There are a lot ways to think about games—as cultural artifacts, works of art, works of programming craft.
Racing the Beam asks you to think about games in a way that is rarely considered: as a negotiation between game developer and hardware platform, between an artist with vision and the constrained tool that must be used to bring that vision to life. It’s a particularly apt metaphor for the platform in question, the Atari 2600, as almost all of that console’s games were made by one-man programmer/artist/designers. The result is a video game history unlike any I’ve ever read.
Racing the Beam is full to the brim with interesting tidbits about the nature of the Atari’s hardware. Cost-cutting measures on the system meant it was designed in a very specific way, to play games like
Pong and
Combat but little else. That meant that nearly everything that was actually done with the console was an elaborate hack. Getting more than two characters on screen, a la
Space Invaders? That was a hack. Getting cars to drive onto screen from the left and off the screen from the right? The Atari was never designed to do anything like that, so that’s a hack too. That beam of brightly colored safety in
Yar’s Revenge? That’s an absolutely ingenious hack.
Told in this way the story of the Atari 2600 becomes a story of brilliant renaissance men, twisting to their whims a piece of hardware that turned out to be far more versatile than its creators could heave dreamed. It’s also supposed to be a story about how this weak system with almost no memory tempered the ideas of developers, but this comes off much less well. The way the book is written, even the system’s abominable port of
Pac-Man looks like a miraculous work of laudable engineering. By the end, it almost makes you think that the Atari 2600 could run, well, anything, if only you put the right genius in front of it.
Still, maybe this is the best way to look at that time period. The people involved in the programming of the 2600 were wizards. All too often they were tasked with impossible projects, like converting a graphically rich arcade game to a console that couldn’t even hold an entire screen’s worth of data at once. The stories of how they succeeded and failed paint an important historical picture about the relationship between the system and the people who made art come alive on it.
Racing the Beam paints that picture well, but it’s still in many ways a book about a computer and some programmers. It will occasionally become dense with technical speak and it even sometimes boxes out esoteric machine code, so if you don’t have any technical knowledge you can expect to re-read some pages many times before your understanding becomes complete. It’s still worth it to try, though. Watching Atari's wheezing beast get tamed by the intellect of this industry’s forefathers is a great and necessary journey for anyone who cares about games.
Pick it up here: Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)
Related Links:
Whatcha Reading: 20 Years of Nintendo Power
The Videogame Ages, part 1
Death of the Gamer, Redefinition of the Audience