Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies) Read online

composed of many horizontal lines, illuminated by an electron beam that

  traces each one by moving across and down a picture tube. Some pro-

  grammers worry about having each frame of the picture ready to be dis-

  played on time; VCS programmers must make sure that each individual

  line of each frame is ready as the electron gun starts to light it up, “racing the beam” as it travels down the screen.

  The Roots of Video Gaming

  In World of Warcraft, you start off, as a human, in Northshire Abbey. You can move your character around using the W, A, S, and D keys, an interface popularized by the fi rst-person shooter Quake. As you do this, the terrain that you’re standing on moves off the screen and new terrain appears as

  if from off screen. You are in a virtual space that is larger than the screen.

  This shouldn’t be at all surprising. It seems that every 3D game, from

  Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Super Mario 64 to Tomb Raider, offers virtual spaces that are larger than the screen. Quake and other fi rst-person shooters have them as well, as do 2D games. In the original Legend of Zelda,

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  for instance, when you have Link walk off one side of the screen, he appears on the other side of a new screen in another part of the large

  virtual space.

  Video games weren’t born with these extra-large virtual spaces,

  though. Pong, Spacewar, Space Invaders, and Asteroids are a few of the many games that have a single screen as their playing fi eld. The idea of a game with a virtual space bigger than the screen had to be developed and implemented for the fi rst time at some point.3 This was done by Warren Robi-

  nett, as he designed and programmed Adventure, the fi rst graphical adventure game, for the Atari VCS in 1978.

  Engage with Half-Life 2 and you could fi nd your avatar, Gordon

  Freeman, surrounded by attacking enemies who provide supporting fi re

  for each other, dodge, and hide behind cover, powered as they are by what

  the game industry calls artifi cial intelligence, or AI. The pleasure of many solo games, whether they are real-time strategy games such as Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos or fi rst-person shooters, comes from the worthy but sur-mountable challenge that computer opponents are able to provide.

  The computer’s ability to play against a person and to play somewhat

  like a person, rather than just serving as the playing fi eld and referee, wasn’t a given in the early days of gaming. Early on, most games were

  either two-player, like Pong and Spacewar, or else offered an asymmetric challenge, like that of Space Invaders. But there were other developments that helped the industry move toward today’s crafty computer-controlled

  enemies. One early example was Alan Miller’s Atari cartridge Basketball, which, in its 2K of code and graphics, managed to provide a computer-controlled opponent for a one-on-one game. But even before then, one

  of the VCS launch titles, Video Olympics, offered a one-player “Robot Pong” mode that provided an opponent who, although not anthropomor-phic, managed to be challenging without being impossible to defeat.

  It’s obvious to any gamer today, and certainly also to those who

  produce games, that there are well-established videogame genres: fi rst-

  person shooters, real-time strategy games, sports games, driving games,

  platformers, adventure games, and survival horror games, for instance.

  Video gaming wasn’t always stratifi ed in this way. From the very early days, in which two-player head-to-head challenges predominated, video games

  began to branch out as games employed many types of hardware and soft-

  ware interfaces, display technologies, game forms, and representations.

  Gradually, conventions of different sorts began to emerge and various

  genres became evident.

  Some of the development of today’s videogame genres arose thanks

  to computer games and arcade games, but games for the Atari VCS made

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  important contributions as well. Certain genres the Atari VCS helped develop (such as the vertical scroller, which was fostered by Activision’s River Raid) do not defi ne important sectors of today’s videogame market.

  Others remain infl uential, such as the graphical adventure game, the pro-

  totype of which was Atari’s Adventure, and the platformer, pioneered in Activision’s Pitfall! One game critic even traces the origin of survival horror to the 1982 VCS cartridge Haunted House.4 Regardless of whether the case for this lineage is persuasive, it is obvious that the Atari VCS was at least a seedbed for videogame genres, if not the forge in which many

  were formed.

  The Atari VCS is certainly a retro fetish object and a focus of nostal-

  gia, but it is also much more than this. The system is essential to the

  history of video games, and in niches it remains a living part of the

  modern videogame ecology.

  Cartridge Games for the Home

  The Atari Video Computer System was the fi rst successful cartridge-based

  videogame console. (In 1982, when the Atari 5200 was introduced, the

  system was renamed the Atari 2600, the new name being taken from the

  system’s original product number. Because our focus in this book is on

  the period 1977–1983, we have decided to call the console “the Atari VCS”

  throughout the book.) The system appeared at a time when the vast major-

  ity of video games were played in bars, lounges, and arcades. The arcade

  cabinet has become a rare sight in the United States, but in their best year, coin-operated games collected quarters that, adjusting for infl ation, sum to more than twice the 2006 sales of U.S. computer and videogame

  software.5

  Arcade games derive directly from tavern and lounge games such as

  pinball. They are indirectly descended from games of chance, including

  midway games and slot machines. Among his many trades, Atari founder

  Nolan Bushnell worked the midway as a barker before founding Atari.6

  His contributions to video games owe much to the principles he learned

  from his experiences at the carnival.

