Ah, yes, gaming. That thing we all love to do in our free time. Or work time. Hell, some even do it when they really should be taking a shower.
Something that few people think of is where all these games began; I don’t mean the developers slaving away in some Activision dungeon. I mean, where did real gaming begin? Who were the first people to grab an arcade machine from their local arcade palace and decide, “Man, I want this in my house.”
Of course, real gaming began in some IBM or Bell laboratory. The researchers are arguing about something called Bertie the Brain, which played Tic-Tac-Toe (Os and Xs for some) and tennis for two.
Bertie was made in 1950, stood 13 feet tall, and was in a Canadian National Exhibition. However, at the end of that exhibition, it was disassembled, considered a novelty, and if modern history is any indication, the developers were laid off right after the Friday evening pizza party.
If you were to crack open a history book, it would probably talk about Tennis for Two, the 1958 game that was revealed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was a two-player game played on an oscilloscope. But for the average home, this was nothing but a novelty. In fact, the first at-home video game console was the Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, and it played exactly one game.
While Pong and seemingly 20 other consoles were released earlier, I am revising this to be a much more specific piece. Today, we will be talking about the Atari 2600.
What Is The Atari 2600?
Known as the Atari Video Computer System, the Sears Video Arcade, and that weird wooden thing that got chucked out by your grandmother when your dad or mom left the house. The Atari 2600 is the perfect symbol of what classic consoles were.
Personal computers were also being revolutionised at the time, mainly being invented. Early consoles and PCs aimed to be the most technologically advanced and capable machines of their time. As a console, the Atari 2600 was made with one single idea in mind: to bring the arcade into the living room.
While personal computers were the ultimate expression of gaming and how we can push the limits, the Atari was the essence of video gaming itself.
Up until that time, home consoles had been expensive, surprisingly large, and extremely limited. If you bought a console, you bought the games that played on it all at once. This is usually because these consoles could only play one game, the game the developers loaded onto it, or were entirely closed to third-party developers.
The Atari 2600 was no gaming goliath like we have with consoles today. The tradition of consoles being seemingly weaker than their PC counterparts started early. At launch, the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM and a CPU that ran at 1.19Hz.
A modern digital watch, not smart, probably has millions of times the thinking power of this console. And yet, the console launched and immediately became the thing to have.
If you wanted to be the king of the nerds (it was the 1970s; we must use period-accurate words here), you had to own the Atari 2600.
What’s more, the console did something that absolutely no one else had thought of doing by that point. They made it possible for third parties to make games for the system. To give you an idea of how amazing this is, the last game made for the Atari 2600 was released in 2021. In fact, Atari still has the console available on their website.
That is 44 years of gaming.
The Atari 2600 home console can be seen as the square point where home video gaming consoles began. Fathers played with their children, nerds wished to play with their girlfriends, and mothers swore they would throw the console down the trash.
Except the cost of the console stopped many vandalism attempts. Back then, it was $190. In today’s money, that is $920. In real world money, that is a whopping R17,500.
Apart from being expensive, the Atari 2600 was also underpowered. It is a downright shame that despite its wildly successful launch, the company’s fortunes went downhill from there.
Bad decisions and management would cost Atari dearly, with their next releases, 5600 and 7800, being failures. They tried their hand at handhelds with the Lynx. But this was sandwiched between the Nintendo Gameboy and Sega Gamegear, and you never want to be in the middle of a Nintendo and Sega sandwich in the 1980s.
The Atari Jaguar was the final straw that broke the 64-bit camel’s back. But hey, they did have at least one last super revolutionary invention: the 5800 came complete with a storage compartment for your beer!
Limitations breed innovations
Arcades and consoles, PCs and handhelds, what are they without the games we play on them. On our modern systems we complain when something doesn’t have at least 100GB of space. If the RAM is below 16GB we may as well throw it away.
But the Atari 2600 had a measly 128 bytes of RAM and 40 kilobytes of storage (ROM). Limitations that meant many games could not load the level and the music at the same time – this was a recurring theme at Atari. The DOOM port for the Atari Jaguar is notoriously known as “Silent Doom”. 8-bit gaming was a wild time, and getting the most out of a machine was a true struggle.
Coupled with the slow processor, designing for this thing was seen as a true challenge. Fortunately, there are workarounds for these problems.
First is bank switching, this is the process of extending ROM beyond the processor’s capabilities. Developers did this by implementing PLDs (Programmable Logic Devices) onto the cartridges, which could move address space around registers and afford games more read-only memory. Yes, this means that the storage for the game’s saves and actual coding ran directly from the cartridge.
The much weirder solution came when developers had to overcome the small RAM problem. In the absurdity that is the 1970s and the 1980s, developers just shoved an extra 128 bytes of RAM onto the cartridges. Now, the Atari 2600 had a whopping 256 bytes of RAM to work with.
A unique challenge with this scarcity of RAM was the lack of a frame buffer, which stores image data of the next “screen” that must be displayed. Because of this, all the sprites and graphics were drawn on a single scan line as the electron gun (CRT TVs then) passed the beam over the TV screen—or, in simpler terms, these graphics were being rendered in real-time!
A single scan line consisted of 76 clock cycles on the CPU. The reads from the ROM and writes to memory had to be so precise that they had to be programmed down to the clock cycle on a scan line. This is what the Atari developers referred to as “racing the beam.”
This would work fine for a simple game like Pong, but what about Space Invaders, which needed sprites over multiple rows?
Since a sprite was drawn on the screen and would only need to be changed once the electron gun passed over it again, that sprite would get redrawn and reused across the screen, meaning it could give the impression of multiple alien ships approaching your spaceship!
It didn’t end there, either. The Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man needed to “flicker” the ghosts’ sprites, have them disappear for a few frames and reappear in a new position to save memory and give the illusion that they were moving, along with the player sprite. Just for reference, this was viewed as one of the worst Pac-Man ports ever.
Video chess was a different beast altogether. Because one disgruntled customer complained that Atari had advertised a chess piece in its marketing and, upon release, found that there was no such game, the company sent out its super team of developers to once more use 100% of their brains. Space Invaders was hard. Pac-Man was a proper challenge. But how do you simulate an entire chess game?
The answer lay in a technique called Venetian blinds. Each chess piece would get a few pixels on a scan line rendered, but the next scan line would be completely blank. The next one would render some more pixels, and the process would be repeated.
This allowed every second scan line’s clock cycles to be freed for more CPU processing, such as moving chess pieces and gave the stylistic appearance of looking like blinds. As an additional help, the screen would also go completely blank on the computer’s turn to allow the computer to move its piece and re-render the chessboard.
Paving the way forward
These games did not exist because assets were easy to make or find; instead, they existed because developers demanded they do. Clever tricks and extreme optimisations meant that the games ran even when everyone thought they could not. A great example of this is how the sounds made by the console were running off calculations instead of actual stored music.
The games of the Atari 2600 were more of a show of technical mastery than the console itself. Many great developers who have led the gaming world as we know it now started by cobbling together codes for this console. This happened because as the console aged, its development became easier.
Second-hand consoles would be grabbed by enthusiasts, opened, soldered into new things, and used to run more than simple games. While we may look down on this console today, it certainly pulled up its 1970 boot-cut jeans and showed us just what it was capable of.
BigMacDaddy is a rockstar, MLG gamer and world-renowned knowledge base for all gaming studios… in his dreams. In real life, he is a full-time software developer and loves family time. His hobbies include a lil’ YouTubing, chess, game development and travel.