Halo 2600

Halo 2600 is an action-adventure shooter video game, with gameplay inspired by the Atari titles Adventure and Berzerk; it plays as a "demake" of the Halo video games as if they were created for the Atari 2600. The player uses the joystick to control the character of Master Chief, the protagonist of the Halo video games, as he makes his way through 64 screens, divided into four zones: outdoors, Covenant base, ice world, and a final boss area. Weapons and power-ups are available to combat the many enemies that appear. The player and enemies can each be killed by one hit, unless a shield is collected. The player has three lives. After successfully completing the game once, the player can play through the game in "Legendary mode", with the game tweaked for an extra challenge. ==Development==

Ed Fries got a taste of game development in his teenage years, developing Atari 800 games at home. Fries took a summer internship with Microsoft in college and eventually joined the company. Fries left Microsoft in January 2004, after 18 years with the company. the Atari 2600 retained a dedicated hobbyist industry who still bought and played classic games. and found the challenge in developing Halo 2600 one of adapting to constraints. The Atari 2600 has much less space and memory than was available for Halo. With only 128 bytes of RAM, drawing Master Chief was difficult, and creating a game with other characters even more so. Fries later stated that making the game taught him that constraint is sometimes a fuel for creativity, comparing the process of adapting Halo to the effort in turning a novel into a poem or haiku. "It felt more like writing poetry than it did like writing regular code", he said. "It felt like everything had to be so tight, so perfect. If even one of these tricks didn't exist, if I didn't have this incredibly clever way of drawing this sprite, or if I didn't have this incredibly sick code for drawing the missiles, I wouldn't have been able to fit it in. I couldn't have made the machine do what I wanted it to do." Fries pointed to other artists' work such as Bach's fugues or elaborate origami as examples of deliberately setting constraints to create something more interesting. The full game takes up just 4 kilobytes of space. ==Reception and legacy==

The game was released in July 2010 at the Classic Gaming Expo. Kotakus Owen Good and Destructoids Conrad Zimmerman considered it an entertaining diversion, The gameplay was called "rough" but "amazing" by John Biggs of TechCrunch, who cited the immense size constraints involved in creating the game. In the same year, the Smithsonian American Art Museum added Halo 2600 to its "The Art of Video Games" exhibition. ==References==