Games That Push The Limits of the Atari 2600

pushing the limits of the godfather of console gaming [Music] atari may not have invented the video game but they did pretty much invent the video game industry and the atari 2600 may not have been the first console but it was the first one that really mattered a half-timbered gaming dreadnought that came crashing into the homes of millions worldwide it might have looked like the dashboard of an austin allegro but in 1977 this was the future to begin with the vcs as it was then known was envisaged just not much more than a souped-up version of the dedicated and plug-and-play consoles that were already infesting the world's living rooms a pong machine with interchangeable games on rom cartridges and the first tranche of titles that were tipped out betray these modest ambitions combat video olympics ac battle and a handful of others were all fine entertainment at the time exciting and new and a lot better than watching the love boat but they spoke only in whispers of the new world that gaming would soon open up things were to change though and atari's horizons broadened with the release of two pioneering games with a shared origin starting with superman not the first game based on a licensed property that's true but probably the first to exploit something as iconic as this atari must have been keen for this to be a hit and programmer john dunn gave them their money's worth with a low res comic book fantasy that went some way beyond anything that had been seen before a game with a narrative a game with a world larger than the screen a city rendered in blocky pastels the backdrop where the story plays out turn into superman rebuild the comically undersized bridge in prison lex luthor and his henchmen basically collect the items and put them in the right places saving the day not a massively complex game by any remotely modern standards but a good old leap away from pong like the first tetrapod that crawled out of the sea neither reptile amphibian nor mammal but some primitive forebear of all three this is a game that's hard to categorize but whose dna appears in 10 000 descendants or more a running jumping flying transforming object collecting superman in an embryonic open world on the technical front this was unsurprisingly pretty bleeding edge featuring what i think is the first appearance of two 2600 tricks multi-color animated sprites and sprite multiplexing both arise by exploiting a side effect of this system's rather basic graphics rendering capabilities images being constructed line by line by the game's code rather than a full frame at once by changing the colour of superman between the successive lines drawn we are able to pick out his head from his body his flapping cape animated by changing its shape between each full frame more objects are added on screen by reusing sprites each one being drawn on alternate frames although this does cause noticeable flicker now although it came out first superman was actually based on the code of a game that eventually appeared a few months later one that hacked even deeper into the wild blue yonder of gaming atari's adventure released probably in 1980 everybody seems a bit fuzzy on the details now adventure may seem like a bit of a step back from superman at first its graphics even more basic almost like a parody of retro games the intrepid square facing off against the duck things the manual calls them dragons but i don't think they were fooling anybody even in the disco era but adventure when you get down to it is a better realised game than superman one with more complex mechanics at play a game that can throw up some surprising twists despite its visual naivety something that begins to feel like a real adventure objects aren't just tokens to be put in the right place but alter your interactions with the world the key opens the door the sword defeats the dragon and the bridge opens up a new path through the maze these simple systems work together to create some often surprising emergent gameplay defeating the duck dragon by grabbing the sword stealing bats it's always good for a laugh but a lot of weird twists can play out inspired by the text-based colossal cave adventure that was clogging up the campus computer labs of the day adventures shift to the visual realm created something far more enduring it's not hard to trace the ancestry of many modern games to adventure everything from dragon quest to zelda to dark souls owes a debt to this flickering phantasm from the 70s as a pair adventure and superman were real innovators deploying features that today seem so fundamental to gaming it's difficult to believe they needed to be invented just the geometry of an interconnected world was something that had never been laid out in a video game before both the manuals of these games taking special care to explain to players that going off the side of the screen leads to a new area as big as these two were they are both mere flickers in pop culture compared to the megaton bomb that this next game became yep it's space invaders [Music] at this point in its career the 2600 was hardly a failure but it wasn't quite the runaway success atari was hoping for either given all the cash they'd sunk into it but space invaders provided the answer it must have seemed like a bit of a gamble at the time spending all that time and even more cash converting a major arcade hit