Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

by Nick Montfort, Ian Bogost

A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS. The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game Combat , Adventure , Pac-Man , Yars' Revenge , Pitfall! , and Star The Empire Strikes Back . They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure , for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto ), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games.

Genres: Games, Nonfiction, Technology, Video Games, History, Game Design, Computers

180 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2009

About the author

Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at MIT. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities; the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10; and the coeditor of The New Media Reader (all published by the MIT Press).

Reviews

[Rose Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a good book, a good read. Time well spent, I'm sure i will be using many of the things I laerned here in my upcoming projects.

[James Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was non-existent to being in diapers during the days of this story, so I can't speak to the historical accuracy or the even just the feels of the time. But my parents had an Atari 2600 and this book accurately captures the wonder caused the little colored boxes that would appear on their big wooden console television when it was plugged in.

As a professional programmer, I was particularly fascinated by the technical details of this little machine. In my world, displays are driven by framebuffers and backed by rectangular arrays of RAM. The idea of lighting up a point on the screen is, at its heart, synonymous with writing some bytes to the correct memory location. Turning the bytes in RAM into glowing points on the screen is handled by dedicated hardware that is mostly abstracted away for today's programmer.

But the 2600 doesn't have anything like that. It was designed in concert with the display hardware of its day: an electron beam that scans back and forth, back and forth. To draw on the screen, the programmer has to carefully turn the beam on and off timed precisely with each cycle of the CPU.

I am an Apple fan. I believe that the best software is written in concert with the hardware it will be running on so that each can take advantage of the other. The 2600 completely embodies that philosophy: its software is completely harmonized with the way that television and video signals worked at the time. So much so, that it's basically impossible to completely emulate the experience on modern displays. Our screens just don't allow for pixels bleeding in to one another or for phosphors to slowly dim once the beam has been turned off.

There's more to this story, of course. The way that most games were written by a single developer who owned every aspect of it (from concept to playability to music and art) is an interesting contrast to today's multi-million dollar development teams. The rivalry between Atari and Activision, whose original logo is still recognizable to all gamers today, is of note. And, of course, there's the way that women's struggle to gain respect in the industry is basically mirrored in today's software industry.

This book checked several boxes for me: as a modern programmer who enjoys history, I enjoyed reading the accounts of this pivotal project. As a lover of quality products, I enjoyed reading about the development of this seminal consumer offering. And as a gamer, I loved the nostalgic look at the console I first started growing up with.

And ultimately, as a reader, I enjoyed a well-written account of days of long ago.

[Angus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Often, when we talk about art, we talk about constraint. Constraint can be self imposed and, sometimes, can be the product of the medium. It's difficult to imagine a piece of hardware that imposes more constraint than the Atari 2600. With 128 bytes of volatile memory and a 4k rom cartridge size (later 8k with a bank-switching ROM that allows you to 'page' from the cart), memory constraints are severe. The Atari had sprite registers for 2 players, 2 missiles, and one ball, all of which fell directly out of the software designs for Pong and Combat!

The machine was tightly coupled to everything that was required for just two games, and from this developers created hundreds. The 2600 didn't have frame buffers, all video was drawn in real time, pixel by pixel, every cycle counting towards time before a CRT beam pulse.

All of this, to me, sounds maddening. The constraints are so severe as to limit what could be accomplished in a short period of time. The Atari port of Pacman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdT0l..., is a cruel parody but also a piece of technical wizardry, seriously stretching the boundaries of what was possible on the platform.

Monfort takes on an ambitious project in attempting critical reading of the hardware and software that comprised the 2600 as a platform. He discusses these limitations and their workarounds to give both a brief history of the platform, the extraordinary hacks that led to some of its best games, and to place them in a cultural context. Atari seems like a company that should never have happened, locking single developers away for anywhere from 6 months to 5 weeks to emerge with something capable of generating millions of dollars in revenue. We see simplicity as a beautiful and costly thing, constraint a real challenge to both creative thinking and pragmatic work.

