Blue Sky Ranger Ron Surratt celebrates his birthday September 15. Ron's first project at Mattel Electronics in 1981 was programming the system software for the Intellivision Intellivoice module. After that, he was put in charge of the in-house production of M Network Atari 2600 cartridges: mostly ports of Intellivision titles to the Atari 2600 console.
In 1983, top priority for Mattel's marketing department was a 2600-version of the Intellivision hit BurgerTime. After careful analysis of the original, Ron declared that a 2600 version was impossible. Marketing asked what additional programming resources would be required. None, Ron replied, it can't be done. What hardware modifications needed to be made to the cartridge? You're not getting it, Ron said, it can't be done. No, Marketing came back, you're not getting it: BurgerTimewill be released for the 2600. Ron set about programming the game.
The difficulty lay in that the game was not allowed to flicker. A hardware restriction of the Atari 2600 was that when too many moving characters - sprites - were in a row on-screen, they began to flicker. In the first M Network games in 1982, sprite movement was carefully choreographed to minimize this flicker - far better than Atari had done in their own original releases. Marketing had jumped on this, pointing to the lack of flicker as proof of Mattel's superiority. Of course, this meant that all new games had to meet the standard of the early ones: no - or very little - flicker.
Unfortunately, the highest scoring move in BurgerTime, dropping all of the bad guys at one time, requires that they all be in a row. So how could he keep a row of sprites from flickering? Ron used something of a cheat: a regular sprite's look is defined by the programmer, but there is also a special sprite - a missile - defined by the hardware. A missile is simply a rectangle intended, as its name implies, to be used as the graphic for a projectile. The programmer cannot change its shape, only its color and width. Despite its graphical limitations, missiles do have one advantage: they don't flicker when in a row with other sprites. So Ron made a square missile orange and called it a slice of cheese, made another square white and called it an egg, and made a thin missile brown and called it a bread stick. Voila: no flickering.
Some fans of BurgerTime were disappointed to find that the chef was being chased around the maze by colored squares and sticks, but most were happy that the gameplay was quite faithful to the Intellivision version.
Blue Sky Ranger Ron Surratt celebrates his birthday September 15. Ron's first project at Mattel Electronics in 1981 was programming the system software for the Intellivision Intellivoice module. After that, he was put in charge of the in-house production of M Network Atari 2600 cartridges: mostly ports of Intellivision titles to the Atari 2600 console.
