Crazy Limit Pushing Games From the Last Years of the Atari 2600!

[Music] it could have maybe it should have been laid to rest in the mid 80s but it wasn't the 2600 was the console that wouldn't die the great video game crash saw competitors fall by the wayside in droves but not this beast no in 1986 the atari 2600 was relaunched a newer sleeker bunch of dark chambers from 1988 a game that may look familiar to hardcore retro gamers like a slimmed down version of gauntlet or if you're really on the ball you might recognize it as a renamed conversion of dandy the atari 8-bit game that inspired the better known arcade classic yes atari's marketing in this era might not have made much sense outside of jack trammell's head but they at least realized that if the 2600 was going to walk around and honed the rest of its product lineup like the ghost of black friday's past it was going to need some new games coasting on re-releases of old classics wasn't going to cut it and dark chambers fits the bill nicely more sophisticated than most 2600 games this is an experience that's closer to the home computer game that it was born of dark chambers does a few things that not many games on this platform had done at this point made possible in part by the addition of the sarah chip in the cartridge this not only provided bank switching expanding the rom size available but also added some much needed extra ram this game clocks in at a whopping 16 kilobytes would you believe big by 2600 standards and it also has an extra 128 bytes of ram yes that is bytes doubling the amount the console has available of course the larger sized rom allowed for more stuff to be in the game it features 26 unique levels and quite a few animated sprites along with some fairly detailed title graphics on top of this the extra ram made room for a game with more things happening although still only a laughably tiny amount this extra space allowed more complex state data to be stored so the game could track what items have been picked up what doors have been opened within a level when the player backtracks amongst other things and whilst i'm talking about dark chambers i also can't leave out secret quest a sort of similar top-down game that came out a year later advertising the involvement of atari founder nolan bushnell on the box this was a far cry from the era when atari refused to acknowledge game creators in any form but how much he actually contributed to the game is up for debate it's clear though that nintendo was on the minds of the developers aiming at a zelda style game the massive success of the nes unignorable in the late 80s another attempt to be more sophisticated is one of the few titles on this system to feature any sort of save though this is password based rather than battery backed up like dark chambers this is actually not a bad game at all looking back though probably not enough to be a great substitute for the legend of zelda for gamers at the time one thing that both games have is very clever and efficient use of the system sprites to draw graphics yes the 2600 was uniquely challenged in the visual department that's for certain but let's come back to that point later and take a look at kung fu master first released by activision in 1987 yes atari's continuing support of the console meant that this long-time third-party developer in fact the original third-party developer were keen to get a slice of the pie too going on to release a slew of games that were as ambitious as anything atari themselves were doing now this is a pretty impressive port of the arcade hit retaining a lot of the snappiness of the original actually playing quite a bit better than many of the home computer ports even if it is paired back to the basics it looks quite good too the graphics are step up from nearly anything else you'll see here it also exhibits something very unusual for this 70s survivor horizontal scrolling yes the 2600 wasn't built with scrolling backgrounds in mind at all that concept not even really invented when it was created a few games gave it a good go and vertical scrolling became quite common but lefty righty as opposed to uppy downey well you didn't see it so often why not well unlike later consoles the 2600 had no built-in scrolling capabilities so if you wanted to do it you had to do it in software writing code to manually move everything you wanted to move this was a problem on such a primitive system just drawing completely static graphics was challenging enough and vertical scrolling was just about possible taking advantage of the way the system constructed its graphics out of lines of pixels but horizontal scrolling well not enough cpu power not enough ram not enough of anything really so how's it doing it well it's faking it using sprites yes the atari 2600 had five sprites at its disposal allowing it to draw stuff that moves independently of the background graphics these sprites were limited in width and there was only enough ram to store one line of sprite data at once but by switching things out very quickly you could effectively make them as tall as you liked and even change their horizontal position mid frame so each one could draw a lot of stuff you could even multiply them allowing the same sprite to appear up to three times on the same horizontal line yeah okay the intricacies of all this are kind of dense so let's take a look at kung fu master using a debug feature of the stellar emulator here each sprite is drawn in its own colour no matter how it would normally look and we can see these simple repeating elements of the background being drawn with the sprites available moving to the right or left giving the main character the appearance of movement much of the heavy lifting is done by what are called the player sprites coloured