In a time when nearly every computer we interact with is general purpose, where we sit atop a tower of countless abstractions, it's fascinating to take a close look at the foundations. I look forward to reading 10 PRINT CHR(205.5+RND(1)) GOTO 10

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A close look at what writing programs for the Atari VCS (aka the 2600) was like. The machine was incredibly tiny by current technology's standards, but the authors make the case that its shortcomings actually pushed its authors to try and make innovative games. A bit technical in places, but extremely interesting for those interested in the history of programming.

[Ninja · Rating 4 out of 5]

More technical than I was expecting. At times, that made it a little dry, but it was definitely enriching, and seeing how the technical limitations in the system translated into design, gameplay and graphical choices was quite interesting. That explanation also means you get a deeper appreciation for the latter games explored in the book as they pushed beyond the obstacles earlier games halted at.

The book's authors themselves are not above sliding in passing references to classics in computing fiction, with lines such as "This sometimes allowed dramatic effects to be displayed to viewers who, plugging in a joystick, found the television above the port to be the color of sky"

And the heroics - David Crane crammed 255 screens of jungle for Pitfall! in 50 bytes, and went from single-life-single-try to 3 lives with display, "For the 'lives' indicator I added vertical tally marks to the timer display. That probably only cost 24 bytes, and with another 20 hours of 'scrunching' the code I could fit that in"

[JJ Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book on how the Atari 2600's hardware constraints influenced the design of video games on the platform. The book covers the technical details in a way that's comprehensible to the average person yet is still interesting to someone with a background in computer engineering.

The message of this book is simple: the 2600 (aka the VCS) was designed to render simple top-down games between two players (e.g. Pong) to a CRT display. And over its decade commercial viability (+ the homebrew scene to this day), programmers figured out how to make it do much more than that, while still being limited by the system designed to do a lot less.

I wish the authors would attempt something more ambitious in scope in the future.

[Ren the Unclean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is super interesting, but doesn't always serve its audience, being stuck somewhere between highly technical and overly simple. It is basically a series of anecdotes about the creation of carefully selected Atari games that give amazing insight into what the creation process was like from a very low level (meaning less abstracted from the hardware, not simple) technical perspective.

It was telling how much the hardware and base software design had such a huge impact on what could and could not be done with Atari games and how the programmers worked around these issues as the life cycle of the system went on. Some of the anecdotes about how specific designs came about and techniques used to achieve certain effects were especially interesting.

There is an amazing amount of technical details on some systems, such as how colors are displayed by the Atari and how programmers dealt with limited sprite memory. Unfortunately, some of the other issues that game makers of this time dealt with are sort of glossed over, or not explained at all, which is a missed opportunity.

It is clear that I am not really the target audience of this book, since it seems to be written to at least be mostly understood by non-programmers, although there are many sections that I have no doubt would be beyond the grasp of the layman. I really enjoyed this book, and wish there was a similar examination that delved farther into the technical details.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the most in-depth look at the Atari 2600 I've ever read. I kinda think that if that sentence doesn't really generate that much interest for you, you should give this a miss. To me, it was fantastic because the 2600 remained a magical object to me throughout almost all my life. Magical in the sense that I had no idea how it worked. The original games that we had for it had blocky graphics and minimal sound, but a year or two later, the games quickly developed higher resolution graphics, even musical soundtracks. It was the same box running it -- I didn't understand how the games seemed to make quantum leaps in sophistication.

The answer is that people learned how to pull some truly insane tricks with their code, and this book spells out how it was done. The text honestly isn't that technical, though you need to know some basic computer concepts. Actually, I wished that it nerded out even further in places, but I think that says more about me than the text.

This is an academic text, and talks about how the capabilities of the platform shaped the kinds of games that were produced for it -- which seemed kind of a no-brainer to me. But then I suppose nobody makes the argument that ballpoint pens made for different poetry.

[Paul Cowan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful one for the computer geeks: the story of how the Atari VCS programmers managed to make their games perform well under INSANE hardware constraints. Incredible tales of trying to fit all your calculations inside the horizontal and vertical blanking intervals, including faking super-large or super-detailed sprites by toggling the sprite buffer before the next line starts scanning; even more incredible tales of saving critical cartridge bytes by not storing a map for your battlefield, but rather tweaking your code itself so you can use N bytes of your own machine code as the map, making it serve dual purposes. Crazy stuff; these people were geniuses. Great read.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never realized just how many limitations the programmers for the Atari VCS/2600 had to deal with until I read this book, which describes the hardware, game design, and history of the system. It's fascinating to read about the severe memory restrictions that early game creators worked with, and how they managed to create fun, challenging games -- and early elements of modern video games, like imperfect AI -- despite them.

The book does get a little too technical at times, but those parts can be skimmed without affecting the overall story of the system.

[David Dinaburg · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a moment when someone from America calls soccer “football” because they’re really into Premiere League and it is technically correct but sounds extremely jarring; an analogue experience for video game dorks is the Atari VCS. Most people—even the ones who know enough about Atari Corporation to not simply call any of their systems “Atari”—likely still call the “VCS” the “2600.” I know I did before I read Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. The 2600 is a rad retronym built to distinguish the old Atari when the 5200 was the new hotness, with the added bonus of sounding super futuristic and cool; and by cool I mean totally sweet. If that particular geocities-era internet reference went over (or under) your head, don’t fret: that type of paean to nostalgia is not what this book is about. Just a lot of nuggets of really cool (totally sweet) facts.

The learning begins before the cover is even cracked, with the title:

A television picture is composed of many horizontal lines, illuminated by an electron beam that traces each one by moving across and down a picture tube. Some programmers worry about having each frame of the picture ready to be displayed on time; VCS programmers must make sure that each individual line of each frame is ready as the electron gun starts to light it up, “racing the beam” as it travels down the screen.

Racing the beam is a ridiculously inside term, but if it is the only take-away from the book, it’s still a good one. The system is so tied to cathode ray tubes—artifacts which cannot be long for the planet let alone popular consciousness—that the basic structure of the VCS is functionally impossible if your experience with televisions lacks depth. And I mean that literally: If the only TV you can picture is flat, there is simply no space in which to generate the beam of electrons, no beam to ignite the phosphorus, no beam to race, no beam at all. The Atari VCS is a memory of a memory, and if it fades it is only because no one cared about recording its history. Thankfully, that is not the case.

This is the kickoff edition of Platform Studies, which purports to discuss each piece of console hardware as a technological platform, rather than as a personal madeleine or cultural artifact. The series contains the best book I have read about video games, I am Error. It feels unfair to directly compare the two because, as a later entrant in the series, Error has the benefit of templating itself against Racing the Beam as well as being edited by Montfort and Bogost. I know nothing about Bogost, but Montfort wrote Twisty Little Passages which I read prior to my tenure at Goodreads and loved enough to find a job as a chatbot writer for a text-based online game (it didn’t hurt my love of Twisty that I spent my high school years as an avid MUD player). And while I remember the 2600—sorry, the VCS—primarily for Crackpots at my Grandmother’s house and E.T. when our single household TV was in the dining room, this isn't an essay about my experiences with Atari. Though I will say that I liked E.T. and played it a lot. So...disregard my VCS opinions at your discretion.

