Description
Chess Atari 2600
Video Chess is a chess game for the Atari VCS (renamed to the Atari 2600 in 1982) programmed by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead and released by Atari in 1979. Both programmers later developed games for Activision.
The game is played from an overhead perspective. The player uses an “x” cursor to select and move pieces, rather than using chess notation. If an attempted move is illegal, a warning sound is made and the move is not made. If the right-most switch is set to A the computer plays as white; setting it to B lets the player play as white. With the left switch, selecting A allows the board to be set as the player pleases, whereas selecting B sets up the board for a regulation chess game.
Chess Atari 2600
There are eight different difficulty levels, with the computer-player taking a variable amount of time to determine its moves for each level. According to the manual that came with Video Chess, these were the average amount of time it would take at each level for the game to determine its move:
- 15 seconds
- 30 seconds
- 45 seconds
- 2 minutes, 45 seconds
- 3 minutes, 15 seconds
- 12 minutes
- 10 hours
- 10 seconds
The manual mentioned that these times were an average as other factors such as the complexity of the board position would impact the amount of time for the computer to determine its move.
Another great retro game available at Escapist Gamer – Desert Falcon (Atari 2600)