in red and yellow you might notice that there's actually nothing moving on the same plane as the main character it's all above and below and that's because there's just not really enough sprites available to show anything else besides the player and the enemies in this part of the screen yes this might not look like much even by the standards of the era it came out in but it's a brilliantly clever use of the hardware and no flicker 2 a problem with many 2600 games eliminated with cleverly timed coding and judicious use of the sprite multiply feature there's more i could say about this but let's press on and have a look at tomcat the f14 fighter simulator to give it its full name from 1989 [Laughter] created by another third-party developer well actually maybe fourth party because this is a company founded by former activision employees but that's another story now this is a game that looks very very good for this system right from the get-go created by dan kitchen the same guy responsible for kung fu master but now at the new company that he had founded not the first time anybody attempted a simulator on the 2600 this could easily be seen as a polished up more action-oriented version of activision's space shuttle but it's got to be the most visually impressive from the very first moment we can see the system's limits being pushed even when there's nothing happening how so well thanks to the 2600s uniquely limited graphics capabilities even drawing this view of a cockpit isn't easy you see as well as the sprites we have the playfield graphics designed to draw well play fields or backgrounds in fact it can only store half of one line of playfield graphics in its ram at any one time requiring it to be constantly updated at the expense of cpu time if you want to draw anything complex but even then you're still limited to very chunky graphics indeed with a horizontal resolution of just 40 pixels across for some games this was just fine but for anything more detailed like a fighter jet cockpit playfield graphics were never going to work the playfield graphics here provide a general shape of the scene but anything more intricate is rendered with precisely laid out sprites which can have smaller pixels giving a more detailed higher resolution image if we drop into debug mode again we can see that large parts of the image are being created with the player sprites and what are called the missile and the ball sprites the ingredients of pong being bent into something much more sophisticated the text here is an interesting addition yes by any other standards it may not look it but this is very clear and high resolution for the 2600 few other games ever bothered with much text there was no easy way of drawing it it took up a lot of memory comparatively and it took away resources from other parts of the game here it's generated by marshalling the red and yellow player sprites into drawing what becomes an essential information readout as mentioned before both dark chambers and secret quest used sprites to fill out what couldn't easily be drawn any other way in a very similar manner to what's being done here one thing in this game that isn't being drawn with sprites is the horizon of the outside view and you can see it is a bit jaggy but there is another game with a similar viewpoint that does it a different way let's have a look at radar lock again from 1989 created by doug neubauer the very same guy behind the electric look cabins legendary limit pusher solaris which i featured in a previous video in fact this seems to be based on the same engine if you could call it that more action focused with less of the strategic stuff this is still though a screamingly console rattlingly tightly coded game that was a whole world away from what anyone could have envisioned this system doing when it was created there's a lot of high-class code magic here but i'm particularly enamored with this horizon the smooth movement and high resolution of which requires a very elaborate setup to operate three different types of graphics are played on top of each other to allow the horizon to move around like it does we can use the deep bug colours again to get a different view of things and we can see the detail of the horizon picked out in light blue this is in fact the ball sprite originally intended as the name suggests for drawing the ball or poke in simple two player games the ball sprite has its limitations it can only draw unbroken lines in effect but it can be extended as it is here to cover a large part of the screen but that doesn't explain all of what's going on if we use another emulator feature to disable the ball sprite we can see the very chunky horizon underneath it drawn with playfield graphics yes this is what it looks like without the stretched out ball to give it higher resolution but there's more to it than that even if we disable the play field we can see another layer underneath this is the background layer filling in very roughly the water and the sky not really designed for drawing graphics it was really just intended to provide a single solid colour for the rest of the graphics to be overlaid on but here it's being changed very quickly mid-frame to fill in areas the other types of graphics aren't able to do so efficiently why is this seemingly simple thing so ridiculously complex well it just has to be to allow the horizon to be efficiently drawn with that level of detail other systems of this era could easily handle this sort of thing without having the need for anything so intricate and clever but the 2600 was in so many ways a primitive beast a product not of the 80s like most of its competitors at this point but a throwback from the 70s this makes atari's attempt to keep it relevant seem all the stranger and all the more