Ed Fries, a former Microsoft gaming vice president, has written and released a version of Halo that runs on the Atari 2600. The game is a free download and works with all your favorite emulators. Its release coincides with the 11th annual Classic Gaming Expo.

Fries posted some details on the AtariAge forums, explaining how this game came about. He writes:

I hadn't written 6502 assembler in almost 30 years but it turns out it's pretty easy to pick up again since there are so few instructions. I wasn't sure what to write so I created a little Master Chief from Halo and made him run around the screen. Then I created an Elite for him to shoot at. At this point it wasn't my intention to make a full game. I was just screwing around.

As I became more familiar with the machine I thought it might be possible to make something that was actually fun to play. I also ran into some fans of classic games at the Game Developers Conference in March and they encouraged me to keep going and try to make a finished game. At first I had the player battling through a linear series of rooms. You had to kill all the enemies before it would unlock the walls and let you move to the next room. As you can imagine, this got dull pretty quickly. I was doing it this way because it was relatively easy on the Atari 2600 but what if, instead, I could make a 64 room map the player had to explore, kind of like the old atari game Adventure? To implement this would require that I make an "asymmetric playfield" so that some rooms might have a wall on one side but not on the other. It turns out that's pretty tricky to do on the 2600, at least while you are trying to drawn everything else you want to draw, but I managed to get it working.

To add variety I divided the map into 4 "zones": outdoor, covenant base, ice world, and final boss area. Each had a unique look and some unique enemies. I also played with the atari's ability to stretch and duplicate sprites to create some further surprises for the player. Then I added some pickups the player could find to help them on the way.

Those pickups make the game, in my opinion. You can't start shooting until you find a gun, something that vexed me at first. There are different enemies and sometimes killing them reveals shields. The game reminded me a little of Berzerk, except for lack of electrified walls (Halo 2600 originally had them, Fries says. He got rid of them to make the game easier.) Still, it's a very challenging game.

Halo 2600 was one of several new homebrew games to be released at the Classic Gaming Expo. (Others included a boxing game for the 2600 and a war game for the Atari 7800.) Its provenance — a former Microsoft guy writes an Atari VCS version of a popular Xbox game — makes it an especially interesting bit of 8-bit fun.

related:

Atari 2600 Homebrew Games

Racing The Beam: Inside The Atari 2600