Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer SystemMIT Press, 2009年1月9日 - 192 頁 A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS, the gaming system for popular games like Pac-Man and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. 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. |
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第 1 到 5 筆結果,共 31 筆
第 2 頁
... simple, elegant, and influential platform of this sort. In other cases, a platform includes an operating system. It is often useful to think of a programming language or environment on top of an operating system as a platform, too ...
... simple, elegant, and influential platform of this sort. In other cases, a platform includes an operating system. It is often useful to think of a programming language or environment on top of an operating system as a platform, too ...
第 3 頁
... simple statistics of screen resolution or color depth that are used as shorthand by fans and marketers. We offer here such a platform study, one that considers an influential videogame system that helped introduce computing to a popular ...
... simple statistics of screen resolution or color depth that are used as shorthand by fans and marketers. We offer here such a platform study, one that considers an influential videogame system that helped introduce computing to a popular ...
第 7 頁
... simple graphics on an oscilloscope . Steve Russell , an MIT student , had created Spacewar earlier that year . The game quickly spread to the few institutions fortunate enough to have a PDP - 1 . Given the price tag of more than ...
... simple graphics on an oscilloscope . Steve Russell , an MIT student , had created Spacewar earlier that year . The game quickly spread to the few institutions fortunate enough to have a PDP - 1 . Given the price tag of more than ...
第 10 頁
... simple shooting games. This component allowed even companies without much electronics experience to bring Pong-like games to market, and many did just that. Campbell- Kelly writes that there were seventy-five Pong-like products ...
... simple shooting games. This component allowed even companies without much electronics experience to bring Pong-like games to market, and many did just that. Campbell- Kelly writes that there were seventy-five Pong-like products ...
第 11 頁
... simple elements present in these early games would be the basis for the console's capabilities from that point on. Previous attempts at home machines that used interchangeable car- tridges, such as the Magnavox Odyssey and the Fairchild ...
... simple elements present in these early games would be the basis for the console's capabilities from that point on. Previous attempts at home machines that used interchangeable car- tridges, such as the Magnavox Odyssey and the Fairchild ...
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action-adventure action-adventure games Activision appear arcade game Asteroids Atari VCS ball bitmap Bogost Bushnell button BYTE BYTE chip coin-op games color clock Combat computing systems controllers created creative culture digital media display draw early electron Empire Strikes Back game’s gameplay genre high score HMOVE home console home video games horizontal innovation Intellivision interaction interface joystick licensed machine maze missile move Nintendo objects offered on-screen Pac-Man paddle Parker Brothers PDP-10 Adventure pixels plane Platform Studies play player playfield graphics Pong port processor Qotile released Revenge Robinett scan line screen Slot Racers snowspeeder sound Space Invaders Spacewar sprite graphics Star Castle Star Wars switch tank games technique television text adventure titles two-player variations VCS Adventure VCS cartridge VCS games VCS hardware VCS Pac-Man VCS platform VCS program vertical Video Olympics videogame Warshaw Yars