Print Screen: "Racing the Beam" and "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li"

One of these is good.
3/9/2009 9:01 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

It's not an especially original insight. You can understand media and art better if you appreciate the technical constraints on the creators. Shakespeare scholars study how shows were adapted from the Globe Theatre to smaller surroundings. Music scholars recognize the importance of electronic instruments in changing both performance and songwriting.

So, this age of competing platforms, in which the Wii's unique control system and the PC's openness are creating new challenges for developers and publishers, is an opportune moment for MIT Press to launch its Platform Studies series. Technical and commercial constraints force tough decisions on game designers, and, the series argues, only by understanding the platforms themselves can we get a full understanding of the history of game design.

"Racing the Beam," by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, is the first book in the series. It, appropriately, takes on the Atari Video Computer System (Atari 2600) -- the first big success in the home console environment and the system responsible for both the birth and crash of the videogame industry in the 1980s. Montfort and Bogost take a case study approach, using six games from the system's history to illustrate the problems and potential of the Atari VCS.

If you buy this book expecting the gaming nostalgia trip of last year's LucasArts history, "Rogue Leaders," you will be very disappointed. This is a very technical book that demands close attention from the reader. There are, of course, the familiar stories of Warren Robinett hiding his name in Adventure, and the bad 2600 port of the classic arcade game Pac-Man. But you also get paragraphs about controller design, the difficulty of making a maze, and collision detection on the Atari 2600. "Racing the Beam" is certainly not impenetrable to the uninitiated, but it is a serious book with a serious goal.

You can see this in the choice of case studies. Though Adventure and Pac-Man are certainly no-brainers, the very simple Combat and Empire Strikes Back are chosen instead of the more iconic Missile Command. The purpose is not to outline the history of the console as much as it is to outline the history of design on the console. Combat was a more sophisticated Pong. Adventure introduced problems of wraparound screens and mapping. Pac-Man tried to cram a successful arcade game on a smaller platform before all the solutions had been figured out. Yar's Revenge was an original game and a hit. Pitfall drew from a range of sources and had to create a plausible setting with limited graphical power. Finally, Empire Strikes Back pushed the console's limits of color and sound to bring a beloved movie to life.

It's hard to critique the content of a book like this without knowing more than an amateur gaming historian, but the approach is certainly refreshing. A lot of the debate in the current console war has centered on which machine has more power or is harder on developers. However, very little game criticism indicates how hardware design influences the software (the Wii being one exception in the discourse). Today's developers certainly have more power to work with, but the principle is the same -- a console's architecture helps decide what is and is not possible.