A gem of video games that Ed Fries created and you can enjoy totally free in your browser
We have experienced all kinds of adventures controlling the Master Chief during the popular Halo saga and the truth is that the Bungie FPS It has not stopped giving us joy. Microsoft hit the table brutally with the launch of the title for the first Xbox and made the green soldier its main banner in the video game industry.
23 years have passed since the first installment began shooting and one of those responsible for the birth of the brand was Ed Fries. The former top figure in Microsoft’s gaming division was in charge of adding Bungie and Rare, among others, as studios that would allow the leap to the competition against Sony and Nintendo.
Thus, more Master Chief adventures followed with its support for Xbox 360, Xbox One and… Atari 2600. Yes, the legendary console of the 70s and 80s also had its own dedicated project in which we could destroy the Covenant troopsalbeit with a much more pixelated version. It was Fries himself who was in charge of bringing forward a production that saw the light of day in 2010 for a system whose production had finished 18 years earlier.
However, what motivated Fries to create Halo 2600? Excited about reading the book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer Systemwho has a special dedication to the Atari 2600, the person in charge knew that he could carry out his idea. The truth is that the field of programming was not foreign to the director, since he had managed to create his small works with an Atari 800 when he was young. He began with great humility, since he barely had in mind to give shape to the protagonist, but he was quickly convinced by those close to him to continue further.
“The memories it brought back were more like, ‘Hey, it’s fun to make games!’ And ‘Hey, I can still do this.’ The Atari 2600 is very difficult to programso it presents a really interesting and fun kind of challenge. There are some really good development tools out there these days, so I really enjoyed the whole experience,” Fries recalled of a title he put together over the course of six months in his spare time. In addition, a number of independent developers provided him with the documentation and help he needed to focus on his work.
“I tried to keep some people at Bungie and Microsoft informed during development in case they were upset by what I was doing, but They never discouraged meso I kept working,” Fries commented at the time, which gave him wings to continue giving free rein to his imagination with the Atari 2600. This is how he described the difficulties he had to overcome during programming.
“The thing to understand about the Atari 2600 is that it is an incredibly limited machine. It has only 128 bytes of RAM, and without bank switching, the maximum program size is just over 4000 bytes. There are only two 8-pixel-wide monochrome sprites, two one-pixel bullets, a ‘ball’, and a 40-pixel-wide background (and that’s even exaggerating!).
There is no memory to store the screen image like any modern console or PC, instead it has to be drawn line by line by changing the values of registers that control the sprites and background. The processor is so slow that only 76 clock cycles occur while drawing one line of the screen, and the simplest 6502 assembler instructions take at least 2 clock cycles. So just drawing an image of Master Chief is difficult enough. Creating a full game within these constraints is much more difficult.
The result was published in July 2010, so Halo 2600 allows us to play a demake on par with the series. There are 64 levels in the title that can be completed in about 20 minutes, which are divided into four zones: exterior, Covenant base, ice world and a final boss area. What you have to do is annihilate every living being on screen using different weapons and power-ups, but with the peculiarity that all of them, including the Master Chief, die with a single hit.
You can only get three lives to reach the goal, and if you do, you can enjoy Legendary mode with additional challenges. In fact, while he was tinkering with the code to add details like the sound of the main theme of Halo 2Fries encountered such crazy bugs that he decided they should remain in the final version.
“I discovered the existence of what I call ‘Magic Land’. I was working on a boss battle bug and accidentally found myself completely outside of the 64-screen map. I was wandering through memory that was never meant to be interpreted as part of the map, but the code was doing its best to interpret what was being thrown at it.
Strange, deformed monsters attacked me in even stranger ways as I wandered through this bizarre land I had accidentally created. “I left one or two bugs in the final game to allow others to find and explore this strange landscape as I did.”
The reception was very good, to the point that the website AtariAge was responsible for publishing Halo 2600 and release limited physical copies. The Smithsonian American Art Museum was in charge of showing it in an exhibition and you can even play it completely free from your browser. A small gem of video games that pays tribute to a legendary saga.
At VidaExtra | Review of Halo, The Series: a brutal blockbuster in which Paramount and 343 Industries redesign the Master Chief
In VidaExtra | All the Halo games in chronological order: from the space adventures of the Master Chief to other stories from his universe
