THE GRAPHIC ARTIST
Artist Alan Murphy on the limitations of 2600 graphics
What were your first impressions of 2600 game visuals?
I first saw the 2600 when I was hired at Atari in 1980. I had been playing arcade games and wasn’t too impressed with ‘Stella’, as the engineers called it. I actually thought most of the games sucked. until Atari brought in artists, all art was done by programmers, most of whom had little or no art training.
The art was so bad in most games you’d be forgiven for not wanting anything to do with them.
How did creating 2600 art compare to designing visuals for other systems?
I worked on 5200 and arcade games as well, so when I was assigned a 2600 game I would kinda groan. At first, everything was established on graph paper, and it wasn’t clear if art or animation would even work until the programmer coded it. Later on, artists used an emulator, so we had a pretty good idea how art would look on the system ahead of time, and that proved to have a dramatic improvement on the quality.
Was designing high-res 2600 graphics more rewarding?
of course I preferred high-res visuals, but it was a real pain in the ass to make anything look good on that piece of shit. As we used to say, it was like trying to draw with a bar of soap and your hands tied behind your back. Bugs Bunny was a little better: it had more memory set aside for the art compared to other 2600 games I had worked on.
How did you feel after moving on from designing 2600 graphics?
I moved over to coin-op after the video game crash in the early eighties and quickly got into 3D, so I was no longer doing much raster art. I didn’t miss it at all. polygons were cutting edge in the eighties, and my passion was 3D.
How do you feel now about your time as a 2600 artist?
It was a lot of fun; I was in the right place at the right time. what bothers me a little is that when people refer to retro gaming they don’t think of the 2600 anymore. people think of Nintendo or even Sega. It’s not a big deal, but early games on the 2600 don’t get much credit.