Atari Alumni

If you draw a straight line representing the evolution of video games from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii, one thing is clear: if you don’t know your past, you can’t know your future.

That was the central lesson of Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost’s Friday talk at the Game Developers Conference here, “Learning from the Atari 2600.” Essentially, Bogost argued, it’s not always necessary to reinvent the wheel; sometimes, instead of being discarded as so much arcane, the discoveries of the past are best adapted for the future.

Bogost and MIT assistant professor Nick Monfort recently published Racing the Beam, a book about the iconic Atari VCS, popularly known as the 2600. So Bogost’s talk Friday was clearly drawn from the research for that project. And while his fondness for the 1970s-era video game console was evident, the point he was really trying to make was that the seeds of successful games–especially those enjoyed by large groups of diverse people–have very little to do with the latest and greatest technology and much more to do with mechanics that make for enjoyable shared experiences.

For Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, a former carnival barker, the bloodlines that led to the 2600 were three things, Bogost argued: the fun-for-the-whole-family excitement of a midway, the shared competition of a game of darts played in a tavern, and the gather-around-the-TV sense of family time afforded by the den. At the same time, Bushnell wanted to repeat the success he’d had with coin-op arcade games like “Pong,” but for the home.

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