Homestar Runner -- and the boom in "homebrew" Atari 2600 games
Check it out. Programmer Paul Slocum is working on a Homestar Runner game -- for the Atari 2600! You can check out the details here, but the project makes a weird sort of sense. After all, Homestar Runner is a web cartoon designed in Flash, a vector-based animation engine -- which gives it a sort of ontological provenance in the world of computerized simulations. Plus, Homestar Runner is intentionally low-fi, making it exquisitely translatable to the chunky graphics of the Atari 2600. Porting web 'toons to early gaming platforms: I think this guy has discovered a sort of Rosetta Stone for digital content!
Actually, Slocum is one of the most prominent artists in a strange subculture -- programmers who create new games for the Atari 2600, and sell them in old-school cartridge format. There's a host of these games for sale at Atari Age, including Solcum's earlier masterpiece, Marble Craze. In that game, you use both paddle-wheels at once -- giving you an extraordinarily high degree of control over a marble, as you attempt to wend it through a series of mazes and puzzles. Atari Age reviewers went faintly berserk with praise for the game, which also makes sense: By abjuring high-end graphics, Slocum imposed a sort of sonnet-like restriction upon his design that forced him to focus on the nature of play. I actually think every game designer on the planet should be required to produce a fun, addictive game for the Atari 2600 before they're allowed to produce a game for the Xbox, Playstation or computer. That way, they'd actually learn how to come up with things that make for good play, not merely good eye candy.
Actually, some of these homebrew games look pretty cool. Consider the description for "SCSIcide":
If you're a fan of fast-paced paddle games like Kaboom!, then you'll love SCSIcide. In SCSIcide you play the role of a hard drive read head. As the different colored bits scroll by on the hard drive platter, you need to quickly read them in the correct order before you suffer a buffer underflow. As you complete each level, the data scrolls by more and more quickly! How far can you go?
This reminds me of a neat argument about games I once read. Back in the late 80s, the American Museum of the Moving Image held an exhibit devoted to early-80s video games. In an essay commissioned for the show, the author (sorry, I can't remember who it was) argued that because early video games were a) severely limited by memory and graphics, and b) programmed by geeks who were fascinated by the internal mechanics of chips and code, the games were essentially metaphoric projections of the internal life of computers. And it's actually kind of true. Consider the language of early games: They were all about navigating mazes (file systems), figuring out how to open doors (files and drive sectors), "saving" things, etc. As I later joked, "video games are what computers think about when we're not using them." So this SCSIcide game forms a neatly recursive loop. It's a game that is based on the dynamics of a modern computer drive, yet played on game system so old that it formed the inspiration for millions of kid geeks to get into programming.
Posted by Clive Thompson at August 10, 2003 01:26 PM
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Clive,
It should also be pointed out that the first HomeStar Runner cartoon was animated on an NES console back in the early 90s, so things would be going even more recursive by making a 2600 video game out of the "show."
It's also worth pointing out the sad truism that in our accelerated technological culture, we're just barely beginning to fathom the true intricaties, capabilities, and power of our technological gadgets before the "next generation" of said tech comes along and makes (most) everyone stop paying attention to the "old stuff." Witness the fact that people are still doing new stunts on 2600 game machines; that new music generated by that grandfather-of-all-sound-card chips the venerable C64 sound chip (SID) is being posted on websites daily; that a few years ago, the ultimate vogue in electronica was to hook up some 30 year old analog synths to your ProTools system to capture that ellusive "analog warmth"; etc.
And consider something that Nicholas Negroponte once observed in Wired (back in '95 or '96): that as powerful as the World Wide Web is (with all of the "new" applications: blogging/self-publishing, day trading, Peer-to-peer file sharing, etc), you really don't need a computer much more powerful than a 486, with a decent (and now super-cheap) modem to access it.
Or am I just getting old and nostalgic?
bud
Posted by: bud at August 10, 2003 7:12 PM
Nah, you're not getting old and nostalgic at all! I think it's no surprise that, surrounded by chips with nigh-petaflop processing capabilities, able to juggle gazillion-floating-point numbers with ease, a sector of geek culture is turning back to old-school computation. It's all about limitations. Limitations are the engine of creativity.
Posted by: Clive at August 10, 2003 10:14 PM
By the way, that's incredibly cool to know about the origins of Homestar Runner! Do you have any links to sites talking about it?
Posted by: Clive at August 10, 2003 10:15 PM
Clive,
My apologies, the first HomeStar Runner was done on an SNES...
go to the museum page at homestarrunner.com, and look in the file cabinet drawer for the folder labelled "Super SNES" - there's a Qtime movie there that lays out some of the history...
And I totally agree that limitations are a great motivator for creativity: My first keyboard sampler (an Ensoniq EPS) was already two generations out of date when I bought it, but economic limitations forced me to make the absolute most out that thing for five years. Man, I knew that mother* inside and out, top to bottom, back to front. It did MY bidding! I've not gotten quite so deep into any instrument or software package since, usually because I upgrade to something newer and shinier before I really get to know it...
