Video Chess - Development

Development

Video Chess was developed by Larry Wagner (AI) and Bob Whitehead. The box art of the first production run of the Atari Video Computer System (or VCS, later known as the Atari 2600) featured a chess piece, even though Atari at the time was not contemplating designing a chess game. A man from Florida supposedly sued Atari over the box art; however, in an interview, Video Chess programmer Bob Whitehead said he was not aware of such a lawsuit.

At first, the idea of chess on the Atari 2600 was considered to be impossible due to the limitations of the technology at the time. For example, Atari had to overcome sprite limitations; the Atari 2600 was only capable of displaying three sprites in a row, or six (such as in Space Invaders) with the right programming. The eight-piece-wide standard chess board exceeded this limitation. To rectify this, Bob Whitehead developed a technique known as "Venetian blinds" where the position of each sprite changes every scan line; this allows for eight or more sprites in a row. Additionally, the concept of bank switching ROMs was invented for earlier prototypes of Video Chess that were larger than four kilobytes in size, however the released version ended up fitting the standard 4K size.