A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression
in the Atari VCS, the gaming system for popular games like Pac-Man and
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so
completely that "Atari" became the generic term for a video game
console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of
changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most
significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even
entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this
influential video game console from both computational and cultural
perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated
platforms--the systems underlying computing. This book, the first in a
series of Platform Studies, does so, developing a critical approach that
examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression.
Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in
detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars'
Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They
describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and
track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics.
Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space
larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of
such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by
allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star
Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction
between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that
the Atari VCS--often considered merely a retro fetish object--is an
essential part of the history of video games.
