Games of future past
Games of future past
Games of future past
By Liam Otten
October 16, 2023
Summary
In Battle Bird-Bot Blowout, Peri Glick, a senior majoring in film and media studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, deploys vintage 128-color NTSC graphics and a nearly 50-year-old programming language to craft a new game for the iconic Atari 2600 console.
Unlike contemporary games, "In the Atari, you don't get to program a lot of plot," Glick says with a wry grin.
Glick created Battle Bird-Bot Blowout last fall as her final project in the course "Retro Game Design." Taught by Ian Bogost, the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor and director of film and media studies, the class explores the history, aesthetics and idiosyncratic technology of the Atari, which dominated - and in many ways invented - home videogaming in the early 1980s.
"'Do you have an Atari?' 'You want to play Atari on that Atari?' For a while, video games were just Atari.
A celebrated game designer, he is co-author, with Nick Montfort, of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, one of the first books to explore how digital media platforms shape creative expression.
A Slow Year, Bogost's collection of seasonally themed Atari game poems, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's permanent collection.
"In their heyday, most Atari games were written by a single person," Bogost says.
Reference
Otten, L. (2023, October 16). Games of future past - the source - washington university in St. Louis. The Source. https://source.wustl.edu/2023/10/games-of-future-past/