created by a competitor no less but of course with hindsight it seems like an obvious slam dunk the biggest game in the world on the biggest console in the world and space invaders was big an international phenomenon the leading edge in technology but also the leading edge in game design too space invaders three lives keep playing until you die and rack up a high score was a brand new hook for a game one that sucked coins out of pockets like no other it's lost something in the translation partly for technical reasons but also partly stylistic too the number of aliens on screen was reduced from 55 to 36 perhaps the most notable gameplay change but to make up for it atari did their favorite trick of adding dozens of variations to the base game 112 video games boasted the box if that wasn't going to win over those last few loveboat fans what would koda rick mora must have viewed this conversion with a bit of trepidation though nothing like this had ever been done on the 2600 before could he make it happen well yes he could in fact but it needed some clever programming 36 enemies on the screen as well as the bases the player and the occasional flying saucer all displayed at once without flicker the screen so dense with action had never been seen on the old wood grain wonder before even more impressive when you consider that the system is only supposed to have 5 sprites or five moving objects in total to play with and three of those are a bit crap how was it done well let's use one of the debug features of the stellar emulator to illustrate what's going on here each of the game's hardware sprites is given its own color regardless of how it looks in the game usually you'll notice most of the graphics are red and yellow these colors represent the two more detailed player sprites being reused all over the screen with some advanced multiplexing techniques two sprites being coaxed into acting as 40. the 2600 has quite a handy sprite multiplying feature so for each row of aliens two sprites multiply into six some intricate coding required to make things work when aliens are shot down and disappear the bases are done in a similar way but here the shape of the base sprite is stored in some of the few bytes of the system's precious ram to allow them to be destroyed pixel by pixel as in the original arcade game the player and enemy shots are created using the single ball sprite reused all over the screen once again but this time with some flicker to allow it to appear more than once on a scanline the only thing in this game that doesn't animate at the full 60hz why not use the more obvious missile sprites well duplicating the players also duplicates these meaning there would have to be three copies on the screen for each one fired thanks in no small part to how well it turned out space invaders was a massive hit on the 2600 yes a fabled killer app going on to sell over 2 million copies and doubling the sales of the system no longer a mild disappointment but a genuine hot seller the 2600 was entering its stride just as a new company was entering the market [Music] activision the world's first third-party console game developer not an easy birth as atari weren't all that happy with this news seeing them purely as competition the complex licensing agreements of modern consoles still a long way off activision soon gained a reputation though for quality knocking out top games like chop command robot tank and the very early scrolling shooter river raid but let's take a look at what was probably their breakout hit and the best selling game of 1982. it's pitfall [Music] created by the soon-to-be legend david crane this is a game that took the platform genre in a new direction literally the uppy downey climbing game as they were then called was already well established at this point but pitfall added a lot of width run right avoiding the enemies and collecting the bonuses was the idea one that holds true in this genre right up to the present day pitfall was groundbreaking in its design moving away from the arcade high score blast and reshaping the video game into something better tailored to the home console a longer more filling experience compared to the bite-sized servings of coin-operated games an idea that nintendo would soon run with quite a long way technically it was top of the line too a much more naturalistic setting than most games of the era pitfall makes use of a lot of neat tricks to make it all happen the same sorts of sprite reuses we saw in space invaders but this time with lots more colour and more vivid animation on the part of the protagonist pitfall harry the swinging vines make clever use of the ball sprite to create the effect stretched out and moving by different amounts on each scan line the backgrounds are worthy of note 2 more detail than you would usually expect from the 2600. the resolution of the playfield as it was called was limited to just 40 very fat pixels across but here extra detail was added to the trees by seamlessly using the player sprite graphics to add little features that could not otherwise be drawn 256 screens in all await the player with 32 treasures to collect within the time limit all this was shoved into a tiny 4 kilobyte cartridge thanks to procedural generation an algorithm of less than 50 bytes creates the entire layout for all this game screens something similar was used in river raid but this time the algorithm is reversible