Halo 2600

Written by Ed Fries, former vice president of game publishing at Microsoft, who was involved in Microsoft's acquisition of Halo developers Bungie. Fries enjoyed the creative problems involved with creating a game with extreme technical constraints. Upon release, the game was generally well-received, and was selected for inclusion in a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit.

It is recorded as the work of Ed Fries. Publication is recorded by Atari Age. The recorded date of publication is 2010. It is associated with United States. Recorded genres are action-adventure game. It is recorded in the collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum.

• Title — Halo 2600 • Publisher — AtariAge • Designer — Ed Fries • Released — July 2010 • Genre — Action-adventure • Modes — Single player • Platforms — Atari 2600

• Illustration — Gameplay screenshot Halo 2600 is an action-adventure shooter video game, with gameplay inspired by the Atari titles Adventure and Berzerk; it plays as a "demake" of the Halo video games as if they were created for the Atari 2600. The player uses the joystick to control the character of Master Chief, the protagonist of the Halo video games, as he makes his way through 64 screens, divided into four zones: outdoors, Covenant base, ice world, and a final boss area. Weapons and power-ups are available to combat the many enemies that appear. The player and enemies can each be killed by one hit, unless a shield is collected. The player has three lives. After successfully completing the game once, the player can play through the game in "Legendary mode", with the game tweaked for an extra challenge.

• Illustration — Ed Fries in 2015 Ed Fries got a taste of game development in his teenage years, developing Atari 800 games at home. Fries took a summer internship with Microsoft in college and eventually joined the company. In 2000, he was head of Microsoft Game Studios, trying to develop a launch lineup for Microsoft's unproven Xbox console. After being contacted by developer Bungie's vice president about a possible acquisition, Fries shepherded Microsoft's purchase of Bungie and their developing project, a game that would become the Xbox's killer app, Halo: Combat Evolved. Fries left Microsoft in January 2004, after 18 years with the company. Fries read the book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, which is about programming for the Atari 2600, and was inspired to create his own game. Initially, Fries only intended to recreate the Master Chief, but decided to finish the project after encouragement. He was aided by an extensive community of homebrew enthusiasts, where he found emulators, example code, and documentation. Despite having been released in 1977 and ending production in 1992, the Atari 2600 retained a dedicated hobbyist industry who still bought and played classic games. Fries had not programmed in assembly in thirty years, and found the challenge in developing Halo 2600 one of adapting to constraints. The Atari 2600 has much less space and memory than was available for Halo. With only 128 bytes of RAM, drawing Master Chief was difficult, and creating a game with other characters even more so. Fries later stated that making the game taught him that constraint is sometimes a fuel for creativity, comparing the process of adapting Halo to the effort in turning a novel into a poem or haiku. "It felt more like writing poetry than it did like writing regular code", he said. "It felt like everything had to be so tight, so perfect. If even one of these tricks didn't exist, if I didn't have this incredibly clever way of drawing this sprite, or if I didn't have this incredibly sick code for drawing the missiles, I wouldn't have been able to fit it in. I couldn't have made the machine do what I wanted it to do." Fries pointed to other artists' work such as Bach's fugues or elaborate origami as examples of deliberately setting constraints to create something more interesting. The full game takes up just 4 kilobytes of space.