desperate yes it might have been a cash cow but it can't have been good for their image this ancient system still on their roster when the rest of the world had moved on by 1989 atari themselves had released two separate home console successors and numerous models of home computers and were on the verge of releasing the pioneering links but they still couldn't quite leave the 2600 alone and one thing that i can't leave alone is appeals for my patreon yes this might be a good moment to briefly insert one if you'd like to support me making videos here on youtube head over to patreon.com forward slash sharopolis or click the link below that would be marvellous the twilight of the 2600 saw games that pushed the limits in all sorts of ways both technologically and in terms of game design and this next one fatal run tries to do both yes it's a driving game that looks an awful lot like pole position from a few years earlier but this has vehicular combat thrown into living it up a bit yep drive from place to place destroying cars upgrading as you go like an home brand mad max more involved than the usual fare on this oldest of the old school machine even if on the surface it doesn't look that much more advanced than those early 80s classics like secret quest there's even a password-based safe system but this game's most notable feature is oddly just its sheer size a whole 32 kilobytes of data is in this cartridge incredible a yes one game that takes up more space than every vcs launch title put together yes it's almost as large as our first gen nes game and okay by this point in time it was well it wasn't all that big the 2600 was always limited in how much storage space it had access to partly because of cost constraints but also for technical reasons the first generation of games could be at most four kilobytes in part because of the variant of the cpu that atari chose to use but also well because they thought that that would be enough for anyone it wasn't of course but this capacity could be extended through bank switching which allowed larger memory sizes by splitting the code up into chunks and swapping it in and out as needed like dark chambers secret question radar lock whilst we're about it fatal run uses the sara chip to do its bank switching but with the rum size upped even further making this the largest ever officially released game okay to be fair it's not entirely obvious what the extra space is being used for yes it had quite a lot more than earlier 2600 games but not that much much of the extra space seems to be graphics data used for the various backdrops and the bits between levels as well as an unusual amount of text for a 2600 game atari can't have been all that enamored with this as it never saw an american release only pal territories ever got this game but it wasn't as if this system had been abandoned in its home nation because more releases still kept coming yes 1989 was a big year for the 2600 another prominent name from this last push is road runner prototyped as early as 1984 it seems to have been shelved for a number of years before its resurrection difficult times in the video game industry but the finished version turns out to be one of the more impressive titles on the system a conversion of the atari arcade game quite away from the sumptuous cartoon visuals of the original but it still has its charms once again sprites are used to make elements of the moving background but also playfield graphics are used too to draw the moving lines on the road and the extra lanes on lighter levels it's not quite running at the full 60 frames per second in fact different elements of the graphics take turns to be updated the moving playfield parts are only updated every fourth frame making it noticeably jerky but it still works well enough again i could say more but well time is pressing and you know there's just too many interesting games from this strange interlude in gaming history for me to cover them all in any one video it's already turned into a bit of a whistle stop tour of these late comers i could mention double dragon double dunk commando hikari warriors to name but a few pretty much everything that came out in this period pushed the limits but they had to if they would have any chance at all of appealing to the gamers of the day even the younger ones with budget-minded parents that seem to be the target for this whole exercise there are two games though that i certainly can't let pass by firstly winding back a year to 1988 it's california games from the company epics who played a large role in creating the atari links and were also staffed with a number of people who'd worked on the star path supercharger they were deep in the atari nexus and it's no surprise they knew how to hammer some high performance out of this now obsolescent high-tech coughing dodger actually before we get going on the gameplay let's go back to that rather impressive title screen a lovely demo scene style effect making good use of the 2600s huge colour palette and some clever manipulation of the background colour register and playfield graphics it's also got one of the better tunes on this platform to a more or less recognizable rendition of louis louis for all its at times crippling limitations this old grandfather clock could do some tricks that other systems even much more powerful ones would struggle with anyway the game itself is a fairly standard multi-event sport thing like track and field but with a radical extreme sports vibe it was the style at the time this here is the first event freestyle footbag and no i've no real idea what's going on or how this is a competitive sport but let's not worry about that because here we have something that's quite rare on the 2600 a sprite with two colors on the same scan line that