Racing the Beam The Atari Video Computer System

The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completelythat "Atari" became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS wasaffordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these werecreated, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entiregenres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console fromboth computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigatedplatforms--the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies)does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms andcreative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detailsix game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The EmpireStrikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and trackdevelopments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was thefirst game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtualspaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player towalk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instanceof interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the AtariVCS--often considered merely a retro fetish object--is an essential part of the history of videogames.