Video Chess (Game)

Video Chess

GAME » on 1979

Atari 2600 (Platform)Atari 8-bit (Platform)Xbox 360 Games Store (Platform)

Atari's digital adaptation of the classic board game Chess, featuring an AI opponent suitable for beginners and experts alike.

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Overview

Video Chess, known in the Atari 8-bit version as Computer Chess and not to be confused with the TI-99/4 game Video Chess, is a digital chess game developed and published by Atari (Company) both for the Atari 2600 (Platform) and for Atari 8-bit computers in 1979.

An adaptation of the board game chess, Video Chess pits players against an AI opponent with eight difficulty levels (each of which determine the amount of time the chess engine takes to think of its best move, from 10 seconds to 10 hours). The Atari 2600 version is one of the earliest known chess games for a home game console, making use of the system's joystick for moving a cursor around the board.

The Atari 2600 version of the game was known for circumventing the system's graphical limitations using a technique called "Venetian blinds", which split a single sprite into two separate objects (both chess pieces and the cursor) by alternating scanlines, giving each piece a striped appearance but allowing a full row of eight pieces to be displayed without any flickering.

It was later included in several Atari 2600 compilations, such as Atari Anthology (Game), Atari Flashback Classics vol.2, and Atari Vault (Game), and was included in the short-lived Game Room (Game) service.

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