was always the hallmark of 2600 sprites they could be many colors but only vertically each horizontal row of pixels had to be the same color even if going up and down they could be different it was easy enough to switch colors in between scan lines as the screen was drawn but you couldn't change the color of pixels fast enough to do it in the middle of a row and yet here we can clearly see these switching colors in this guy's face the separation of the arms from his tank top and even what looks to be a bold patch weirdly enough how is it done well it's a case of putting two sprites together laid on top of each other in a fairly complicated pattern yeah i know it's a small detail but very few other games did this and it stands out as a result there's also some nice scrolling effects with the clouds too but well enough of a foot bag let's jump forward to the final event and see some surfing again we've got a two color per line sprites here with the surfboard being picked out in a different shade this kind of interesting wave effect has got to be the start of the show though it looks a little odd but it's extremely colourful the colour palette put to good use here and kind of smooth too what's going on more clever manipulation of the background colour it's changed for every line of the c area and changed again about halfway through to give the impression of a rolling wave this is another thing that a lot of systems would struggle to recreate exactly most of them just don't have that many shades of blue for a start i really don't know how you're supposed to play this surfing event but probably nobody ever did even epic themselves not that it really matters now okay then let's make this the final one i think it has to be because it looks like this was perhaps the last game ever released for the 2600 if not it was pretty close it's ghostbusters 2 from 1992. yes this was the year that the 2600 was finally officially discontinued although atari's game releases had dried up before then and it was all over if there was ever a moment in gaming that had passed it was probably this one a licensed tie-in for a three-year-old slightly disappointing sequel on a game system from the last decade but one i can't find out exactly how this came to be apparently it was developed by none other than activision but shelf because well it's bloody ghostbusters 2 on the 2600 but later picked up and published by possibly british company salute limited for reasons that seem to be lost to history it's not really a long game but what's here is definitely limit pushing the first level has some nice vertical scrolling some interesting physics and some infuriating controls whilst there's a lot here to impress this by itself isn't the best thing on offer though visually it does have that classic era activision flare level two though well that tips it over the edge a proper horizontal scrolling shooter not many of these on this system and not anything that looks this good at least until we get into the homebrew era he seems to be playing as an ice cream cone jammed into a chicken drumstick well actually i think he's supposed to be the statue of liberty's hand which kind of makes sense in the context of the movie but only just he's got a sort of slightly disturbing digital surrealism about it but it does look weirdly stylish it's even got parallax scrolling elements of the moody black skyline moving past in two different layers no less yeah it's faked with sprites once again but it's quite an effective little trick that black seam line moving on the same plane as the main sprite is done with the missile sprites and the quite large number of enemies on screen is done with some deft sprite multiplexing techniques essentially this means you alternate sprites between frames they take it in turns to be drawn increasing the amount you can have on screen at the cost of some flicker sadly this doesn't play all that well really it's just too hard to control in short but there's some real potential here even if it's let down a bit by the execution in the end i imagine this game engine could have made an interesting dratius style shooter with a bit more time in the oven but time well time that was one thing the 2600 did not seem to have at this point so i think this is where i'm going to leave off it has to be really i probably shouldn't be that surprised the 2600 had such a long life this was the fate of all the really successful consoles the nes the ps1 the ps2 the wii big big hitters have a long tail and the 2600 was a big big hitter back in those early days of console gaming from cutting edge to oh my god are they still making games for this thing a fate that only true legends get to enjoy should they have canned it earlier well from a business point of view atari might have been better focusing on new products but 2600 fans can hardly complain about the extra games impressive as these oddball end-of-the-line releases were they often still feel a little bit cheap a bit half-assed but i guess a lot of these games were rushed out in a short time with a minimal budget a bit of a cash grab maybe it's a shame because well i think there's more than a few of these games that could have been something really amazing with some more resources put into them we perhaps haven't seen the full potential of the 2600 yet there's more out there the whole world of homebrew lies before us but i think that's for another video so yes this really is the end for now thank you for watching thank you to my ever generous patrons your support is much appreciated and i will see you next time folks goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 154,837

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Id: ADy1F8v59YU

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020