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Reddit mentions of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)

Sentiment score: 13
Reddit mentions: 19

We found 19 Reddit mentions of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies). Here are the top ones.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)
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Found 19 comments on Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies):

u/[deleted] · 23 pointsr/retrogaming

You have to understand at the time, that the idea of just moving something on your own home TV screen was amazing. The graphics sucked compared to the arcade games but it was the best we could have at home, without having to put a quarter in for each play.

Arcade games at the time weren't very complex either. The Atari could generally duplicate the game mechanics of many games even if they looked like poor copies. Games on the Atari also did innovate. Pitfall may seem lame today but imagine it coming out in a world before platform games were common. A world where just rendering a player that looked somewhat human was a graphic breakthrough.

Atari was a phenomenon at the peak of the early 80s video game boom. It may be hard to believe but yeah we got genuinely excited about the games. The two player games were probably the best, since anything resembling "AI" was barely possible. Single player games usually used patterns for the bad guys (common in the arcade too) and getting a new high score was the goal. My brothers and had a book where we recorded the family high scores and we were always trying to beat each other.

Games were almost entirely skill based. The system couldn't handle new graphics for later levels, so everything is very similar throughout the games. There is no sense of beating a level to see the next. Pitfall impressed us because it had 256 screens, which were just rearrangements of a few types of hazards, but still it blew our minds.

The 2600 doesn't hold up, it's an early system with very basic games. The novelty to me is in how much they were able to accomplish with such limited hardware. In particular Activision pushed the system way beyond what Atari itself was producing. The book Racing the Beam offers an in depth look at how some of the games were made. It's really almost a kind of video sorcery. Nothing like how modern systems work.

When you look at the Atari you are looking at the formative years of home gaming. Games were simple but novel because they had never been seen before.

After the video game bust, those of us who were still playing moved on to 8 bit computers which were much closer to the NES in terms of gaming. The expanded amount of storage (160KB per disk side on a Commodore 64!) allowed for games with multiple levels and differing graphics. Computer gaming also gave rise to more sophisticated genres such as RPGs and strategy games.

I still play the 8bit computer stuff once in awhile as well as NES and beyond, but the Atari is only rolled out for the occasional bout of nostalgia. Even when playing with one of my brothers, the most we can stomach is a match or two of Combat or a round of Demon Attack.

You're correct, Atari games ARE generally poor in comparison to what came later. The best you can do these days is to try to appreciate them in context of where video gaming was at in the late 70s and early 80s. And also understand that these first steps directly led to the video games we have today.

u/kommando208 · 13 pointsr/books

It ties back to the concept of restriction as a source of creativity.

To see this fully illustrated, read "Racing the Beam", which is largely concerned with how the basic and confined platform the Atari 2600 provided to the first game programmers directly inspired and influenced modern definitions of genre and expression in the medium.

u/ginsweater · 10 pointsr/gamedev

There are a number of resources on early game development. If you're interested in Atari 2600 games (games were 2K or 4K of ROM, the system had 128 bytes of RAM) there's a wonderful book called Racing the Beam:

http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X

It goes deep into the technical details of several Atari games.

There's also been a lot written about the Apple II Prince of Persia, as Jordan Mechner released the source on Github a couple years ago:

https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

Fabien Sanglard has been doing a detailed code review on his blog.

u/fermion72 · 9 pointsr/programming

Awesome. He plugs Racing the Beam, which is a phenomenal book and digs into more details.

u/raydeen · 6 pointsr/gamedev

I'd encourage anyone interested to check out Racing The Beam. It goes into detail how some of the early programmers got as much as they did out of the 2600. The chapter on PitFall! is really great.

u/alexleavitt · 6 pointsr/AskSocialScience

Yes, there are definitely some scholars that are pursuing projects like this, but I don't think they've necessarily congealed into a proper subdiscipline. You might find some more stuff done around "histories of technology" or archiving: for example, there are some that practice it, like those at Archive.org and people like Jason Scott of Archive Team, or practice in an artistic sense, like Olia Lialina.

As far as more academic scholarship goes, I'm thinking back to a conference a couple years ago to a panel I really liked on Computer Histories (see http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/subs/agenda.html for more details). Sandra Braman's work was really cool, and Kevin Driscoll is a classmate of mine whose work I really admire (another cool article he recently put out was a history of databases (From Punched Cards to "Big Data": A Social History of Database Populism). Nick Montfort, the moderator of that panel, has also done some cool work around video game histories, notably Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System.

u/Xenomech · 5 pointsr/gaming

The book, Racing the Beam, is a great look into the hardware and programming of the Atari 2600, and it talks a lot about this sort of stuff. It's fascinating.

u/Antidote · 5 pointsr/gamedev

If you haven't already I highly recommend Racing the Beam. It goes into detail about how the thing was programmed and how the constraints of the system informed gameplay.

u/Ezreal_As_lt_Gets · 3 pointsr/Games

Bioshock 1 & 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction & Blacklist ran heavily modified versions of Unreal 2.5, with Bioshock taking a few things from 3 that were able to be ported back to the older engine (mainly graphical effects for the water and fire). Once you know your way around an engine you can really make it do some absurd things within it's limits. While not technically dealing with game engines a good book on this is Racing the Beam, which basically shows you how the Atari 2600 was made to play nothing more complicated than Pong and everything after the first two years or so of the system was people having to essentially perform magic to make it do what they wanted.

u/tragomaskhalos · 3 pointsr/programming

Not for nothing is this book called "Racing the Beam" :)

u/stpe · 2 pointsr/retrogaming

Quite technical and highly recommended - Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System.

Does look into how limitations of the platform (Atari 2600/VCS) influenced the game design, implementation and creativity on the platform with several in-depth (down to looking at assembly code) case studies of a couple of games.

Very good read!

u/EtanSivad · 2 pointsr/gaming

One more thing, of the thousand hours of programming, easily 100 hours went to squeezing the game onto the minisucle 8kb (or maybe this was one the 4kb carts). For anyone interested, http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299461261&sr=8-1 "Racing the beam" is a pretty fascinating study it what it took to program these older games.

u/HiroP713 · 1 pointr/truegaming

Racing the Beam covers a lot of these sorts of technical limitations for the Atari 2600.

http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X

u/librik · 1 pointr/programming

Racing the Beam was my recommendation for best computer book of 2009. It's about how the hardware choices of the Atari 2600 shaped the mindset and culture of Atari programmers. It's the only book I know of that really explains how people hack small systems, how brilliant insights become clever code which then becomes essential knowledge for those who seek further mastery of the machine's potential.

For a great analysis of the architecture of one of the most important pieces of Big Iron ever built, check out Jim Thornton's book Design of a Computer: The Control Data 6600 (PDF). It's perfectly readable without electronics training (just skip chapter 3), and you can watch Seymour Cray invent the cutting-edge CPU technology of 1980-2000 -- in 1963.

u/Knochenhans · 1 pointr/zxspectrum

I guess you mean that one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X Seems to be about the Atari VCS but sounds interesting neverless, thanks! :)

u/hahanoob · 1 pointr/gamedev

Racing The Beam is about the Atari 2600 (though it does mention the NES in passing). And you did say "any early-model game consoles". I hope they do one on the NES sometime, it was great for getting some perspective on modern hardware.

u/WhiteZero · 1 pointr/Games

Racing the Beam is suppose to be a good book on old console development and how they tuned graphics to the way CRTs worked.