Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game · HackerPapers discussions

Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game — mentioned by floatingatoll

Sat, 16 Nov 2019 07:25:41 GMT

Related on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18412547 > Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game One type of archaeogaming research is digital excavation, a technical examination of the code and techniques used in old games' implementation. We apply that in a case study of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game released in 1982 by US Games. The player in this game is, appropriately, an archaeologist who must make their way through a zombie-infested maze. Maze generation is a fruitful area for comparative retrogame archaeology, because a number of early games on different…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game — mentioned by nneonneo

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:14:31 GMT

Nice article - but the BBC did get a major detail wrong. The mazes are not always solvable - Figure 5 in the paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035) explicitly demonstrates an unsolvable maze sample from the game, which can only be solved by collecting and using a "make-break" powerup (which allows the user to create or remove a wall). They interviewed a co-creator who claimed it did always make solvable mazes, which is probably where the BBC journalist got confused.

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game — mentioned by throwaway66920

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 11:48:06 GMT

A paper that actually talks about the algorithm and a quote that sums it up https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.02035.pdf > The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked.’

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game — HN submission

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 05:40:05 GMT

Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game

42 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.