  Midway games rely on partial reinforcement—a type of operant con-

  ditioning that explains how people become attached (and possibly

  addicted) to experiences. Partial reinforcement provides rewards at

  scheduled intervals. Psychologists Geoffrey R. Loftus and Elizabeth F.

  Loftus make the argument that video games offer superlative examples of

  partial reinforcement, presenting incentives at just the right moments to

  encourage players to continue or try again when they fail.7

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  The classic midway games, which involve things like throwing a ball into a basket or knocking down bottles, appear to be contests of skill. But the barker can subtly alter the games to tip the odds in or out of his favor.

  For example, by slightly, imperceptibly turning the angle of the basket,

  the basketball game operator can almost ensure failure, or make success

  very easy, for a particular throw.

  Midway games are illusions more than tests of skill, designed to offer

  the player just enough positive feedback to give the impression that

  winning is easy, or at least possible. The midway barker must occasionally allow players to win, persuading onlookers and passersby that the game is

  a sure thing. Bushnell was a natural barker; he had an uncanny ability to

  read people and play to their weaknesses. He knew that the big, brutish

  fellow would be willing to drop a small fortune trying to beat a game that he’d just seen a weakling master.

  It was as if Bushnell had all of this in mind already when
he fi rst

  started working with video games. As an electrical engineer educated at

  the University of Utah, he discovered Spacewar at school in 1962. That game ran on the PDP-1 minicomputer and displayed simple graphics on

  an oscilloscope. Steve Russell, an MIT student, had created Spacewar

  earlier that year. The game quickly spread to the few institutions fortunate enough to have a PDP-1. Given the price tag of more than $100,000, these

  were usually universities and laboratories.

  Bushnell spent the next decade trying to make a version of Spacewar

  simple enough to run on more common, less expensive hardware. The

  result was Computer Space, which arcade game manufacturer Nutting

  Associates released in 1971 to very limited commercial success. Complex-

  ity of play was part of the problem—the general public wasn’t accustomed

  to arcade games. Parlor and midway games inspire play based partly on

  familiarity and partly on external rewards. To make a breakthrough,

  Bushnell needed to merge his experience as an electrical engineer and as

  a midway barker.

  Slot machines certainly implement the midway barker’s technique,

  providing scheduled payouts of varying amounts based on complex odds

  tables. These tables were originally encoded mechanically and are now

  represented electronically. But pinball machines and video games give the

  player partial control over an experience, and in that respect they have

  more in common with midway games than with slot machines. In the

  taverns that fi rst hosted Bushnell and Al Alcorn’s coin-operated Pong (1972), the game became a social hub, serving a function that darts,

  pinball, and related tavern sports had fulfi lled in that space. In Pong and its siblings, partial reinforcement operates on two registers. First, the

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  game encourages continued play and rematches—it promotes “coin drop,”

  a measure of the rate at which a machine takes in cash.8 Second, the game

  encourages players to remain in the bar, ordering more food and drink.

  It is important to the history of video games that they bring their persuasive powers to bear within specifi c architectural spaces, enticing players to enter and remain within certain places.

  As tavern culture gave way to the video arcade of the late 1970s and

  early 1980s, secondary pursuits like eating food surrendered to the

  primary pursuit of playing games. Arcades had more in common with

  casinos than with taverns. Bushnell, ever the entrepreneur, recognized

  this as a market opportunity and decided to create an arcade space with

  the additional social and gastronomical goals of a tavern, one that would

  also appeal to a broader audience. While still at Atari, he hatched the idea for Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatres, a place for kids and families

  to eat pizza and play games.9 Here, Bushnell combined all of his prior

  infl uences. Chuck E. Cheese’s was an arcade: its games encouraged con-

  tinued play and cross-cabinet play. It was also a restaurant: food and drink drew players to the locale and kept them there longer. Finally, it was a

  midway: players collected tickets from games of skill and chance like

  skeeball in the hopes of exchanging them for prizes.

  Yet despite Bushnell’s very relevant background, Pong was not simply and directly the result of one man’s midway job. In 1958, Willy Higinbotham created a playable version of tennis that ran on an analog computer,

  with display output to an oscilloscope, just as Spacewar would do half a decade later. Higinbotham worked at the Brookhaven National Labora-tory, a federal nuclear physics research facility on Long Island. His game, dubbed Tennis for Two, was created as a demo for the lab’s annual visitors’

  day. Higinbotham intended it both as a distraction from the rather

  mundane operation of the facility and, purportedly, as evidence of the

  future potential for nuclear power.

