6 comments

  • EvanAnderson a day ago

    I played the hell out of this game at around 7 y/o. My father read the manual and helped me with it. I played it recently under emulation and was a little shocked that I remembered the entire game.

    This documentation is very, very nice. I particularly like seeing how the scoring worked. It was always a mystery to me, playing the game, as to why my scores were so low. Escaping the prison room looks like it was the culprit. It would be interesting to go back and read the manual with knowledge of the game's internals.

  • glimshe a day ago

    Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the best games for the Atari 2600 and I say this without any nostalgia for the title. It's an early adventure game and has a kind of complexity absent in most Atari 2600 games which, based on today's standards, are largely stupid. I've discovered things about this game years later by reading a walkthrough... It has a point system similar to the Sierra games because some activities are actually optional, a breakthrough feature.

    In fact, the Howard Scott Warshaw works are great: Yars Revenge, with simple but classic gameplay and E.T., the victim of one of the most unfair public lynchings of a game ever.

  • mrgoldenbrown 2 days ago

    Wow this brings back memories of frustration. We could never figure out what that game wanted us to do, and there was no Internet or even Nintendo Power to help.

  • s-macke a day ago

    I’ve performed many experiments using AI to reverse-engineer old games like this one, and it looks like the newest generation of models has no trouble with it. They’re actually awesome.

    Even with the current models, we might be able to automatically reverse-engineer all those old games, decode all assets, and even rewrite them in a more sensible language than assembler.

  • newobj a day ago

    that's awesome. it was a deeply mysterious game to me as a kid. the first mysterious game i ever encountered really. hell of a vibe.

  • cobbzilla a day ago

    Awesome game. Winning was HARD. I don’t think I ever got the max score. Maybe time to try again!