Video games aren’t a given—they didn’t have to happen—but they are so ubiquitous now that I am very surprised that stories about their origins aren’t more popular. Changeable software cartridges connected to a hardware platform that piggybacks off of a pre-existing and console-agnostic television is an insane idea in a world of closed units like arcade machines. Pulling a piece software from dedicated hardware that was designed to do nothing else and shoving to into a generic platform while trying to retain the original shape seems herculean:

To draw the four pursuers, programmer Tod Frye relied on a technique called flicker. Each of the four ghosts is moved and drawn in sequence on successive frames. Pac-Man himself is drawn every frame using the other sprite graphic register. The TIA synchronizes with an NTSC television picture sixty times per second, so the resulting display shows a solid Pac-Man, maze, and pellets, but ghosts that flicker on and off, remaining lit only one quarter of the time. The phosphorescent glow of a CRT television takes a little while to fade, and the human retina retains a perceived image for a short time, so the visible effect of the flicker is slightly less pronounced than this fraction of time suggests. The fact that the monsters in Pac-Man were commonly referred to as “ghosts” apologized somewhat for the flicker and suggested the dimness of the apparition. The manual for the VCS rendition of Pac-Man included large illustrations of ghosts to drive the point home.

Someone has to learn this stuff; it is quaint that we in America still call football soccer, and it adds diversity to an increasingly globalized world. But at least we know what the rest of the world calls it, even if we don’t care. That’s all I’m shooting for—to know what the Atari Video Computer System was, even if most of us don’t care.

[Themistocles · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of a let-down, this one. I was expecting much, much more. As it is, it's a (small) book with a few interesting stories, but little coherence. There are passages that require programming knowledge and others that refer to the most basic things - quite uneven. And at that price, I don't really recommend it.

[Franz Scherer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wenn ich könnte wie ich wollte, würde ich genau so forschen und schreiben.

[Jared Castiglione · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was a kid, the Nintendo Entertainment System, or simply “the Nintendo” was the gold standard of video games. It was perfection. And while it was my first, I’ve come to learn that the NES was part of the “Third Generation” of home consoles. And it’s been given the distinction of recovering the opinion of video games here in the US after the “video game crash of 1983.”

So what happened before? How does Atari fit into all of this?

Racing the Beam opened my eyes to the Atari VCS (what we call the Atari 2600 today.) It’s part history: there’s quite a few stories, anecdotes, and conversations with the key people involved in the project. It’s part technical specifications too: going deep into what powers the Atari and what it was originally designed for.

And while the phrase “challenge accepted” wasn’t coined the way it’s used today, that’s exactly what some of the programmers thought.

The book chronicles these “hold my beer” moments with an in-depth look at 6 of the most pivotal and important games of the lot. Games even today are looked back on fondly, either with “nostalgia goggles” or not, or because of how they were created and what they inspired.

Racing the Beam is the perfect book for learning the history of the first and second generations of home consoles. The ideas we take for granted today and how they didn’t exist before Atari made it possible. Simple things too like a video game with more than one screen, or playing again the computer instead of another person, or maybe most importantly, giving credit to the developers who created the video game! Oh yea, and why we refer these games as Video Games.

Check out this book. You can actually find a PDF of it for free with a simple search.

I finished this book with a new appreciation for the games on the Atari VCS. Before, with my Nintendo point of view, these were nothing more than watered down home versions of arcade games. Now I marvel at what they were able to accomplish and how they pulled it off. Or in some cases, didn’t!

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/racing-the-beam-the-atari-video-computer-system-by-nick-montfort-and-ian-bogost/

I know very little about computer games, and still less about the early history of the Atari system; but sometimes it does you good to read about a field of human endeavour with which you are completely unfamiliar. This is a tremendous analysis of how coding is affected by external factors, especially the way in which the business of game development is financed and structured, but also from learning about player preferences and making crazy bets about game features which turn out to pay off (or not).

This slim volume looks in depth at six games, only one of which I had heard of – Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, but also in passing at the other games developed before or at the same time in each case, to paint a picture of the intellectual moment in which the writing of the game took place. There is a modest amount of machine code, but a lot of analysis of how ideas get turned into player experience. I don’t think I have retained very much of the information, but I come away struck by the cultural profundity of the whole enterprise. Recommended even for those like me who are not immersed in the subject.