I'm weak I know...
bud
Posted by: bud at August 10, 2003 11:47 PM
To a far lesser degree, I'm loving the way the Gameboy Advance SP is fostering similar tendencies amongst game developers.
It's basically a slightly hopped-up SNES in the palm of your hand, and is the only gaming machine currently on sale where the majority of newly-published titles are in 2D.
I've been lamenting the push towards the third dimension in videogames for years now, not because it's intrinsically a bad thing, but because it's been treated as a necessity, rather than an option. Games designed for 2D play are simply not given the green light by publishers and never see the light of day - except on the GameBoy.
I've reached the point where the major gaming systems sit gathering dust beside my TV, whilst my GameBoy Advance SP gets used every single day by both myself and my girlfriend.
Posted by: Tony at August 12, 2003 5:56 AM
I do miss non-3D games. There's this new sort of homebrew-centric console coming out, and I was wondering if it might give us some good new 2d games...
http://www.xgamestation.com/
You gotta love the vector support, and $99 is pretty reasonable. I just wonder if a lot of would-be programmers for this systems are more drawn to the nostalgia of true old skool systems. I am.
The text adventure is probably the dead genre that makes me the most sad. While some old games are coming back on PDAs and cell phones, it doesn't work for Infocom since you really need a full keyboard.
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Clive,
It should also be pointed out that the first HomeStar Runner cartoon was animated on an NES console back in the early 90s, so things would be going even more recursive by making a 2600 video game out of the "show."
It's also worth pointing out the sad truism that in our accelerated technological culture, we're just barely beginning to fathom the true intricaties, capabilities, and power of our technological gadgets before the "next generation" of said tech comes along and makes (most) everyone stop paying attention to the "old stuff." Witness the fact that people are still doing new stunts on 2600 game machines; that new music generated by that grandfather-of-all-sound-card chips the venerable C64 sound chip (SID) is being posted on websites daily; that a few years ago, the ultimate vogue in electronica was to hook up some 30 year old analog synths to your ProTools system to capture that ellusive "analog warmth"; etc.
And consider something that Nicholas Negroponte once observed in Wired (back in '95 or '96): that as powerful as the World Wide Web is (with all of the "new" applications: blogging/self-publishing, day trading, Peer-to-peer file sharing, etc), you really don't need a computer much more powerful than a 486, with a decent (and now super-cheap) modem to access it.
Or am I just getting old and nostalgic?
bud
Posted by: bud at August 10, 2003 7:12 PM
Nah, you're not getting old and nostalgic at all! I think it's no surprise that, surrounded by chips with nigh-petaflop processing capabilities, able to juggle gazillion-floating-point numbers with ease, a sector of geek culture is turning back to old-school computation. It's all about limitations. Limitations are the engine of creativity.
Posted by: Clive at August 10, 2003 10:14 PM
By the way, that's incredibly cool to know about the origins of Homestar Runner! Do you have any links to sites talking about it?
Posted by: Clive at August 10, 2003 10:15 PM
Clive,
My apologies, the first HomeStar Runner was done on an SNES...
go to the museum page at homestarrunner.com, and look in the file cabinet drawer for the folder labelled "Super SNES" - there's a Qtime movie there that lays out some of the history...
And I totally agree that limitations are a great motivator for creativity: My first keyboard sampler (an Ensoniq EPS) was already two generations out of date when I bought it, but economic limitations forced me to make the absolute most out that thing for five years. Man, I knew that mother* inside and out, top to bottom, back to front. It did MY bidding! I've not gotten quite so deep into any instrument or software package since, usually because I upgrade to something newer and shinier before I really get to know it...
I'm weak I know...
bud
Posted by: bud at August 10, 2003 11:47 PM
To a far lesser degree, I'm loving the way the Gameboy Advance SP is fostering similar tendencies amongst game developers.
It's basically a slightly hopped-up SNES in the palm of your hand, and is the only gaming machine currently on sale where the majority of newly-published titles are in 2D.
I've been lamenting the push towards the third dimension in videogames for years now, not because it's intrinsically a bad thing, but because it's been treated as a necessity, rather than an option. Games designed for 2D play are simply not given the green light by publishers and never see the light of day - except on the GameBoy.
I've reached the point where the major gaming systems sit gathering dust beside my TV, whilst my GameBoy Advance SP gets used every single day by both myself and my girlfriend.
Posted by: Tony at August 12, 2003 5:56 AM
I do miss non-3D games. There's this new sort of homebrew-centric console coming out, and I was wondering if it might give us some good new 2d games...
http://www.xgamestation.com/
You gotta love the vector support, and $99 is pretty reasonable. I just wonder if a lot of would-be programmers for this systems are more drawn to the nostalgia of true old skool systems. I am.
The text adventure is probably the dead genre that makes me the most sad. While some old games are coming back on PDAs and cell phones, it doesn't work for Infocom since you really need a full keyboard.
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