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silveradept[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
And for the time, that was very impressive, because it meant I could play video games. Including Night Driver, Frogger, Super Breakout, Missile Command, Video Pinball, a truly awful Pacman port, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, and games that were a little too scary for me at the time, like Haunted House and Pitfall!. The Atari 2600 also taught me about the value of remembering and accurately writing down passwords and other specific information, because when you set the self-destruct mechanism in Secret Quest, you'd better know where the exit teleport is and have cleared the way before you get there.
For the most part, however, my time spent with the 2600 focused on a small subset of games: an excellent port of Space Invaders that I could find the pattern for to clear even the levels where the invaders started one line above a permanent game over (leading to a fanfic universe where the aliens zapped out of the sky were served up as food supplies, with the wandering spaceship seen as caviar of a sort. This was well before XCOM made it possible to sell aliens as food.), Video Pinball, where I eventually became a grunch adept to get those elusive multipliers and extra balls, Super Breakout, where I rarely ever cleared the field, but the courses were entertaining, and Circus Atari, a springboard paddle game that was about popping balloons by keeping clowns bouncing in the air. Very young me didn't make a lot of progress on the game at first because one of the things I had to learn was that the button on the paddle control swapped the springboard so that the flying clown could land on the open side and keep things going instead of crashing down in the corner. (I got better at the game after that.)
Instruction manuals, you say? What are those? I'm playing on my parents' console, there are no instruction manuals, not really. So a lot of my very early learning days were figuring out what the button did, where the controls could be moved, and what the objective was. Triple-A games these days have tutorials to teach us all the controls, but at that point, it was pretty simple.
By today's standards, of course, the graphics on the system were pretty terrible, all very blocky and without much detail at the beginning, at least compared to the phenomenal works of art their box and cartridge pictures wanted to evoke. The sound was also what people usually think of when they think of very old retro games, with bleeps and bloops and very short melodies potentially possible through synthesized sound. (Which didn't last nearly as long as popular conception thinks it did. Both the sound banks on the NES and the SID chip in the Commodore 64 advanced sound design pretty quickly once the crash was done.) There were some later entrants into the system that I remember being pretty decent, including one called Montezuma's Revenge that had a memorizable gameplay loop to amass lots of points with, but that would eventually take all of your lives because the timing windows in between things like flashing one-hit-kill lasers would eventually get too short (or nearly so) to allow someone to safely traverse the room. Actually, that was the difficulty increase on most games, sending you back to the beginning again to try a new loop where things moved faster than they had the last time. Even with a clock speed of 1.19 Megahertz, the game would eventually be moving far too fast for anyone to be able to play it successfully. And, perhaps learning from some of the arcade cabinets of the time, cartridges were usually pretty well programmed that you'd never reach a kill screen before the game exceeded your ability to play it.
That said, at a convention a couple years back, I learned a lot more about the Atari Women project to bring to the foreground the stories of women who worked at Atari in programming, or the women who were eSports champions of the era, and got to see cartridges signed by their programmers and artists who worked on them. (For as much as certain elements want you to believe that the only people who would be called gamers or have influence on the game industry are very young men and boys with toxic attitudes, it's never been true that gaming is only for one gender, and all throughout the history of the industry, women have made incredible contributions that deserve celebration was much as their more famous co-workers and bosses.) That was extremely cool to learn the history of the company and the people who were part of it.
The actual memory must closely associated with the system is from Circus Atari, and it's one of the two earliest memories I have with computing and gaming, and I forget which came first. For the purposes of this story, though, I have to admit that while I knew the console was my parents', I very rarely saw either of them using it to play games. They played board and card games with the children, where one of the children almost always had to be the person who did the maths involved in scorekeeping and the like. (You're be surprised how often you have to do math calculations with weird numbers when you play board games, especially ones that involve money.) When I did see them playing, it was almost always Super Breakout, game 7, an endless mode where the lines of bricks would advance one line down the playing field every time the ball hit the paddle, which would make for a difficult time when the ball was in fast mode, but could make for some entertaining sounds as a ball bounced itself among many layers in slow motion, accumulating low scoring amounts and getting rid of the accumulated detritus. (The techniques I learned from that game have served me well with other brick-breakers over the years, including the ones that go out of their way to make clearing their levels supremely difficult.)
