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Nick Montfort

Ian Bogost

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies) Hardcover – January 9, 2009

by Nick Montfort (Author), Ian Bogost (Author)

114 ratings

Book 1 of 11: Platform Studies

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A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS.

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.

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publisher

The MIT Press
Publication date

January 9, 2009
Dimensions

6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

026201257X
ISBN-13

978-0262012577
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Montfort and Bogost's analysis is both technically detailed and historically contextualized, both informative and methodologically instructive. They write with a rigor and grace that future contributors to the series may be at pains to match.

―Seth Perlow, Convergence

Read it, it will do you good.

―José P. Zagal, Game Studies

Racing the Beam doesn't spare the technical details, but is always accessible and compelling. Downright thrilling at times, in fact, a sort of The Right Stuff of video game development.

―Darren Zenko, thestar.com (Toronto Star)

Review

Montfort & Bogost raise the bar on anyone wishing to talk meaningfully about computer culture. Not only must we interpret these machines, we must first know how they work―and yes, sometimes this means knowing assembly code. From chip to controller, the authors lead us with ease through the Atari '2600' Video Computer System, one of the most emblematic devices in recent mass culture.

―Alexander Galloway, Associate Professor of Culture and Communication, New York University, and author of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ The MIT Press; 2nd ptg edition (January 9, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 026201257X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262012577
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,330,762 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #277 in Computer & Video Game Design
- #826 in Game Programming
- #5,159 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences

Customer Reviews:
114 ratings

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Nick Montfort
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Nick Montfort develops computational art and poetry, often collaboratively, and studies creative computing of all sorts. He is professor of digital media at MIT, also teaches at the School for Poetic Computation, and lives in New York and Boston.
In addition to his books, Montfort has done digital media writing projects including the ppg256 series of 256-character poetry generators; Sea and Spar Between (with Stephanie Strickland); the interactive fiction system Curveship; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; the group blog Grand Text Auto; Implementation, a novel on stickers (with Scott Rettberg); The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (co-edited with three others); and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester's Nightmare. He directs the lab/studio The Trope Tank.
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Ian Bogost
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Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, where he writes regularly about technology and popular culture.
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D. Hodgson

The guiltiest of pleasures

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 20, 2010

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"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!

29 people found this helpful

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Thomas Kite

Not quite enough meat for the geeks (but still worth a read)

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 17, 2014

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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.

10 people found this helpful

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..::Arman

Wrangle the raster. Seize the day. BUY THIS BOOK before ready player 1 makes it too cool to own or sues for 80s infringement

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 15, 2017

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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.

7 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

I. Black

Fantastic Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 12, 2014

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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.

3 people found this helpful

Peter Street

Good, if you're technically minded

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 5, 2012

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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.

One person found this helpful

Martin Linklater

A glorious trip down retro lane.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 1, 2016

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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.

Happy

Not technical enough

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 27, 2019

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

Woody

Great nostalgic book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 6, 2019

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