allowing the player to backtrack and return to previous screens something that becomes an essential part of the gameplay a revolutionary game the only platformer that's going to top this on the 2600 is its direct sequel pitfall 2 released two years later in 1984 [Music] basically giving the player everything the original had plus a nice helping more the second in the series adds a lot of depth to the width a network of subterranean caverns and legs to go trolling for treasures in this game's most notable feature has to lie within its cartridge though the capabilities of the system expanded slightly with some extra silicon goodies on board nintendo may have made heavy use of this sort of deal in a few years but the atari was there first the standard cartridge capacity had already been expanded from 4k to 8k with bank switching and some games benefited from extra ram in there too but pitfall went even further making use of both of these upgrades and a primitive co-processor that expanded graphics and sound capabilities on top of that essentially offloading some of the work the cpu had to do with specialized hardware feeding the ti-8 chip with graphics and sound data directly and speaking of sound the audio experience is probably the best of any classic 2600 game four channels as opposed to the usual two bypassing the slightly wonky internal tone generation sounding something like normal human music rather than the top secret cia psyops weapon screech of most games on the 2600 [Music] now as the early 80s turned to the mid there was trouble at brewing in the video game industry in the form of the great video game crash many companies vanished in short order their livelihood not so lively in the downturn but atari and activision hung on surely though it was time to say goodbye to the venerable old vcs now in its ninth year well no it wasn't actually the 2600 had remained a fairly buoyant seller through all this and atari with saucy jack trammell now at the helm were determined to capitalize on it jack was famously wary of video games but the system was relaunched in 1986 at cash cow he couldn't say no to milking the new 2600 popularly dubbed the junior was smaller sleeker slicker and much cheaper a budget alternative aimed perhaps at a younger audience yes it looked like the dashboard of an austin montego and this time it wasn't so much the future as it was a past that would not die now many of the games that appeared in this new old era were re-releases of the classics from yore but atari and others got busy with all new releases too probably the finest of this bunch was solaris at limit pusher if ever there was one solaris made a very good attempt to bring in the now more sophisticated games of other 8-bit systems home to the old sawdust superstar something that others tried but generally failed with created by doug newbauer father of star raiders this started out life as a star raiders sequel was then touted as a last starfighter movie tie-in before becoming its own thing after a couple of years of trading water in development limbo it's not hard to say it's star raters pedigree but this is a more action oriented title less of the strategy more of the shooting and maybe not such a bad thing too because it plays astonishingly well it's fast it's pretty frantic but there is a nice amount of detail and depth too a twitch game with a drawn out finish but what's most notable is just how good this looks for a game running on this old plastic plank there's so much happening on the screen all without a trace of flicker except when it's done for effect a master class in neat vcs tricks on display here pretty much everything we've seen in previous games on this list and more even if you're not all that familiar with this platform you will i'm sure notice stuff that just doesn't seem to be possible most of it is thanks to extremely clever sprite manipulation giving more objects on the screen and more detail those planets with the ring around them they're constructed out of three separate bits both the player sprites and the ball marshalled into a rather nice motif to brighten up the background the track sloping off to infinity in the corridor levels the smooth edges of that are given by using elongated missile sprites giving a higher resolution than possible with just the standard playfield graphics i'm sure there's some out there that would disagree but i don't think i will be too far amiss in calling this the best game ever released on the old melamine marvel at least in the classic era it looks good it plays good and those limits are pushed hard without graphics overshadowing playability wouldn't it be nice if i could call this the 2600s swan song a beautiful way to round off a good nine-year commercial innings leaving the rest in the hands of homebrewers but lord no that's not what hinge battle zone hero and well dozens of others have not even mentioned eye magic or star path what about all those late releases like double dragon and commando and that's not to mention the massive number of homebrew releases that just keep on coming but i think that's all got to wait for another video so sayonara for now i'll sign off and say see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 186,930

Keywords: atari vcs, atari 2600, space invaders, adventure, pitfall, solaris, atari games

Id: zM0IsWdIc_g

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020