So, one of the many evenings of my childhood, Dad asked me to play the Circus Atari game he was playing. I had no idea how long it had taken him to get to this point, and in all of my subsequent attempts to replicate the feat, I've come up short. The score counter for Circus Atari went up to 9,999 points before rolling over, and while there were ways of achieving extra lives, you could only store one of them at any given time. 5 initial lives, plus whatever you could pick up along the way. Dad had finished a life with 9,998 points, and enough lives left over that even if I only got the single point guaranteed on each life (for putting the acrobat into play), the score was guaranteed to roll over. So, at a very young age, I got to rollover a difficult game thanks to good timing and selflessness from my dad.
Eventually, I would be able to roll over Space Invaders multiple times in one game, and achieve rollovers of my own in a few other games for that console, but this first one was special. I'm pretty sure I was always going to be a person who played video games a lot in their life and would amass a cabinet of achievements, but this one was the one that got me going on that particular idea. So you can either think of it as a fond memory or the beginning of the curse that made me the person I am.
- CPU: 1.19 MHz MOS Technology 6507
- Audio + Video processor: Television Interface Adapter (TIA)
- Output: B/W or color TV picture and sound signal through RF modulator. 2 channels of 1-bit monaural sound with 4-bit volume control.
- RAM (within a MOS Technology RIOT chip): 128 bytes (additional RAM may be included in the game cartridges)
- ROM (game cartridges): 4 kB maximum capacity (64 kB with bank switching)
- Input (controlled by MOS RIOT): Two screwless DE-9[a] controller ports, for single-button joysticks, paddles, trackballs, driving controllers, 12-key keyboard controllers (0–9, #, and *), and third party controllers with additional functions. Six switches (original version): Power on/off, TV signal (B/W or Color), Difficulty for each player (called A and B), Select, and Reset. Except for the power switch, games could (and did) assign other meanings to the switches. On later models, the difficulty switches were miniaturized and moved to the back of the unit.
And for the time, that was very impressive, because it meant I could play video games. Including Night Driver, Frogger, Super Breakout, Missile Command, Video Pinball, a truly awful Pacman port, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, and games that were a little too scary for me at the time, like Haunted House and Pitfall!. The Atari 2600 also taught me about the value of remembering and accurately writing down passwords and other specific information, because when you set the self-destruct mechanism in Secret Quest, you'd better know where the exit teleport is and have cleared the way before you get there.
For the most part, however, my time spent with the 2600 focused on a small subset of games: an excellent port of Space Invaders that I could find the pattern for to clear even the levels where the invaders started one line above a permanent game over (leading to a fanfic universe where the aliens zapped out of the sky were served up as food supplies, with the wandering spaceship seen as caviar of a sort. This was well before XCOM made it possible to sell aliens as food.), Video Pinball, where I eventually became a grunch adept to get those elusive multipliers and extra balls, Super Breakout, where I rarely ever cleared the field, but the courses were entertaining, and Circus Atari, a springboard paddle game that was about popping balloons by keeping clowns bouncing in the air. Very young me didn't make a lot of progress on the game at first because one of the things I had to learn was that the button on the paddle control swapped the springboard so that the flying clown could land on the open side and keep things going instead of crashing down in the corner. (I got better at the game after that.)
Instruction manuals, you say? What are those? I'm playing on my parents' console, there are no instruction manuals, not really. So a lot of my very early learning days were figuring out what the button did, where the controls could be moved, and what the objective was. Triple-A games these days have tutorials to teach us all the controls, but at that point, it was pretty simple.
