History of “Adventure” for the Atari 2600
atariarchive.org
atariarchive.org
The game makes no attempt at all to re-use a sprite slot for another sprite appearing further down the screen. It's just two sprites, then no more.
The game also uses the hardware's pixel-level collision detection to check for collisions rather than bounding boxes, so when the sprites are flickering, they cannot collide with the player. But collision detection is not the only way that objects can interact, there's also the Bat and Magnet, or the dragons having objects to guard/run away from. The bridge also makes the game ignore player collisions for a particular bounding box inside the bridge.
Racing the beam - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
The only real time you need to handle things specially is that some room exits are conditional based on whether Game 1 is selected or not.
Because it was so simple to reuse the rooms, there was enough empty space in there for the Easter egg. The "Created by Warren Robinett" sprite alone is a whopping 96 bytes of sprite data.
But you don't need all that much special code to get the Easter egg into the game. You define one additional room that reuses an existing room layout, and add one more sprite to the list of sprites. The sprite is pre-placed in the new room, as defined by the data that initializes all the game objects. The code for the dot mostly uses the existing code for objects, you can pick up and drop objects already, and the dot is no different in that respect. There is a little bit of added code for removing the right side barrier when it's in the correct sprite slot (easy to happen when three objects are in the room), and there's also a little bit of extra code to override the right-side exit for the room.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixa/id826977016
I'm old, I played the original "Adventure" for the Atari 2600 to death when I was a kid and am a huge fan . And, personally I really liked Pixa. I thought they did a good job of translating it to something interesting with mobile controls and I "cleared it". I suspect maybe only oldies like me seeing it through the less of nostalgia would get into it.
I don't remember how long it took to clear, a few hours at least because it has multiple maps.
Someone might be misled into thinking that the color change has some effect on how the collision detection works, thinking that because the background and wall are the same color, the collision detection must not work anymore. But this is not the case, the game logic is actually checking that the dot is changing the wall color in order to disable collision for the wall.
I thought I was the only one that knew/did this! I also did this on my Pitfall 2 (awesome soundtrack, btw) and watch Harry fall through the otherwise solid ground, landing directly beside the gold monkey (or whatever it was) to instantly win the game!! Good times. ;^)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNK44eqvP38
And of course, the "someone get this freakin duck away from me!"
It is very strange considering my affinity for weird stuff. I loved the BASIC Programming cartridge, and later in life, I would amass a huge Infocom collection starting with Zork on the C=64. But this graphical Adventure held no interest for me or my sister. Neither did Superman, which was modeled after it. Sure, I heard a lot about it. I heard enough to squick me, because it seemed that the devs were sort of abusing the hardware limitations to provision this weird adventure-y experience in a graphical format that I would not enjoy. (Nor would I get very far in exploring this world because it was so, picky-picky-picky. If you ever played E.T. on the 2600, you'd understand!)
When Haunted House was released 2 years later, I did pick that one up, out of morbid curiosity, I suppose, and it was kind of interesting, but not something that I spent a long time figuring out. I followed the Swordquest series with interest, (the marketing built those up with a real mystique and some epic fanfare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordquest#Contest) and invested some time in some of those, but still -- I suppose, even back then, I was far more interested in the "twitch" action type games. We loved Pitfall and other Activision titles such as River Raid.
I built a clone of it for Windows using Direct X in probably 1999/2000. I don't have a Windows machine, but I think Microsoft's obsession with backward compatibility means it probably still works:
https://naildrivin5.com/adventure/index.html
Here's the C++ code in all its glory: https://github.com/davetron5000/adventureclone/
It replicates the 2600 game, and adds two new levels (additional castle and maze), and two new (optional) objects, a candle that shows more of the labyrinths, and a shield that prevents the dragons from eating you.
Is it? It’s certainly up there. But I would think Pitfall would be the best known today in terms of gameplay.
That aside, I really enjoyed the article.
Among 2600 games that weren't terrible though, I'd say its probably up there.
But I suspect they’re not familiar with the game at all, just the story. If they know about Pac-Man it’s likely the same.
I decided to go with Pitfall because I think it’s well known but people have likely seen at least a screen or two being played, jumping on gators or over logs.