Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

Activision, Cartwright suggested a possible variant to Bob Whitehead’s
popular Skiing cartridge. 9 If the skier were changed to a kayaker, he surmised,
the interaction could remain largely the same, but would allow for
adjustments to the setting and refi nements in the character’s behavior.
This sort of technique would later come to be known as skinning. Today,
the term has a negative connotation, suggesting commercial exploitation
without fundamental innovation. But Cartwright’s design philosophy was
not without its positive qualities. It involved the slow refi nement of basic
ideas toward perfection.
Cartwright’s fi rst Activision game was Barnstorming, released in
1981. 10 In it, the player to navigates a biplane through barns while avoiding
obstacles. The player controls the plane with the joystick, which is seen
from the side. In 1982, Cartwright created Seaquest, a submarine combat
game. The player controls a vessel once more, this time in water, and this
time avoiding, collecting, or destroying various objects at different levels
of depth. Frostbite, Cartwright’s next game, was released in 1983 and is
similar as well. The player moves the character Frostbite Bailey across a
freezing river, taking care to land only on ice fl oes that move from side to
side. As the player changes the colors of these fl oes, a block of an igloo
appears on the icy bank at the top of the screen. Frostbite is a very different
game from Barnstorming, but it retains core behaviors from its predecessors:
a player object moves up and down into “lanes” on the screen, avoiding
or collecting objects. All of these games clearly take advantage of the
line-by-line nature of VCS graphics. As in Air-Sea Battle and Freeway,
nonplayer objects are constrained to specifi c horizontal patches of the
screen, so that the sprite graphics registers can be reset at different
vertical locations and more than two simultaneous objects can appear
on-screen.
David Crane’s design philosophy was quite different from Cartwright’s.
Crane saw Atari VCS development less as a refi nement of the
gameplay in known interaction models and more as a challenge to make
the highly constrained VCS hardware do new and exciting things. In
Crane’s words, “I got more enjoyment out of discovering a new trick than
from the game design itself. More often than not, I used this technique to
lead me in a new direction of game design, and some of the tricks were to
me as much an accomplishment as solving the Rubik’s Cube the fi rst
time.” 11
Freeway, which Crane developed in 1981, offered an improvement
on the techniques of same-screen sprite register rewrites (which Larry
Kaplan had fi rst used in Air-Sea Battle) and multicolored sprites (fi rst used
in the 1978 Superman) accomplished by changing both the sprite color
6 Pitfall! [105]