Nick Montfort > Quotes

“Parker Brothers and other companies sold a billion dollars worth of handheld games in 1979, which didn’t encourage them to look to the much smaller videogame market. In that market, the leading company, Atari, had sales of only $238 million during that same year—and that was after the Atari VCS had been on the market for more than twelve months.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“When the snowspeeder endures for two minutes in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, it wins the temporary invulnerability of “the Force” and the Star Wars theme plays, as it does when the cartridge first starts up. This rare musical treat effectively draws a connection to the Star Wars movies and also works effectively in the game, making the period of invulnerability even more heightened. The theme plays as sound effects from the game continue, too, so that it is integrated into the experience of play rather than interrupting it.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“good examples of platform-aware work in Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Steven E. Jones’s The Meaning of Video Games, and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“In an attempt to recover ROM space, Bob Whitehead moved one of his subroutines so that it ended just before a block of sprite data. The TIA’s sprite registers hold only a single byte of data at a time, which the program changes each on scan line. In this case, the first line of the sprite data was the hexadecimal value $60, which also happens to be the machine reference for the opcode RTS (return from subroutine).”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“The arcade cabinet has become a rare sight in the United States, but in their best year, coin-operated games collected quarters that, adjusting for inflation, sum to more than twice the 2006 sales of U.S. computer and videogame software.5”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“The first video game based on a movie or television series is probably Mike Mayfield’s 1971 text-only game Star Trek, a strategy game about commanding the USS Enterprise against the Klingons. But Mayfield created the game as a hobbyist on a Sigma 7 minicomputer, a device that required as much space as several refrigerators. It hardly seemed to be at risk of becoming a commercial product.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“Although continual sound effects were common in VCS games, it is hard to produce anything that sounds like Western music on the machine. The frequencies that the TIA can generate miss most of the chromatic scale. When Garry Kitchen was working as a programmer for Activision, he went through and marked the notes that the Atari VCS could hit. He then asked a professional composer of jingles to put something together using only those notes.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“the idea of radical equality Kassar cited in response to Crane’s request—programmer being equal to assembly line worker—had a precedent. In the early days, Bushnell maintained a policy that no one would be fired (although they might be denied a raise) and ensured that everyone, from executives to assembly line workers, had the same health care plan. But with VCS development organized along a model of the lone programmer who was almost completely, individually responsible for a sometimes very lucrative game, it became less tenable to claim that the programmer was no more important than any other human resource.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“(the "I" who cannot understand certain words and translate them into actions) is now somehow within the IF world, counseling the player character not to eat a piece of direct mail.”
― Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction

“By the early 1980s, VCS development was still largely the same, although some changes were brewing. At Atari and Imagic, the first artist-programmer teams were created, allowing artists to focus on sprite and screen visuals.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“Atari’s driving game Gran Trak 10 was the very first to have a store of ROM, but it did not use a chip to implement this memory. It stored sprite graphics in a matrix of diodes, each of which was placed individually on the printed circuit board.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“PF0 is written from the low bit to the high bit of the upper nybble (half-byte), PF1 is written from the high bit to the low bit, and PF2 is written from the low bit to the high bit. This method simplified the chip’s circuit design,”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“games like Taito’s Space Invaders were not designed with the peculiarities of the Atari VCS in mind. Sprites were different in many post-1977 arcade games. Most important, there were often more than two per screen! When faced with the rows of aliens in Space Invaders or the platoon of ghosts that chases Pac-Man, VCS programmers needed to discover and use methods of drawing more than two sprites, even though only two one-byte registers were available.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“the idea of radical equality Kassar cited in response to Crane’s request—programmer being equal to assembly line worker—had a precedent.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

“Perhaps because of the special nature of the TIA, or perhaps because of the limitless human capacity for technical fascination, programmers have continued to hack at and develop original VCS games. There is a thriving hobbyist community that has picked up the Atari VCS, using and refining emulators, writing disassemblers and development tools, and even manufacturing cartridges and selling them, complete with boxes and manuals. This “homebrew” scene could be seen, strictly speaking, as continuing the commercial life of the Atari VCS, but the community is not very corporate. It operates on the scale of zines and unsigned bands, with most recent ROMs offered for free online—even if they are also sold in limited releases of a few hundred copies in cartridge form.”
― Nick Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System