It is an unmistakable artifact: the woodgrain deck with its bank of switches, the rubber-gripped joysticks with their single button in inviting PUSH ME orange, the primitive-looking games with their bright, blocky graphics and bleep-blorp sound effects.
But for authors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, the Atari VCS – more popularly known as the Atari 2600 – was and is much more than a piece of '80s iconography; it is a unique piece of technology that changed the world forever.
In Racing the Beam, their new book which inaugurates the Platform Studies series at the MIT Press, they explore how the arcane inner workings of the once ubiquitous system shaped and informed the games that went on to shape and inform human culture.
Read the full post here on thestar.com...