A Lunch BIT from Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
March 6, 2014
Before Xbox, Playstation, Wii, and even Nintendo, there was the Atari Video Computer System, known simply as Atari. Gamers of the 1970s and 80s will recall countless hours spent entranced before dots bouncing across their monitors while playing early video games like Breakout and Combat on this pioneering console. In their book, Racing the Beam, the inaugural volume in the MIT Press’s Platform Studies series, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost investigate game systems’ underlying computing, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression.