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24-Hour Atari 2600 Video Game Design Contest
morcheeba writes "Retro Redux was a 24-hour video game programming contest held last weekend in New York. Nine teams worked through the night to produce new Atari 2600 compatible games. Awards were given for the most innovative game, best
visuals, and best sound. The best game overall was "Ninja Garden," and it will be featured in a future version of the Atari® Flashback(TM) Game Console. The New York Times was there with event coverage."
Some of the best games I have ever played were on my father's anchient atari 5200. Back when games where focus on having challenging gameplay and great replay value. Since when has pac man or galazia or qbert gotten boring? It would seem most games nowadays are more focused on fancy visual effects rather than basic gameplay. It's a shame, but at least we still have the classics. Interesting wiki http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Videoga mes_history on the history of video games.
The article says that they were given "a brief tutorial in the software they [used]" before starting hacking.
Was this some sort of game creation kit they were using? ISTM that for a machine like the 2600 (or any console, for that matter) you'd need more than a brief intro if you were going to write a decent game in 24 hours.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
Okay, I was actually one of the people that helped run the event...believe it or not.
I just want to comment to say that figuring out the constraints was the most difficult part to figure out. We determined pretty quickly that the flashback--which the teams were ostensibly designing for--was actually a Nintendo-on-a-chip. In the end, after figuring out that none of these teams could really write assembly that quickly so as to match the 2600's real specs, we settled for using Gamemaker, keeping the size of the executable ('cartridge') under 3/4 of a meg or so, the event team prepared a set of 8-bit sound bytes, and we settled on a reasonable pixel size and resolution...don't remember offhand--some of you hardcore geeks could give a reasonable approximation I'm sure. I think the assumption was that in the end it'd have to be ported to whatever the flashback 2 was going to be anyways, which doesn't exist now...so, there you go.
It was really a fun event though. I think the thing to focus on was that the games that people made were really *fun* and it's amazing that these students got together and produced these awesome games (I played most of them, they are really fun and creative--and the sound for them really stands out, which unfortunately you can't get in screenshots) in less that 24 hours (it was actually 23 'cause of daylight savings time, we realized on the eve of the event). I'm hoping we can do it again next year.
Ninja Garden is really addictive by the way--the controls are really simple and fun, it sucks people in really quickly. It was the only two-player game created and in the end that proved to be a success with the judges. It deserved to win, even considering the high quality of the other games.