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.
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