Episode 28–The Internal Magic of the Atari 2600

This is the fourth episode in our coverage of the 2015 Louisville Arcade Expo and we are proud to bring you the audio (and video) from the David Crane seminar entitled “The Internal Magic of the Atari 2600”.

During the presentation we are treated to a history lesson like no other. David delves into some of the history of Activision and how he and the other founding members left Atari to go into startup mode and build what would become one of the most influential companies in video gaming history. David covers many details behind development of some of the landmark titles Activision released for the platform (like Pitfall, Pitfall II, Kaboom, Freeway, Laser Blast, Dragster and many others) and it becomes apparent that there is FAR more story than could ever hope to fit into an hours’ discussion.

The title of the seminar is well-named in that David then takes the conversation into a very technical direction and talks about the process for developing games for the Atari 2600 and speaks to many of the lessons learned and even shows some of the internal coding mechanisms that were afforded by the Atari 2600 hardware to produce such engaging games with so little hardware resources.