  While Bushnell was working on his tavern-grade adaptation of Space-

  war, Ralph Baer commenced work on his television gaming device, the

  “Brown Box.” Like Bushnell, Baer saw the potential for computer games

  among a broader market, but his great equalizer of choice was the televi-

  sion, not the tavern. The Brown Box was eventually commercialized in

  1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the fi rst home videogame console. Baer,

  a fervent supporter of patents and intellectual property protection for

  software and electronics, worked with Magnavox to battle successor tech-

  nologies in court throughout the 1970s and 1980s in many lawsuits, some

  of which named Bushnell and Atari as defendants. Some of the claims

  against Atari rested on the similarity of Pong to the Odyssey’s tennis game,

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  which Bushnell had seen before Pong was built. Magnavox prevailed.

  Baer’s opposition to similar-looking work seems somewhat ironic,

  though, given the similarity between the Brown Box’s television tennis

  game and Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two.10

  Legal disputes aside, Baer and Bushnell were alike in focusing on one

  important component in their efforts to create consumer-affordable

  video games: the television. The Odyssey very obviously relied on the tube in a user’s own den or living room, but the arcade game Pong was television-based as well, even though most of the TV was hidden away. Al

  Alcorn, the engineer who built Pong, purchased an ordinary consumer-grade black-and-white television for the cabinet, paying much less than

  he would have for the equivalent industrial monitor.11

  The fi rst Pong unit was installed in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a bar in Sunnyvale, California. Increasingly apocryphal stories of the game’s

  installation report lines out the door but almost never mention the prec-

  edent for coin-operated video games in Andy Capp’s. When Alcorn

  installed Pong in the summer of 1972, Computer Space was sitting there in the bar already.12

  Pong solved the problem that plagued Computer Space—ease of use—

  partly by being based on the familiar game table tennis and partly thanks

  to the simplicity of its gameplay instructions. “Avoid missing ball for high score” was a single sentence clear enough to encourage pick-up play, but

  vague enough to create the partial reinforcement of the slot machine and

  the midway; after failing, players wanted to try again. One other important sentence appeared on the machine: “Insert coin.”

  Pong’s start in a Silicon Valley tavern rather than a corner convenience store or shopping mall is an important detail of the medium’s evolution.

  Bars are social spaces, and the context for multiplayer games had already

  been set by the long tradition of darts, pool, and other games common to

  the tavern. Pong was launched in 1972; volume production of the machine started the next year; and, by 1974, there were 100,000 Pong-style machines that, as Martin Campbell-Kelly explained, “largely displaced

  pinball machines, diverting the fl ow of coins from an old technology to a newer one without much increasing the overall take.”13 But taverns are

  also adult spaces that are fewer in kind and number than the millions of

  living rooms and dens that had access to video games thanks to Baer and

  Magnavox. At a time when coin-ops ruled the market, part of the appeal

  of the home console system was its promise to tap into a new market of

  kids and families.

  In 1973, just a year after Pong’s coin-op release, Atari start
ed eyeing the home market for video games. The company’s home version of Pong

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  1.1 To play Atari’s Home Pong, the two players each use one of the knobs to control a paddle that appears on the TV screen.

  (fi gure 1.1) boasted considerable technical advances over the Odyssey,

  including an integrated circuit that contained most of the game’s logic on a single chip, on-screen scoring, and digital sound. The device connected

  to the television directly, but was small enough to store out of the way

  when not in use. Atari agreed to let Sears sell it exclusively, and the department store initially ordered 150,000 units.14 Atari’s triumph was short-

  lived, however. In 1976, General Instrument released its $5 AY-3-8500,

  a “Pong-on-a-chip” that also contained simple shooting games. This

  component allowed even companies without much electronics experience

  to bring Pong-like games to market, and many did just that. Campbell-Kelly writes that there were seventy-fi ve Pong-like products available by the end of 1976, “being produced in the millions for a few dollars

  apiece.”15

  Even if Atari had cornered the market for home Pong, owning the

  system wouldn’t have done anything to directly infl uence future pur-

  chases. Try as Atari did to enhance their product, offering new features

  and more controllers for multiplayer action in later versions, how many

  Pong units could one house have needed? Those at Atari therefore sought to imitate some features of the nascent personal computer with a home

  console that used interchangeable cartridges, allowing the system to

  play many games. There would be an important difference from home

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  computing, though: all of the cartridges for the system would be made by one company.

  The tremendous success of Pong and the home Pong units suggested that Atari should produce a machine capable of playing many games that

  were similar to Pong. The additional success of Tank by Kee Games (a pseudo-competitor that Atari CEO Bushnell created to work around the

  exclusivity that distributors demanded) suggested another similar game