Just watched the documentary on Netflix.

I found it extremely interesting. It was very well done and researched. I played lots of their games as a teen and had many hours of fun with family and friends because of them. To think that a game that was designed in only five weeks and probably programmed exclusively in assembly is mind-boggling.

 

Not only a game, but a more complicated one than usual being played in three dimensional space, at least in the mind of the viewer. Some people were born to program, and the write/designer of ET is apparently one of those people.

 

If you liked that, have a look at "indie game: the movie". I thought it was a great doco showing that games, like movies, don't need millions of dollars or great graphics to be a great game.

 

Not only a game, but a more complicated one than usual being played in three dimensional space, at least in the mind of the viewer. Some people were born to program, and the write/designer of ET is apparently one of those people.

But all made possible by a hardware designer. The Atari graphics chip was way ahead of its time IMHO. Player missile graphics that were an overlay on top of the background video. This was huge in allowing the software designer to manipulable a couple of memory locations and move images across the screen. No need to use the old brute force method of saving the underlying image, move the "player" to that location then replace the previously saved underlying image the way it is done on many of the graphics computers of that time.

Also of enormous benefit was being able to manipulate a memory location that represented the start of memory where the chip would start mapping an image to the screen. This is why a lot of the Atari games scrolled horizontally and / or vertically. The developer would have the whole background image in memory then manipulate the register for start of video memory the correct amount to scroll the image across and / or up and down on the screen.

The Atari 400 and 800 BIOS was far ahead of its time too. In fact the later PC BIOS pales in comparison. It was so easy to not only use devices at the BIOS level, it was also very easy to add your own device. I wrote my own device driver for an RS232 serial port that I designed. Interfacing to the OS was almost elegant thanks to Atari.

It is a shame Atari did not keep up with the PC and game console renaissance. It might be a different world today.