Unearthing Entombed

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Now that we are some sixty years into the digital era, the early days of modern computers are growing distant and mysterious to us. The field of game archeology seeks to uncover the origins and uses of these technological artifacts, and to determine what they tell us about the industry that created them. The New Yorker writer Simon Parkin and his producer Alex Barron try some archeology of their own on a video game from 1982 called Entombed. With the tiny amount of memory on an Atari 2600 cartridge, Entombed accomplished something new, and to this day nobody can figure out how it worked. Was it really developed during a programmer’s drunken blackout?

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.0	Simon Parkin writes about technology for the New Yorker, and he was on the show recently
0:18.8	to talk about playing video games with his kids during the pandemic. At the same time, he was on the show recently to talk about playing video games with his kids during the
0:22.0	pandemic. At the same time, he was working on a story from the dawn of the video game
0:27.3	age about a game that came out when Simon was barely out of diapers. Simon's partner in
0:34.4	telling radio stories is our producer Alex Barron.
0:39.5	So here's Simon and Alex.
0:46.7	Once upon a time.
0:49.2	Specifically the early 1980s.
0:50.5	In a far off land.
0:52.2	Santa Monica, California.
0:55.3	There was a bunch of hippies making video games at a place called Western Tech. And one of the projects they were working on was a game for the Atari
1:01.1	2600 called Entombed. In Entombed, you play as an archaeologist who is trying to escape from an
1:10.2	underground catacomb.
1:11.7	But this is a video game from the early 80s, so your character is just a little stick figure
1:16.8	that you navigate through this blocky maze that scrolls up from the bottom of the screen.
1:21.6	If you get stuck, then the maze pushes you to the very top of the screen and you die.
1:29.9	Now, the programmers working on Entombed had a big problem.
1:33.9	They didn't want the player to just play the same maze over and over again, because that would
1:38.5	be boring.
1:39.7	But Atari cartridges had a tiny amount of memory on them, like two kilobytes.
1:45.1	That's about a thousand times smaller than a photograph you might take on your mobile phone today.
	...

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