History of "Adventure" for the Atari 2600
7 comments
·May 5, 2025_JamesA_
Play Atari 2600 Adventure online.
Dwedit
I once ported the game into Flash, using a disassembly of the game as reference. I had it on my website, but it got DMCA-ed off for trademark reasons.
staplung
Robot Chicken "advertisement" for Adventure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNK44eqvP38
And of course, the "someone get this freakin duck away from me!"
rolph
if you played adventure:
zzzeek
I found the easter egg in Adventure on my own, however, this was using the method of turning the 2600 power switch on and off really fast which caused the game to boot into a semi broken mode where one of those thin vertical black lines would be moved over, such that you could go under it. that's how I got into the room. I thought if I kept experimenting like this I'd find the source code for the game, but that didn't happen. learned about the dot some years later.
Dwedit
When you bring the dot into the screen with the wall, the wall turns light gray to match the background color. Yet the wall is still there, and still drawn on top of the background and player.
Someone might be misled into thinking that the color change has some effect on how the collision detection works, thinking that because the background and wall are the same color, the collision detection must not work anymore. But this is not the case, the game logic is actually checking that the dot is changing the wall color in order to disable collision for the wall.
This game is quite simple in how it uses the Atari 2600 hardware. Atari Hardware can draw exactly 6 thing on a scanline: Playfield, Ball, Sprite 1, Sprite 2, Missile 1, Missile 2. So Adventure made the player be the Ball, the thin walls (seen on two rooms) be the missile, and two of game objects become the two sprites. There is also the torch-light sprite that can take the place of one of the game objects in dark rooms, drawn behind the background.
The game makes no attempt at all to re-use a sprite slot for another sprite appearing further down the screen. It's just two sprites, then no more.
The game also uses the hardware's pixel-level collision detection to check for collisions rather than bounding boxes, so when the sprites are flickering, they cannot collide with the player. But collision detection is not the only way that objects can interact, there's also the Bat and Magnet, or the dragons having objects to guard/run away from. The bridge also makes the game ignore player collisions for a particular bounding box inside the bridge.