This ATARI 2600 Game has 100,000+ Unique Levels

[@crookedmouth1971]

Great video! Thank you for covering Carol Shaw. It was refreshing to read about her in Electronic Games back in the day and it is refreshing today. I love Crane, Kaplan, Kitchen and all but we always hear about them. River Raid was one of my favorite games and a must have on the VCS. She also designed another of my favorites for the Intellivision called Happy Trails which was a Locomotion inspired game but it sure was slick and great fun.

[@Morgan423Z]

River Raid was my absolute favorite 2600 games as a kid. This brings back a lot of great memories.

[@TVindustries5000]

thought this was gonna be about Entombed actually, but the way its programmed its basically a different game (level layout wise) everytime you turn it on

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Carol was also one of the first female programmers in the industry. Also, figuring out how to do smooth vertical scrolling on the 2600 was tricky as well and River Raid does it very well.

[@FeralInferno]

4kb limit.. can you imagine a limitation like that these days? Great video, man!

[@Sheevlord]

Wait until you find out how much RAM Atari 2600 had. 128 bytes. Yes, bytes.

[@Nikku4211]

The demoscene has some demos that are 4kib.

[@nicholaslarson3778]

With the Atari 2600 you don't even have enough memory to map out the full screen in a matrix (160x192 resolution). You had to re-write the memory buffer for each line during the horizontal blank period so the TIA chip could draw it. You basically were drawing everything one line at a time and you had to time it with the electron beam in the CRT.

[@davemarx7856]

A screenshot of this comment is 466 kb

[@davemarx7856]

Mistake, it's 422 kb

[@94Angelwing]

River Raid is still one of my all time favourites.

[@DELTARYZ]

I love how you kept with the theme of Activision's wishes and kept everything associated with the real people who created them. These people are engineers, inventors, and artists, and their work should be recognized! Atari 2600 games tend to age like milk because of their rigid simplicity. Your average kid today would implode from sheer boredom trying to play it. When something really goes above and beyond and really makes something with DEPTH, it's incredibly impressive considering the limitations they are working with.

[@pojr]

Yeah it's interesting that people play NES games for nostalgia, but you don't see a lot of people playing 2600 games.

[@DELTARYZ]

@@pojr I think part of it is just that not as many people who use the modern internet were around during a time those systems were popular, so there's none of that nostalgia for it.

[@intel386DX]

@@pojr I play Atari 2600 for nostalgia ,but NES for fun :) not only nostalgia

[@stixstixy]

@@pojr atari nostalgia was decades ago

[@lunsj]

@@pojr We're still around. We just have to wait for our grandchildren to visit so they can sign us into our Google accounts ;)

[@edwin3928ohd]

A new POJR! Time to go grab 1AM whataburger and come back and watch this. I have said this before, but the algorithm will eventually light you up.

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

It's happening!

[@JosipRetroBits]

That same year (1982) the game Pitfall! was released, also by Activision and it uses the same logic to generate a large number of screens. In the end Pitfall! gets all the credit for this unique screen generator or to be precise, David Crane as a designer of the game. Now, who was first here...do not know, but both games came out from the same company so... :)

[@pojr]

True. Pitfall would actually be a cool topic to cover.

[@OtakuNoShitpost]

Based on Crane's talk, pitfall is slightly different in that the screens weren't stored but rather generated. As I understand this explanation, RiverRaid had some number of screen segments it would stitch together, and so those segments are stored. But pitfall did not store screens but generated them. Still from a static seed

[@JosipRetroBits]

@@OtakuNoShitpost Ok, Yes that is a bit of a difference but still, both start with a static seed and use the same (or almost the same) logical operations to get the next screen/segment right?

[@OtakuNoShitpost]

@@JosipRetroBits I suppose. They're definitely similar. But river raid is like set seed Spelunky and Pitfall is like set seed Minecraft, to use modern examples

[@zerobyte802]

I haven’t looked but I suspect River Raid uses an LFSR to generate the levels. Crane’s PRNG function is reversible and outputs 256 unique values exactly once each. They are not the same.

[@eminboztepe]

I read from various interviews from programmers at Activision that all said that Carol Shaw couldn't program herself out of a paper bag. Apparently the actual coding was done by others.

[@tomsuzyinfluencerinfj2712]

The game has an ending, you blow up and 6 !!!!!! (stands for well done) exclamation marks replace the numbers

[@talir71]

When I saw the title of this video, I assumed it was about MAZE CRAZE, a game that generated a completely random single-screen maze every time you played. POJR, you should do a video on that game. It’s not as exciting as River Raid, but I have a lot of memories from playing it in the 80’s.

[@jonothanthrace1530]

It's interesting that the 2600 had native vertical scrolling when the NES needed expansion chips for it.

[@janlentan892]

Uh... That's not true, the NES could handle scrolling in hardware, and both horizontal and vertical scrolling was possible...

[@jonothanthrace1530]

@@janlentan892 it could do smooth horizontal scrolling in hardware, but vertical scrolling had to be done in chunks, as seen in Ice Climber and Devil World.

[@Don_Ramiro]

@@jonothanthrace1530 NES was capable of doing that without expansion chips. Look at games like Road Fighter

[@dr.charlesedwardflorendobr3952]

Reminds me of Shenmue. Instead of saving the entire map, the programmers came up with the system that the computer would draw the entire map and community to save space.

[@dallase1]

It does not have over 1000 different levels that are unique it just varies the shapes of the land slightly like most games. What happens when you go through all the levels? If it loops over again then it is a game that eventually repeats it's levels.

