No, you aren't hallucinating - this really is Halo, the unbelievably successful video game series that debuted on the XBox in 2001 and has since exploded into perhaps the most successful video game franchise of the 21st century so far. But this certainly isn't Halo as you've ever seen it before. While the original Halo series is a complex, high-tech shoot-em-up with a focus on intense naturalism and realism, this version somewhat resembles Lego bricks playing field hockey on a broken computer screen. But that's part of the charm of playing the venerable old Atari 2600.
For those not born during the Kennedy administration, the Atari 2600 is the granddaddy of video game consoles, the machine that started it all. In its heyday, it was the most successful toy ever created, and its parent company, Atari, was the Apple Computer of its time. (Steve Jobs was a lowly employee there early in his career.) Yet, barely fifteen years after their meteoric rise, a changing marketplace and a series of colossal failures led Atari to bite the silicon dust. Today, the name is nothing more than a trademark, floating around the corporate world like a digital ghost.
Nevertheless, the Atari 2600 lives on. Thanks to many enterprising coders with an appreciation for finely aged bits 'n bytes, several dozen new games a year are being programmed by hobbyists. With no big corporate bosses to tell them what to do, these games are more inventive and audacious than Atari could have ever dreamed of. And, since more than 30 million Atari 2600 consoles were sold, playing one is as easy as looking around Craigslist, eBay, or your mom's attic.
The genius of the Atari 2600 is its accessibility. The controller is a single joystick with one button. The graphics make your little brother's Game Boy look like a nuclear supercomputer. But it's this stone-age simplicity that makes the Atari 2600 so beautiful. The technical limitations of this machine meant that programmers can't rely on flashy extras, like blood or cutscenes or voice actors or fancy animation. They've got to focus on gameplay - making the experience of playing quick, engaging, and rewarding.
Which brings us to Halo 2600. This game is speedier than crack, and even more addictive. This two-dimensional shooter plays very similarly to the arcade classic Bezerk!, but with many notable twists, including several different types of enemies, upgradeable weapons, and shields which can be acquired to protect the player from shots. Although the graphics are simple, they're very effective, and it's incredible the variety and detail the programmer, Ed Fries, has packed into this tiny little 128K cartridge.
Ed Fries is the former vice-president of publishing at Microsoft, and one of the people who first brought the Halo series into existence. He's also a veteran of the late-70s/early-80s video game industry, and a former Atari programmer. In his free time, he decided to bring his programming skills back to life, and wrote a version of his XBox masterpiece for the 30-year-old Atari. The result is a weird, surreal, and astonishingly fun mixture of past and present - a cross between primitive and cutting-edge.
If you don't have access to an Atari 2600 console, you can still play Halo 2600 online. Ed's been kind enough to create a version in JavaScript: just visit Ed's webpage to play. A warning: if you start playing, you probably won't be doing anything productive for the next hour or so.
No comments:
Post a Comment