A History Lesson Followed by an Adventure!

A Brief Summary of the reading: Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost

This book is supposedly the first of what the authors hope to be many publications on "platform studies," i.e. the technological analysis of the computer parts that make up a gaming platform and their interaction. They state that the platform is something that must be studied as it "influences, facilitates, [and] constrains" development of products. Without a platform, game designers would have to create their own platform, but a preexisting platform would provide standardized settings, hardware, and input options across multiple creations. But these benefits come at a cost, the platform you use was originally not created for the exact purpose you need it for, and that may make your work a little more difficult, as we will see later with Adventure.

The first videogames were graphically simple, on one static screen, and either presented an asymmetric challenge or were 2-player competitions. This was how the first arcade and Atari games were. Since then, many advances have been made. Now, game worlds are more than just the visible screen, graphics are more complex, and computers can simulate a second player. Many of these large steps forward occurred on the Atari 2600 (then called the Atari VCS).

The 2600 was the first commercially successful home cartridge-based console. Prior to the 2600, only specialized systems with just one game (Home Pong, for example) were available for use on your television. The 2600 changed this. Videogames had been around for a few years, but only existed in arcade cabinet form. As one of the arcade manufacturers, Atari saw an untapped market in people's living rooms and capitalized on it.

The 2600 sold in 1977 for $199.00, just a little over the manufacturing cost. Every effort was made to keep costs as low as possible to keep the console affordable. They found cheap but effective parts that could do what they needed the system to do. They spent a lot of money on R&D making the Television Interface Adapter, which allowed simple graphics to display on screen. The system had only 128 bytes of RAM. (Your computer probably has at least 10 million times as much RAM as the Atari 2600 did.) The main goal of the system was to be able to cheaply reproduce arcade experiences in the living room. The console had interchangeable controllers for different kinds of input. The authors state that the reason the Atari 2600 was so successful was because of its simplicity. The platform could do a few things very well: it could display three movable objects against a low resolution background and make some beeps and noises, but that was about all.

The authors then go on to describe six influential games in the life of the Atari, one of which being Adventure. Adventure was a ground breaking game. The designer of the game had played a text-based adventure game of the same name and had fallen in love with the game's complexity. He decided that he wanted to make a version of this game for the Atari, but ran into a few major problems.

The original game was text based (users would type "GET LAMP" or "GO SOUTH," and text would appear on screen to let users know what was happening) and this presented two big issues. The 2600 had no easy way for users to input text and no built in way for text to appear on screen as feedback to users. The 2600 did have the things it was good at, however. It could make environments (like rooms or a maze) and have three objects move around and interact. The designer's plans were simple, but innovative at the time. His plan was to "use the joystick to move around, show one room at a time on the video screen, and show objects in the room as little shapes." These ideas (with the exception of the first) were huge steps forward in games.

Previous to Adventure, games occurred in one space, and the players could all see the entire play field. Adventure had the player walk from room to room, allowing for a world much larger than in any other game. The story elements of text based games were able to be told graphically rather than textually. The other big development was making use of the three objects the platform would allow in unique ways. One was the avatar, one a trinket you could pick up, and the third would be something the trinket would interact with (i.e. a sword would kill a dragon, a key would open a lock).

While this game may not seem very complex from our perspective, it was a good example of someone pushing the limits of what the platform was supposed to do. The Atari was made to play games like Pong, and the creators of the system never expected anyone to be able to make a game like Adventure with the tools they had been given. What this developer had done is akin to making a huge, elaborate dungeon out of a ping pong table with two paddles and a ball.