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

Activision fell the more the more they rose which continues to this day

[@LostForestX]

That's really cool to see an example of actual coding in the vid. Looks like school is finally paying off 😏

[@pojr]

As a matter of fact, that second line of code was my final project for Python 😂

[@jimmyclaw9974]

Solid vid. It’s always cool to see the way developers dealt with the super limited resources of these early consoles. I never knew about the rectangular pixels, it explains a lot. Did Colecovision/Intellivision do the same thing?

[@pojr]

The 2600 had some weird rules, and apparently was hard to program for. I'll have to look into what the limitations of the Intellivision and Colecovision were. It seems like the Intellivision had similar limits, as some of the text was big in the earlier games.

[@zebunker]

Reading wiki-facts pretty much

[@pojr]

Wikipedia is great though! Lol.

[@AirZonkWorldChamp]

The game has a kill screen here but only if you reach 1,000,000 points. Nothing special happens, you blow up and the game ends.

[@Lightblue2222]

The 5200 version goes to 10 mil!

[@TotallyLincoln-u1x]

Microsoft currently owns Activision. Most of its games include the Call of Duty series, Pitfall, Guitar Hero, the King’s Quest series and licensed games based on Nickelodeon and Disney intellectual properties (iCarly, SpongeBob SquarePants, Toy Story 2, etc).

[@andymanaus1077]

It wasn't Atari doing this. It was Warner Communications who had bought Atari and turned it into a corporate money-making machine. Warner has a terrible habit of buying innovative companies and then wringing every last cent they could out of them while destroying what made the companies great in the first place.

[@cubey]

Your usage of generic stock footage is lazy, awful, and distracting.

[@cosmefulanito5933]

It would be nice for the channel to not use so many generic images to graph everything. More if they are not even from the correct era.

[@pojr]

Understandable. Sometimes it can be challenging, because I have a limited amount of stock footage to choose from. But it's something I will work on so the videos are more accurate.

[@GreenTeaViewer]

@@pojr I actually find it hilarious that when pojr talks about an early 80s office situation, the stock footage shows a bunch of diverse Apple fanboy types (ahem) in a generic 2020s office

[@andymanaus1077]

The game uses procedural quasi-randomness to generate the screens. It is the same every time because the seed number is always the same.

[@GameSparkTV]

Like I tell the younger generation of kids today if wasn’t for the brilliant minds of developers from the pioneer days of gaming a lot of the games we play today wouldn’t even exist. Activision is a good good game company. My 2nd cousin actually works for them as a senior animation artist. 😊

[@lakojake4215]

Just because you don't get a different board or w/e, every time you boot the game doesn't mean it's not randomly generated. Use the same randomization seed and you'll get the same levels every time. Using an algorithm to generate a string of random numbers is exactly how RNG works.

[@HeiligerGrimmnir]

100% loved RR. It was the first video game I remembered. I also love the angle that she was legit smart as hell... and not the pandering "smart for a woman." Stuff we get so much of today.

[@Boswd]

Such a great game

[@ednguyen3822]

Pretty sure I wore out a joystick playing this masterpiece for the 2600.

[@Roxor128]

Procedural content: saving massive amounts of space for over 40 years.

[@Athesies]

Huh, I've never heard of most of this. It's a pretty cool and interesting story

[@georgef551]

There were no screenshots, as you got drawings of what the game looked like, not an actual screenshot (technology was not there to do it feasibly yet).

[@mynamehasspacesinit8687]

The screenshots in the instructions for Super Mario Bros. (NES) were taken by pointing a camera at a TV screen 💀💀💀

[@georgef551]

@@mynamehasspacesinit8687 Yes, they also hand-drawn some on rare occasions.

[@richhutnik2477]

River Raid and Caverns of Mars are two vertically scrolling SHMUPs that one can crash into the background and die, which is rare.

[@TotallyLincoln-u1x]

That is true but Activision released a massively multiplayer online open world SHMUP for Windows, Call of Duty.

[@brandong.1857]

Had 420 likes until I ruiinede it and made it 421 LOL

[@opa-age]

This guy deserves a lot more views

[@lunsj]

I really enjoyed learning more about Carol Shaw. She was apparently a wizard. According to one of her coworkers she "...was simply the best programmer of the 6502 and probably one of the best programmers period." River Raid is one of my favorite VCS games. For me it's probably: #1: Yar's Revengs. #2: Pitfall II. #3: River Raid.

[@skRapKlan]

This game is AMAZING!

[@donaldsykes927]

One of the best games ever made for the 2600.

[@MarkIrwin02]

River raid is 1 of my all time favorite games. I need to find an atari 2600 and that game now.

[@SylveonTrapito]

I always tried to reach the end. I wonder if the procedural generation makes some impossible levels after you reach a certain point.

[@paule4566]

There is a definitive final level, after which you loop back to the first level. There's a video on KZbin in which someone set up a bot to play the game to completion.

[@SylveonTrapito]

@@paule4566 do you have the link?

[@paule4566]

@@SylveonTrapitoThe title is River Raid Fastest Completion by Lord Tom. My recollection of the video was incorrect. He (the bot) ends the game by rolling the score beyobd 999999 which causes it to flip to "!!!!!!" and ending the game. There was not an ending level that looped to the beginning. Apologies for the error.

[@SylveonTrapito]

@@paule4566 no problem. It's good to find people still care about River Raid all these years! Thank you very much.

[@paule4566]

@@SylveonTrapito I spent many hours as a kid playing this game, wondering if I could get to the last level.

[@MundMoriginal]

Great video, as usual!

[@brianmoore6490]

Shaw and Crane were, in my opinion, the best Atari game programmers. Their games were on another level. River Raid was one of my favorite games, just a great game!