Here, look what this place is like on the inside:
This is an office. It feels, looks, and smells like an office. The lighting is office-awful, as in your options are buzzy flickery-sickly overhead fluorescent lighting or pitch blackness. The bathroom’s lights are on a motion sensor, too. The kitchen area is so much a break room I expected to open the fridge and find tupperware with moldy casserole in it labeled CHERYL’S DO NOT TOUCH. Anyway, it’s home for the next few days while we cover the show. Maybe it’ll feel better when I make us all flapjacks on the copier. Oh! The Atari part! Right! So, because the Scout was a Forestry Service car, I wanted to put it in a forest-y background, so I took this opportunity to show something I’ve always felt deserves more recognition: The Atari 2600 E.T. game’s background graphics. Specifically, these background graphics:
As you may know, E.T. is considered one of the worst Atari games ever made, a colossal letdown and fuckup to such a degree that there’s landfills full of the cartridges. And, sure, the game isn’t good. But, it’s not all bad. I think Howard Scott Warshaw’s (the game’s desgner) graphics are really quite lovely, especially given the limitations of the system, and this forest background I think is genuinely one of the best seen on a 2600 bar none. The background layer of what the 2600 could draw on screen, called the playfield, was even more limited than the foreground, moving graphics. The pixels were all four normal pixels wide, so you’re drawing with dashes, and you can only use 22 of them per scanline, which is only halfway across the screen, so the other half had to be either duplicated or mirrored. That’s a lot of restrictions. Sure, fancy programming can work around a lot of this, but most games just dealt with the limitations, like this forest did, but still, somehow, it looks so good. It feels like a forest. It’s a repeating pattern of dark and light green trees, and it works. It even feels like an evergreen forest. I respect it so much. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get my pants out of the filing cabinet. Under P for pants or did I do T for trousers? Looks like you’ve got more to deal with than just a time zone issue. There must be some rift in the continuum as well. Alas, I’m pretty sure that any other graphic capability they could have squeezed into that little cartridge got blown on Atari’s staff coke budget. I fully support more (any) tuned adverts so the AT staff can enjoy better accommodation. We knew it wasn’t the best game ever, but we had enough fun with it once we started playing on the setting without scientists carrying you away or FBI agents stealing your health powerups. We even thought the title screen’s chiptune rendition of John Williams’ theme was pretty impressive and you could tell a great deal of care was put into the artwork and packaging. It wasn’t until much later when I started using the internet that I learned just how much everyone else hated it, and it was a little bit jarring.