By today's standards, of course, the graphics on the system were pretty terrible, all very blocky and without much detail at the beginning, at least compared to the phenomenal works of art their box and cartridge pictures wanted to evoke. The sound was also what people usually think of when they think of very old retro games, with bleeps and bloops and very short melodies potentially possible through synthesized sound. (Which didn't last nearly as long as popular conception thinks it did. Both the sound banks on the NES and the SID chip in the Commodore 64 advanced sound design pretty quickly once the crash was done.) There were some later entrants into the system that I remember being pretty decent, including one called Montezuma's Revenge that had a memorizable gameplay loop to amass lots of points with, but that would eventually take all of your lives because the timing windows in between things like flashing one-hit-kill lasers would eventually get too short (or nearly so) to allow someone to safely traverse the room. Actually, that was the difficulty increase on most games, sending you back to the beginning again to try a new loop where things moved faster than they had the last time. Even with a clock speed of 1.19 Megahertz, the game would eventually be moving far too fast for anyone to be able to play it successfully. And, perhaps learning from some of the arcade cabinets of the time, cartridges were usually pretty well programmed that you'd never reach a kill screen before the game exceeded your ability to play it.
That said, at a convention a couple years back, I learned a lot more about the Atari Women project to bring to the foreground the stories of women who worked at Atari in programming, or the women who were eSports champions of the era, and got to see cartridges signed by their programmers and artists who worked on them. (For as much as certain elements want you to believe that the only people who would be called gamers or have influence on the game industry are very young men and boys with toxic attitudes, it's never been true that gaming is only for one gender, and all throughout the history of the industry, women have made incredible contributions that deserve celebration was much as their more famous co-workers and bosses.) That was extremely cool to learn the history of the company and the people who were part of it.
The actual memory must closely associated with the system is from Circus Atari, and it's one of the two earliest memories I have with computing and gaming, and I forget which came first. For the purposes of this story, though, I have to admit that while I knew the console was my parents', I very rarely saw either of them using it to play games. They played board and card games with the children, where one of the children almost always had to be the person who did the maths involved in scorekeeping and the like. (You're be surprised how often you have to do math calculations with weird numbers when you play board games, especially ones that involve money.) When I did see them playing, it was almost always Super Breakout, game 7, an endless mode where the lines of bricks would advance one line down the playing field every time the ball hit the paddle, which would make for a difficult time when the ball was in fast mode, but could make for some entertaining sounds as a ball bounced itself among many layers in slow motion, accumulating low scoring amounts and getting rid of the accumulated detritus. (The techniques I learned from that game have served me well with other brick-breakers over the years, including the ones that go out of their way to make clearing their levels supremely difficult.)
So, one of the many evenings of my childhood, Dad asked me to play the Circus Atari game he was playing. I had no idea how long it had taken him to get to this point, and in all of my subsequent attempts to replicate the feat, I've come up short. The score counter for Circus Atari went up to 9,999 points before rolling over, and while there were ways of achieving extra lives, you could only store one of them at any given time. 5 initial lives, plus whatever you could pick up along the way. Dad had finished a life with 9,998 points, and enough lives left over that even if I only got the single point guaranteed on each life (for putting the acrobat into play), the score was guaranteed to roll over. So, at a very young age, I got to rollover a difficult game thanks to good timing and selflessness from my dad.
Eventually, I would be able to roll over Space Invaders multiple times in one game, and achieve rollovers of my own in a few other games for that console, but this first one was special. I'm pretty sure I was always going to be a person who played video games a lot in their life and would amass a cabinet of achievements, but this one was the one that got me going on that particular idea. So you can either think of it as a fond memory or the beginning of the curse that made me the person I am.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-04 02:17 pm (UTC)Wow, so many memories! One thing in hindsight I appreciate is that these games could really only go for a couple hours at best before getting boring, so you would want to turn it off eventually. That and the fact they were simple and repetitive made them much better for my ASD/ADHD brain. :)
no subject
Date: 2021-12-04 04:42 pm (UTC)I was decent at Missile Command once I learned how to lead the targets.
Yars' Revenge is a perfect example of the "game repeats until it's moving too fast for humans" idea, because in the later levels with the blue and green spirals, they were near constant in their assault, and the probe following you around required constant movement to avoid once the safe zone was gone. At a certain point, you couldn't move the joystick fast enough to get out of the way.