Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
by Nick Montfort & Ian Bogost
First posted July 2018
This was the second Platform Studies series book I read.
I remember someone once told me “Super Mario Bros.” was called a ‘platformer’ not because Mario jumps on platforms but because it was the system-seller game, as in was a reason to buy the NES platform.
I like holding this concept in my mind, even though it is very wrong.
There is a moment when someone from America calls soccer “football” because they’re really into Premiere League and it is technically correct but sounds extremely jarring; an analogue experience for video game dorks is the Atari VCS. Most people—even the ones who know enough about Atari Corporation to not simply call any of their systems “Atari”—likely still call the “VCS” the “2600.” I know I did before I read Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. The 2600 is a rad retronym built to distinguish the old Atari when the 5200 was the new hotness, with the added bonus of sounding super futuristic and cool; and by cool I mean totally sweet. If that particular geocities-era internet reference went over (or under) your head, don’t fret: that type of paean to nostalgia is not what this book is about. Just a lot of nuggets of really cool (totally sweet) facts.
The learning begins before the cover is even cracked, with the title:
A television picture is composed of many horizontal lines, illuminated by an electron beam that traces each one by moving across and down a picture tube. Some programmers worry about having each frame of the picture ready to be displayed on time; VCS programmers must make sure that each individual line of each frame is ready as the electron gun starts to light it up, “racing the beam” as it travels down the screen.
“Racing the beam” is a ridiculously inside term, but if it is the only take-away from the book, it’s still a good one. The system is so tied to cathode ray tubes—artifacts which cannot be long for the planet let alone popular consciousness—that the basic structure of the VCS is functionally impossible if your experience with televisions lacks depth. And I mean that literally: If the only TV you can picture is flat, there is simply no space in which to generate the beam of electrons, no beam to ignite the phosphorus, no beam to race, no beam at all. The Atari VCS is a memory of a memory, and if it fades it is only because no one cared about recording its history. Thankfully, that is not the case.
This is the kickoff edition of Platform Studies, which purports to discuss each piece of console hardware as a technological platform, rather than as a personal madeleine or cultural artifact. The series contains the best book I have read about video games, I am Error. It feels unfair to directly compare the two because, as a later entrant in the series, Error has the benefit of templating itself against Racing the Beam as well as being edited by Montfort and Bogost. I know nothing about Bogost, but Montfort wrote Twisty Little Passages which I read prior to my tenure at Goodreads and loved enough to find a job as a chatbot writer for a text-based online game (it didn’t hurt my love of Twisty that I spent my high school years as an avid MUD player). And while I remember the 2600—sorry, the VCS—primarily for Crackpots at my Grandmother’s house and E.T. when our sole household TV was in the dining room, this isn't an essay about my experiences with Atari. Though I will say that I liked E.T. and played it a lot. So...disregard my VCS opinions at your discretion.
It took 15 years for me to be able to find the name of the game.
Video games aren’t a given—they didn’t have to happen—but they are so ubiquitous now that I am very surprised that stories about their origins aren’t more popular. Changeable software cartridges connected to a hardware platform that piggybacks off of a preexisting and console-agnostic television is an insane idea in a world of closed units like arcade machines. Pulling a piece of software from dedicated hardware that was designed to do nothing else and shoving to into a generic platform while trying to retain the original shape seems herculean:
To draw the four pursuers, programmer Tod Frye relied on a technique called flicker. Each of the four ghosts is moved and drawn in sequence on successive frames. Pac-Man himself is drawn every frame using the other sprite graphic register. The TIA synchronizes with an NTSC television picture sixty times per second, so the resulting display shows a solid Pac-Man, maze, and pellets, but ghosts that flicker on and off, remaining lit only one quarter of the time. The phosphorescent glow of a CRT television takes a little while to fade, and the human retina retains a perceived image for a short time, so the visible effect of the flicker is slightly less pronounced than this fraction of time suggests. The fact that the monsters in Pac-Man were commonly referred to as “ghosts” apologized somewhat for the flicker and suggested the dimness of the apparition. The manual for the VCS rendition of Pac-Man included large illustrations of ghosts to drive the point home.
Someone has to learn this stuff. It is quaint that we in America still call football soccer, and it adds diversity to an increasingly globalized world. But at least we know what the rest of the world calls it, even if we don’t care. That’s all I’m shooting for—to know what the Atari Video Computer System was called, even if most of us don’t really care.