Have You Played Atari Today?

I never fully understood why during the hot humid summer so few quality games are released. Sure, we got Battlefield 2 and a few others coming down the pipe, but the gaming landscape is looking mighty bleak in the next few months. So it is times like these when I go back and play some games from the past.

Now when I mean "games from the past" I don't just mean those "older" games like Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog ... I mean old school, like Pitfall!, Yars' Revenge, Kaboom!, H.E.R.O., and Chopper Command.

For those of you reading this who just said to themselves, "what the heck is he talking about? I never even heard of those games!" then I think it's time that you spent a little bit of time learning about some of these classic games and fully understand what it was like playing a game where "you" were represented onscreen as a yellow dot. And yet, it was freaking awesome!

Perhaps the best place to start is by playing Activision's best game of all time, Pitfall! Pitfall! was created in 1982 for the Atari 2600 where you had to collect 32 treasures across 255 screens in less than 20 minutes. All the while you needed to solve puzzles, avoid snakes, scorpions, pits, crocodiles, rolling logs, and quicksand.

Sounds pretty cool, eh? It actually still plays great and is quite a challenge and, oh yeah, the entire game was programming using only 4K of memory. 4K of memory ... for an entire game experience ... all the graphics, sounds, controls, everything in a whopping 4096 bytes of memory. Think about that for a second.

Creating an entire game experience with such a limited amount of memory is almost beyond comprehension. Heck, I think my pen has more than 4k of memory! And when I was a kid I used to gladly spend hours of time playing these games, games which most people today wouldn't even seriously consider "real games", but what's really amazing is how many of these games still hold up today. Sure, they're no Metal Gear Solid, but they get the job done and they're still fun and challenging, which I think qualifies as a quality game experience.

I think all gamers should at least play or read about these games just too fully understand how insanely far gaming has come along in such a short amount of time. Heck, I just like reading about them to just remember what gaming used to be like when I was a kid. Some of the places I like to go include The Video Game Critic, AtariAge, and MobyGames. And let me know what you younglings think of Pitfall!

Posted by Gaming Steve at 1:00 PM | Comments (11) | Posted to Classic | Culture |