Warren Robinett spent approximately one year designing and coding this game in spite of the technical limitations in the Atari 2600 console hardware. Adventure was Robinett’s “brain child” and conceived as a graphical version of the 1977 Colossal Cave Adventure.
There are some today who would disparage the graphics in Adventure. One needs to be reminded however that Robinett had to design and create an entire game that was no bigger than 4 kilobytes! So some might complain that the player character is represented as a square or that the dragon looks like a duck but it is out of ignorance of the constraints which Robinett had to work with. Todays programmers and game developers are more limited by time and money than they are technological constraints.
Your quest is to explore and find a magical chalice and return it to the golden castle. There are roaming monsters that you have to contend with: three dragons who would like nothing better than to eat your face and a bat which steals items and then randomly deposits them about the game world.
There are three levels of play in the game. The first level is the easiest and can be completed in a matter of minutes. The second level is a bit harder and contains secret rooms and hidden items. The third level is the hardest because it completely randomizes where all of the objects might be discovered. This last choice can sometimes “softlock” the game and make winning impossible depending on which keys get randomly placed in which castles.
The Adventure game for the Atari 2600 provided a number of “firsts” when it was first introduced. It was considered new and impressive that a game world for a console could span several different screens. There are actually 30 different screens or rooms in the game. Enemies which could run at you and attack but then continue to move offscreen was a novelty at the time. There are three dragons in this game – the yellow Yorgle, the green Grundle, and red Rhindle – that protect or flee from various items and constantly try to attack the player character. I remember playing this in my youth and almost shitting my pants when the dragon would appear and run at you. There are also various items in the game which are considered helpful and introduced the idea of puzzle elements in an arcade game. The different colored keys open their respective castles, a magnet can be found to pull an item towards the player (sometimes a key you need might be stuck in a wall), a magic bridge which allows you to cross between walls or obstacles and lastly a sword which you can use to defeat the dragons.
Warren Robinett embedded his name in the game within a hidden room. He even kept this secret from Atari executives for more than a year. There is quite a process to reach this hidden room and you first have to retrieve the Gray Dot from the Black Castle catacombs. This remains one of the earliest known Easter Eggs in a video game and it greatly popularized the concept. Adventure was also the first action-adventure video game and the first fantasy console game. This may very well be the very first example of an open world game which is wildly popular today. The game was also the very first game to use a fog of war concept in its catacombs. When you are moving through the outdoor maze the screen is well lit but when you’re exploring the catacombs of the Black Castle it seems like you’re feeling your way around in the dark. This helps to create an element of suspense.
In numerous polls and magazines the game was voted the best Atari 2600 game and noted to be a significant advancement of home video games. The sales of the game were wildly successful for Atari who sold over 1 million cartridges. In both the novel and film versions of Ready Player One, the Easter Egg in Adventure is prominently mentioned and used as a plot device.
While this certainly cannot be considered a computer role-playing game by our definition; I wanted the experience of playing this game merely for a historical perspective on home video games. There are so very many firsts that this game achieved and it was only 4 kilobytes in size.
I played the 1st level and beat the game in a matter of minutes. The second level proved to be a bit harder but it was the third level which I enjoyed the most. I had to find the hidden room and see the Easter Egg for myself as well.
I had a good time playing the game and I am betting that this will provide a great deal of nostalgia for some. Since I’m traveling through time and looking at game progression with a historical lens this was a must play game for me to experience and I felt like I had to include it in my 1980 list of offerings. This game comes packaged with all of the Atari Flashback game consoles as well as many other games which allow you to relive your childhood.
Ah the memories! Atari VCS Adventure is a game I remember playing over and over back in 1980/81.
The challenges of coding games for the VCS were numerous. The amount of RAM was incredibly limited – 128 bytes – so there was no display buffer. This meant that the VCS had to draw the screen in realtime as the electron beam in the TV moved across the display! Doing processing related to the gaming logic had to wait for when the beam was moving to the next line or when wrapping round to the top to start again.
If anyone is interested in learning more about the VCS or Adventure, I can thoroughly recommend the book “Racing the Beam” by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost which goes into great detail on both subjects.
Warren Robinett would go on to write some further interesting games. My favourite of his is Robot Odyssey (1984) which manages to be both fun and highly educational. One to look out for should you get this far into the decade!
The video output of the 8-bits is frightening black magic, and the Atari is perhaps the second most insane*. Most of the systems of this era had the same basic concept of “When the CRT’s electron gun gets to the bottom of the screen, you will get a signal and you have 218 microseconds to get the data ready for the next time the screen draws”, but the Atari VCS had more insanity; while other systems had a video model that was some form of “Here’s a collection of objects to place at various positions”, the Atari system was more along the lines of “Count CPU cycles until the electron gun was pointing at the part of the screen where you wanted a dot and then shout NOW at the TV signal generator.” It’s completely amazing that anyone could do much of anything at all with it.
* The Sinclair ZX80 is the only system that I think could reasonably be called crazier; when it was time to draw the screen, the CPU essentially did a GOTO into video memory, and a special chip on the memory bus diverted what the CPU thought was more program data so that it went through a lookup table straight into a signal generator. Which meant that the running program had to come to a dead stop while the screen was updating, and conversely, the screen went blank while you were typing.
Great stuff from both William & Ross here. I certainly appreciate hearing about this side of the game industry and history as I know virtually nothing about it. Thank you for taking the time to respond and write this up.
Yes, the Atari VCS’ video model was hugely challenging to program but it was immensely flexible. If you could master it, you could accomplish amazing things. Couple this with bank switching of ROM (which allowed titles to be 8KB, 16KB or even 32KB in size) and the VCS was able to hold its own against much later 8-bit computers with far more advanced video capabilities.
Agree on the ZX80 comments. Fortunately the Sinclair designers were able to improve matters for the subsequent ZX81 design. The ZX81 drove the screen in parallel with actual computation though you could turn this off with the FAST command that allowed all processing to be diverted to computation.
One slight clarification to my original post: Warren Robinett wrote the underlying game engine of Robot Odyssey, not RO itself. The influence of Adventure on the mechanics of the gamplay is undeniable however.