Howard Warshaw — the man who created the beloved best-selling Yar’s Revenge for the Atari 2600 — said that a decent version of arcade hit Star Castle couldn’t possibly be stuffed into a game cartridge for the iconic home console. Scott Williamson never believed that.
No… not Desert Bus. Not Superman 64. I’m talking about E.T., the Atari 2600 game notorious for being so dramatically unsuccessful that a millions of unsold copies were poured into a hole in the desert and buried. Over at the A.V. Club they have a very interesting piece about a man trying to play this game, and I really liked it.
Sure, you could debate legislative achievements and spheres of influence to determine who history’s greatest leader was. But you could also imagine an old-school video game where Teddy Roosevelt and Josef Stalin — looking a lot like Nintendo’s Mario — face off riding weaponised extinct giant lizards. Artist Jude Buffum has done the latter and we are all richer for it.
We live in an age of gaming gorgeousness. Gamers’ lives nowadays are filled with fancy normal mapping and illumination engines, powered by slickly encased hardware that outputs onto super-sharp screens. In short, there’s a lot of thought given to aesthetics in the present day. But, it hasn’t always been this way and an upcoming art show will showcase the uglier — yet vitally important — gaming hardware of yesteryear.
In 1979, Atari introduced the joys of first-person space combat with Star Raiders. Next year Star Raiders returns, bringing team-based multiplayer space combat to the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.