Jan 24 2009

Beam us up, Nick & Ian

Gentleman, scholar, and first-ever FWR guest Nick Montfort’s new book, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Game System, is now available for keepsies from the fine folks at MIT Press.  Montfort co-authored the book with the brilliant Ian Bogost, and describes it thusly over at Grand Text Auto:

The book examines the relationship between the unusual hardware design of the Atari VCS (a.k.a. Atari 2600), the games that were created for it, and how those games influenced later titles and genres. Ian and I discuss the Atari VCS itself and six telling cartridges for the system: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. We delve into the technical specifics of the system, tracking developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics.

Montfort talked a little bit about this project when we interviewed him last fall for Episode 007, and I am very much looking forward to picking this up from my neighborhood Powells store in Cedar Hills. Congratulations, guys.