Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)

"Racing The Beam" is a book on a delicious subject that suffers from serving multiple masters. Who is the target demographic here - is it the technogeek enthusiast? Or the Wired cultural sociologist? Maybe it's the Retro Gamer reader who has fond memories of the VCS platform and is looking for a bit of behind-the-scenes action. Authors Nick Monforst and Ian Bogost, whom seem to be hewing to the publisher's adage that every equation cuts your book sales in half, do the reader no favors by leaving out such appendix gold as a memory/register map of the VCS and something along the lines of a brief "Hello World" code example. Sound, which is the other half of the equation, gets even shorter shrift - if the hardware supposedly can't synthesize a chromatic scale in tune, how did later programmers like Synthcart's Paul Slocum get around this?One of the book's problems is that the authors try to make the book seem timely by trying to force connections between its vintage software biopics and such breathtakingly unrelated modern titles as World Of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, and Tony Hawk Pro Skater. It's almost like the publisher was feeling nervous that nobody of college age could relate to such early games, which is a shame given that the stories are all fascinating in their own right. And on the hardware side, while the Apple II and C-64 get brief nods why are no comparisons drawn between the Atari VCS and Jay Miner's later designs incl. the Atari 400, 800 and Amiga? And what were the specs of the Mattel Intellivision anyway, seeing as how it gets mentioned so often as the VCS's main rival?Any reader old enough to remember this hardware as a wood-grain box is probably going to have a few comments bordering on the personal, but let's keep things short. Am I the only person wondering why the rather staid VCS game "Adventure" got such over-the-top respect while Exidy's more refined (and clearly related) 1981 arcade game "Venture" goes unmentioned? How was Video Chess able to perform move lookahead with nearly no stack? And why was the story behind the most important sidescroller ever to be ported, Defender, ignored almost entirely?That said, I loved very minute spent reading this and look forward to seeing more from the "Platform Studies" series. And I bet you will too. Only next time around - more pictures!

This book is not quite what I expected, but I enjoyed it just the same. I'd been expecting a thorough description of the VCS hardware, hopefully down to the (tiny) memory map, and at least a few code examples showing how the screen is generated, sprite multiplexing, etc. There is much more information at this level online, so you can learn about it; just don't expect much more than a cursory examination from this book.With that, the book has a few aims. One is to show how the restrictions imposed by the VCS hardware led to extraordinary leaps of creativity to produce playable and, in some instances, graphically impressive games. The authors do a nice job here of balancing the presentation of the dry technical aspects with sheer reverence for the programmers and designers.Another aim is more long-reaching: showing how some VCS games were the genesis (or an important part) of game genres that still exist today. This might be more of a stretch. There was a lot of arcade video game activity at the same time that the VCS ruled the living room, and many of the VCS titles were ports, i.e. they contributed little to moving the field forward.The book is part of a series called 'Platform Studies'. I'm not a media type, so I don't really know what this means. There's a fair amount of lip service paid to this concept in the book, but it seems a little contrived, as if the editor insisted that 'Platform Studies' be mentioned a certain number of times. Is the VCS an object lesson in platform studies? I don't know. What I do know is that it is probably the simplest programmable gaming system one could imagine. It's a brilliant design that offloaded all the difficult jobs onto the programmers to keep the hardware cost as low as possible. As such it deserves to be recognized for the milestone that it was, and this book does that, and in an enjoyable way.

I still own my original Atari 2600 and never bothered to learn about the secrets of its inner workings (the exception being joystick repair), despite it launching a lifelong interest in software, graphics, and electronics. I picked up this book on impulse after the finely tuned A.I. software of amazon recommendations discovered the algorithm to target 'human nostalgia'. When it arrived it I could not put it down... definitely a great read for anyone interested in the history of gaming regardless of your technical level. The book goes beyond tech as it touches on the market, the companies and personalities involved, the social and consumer norms of the times. Of particular interest (to myself) were the hardware design choices made that confound and make you cringe by today's standards. 'Racing the Beam' gives you the insight to understand these choices by providing the financial limits, competitive landscape, design goals, and technological context present at Atari's release. It is still hard to believe that developing back then was more than just heavy hardware and software constraints (128 *bytes of RAM* and this review is well over 1500 bytes)... The developers were often a one-man team juggling programming, art direction, UX/UI, screenwriting, sound design, and project management while devising logic tricks for precious source compression. No physics APIs or game platform builder or asset store to save the day, oops, I meant deadline. This is real insight on the Pioneering spirit. There is a whole chapter dedicated to Adventure. Very cool! Would be a good primer for those eagerly waiting to read Warren Robinett's Annotated Adventure. Yars Revenge (my favorite) and Pitfall is in there too. This was my first taste of a platform studies book and I look forward to picking up  I Am Error: The Nintendo Family Computer / Entertainment System Platform (Platform Studies)  despite never owning an NES.

I really enjoyed reading this. A very interesting overview of the console and a select few influential games. The authors are not afraid to get technical, very technical when needed and I just loved this.I knew the Atari VCS was difficult to program but I didn't realise just how difficult and thus have even more respect for the original programmers. It's a pity Atari didn't feel the same way back in the day!I'm very close to downloading the necessary assemblers etc. and seeing how well I get on myself. Getting anything on the screen would be quite an accomplishment!One thing to note. I received the book without the dust cover. Just a blank front and back with only a barcode sticker on the back.

First things first, this was a really good, enjoyable read.However, that comment does have to be caveated with a couple of points - first, I'm quite technically minded, so I don't mind reading about interrupts, assembly language, coding standards and such. Second, I have a great interest in how things work. If you've got either of those (the technical information is reasonably well presented, so most of the time you don't actually need to understand it to enjoy the comments that are made), I think you will probably enjoy this book.It covers quite a few sweeping areas of the Atari VCS / 2600, and I wish it went into more detail in a few places, but it's a really nice overview of the way a system was prodded to do something it totally wasn't designed for; and how that then went on to impact game design for over a decade.

As a professional game developer of a certain age, taking a trip down retro lane with this book was fascinating. I learnt to program on 8-bit machines but never had the chance to program the 2600. This book tells the story of the 2600 via the actual games themselves, and once you learn about the technical wizardry those early programmers did with the humble 2600 you'll want to download Stella and plough through all the old ROM's. A great read, but probably not for non-technical historians. Looking forward to more books in this series.

Could do with some programming examples, otherwise not bad, a little bit to "arty" for me.

Great book not overly technical and a great read would highly recommend to anyone interested in retro gaming.