[Kevin Furr · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a name like "Platform Studies" I was concerned it would be a book full of circuit diagrams. But not at all. There's a dose of programming snippets and technical jargon here and there but mostly this is a plain-English narrative centered around certain iconic games as a frame for describing the Atari VCS's hardware, its limitations, and how programmers overcame them to make games with play value. And you really do get an appreciation of the amazingly severe limitations of RAM and ROM and image processing on the VCS. It seems a miracle these guys could write games for it at all. The narrative touches on such icons of video game history as David Crane, Warren Robinett, and Howard Scott Warshaw, and discusses the clever hacks they used to make their games do something worthwhile.

[Billie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Living in a world of cloud computing, crypto farms, and AI, it's fascinating to read about the days when every last bit was crucial to a programmer.

The Atari 2600 was developed in the mid-1970s with simple games like Pong in mind. Nevertheless, game designers were able to hack and exploit the system's quirks to make ever more sophisticated games into the late 1980s. They may not look like much by today's standards, but it's interesting to study the difference between, say, Combat and Pitfall, as more and more programming tricks were discovered over the years.

This may not be for everyone (it gets a little technical), but I think anyone interested in gaming history should check it out.

[Tim Dimo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave a good overview of just how much work went into building these early video games. With just 128 bytes of RAM and a typical 2K ROM cartridge, the developers for the Atari system created some of the greatest early console games. This book is not solely for the technical-minded, as discussion of the broader landscape of gaming is also discussed. Historical items such as the business reason for releasing the awful Pac-Man conversion and how licensing changed the business and contributed to the 1983 crash are explained. Read this book and you'll be amazed that games such as Pitfall! were even possible on this platform.

[Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the idea of "platform studies" and no console is more deserving of this kind of attention than the 2600, which is a very strange beast. This is the second of these books I've read, and they both have uneasily balanced their technical content with the surrounding cultural context. Although I would love something like this but deeper (keep the cultural context, but expand greatly on the technical: include disassemblies with commentary, for example), this is still worth reading for anyone interested in this era of videogames, and the technical details are sufficient for it to be a good first step towards programming the 2600.

[Darryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I grew up with the Atari 2600 when I was in middle school, and still love to play those old games. This book was a very enjoyable read into the technical details of game design, company politics, and the gaming universe during the 1977-1980s. It still amazes me how creative these programmers were with all the technical limitations they faced. It brought back memories of assembly language programming with the 6502 processor.

This is a must read for any Atari 2600 fan, and for anyone who coded in assembly.

[Hayden Scott-Baron · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book really struggles with its own medium, tripping over the lack of diagrams to rely on clumsy descriptions of technical methods. In the worst cases it repeats these technical descriptions on successive pages, like someone realising they’re failing to get their point across. It adds little of flavour about the world in which these titles were created and the interesting design revelations as few and far between. It’s an interesting book at times but ultimately a disappointment.

[Will Cowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history through the lens of the capabilities and original intent of the hardware. A discussion of how developers of important games pushed up against the limitations of the platform and how those limitations created the kind of focus necessary to create games that were greater than they could have been. A fast read, very approachable, and very illuminating about both the Atari VCS, and about the creative process and how the platform informs and drives that process.

[Mihai Parparita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting historical perspective, wish it had more technical details.

Knowing very little about the Atari VCS, I found the book quite interesting. I especially liked the progression from earlier to later games, as technical know-how increased. I just wish that there was end more technical detail (on the level of the Wolfenstein 3D book).

[severyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating for those that are fascinated by this kind of thing. Slightly erratic in technical depth, which seems odd for a book in a series devoted to the architectural side of things. Occasionally peculiar in grammar and syntax, but I guess it's not meant to be a novel.

[Wayne Cheetham · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting bits but I was left very confused as to the target audience.

[Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the history and knowledge about the Atari VCS

[Matthew Clifton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable account of the history of the 2600; mainly from a technical/development pov. A worthwhile read, especially, if you're from a technical or games development background.

