Fries no longer works for Microsoft, but he has a long history in gaming: he was responsible for programming several games for the Atari 800 computer system more than 20 years ago. Halo 2600 is his first attempt at creating a game for the Atari Video Computer System, a console released much earlier than the 800, and considered a beast to program for due to its heavy restrictions and limitations.
The game started as a simple pet project to learn the system: Fries programmed a Master Chief sprite, had him move and shoot. But instead of calling it a day, he pressed on to make it a full-fledged game using the same limitations of most Atari 2600 games: create it using just 4 kilobytes of data. The game was to have a level that featured a driveable Warthog, but not only did it push the size of the game over the 4K limit, according to Fries it also wasn't that much fun to play. So he scrapped it.
Former Microsoft VP creates Halo game for Atari 2600!
Posted on Tuesday, August 03 2010 @ 21:35 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Ed Fries, former vice president of Microsoft's game publishing business, has developed an Atari 2600 version of Halo! About a hundred cartridges were made available at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas this weekend, but fortunately there's also an online version at www.halo2600.com.