Let’s take a trip back in the way-back machine to 1979 — 26 years ago. That’s a long time ago, right? Many of you weren’t even born yet. The Sony Walkman cassette and radio player was the rage; M*A*S*H and Three’s Company were hot on television; Rod Stewart and the Bee Gees were A-list’ers pumping out top 10’s.
It was also the year the groundbreaking Atari 2600 game Adventure was rolled out.
One of the creators behind the Adventure game will, at the 2015 Game Developers Conference, be sharing his experiences developing the game, maximizing features with only a thimble-full of pricey memory to work with, and fighting to earning the credit game developers were due.
Gamasutra summarizes the postmortem: “Warren Robinett, the veteran programmer, designer and The Learning Company founder known for his groundbreaking game design work at Atari, TLC and NASA, is coming to GDC 2015 to deliver a Classic Game Postmortem on the creation of his hit 1979 game Adventure for the Atari 2600 console.
Adventure is particularly notable for (among other things) being one of the first graphical action-adventure games ever released. Adventure also contained one of the earliest known “Easter eggs” ever hidden in a game by a designer — in this case, a hidden screen revealing Robinett’s name and authorship at a time when Atari was unwilling to publicly credit game makers for their work. Thus his efforts to create Adventure meaningfully advanced both the practice of game development and the fight for developers to be recognized for their work.
His talk is about the implementation of Adventure. For clarity, the game code has been translated into C (from its original 6502 assembler code). Because memory was extremely expensive in the late ’70s, the program for Adventure had to fit into a 4K-byte ROM chip. Therefore the program was very short — barely a dozen pages of C code!
At GDC in March, Robinett will speak at length about how he managed to create the game, how it was all jammed into 4K of memory, and how he gave in-game creatures “desires” and “fears” at a time when most games were still filled with simplistic AI.
This is an hour-long session that’s worth keeping on your radar, so make sure to bookmark the session on the GDC 2015 Session Scheduler.”
GDC has had a history of showcasing developers of classic games for postmortems, such as Zork, Robotron, Alone in the Dark, among many other old school titles. If you’re a fan of retro games and the history of the game industry — and attending GDC, of course — then this should be a talk high on your GDC to-do list.