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort perform a historical dissection of the Atari VCS (video computer system) through the discussion of six VCS games: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Given that their purpose is to not just discuss the Atari but justify their coined area of investigation, platform studies, one may be forgiven for asking if the book is not so much a focus on the platform but on these six games. While each is described in some detail, the games are also used as launchpads for discussing other issues more relevant to the Atari as a whole (and videogame platforms in general).

he book is divided into eight chapters, and all but the first and last feature some game. Chapter 1 introduces the subject and outlines the technical specifications of the VCS. Chapter 2, on Combat, is similarly technically focused, with a discussion of how a game like Combat needs to be compressed to be converted from the arcade to a smaller cartridge format. The chapter on Adventure discusses the adaptation of text-based games into graphic games, and its contribution to the concept of virtual game spaces. Pac-Man is on the difficulty of displaying sprites on the Atari, and the technical constraints that raises. Yar's Revenge looks at the development of an original Atari game and how it involved playing to the system's strengths. Pitfall! looks at the rise of third-party developers and Star Wars looks at the history of video games of licensed properties in the context of the 1983 video game crash. And the final chapter deals briefly with the VCS' current status as museum piece, collector's item, and homebrewer's hobby.

As you might guess from that outline, a lot of the book is concerned with the pull between creating games that are suitable for the platform at hand but true to the material they're adapting. In related issues, the discussion of licensing and how games are shaped by the technical constraints of the system are repeating topics. The authors address these issues as they arise, but I felt that their discussion always remained below the surface and never came to a satisfying conclusion. The book doesn't shy away from technical descriptions of the Atari's operation, though they rarely go so far as to discuss the actual coding process. I'll admit, some of the fine details went over my head (like the exact details of how the number-size sprite registers work, for example) but I was never so far lost that I couldn't follow the threads of the argument. A lot of the general history was already familiar to me, but the focus on individual Atari games and their technical elements was a welcome addition. For those who want more "nuts and bolts" in their videogame scholarship (while still keeping an eye on cultural contexts), it's a good place to look.

[Michał Taszycki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read about the legendary console.

The idea of analyzing how the platform and its constrains shaped games produced for Atari 2600 is interesting.

It helps to notice how those early developments shaped future genres of computer games.

Even though the approach requires a thorough explanation of technical details of the console, it doesn't turn the book into a hardware manual.

[Josh Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this. It looks at game design from the perspective of the design of the Atari VCS (2600) system itself -- how the limitations and quirks of that game console led to certain design decisions (good and bad) that affected some very seminal games.

I'm a programmer, so when I think about game design it's very hard for me to completely distance myself from thinking about what would be easy or difficult (or impossible) to actually implement. Sometimes laziness prevents me from making design choices that would be harder to execute. But I like to think that having an intimate understanding of the platform (say, iPhone) gives me a more refined sense of how to make something good particularly for that platform. I can avoid getting mired in things that just won't work. Like how painters study their brushes so they know what the possibilities as as far as texture, stroke weight, etc. So talking about game design from exactly this perspective clicked with me very nicely.

Also: I am just a bit young to have experienced the Atari 2600. I've seen them and probably poked at a game or two as a kid, but I'm of the Nintendo generation. Reading this book with the internet handy to watch some of these games in action gave a really great introduction to the Atari 2600 (or, at least, as good as one could get without really playing one). And this book contains a lot of info about the history of Atari (and Activision and other 3rd party devs) as well as the historical context of all of this.

Finally, this book seems like a great introduction to the hardware history of computers. The book talks about the chips, the design of the motherboard (if that's what it's called), and how the hardware impacted the platform. And get to learn a bit how TVs work. Electrical engineers won't be impressed, but I learned some stuff.

So, yeah -- even though this book can get fairly technical (on an introductory level, at least), it's still a very easy read. Well organized. Fun. Very interesting. Great book!