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

like the NES, which had two action buttons compared to the Atari VCS’s
one, and ever more complex arcade machines, which often sported handfuls
of different buttons, had made more elaborate inputs common.
The Atari VCS had begun as a home console for ports of popular coinop
games, mainly Pong and Tank; within a few years, it hosted Space Invaders,
Pac-Man, and games that were inspired by coin-ops, including Yars’
Revenge. Later, the machine became a platform for adaptations of popular
movies—the Star Wars fi lms, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and even Porky’s. A
decade after the system launched, ports remained a strong infl uence, but
in some cases the games being ported were ones that themselves followed
conventions established earlier on the Atari VCS.
That it was possible to complete a game like Realsports Boxing—even on
a 16K ROM—testifi es to the fl exibility of the Atari VCS’s architecture.
The abstract simplicity of the machine, combined with the stringent constraints
that simplicity imposed, made for an extremely fl exible system.
A more rigid hardware design, such as that found in consoles of the late
1990s and early 2000s, with their support for real-time 3D graphics, can
provide for more sophisticated visual presentations, but such a design
also reduces the breadth of representations that are possible. The minimal
design of the Atari VCS actually maximized what could be done with its
small amount of computation, making it a more versatile platform for creative
expression that it would have been with, for instance, built-in sprites
and hardware facilities that were well-adapted to drawing 2D, overheadview
playfi elds, but were not adaptable to any other perspective.
This simplicity continued to invite new innovations well into the late
1980s. In 1987, Exus released a new VCS controller, the fi rst since the
Track & Field controller of 1984. 1 The controller was a pressure-sensitive
mat that rested on the fl oor in front of the television, emblazoned with
fi ve different-colored circles. Depressing any of these with a foot or hand
had the effect of closing a joystick switch or pressing the red button,
inputs for which designer could program appropriate responses. The
device was called the “Foot Craz” (fi gure 8.1). Two games were bundled
with it, Video Jogger and Video Refl ex. Video Jogger is a simple running game
similar to the running events in Track & Field. But rather than depress
buttons rapidly, the player has to run—literally—on the sensors of the Foot
Craz. Video Refl ex was a Whack-a-Mole-style game played with the feet.
On-screen, bugs appear in one of fi ve colored regions. The player has a
limited time to depress the sensor corresponding to the correct colored
region.
Foot Craz preceded Bandai’s Family Fun and Fitness, which Nintendo
licensed in 1988 and released as the Power Pad. It took more than a decade
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