Look, is this a fun or challenging chess game? No, no not really, but is it an actually interesting technical achievement on the Atari? Yeah actually.
Its funny to think that of all the things people thought were possible and impossible during Atari development, chess games were firmly in the impossible camp. But think about it, the amount of code needed, and the space to hold that amount of code, to have an AI play a human being at chess in a functional way would have been wild back then, and nobody really thought you could make that happen on this weird little brown box that pre-Reagan era kids and Carter-era stoners were hooking up to their TVs. But they did it. On 4kbs.
Its way fun to believe this technical achievement happened not because of a corporate desire to push technology forward but instead because Atari didn’t want to get sued for false advertisement since they put a chess piece on the console’s box art so I won't be fact checking that possibly apocryphal tale. Sure its a little buggy and the hardest difficulty theoretically takes the computer 10 hours to take a move which I assume nobody has ever verified because lord knows I’m not going to, but its a chess game from 1978 that you could play in your freshly wood paneled conversation pit while feeling excited for the future before your dumb parents decided to start putting us on a irreversible path of decline that your generation would perpetuate and that you would most likely blame on your children.
Its funny to think that of all the things people thought were possible and impossible during Atari development, chess games were firmly in the impossible camp. But think about it, the amount of code needed, and the space to hold that amount of code, to have an AI play a human being at chess in a functional way would have been wild back then, and nobody really thought you could make that happen on this weird little brown box that pre-Reagan era kids and Carter-era stoners were hooking up to their TVs. But they did it. On 4kbs.
Its way fun to believe this technical achievement happened not because of a corporate desire to push technology forward but instead because Atari didn’t want to get sued for false advertisement since they put a chess piece on the console’s box art so I won't be fact checking that possibly apocryphal tale. Sure its a little buggy and the hardest difficulty theoretically takes the computer 10 hours to take a move which I assume nobody has ever verified because lord knows I’m not going to, but its a chess game from 1978 that you could play in your freshly wood paneled conversation pit while feeling excited for the future before your dumb parents decided to start putting us on a irreversible path of decline that your generation would perpetuate and that you would most likely blame on your children.