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."

Comments

RETRO fun

[Kaamoss]

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.

Re:NY Times article?

[clamatius]

I think this was the link the submitter meant.

In honor of the Atari 2600 ET game

[AtariAmarok]

This contest should be named in honor of that old Atari 2600 ET game, which, from looking at it, must have been designed and completed in two and a half hours.

Corrected Link

[morcheeba]

Oh, whoa, am I embarrassed! I even double-checked it, too, argh... Here are the corrected links:

No-registration required link (thanks to the NY Times link generator!)
registration-required link

Gamemaker.nl required

[morcheeba]

Yeah, this was required. The contest's introduction/sample design document is here (zip w/ MS Word files). It looks like gamemaker isn't 2600-specific, and, in fact, the rules say to use snap-to-grid to approximate the resolution of the 2600. That's kindof disappointing - I'm guessing that the gamemaker can do a whole lot more in terms of control logic than the limited memory of the 2600.

Re:Screenshots, Sorry, now good:

[beofli]

screenshots

I always found that these kind of pixel games, because they lack details, set our imagination to work, giving them a lot of 'atmosphere'. -- I rest my case...

Not Atari 2600 games

[raindog2]

The Atari Flashback isn't based on any Atari hardware, but "Famiclone" technology (most similar to the NES) like all those "system in a controller" devices. In fact, just looking at the screenshots , I can't even find one that it'd be possible to render on the 2600 (having done some coding on it myself.) They all have either too many pixels or too many colors per scanline, though obviosuly not too many for NES hardware.

For me, this contest might have actually been more challenging than writing a 2600 game in 24 hours, since I know the 2600 but I'm not familiar with coding for the NES nor with the development tools they were using (which was apparently the Windows program "Game Maker" with a limited set of sound effects and limitations on resolution and colors.)

To be fair, though, the game that won ("Ninja Garden") was the closest of all the games to looking like an actual 2600 game.

Re:Not Atari 2600 games

[Anonymous Coward]

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.