Atari 2600 VCS & Adventure - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

that's the symbol for gaming you know the outline of that the joystick that's gaming now they aren't their iconic but they were built to last as well so these are still working perfectly fine here now you know well beyond their sell-by date no there's a PCB and it has kind of a little silver dome over the contacts so and then the bottom of the panel there's a round base to it with little dots on the end and as you move it it pushes that dot onto the metal dome that touches the two tracks together on the PCB and that's your connection so pretty rudimentary but actually because of that that's what makes them quite you know sturdy yeah I mean that and the plastics in them you can't break these things very easily please don't come to try the Atari to 600 Atari VCS Atari 2600 Atari 2600 whichever way you want to say it is an amazing machine so I was lucky enough to have exactly this machine the Bennett own pong console played well again Hong Kong story is very much much an Americanism over here they were just tennis consoles to us but we had these machines and you could play tennis with your baton your ball and bat it between each other that was okay for a little while but actually after a while yeah so one Christmas I was very very lucky to come downstairs in the morning and have a present there kind of that size which was one of these in its box with combat the game that packed with it and it's the sort of the first console really to have this idea of having cartridges that allow you to play different games on it so with the tennis court on when before you had like seven versions of the same game football which was basically tennis with bits of wool would either end of it hockey which was like football would be two bats you know it was all basically the same this was a microprocessor based system and what you did is you had these cartridges that plugged in and they had a ROM chip inside to contain the code that was the game so that allows us then to stick all manner of different cartridges in there with lots of in games brilliant stuff it was pretty limited you know this this was a very limited consult in terms of what he could do it's especially comparison we have today so the graphics were kind of blocky the sound was very very limited but actually it has a really kind of nice iconic sound to it now the joystick could go up down left and right and they had a fire button as well that was useful but that again you know now you can go always and look around and you know George I sticks so to a lot of people it looks pretty basic but it was amazing color great games didn't matter they weren't quite as good as the the arcades that was irrelevant this is combat it's in the console to start the game press the reset anybody that had that will now recognize that rumble and just feel it all 70s again and you had these little tanks you could drive around and fire in each other and if you got near enough so two players that's a lot more fun so you're just going around and avoiding each other but you had game select so game select allows you to select different versions of that game so you the first one we had just a big field into tanks and you shoot each other now we've got these various obstacles in place and you've got to navigate those and still shoot each other brilliant game really very very straightforward but good fun and I remember playing with a brother shooting each other the graphics and the sound rear elevant yeah you've got another player there it's about beating that person this is sports you know you've got to beat that person you've got to beat your brother so you know that's combat it was great packed with the console and was the first game I ever played on it these carts cost they were more expensive than your piece from what I remember at that time lp's were about five are so considerably more expensive but actually if you take that and bring up to today's money that's more expensive than games are today so everybody moaning about the cost of games today needs to think twice because you know you've got what four K of code or something 2k maybe in these cartridges you've now got gigabytes of data so the amount that goes into games these days what you get for your money is incredible back then you were paying more money for far less but then that's just computing all over you do have to shut down let's go through that procedure now right you yank the cartridge out you put another one in so they were very kid-friendly right in that respect they were they weren't delicate devices that needed looking after no pact in stone plastic and shove it in the boxes were a little bit more delicate and that's where we struggle because we obviously want to keep a really nice collection of the old video games but anybody of age what was our about seven or eight at this time trash the boxes so they're quite hard to find so we've got some really nice condition boxes for some of the games and less so for others so we've got Spacey mode is there anybody that recognizes that would be playing at the time brilliantly iconic pac-man looks far better on the cover than it does in actual real-life adventure so this is the one that does feature in ready player one or at least again in the book as we know we can't really say what the films like yep having not seen it and that's the cover for for combat adventures quite funny so this is kind of an arcade adventure so this isn't about typing in go north go south got a joystick for that but this is about finding hidden things finding keys that unlock doors in castles and the reason it features quite heavily in the book ready player one is because of the secret room so the programmer that created the game put his name in a secret room and if you went somewhere picked up something you could unlock that room and go and see that that message and he knew it was there and it would be um you know a certain amount of time before anybody really stumbled across there and when it did come out there's a hidden adventure wow I've got to find that so that's what people did and that's kind of pretty much the ethos of the film it's all these hidden things you've got to know stuff you've got a fine stuff obviously it's all about Keys unlocking the next level so we now think of that as an easter egg is this the first Easter Egg that we know of I'm not I wouldn't know for sure but I wouldn't mind betting it's certainly one of the first I mean people will probably go back and say well actually little bits of code hidden in programs has been there for a long time you can imagine you the programmer wasn't getting the attention that he deserved you know a lot of the time in this industry the programmers create the games they think we'd get a lot of credit for that if you look on these boxes it doesn't who done anything saris policy as I understand it was you're being paid to do this you get your money and then we release it as an Atari game so in the story but that wasn't good enough so there's the secret room in this one let's go through the power up sequence so there's the beginning of adventure just a purple border with a number one in it so to start any Atari game you press the reset button so press that we are this dot that's you I could prove that because I can move them around look yeah and we have a key so we can go up and get the key little bit of noise and we can take it to that gate because it's yellow key yellow castle and we can get in there now we have what could possibly be a sword or maybe just an arrow so we can now take that one and we can come out so you've got to have the right things at the right time so we can go this way all but we can't because there's a wall thing there so now we have to go the other way so I think we might need to go and get that instead and go and kill that dragon II think don't play this for ages yeah so there's the original yellow key in there so we've got to get through this I think and I can't remember how there's just a few K of code a couple of K okay I don't know that makes that game but the thing is again for me playing this no I didn't have this one because the games were relatively expensive but a friend of mine did so I played it over his house and it sounds kind of silly but it did immerse you into a different world you know I was 11 or something I don't know so to a kid seeing this and just being able to explore this world was huge it was great you know an adventure I think so a lot of people means yeah a lot because it was that first time where you had this world that you can go explore a lot of other games you know combat was just on that one field and you shot things space invaders just continual hordes of aliens your shoots it but you could go around different screens and there are things to find things to discover things to explore and that made this quite special so yeah there were the text adventures before but if you weren't the more literary literary type then this was great this was the the beginning of arcade adventures okay so the chip insider is it's quite similar to other 8-bit microprocessors at the time it's actually a 6507 processor so it's a little bit different it was running about one maker Hertz which was about the same kind of speed as well the other ones did it had 128 bytes of RAM that's away me yeah it's not even a kilobyte it's 128 memory locations you can store 8 bit numbers in programming these things is quite a feat really and people are still doing there's a version of Halo being written that runs on this it's not quite that halo you'd recognize but it's pretty impressive it was a fantastic console and the first really of its kind with all these cartridges but then not cheap either 179 pounds to buy one of these when they come out this together with the range of games because so many games were produced for it so many in probably you know there's the story of et which says there were too many games produced for it really they were just rushed out to market bulking dream you know you could just keep producing these things at infinitum and and that but that was kind of half the problem because they relied on that far too much so the console had a very very long life and they were not sorts of games produced some better than others and but they just thought the kids were stupid and they were good they were gonna buy these things and enjoyed them anyway but that wasn't the case because as this got older so those kids and they become a little bit more aware of what a game should be so yeah they had its troubles and then and the industry crashed around it really the first video game crash was with Atari and et and all those other things that were going on and so I'm so bit of a shame but we're still here the graphics being drawn and this is the Plex on the first one I have to set the clay field up for eight lines or so in this position the library once set up to draw it in this position and so on I'm changing the values that we're putting in there each time interesting if you look here it looks like we're a bit late