena that the online 2600 enthusiasts are concentrating most of their energies. Some programmers have even taken it upon themselves to write new games for the platform. While such "home-brew" games are written for the other classic game systems by their fans as well, there's simply more interest in game programming for the Atari 2600.
Bob Colbert, a 34-year-old systems analyst in La Vista, Neb., fulfilled a lifelong dream when he wrote a game for the 2600. Using information about the console that he found on the Web, he created a puzzle game called Okie Dokie -- one of the 2600 revival scene's first home-brew games. His original intent was for it to be played using software-only Atari 2600 emulator programs that are freely available, but he received so many requests for Okie Dokie in cartridge format (so that it could be played on actual 2600 consoles) that he produced a limited-edition run of 100 cartridges. That didn't even begin to meet demand, but he couldn't keep up production. ("The cartridges took a lot of time to make," he says.)
Don't be deceived by the simple look of these games -- programming the 2600 is actually quite tough. "Making any discernible graphics display on the 2600 is difficult," warns Colbert. Home-brew game makers are rediscovering the hurdles that the original programmers who were hired to make games for the system faced -- a system with a mere 1 MHz CPU and 128 bytes of RAM does not allow a lot of room for sloppiness or error. Creating a good game for the system requires a keen sense of technical resourcefulness. Undaunted, most of the newfound game developers see taking on the 2600 as a kind of Zen exercise in which programming skills are put to the ultimate test.
Joe Grand, a 25-year-old in Boston who works in computer security, can attest to this challenge from his experience making his 2600 game, SCSIcide. He points out that "the hardware was originally designed to play Pong-type games." But during the system's latter years, after the golden age of video games ended, titles like Pitfall II and Klax featured impressive graphics, sound and game play. Grand is still in awe:
"The programmers stretched the hardware to limits unintended and unimaginable even by the hardware designers! A lot of times while I'm programming, I'll throw on some disco music, pretend it's 1979 and imagine what the designers had to work with," says Grand. "The design/debug cycle was much more drawn out then, and the programmer couldn't just write some code, compile it and immediately test it on an emulator as we do now."
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