Racing the Beam | Atari VCS / 2600 Book Review
Released in March 2009, “Racing the Beam” was a book written by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort which covers the history and development of the Atari VCS/2600. It is broken into 8 chapters, 6 of which cover the systems earliest groundbreaking games. They are “Combat”, “Adventure”, “Pac-Man”, “Yars-Revenge”, “Pitfall”, and “Star Wars – The Empire strikes Back”. Although there are chapters specifically covering these games, there are a few detours into other classics including Grand Prix, freeway, star castle, defender, barnstorming, among others. The book is written in more of a technical, academic textbook sort of way. They do cover technical aspects of the VCS, which is necessary in order to properly understand the unit’s limitations. The book derived its name literally from the fact that in the early days of television there was an electron beam that shot across the screen many times a second, moving both horizontally and vertically. Certain calculations have to be made in between electron gun movements in order to display the graphics properly. You in effect are literally “Racing the Beam”, across the screen. This was due to the fact that the VCS did not have a video frame buffer. From this book, I also learned of another technical constraint of the VCS. It did not have character ROM as you find for example, on the Commodore 64. This made printing characters on the screen, even the score, much more challenging. This is one of the reasons why you don’t see many text-based game cartridges on the system.
After covering the Television Interface Adapter (TIA), otherwise known as Stella, in the first chapter, the book moves on to the groundbreaking games released for the VCS.
The first such game, in chapter two is “Combat”. Combat was the Pack in Game that was included with the console upon purchase. This was a game that was intended to show off all of the capabilities that the VCS had to offer. The thing that I am the most impressed about Combat is that it has 27 variations which are all stuffed into a 2K cartridge! On the technical side, from the book, I learned a few new things. The sprites in Combat use a double sizing technique and I also learned the VCS has a screen mirroring mechanism, whereby whatever image is in on the left side of the screen can automatically be mirrored to the right side, which saves memory and CPU cycles.
Chapter three covers a groundbreaking game that I recently reviewed, “Adventure”. The book goes into detail about how the game’s author and programmer, Warren Robinett gained his inspiration for the game. Which was from the “PDP 10” text program also called “Adventure”. His idea was to take the concept from a text game and reimagine how to turn it into a graphical adventure.
Next up , “Pac-Man”. In this chapter, I learned the VCS has the capability of flipping sprites horizontally through a hardware register. This eliminates the need to store an extra sprite. This option does not? exist for flipping in the vertical direction. Since the programmer was constrained both on time and on cartridge space, corners had to be cut with regards to arcade accuracy. Having said that Pac-Man was the top-selling Atari 2600 game with over 7 million copies sold.
Next up,”Yars-Revenge”. I learned how Howard Scott Warshow gained inspiration from the Arcade game “Star Castle”. Once he discovered the VCS would not be capable of properly emulating the arcade’s graphics, he instead fostered his own version of the game which had enough variations to become an original game of its own. Yars revenge went on to become Ataris best selling non-arcade ported video game. It was so successful they even seriously contemplated porting it to the arcade.
Next up, “Pitfall!”. Pitfall was one of the first multi-screen platformer style games available on the Atari VCS. I was amazed at how David Crane came up with the initial concept for this game. It all started with a running man animation he had come up with. From there he needed a reason for it to be running. He thought of the jungle, and voila “Pitfall!” was born. It had 255 mazes, used a polynomial counter algorithm to keep track of the mazes, and they were all fit into a mere 50 bytes of cartridge space. This was not a quarter munching type of game. It had a 20-minute timer. Quoting the book, “The 20-minute single-player session was an innovation, which helped establish the experience of home console play”
Next up, “Star Wars – The Empire strikes back”. This was the first video game based on any Star Wars Movie. This chapter covered a lot about video game licensing since Parker bros owned the license for both toys and games. They were under the belief that this also entitled them to the video game software license. This video game made great use of the 128 color palette and had a short recognizable tune that doubled as an introduction and in-game music.
Overall, I learned a lot from “racing the beam” and am glad I read it. The book has been out for over 7 years now and I wish I had discovered it sooner. It has a dry tone and reads a lot like a college textbook, in that it covered technical topics and had a teacher/student vibe. I don’t think anyone ever imagined the Atari VCS/2600 would have ever had the long term success that it has had. Were it not for the discoveries, innovations, and breakthroughs by the early programmers and written about in this book that may have never happened. Understanding the technical intricacies of the VCS, following the beam so to speak, along with the creative thinking of the early developers are what helped make this platform flourish. Not to mention the brilliant design engineering of the system to begin with. A system which was initially intended for simple pong style games. “Racing the Beam” goes into significant detail on these historical points and is a fairly quick read, clocking in at about 150 pages.
It is a part of MIT-Labs Platform Studies Series and can be found on Amazon.com in both hardcover and digital formats.
Highly Recommended.
Youtube Description:
This is my review of “Racing the Beam”
Official Book website:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
MIT Press page link:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/platform-studies
Wikipedia Page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
Youtube Original Post Date: 07/30/2016
