Carol was also one of the first female programmers in the industry. Also, figuring out how to do smooth vertical scrolling on the 2600 was tricky as well and River Raid does it very well.

River Raid was my absolute favorite 2600 games as a kid. This brings back a lot of great memories.

Great video! Thank you for covering Carol Shaw. It was refreshing to read about her in Electronic Games back in the day and it is refreshing today. I love Crane, Kaplan, Kitchen and all but we always hear about them. River Raid was one of my favorite games and a must have on the VCS. She also designed another of my favorites for the Intellivision called Happy Trails which was a Locomotion inspired game but it sure was slick and great fun.

4kb limit.. can you imagine a limitation like that these days? Great video, man!

I love how you kept with the theme of Activision's wishes and kept everything associated with the real people who created them. These people are engineers, inventors, and artists, and their work should be recognized! Atari 2600 games tend to age like milk because of their rigid simplicity. Your average kid today would implode from sheer boredom trying to play it. When something really goes above and beyond and really makes something with DEPTH, it's incredibly impressive considering the limitations they are working with.

That same year (1982) the game Pitfall! was released, also by Activision and it uses the same logic to generate a large number of screens. In the end Pitfall! gets all the credit for this unique screen generator or to be precise, David Crane as a designer of the game. Now, who was first here...do not know, but both games came out from the same company so... :)

When I saw the title of this video, I assumed it was about MAZE CRAZE, a game that generated a completely random single-screen maze every time you played. POJR, you should do a video on that game. It’s not as exciting as River Raid, but I have a lot of memories from playing it in the 80’s.

River Raid is still one of my all time favourites.

Great video, as usual!

I read from various interviews from programmers at Activision that all said that Carol Shaw couldn't program herself out of a paper bag. Apparently the actual coding was done by others.

thought this was gonna be about Entombed actually, but the way its programmed its basically a different game (level layout wise) everytime you turn it on

River Raid and Caverns of Mars are two vertically scrolling SHMUPs that one can crash into the background and die, which is rare.

A new POJR! Time to go grab 1AM whataburger and come back and watch this. I have said this before, but the algorithm will eventually light you up.

It's interesting that the 2600 had native vertical scrolling when the NES needed expansion chips for it.

I really enjoyed learning more about Carol Shaw. She was apparently a wizard. According to one of her coworkers she "...was simply the best programmer of the 6502 and probably one of the best programmers period." River Raid is one of my favorite VCS games. For me it's probably: #1: Yar's Revengs. #2: Pitfall II. #3: River Raid.

Reminds me of Shenmue. Instead of saving the entire map, the programmers came up with the system that the computer would draw the entire map and community to save space.

River raid is 1 of my all time favorite games. I need to find an atari 2600 and that game now.

Solid vid. It’s always cool to see the way developers dealt with the super limited resources of these early consoles. I never knew about the rectangular pixels, it explains a lot. Did Colecovision/Intellivision do the same thing?

That's really cool to see an example of actual coding in the vid. Looks like school is finally paying off 😏

Just because you don't get a different board or w/e, every time you boot the game doesn't mean it's not randomly generated. Use the same randomization seed and you'll get the same levels every time. Using an algorithm to generate a string of random numbers is exactly how RNG works.

This guy deserves a lot more views

The game has an ending, you blow up and 6 !!!!!! (stands for well done) exclamation marks replace the numbers

Huh, I've never heard of most of this. It's a pretty cool and interesting story

This game is AMAZING!

Procedural content: saving massive amounts of space for over 40 years.

There were no screenshots, as you got drawings of what the game looked like, not an actual screenshot (technology was not there to do it feasibly yet).

Pretty sure I wore out a joystick playing this masterpiece for the 2600.

One of the best games ever made for the 2600.

Such a great game

Reading wiki-facts pretty much

The game has a kill screen here but only if you reach 1,000,000 points. Nothing special happens, you blow up and the game ends.

It does not have over 1000 different levels that are unique it just varies the shapes of the land slightly like most games. What happens when you go through all the levels? If it loops over again then it is a game that eventually repeats it's levels.

100% loved RR. It was the first video game I remembered. I also love the angle that she was legit smart as hell... and not the pandering "smart for a woman." Stuff we get so much of today.

Like I tell the younger generation of kids today if wasn’t for the brilliant minds of developers from the pioneer days of gaming a lot of the games we play today wouldn’t even exist. Activision is a good good game company. My 2nd cousin actually works for them as a senior animation artist. 😊

I always tried to reach the end. I wonder if the procedural generation makes some impossible levels after you reach a certain point.

Activision fell the more the more they rose which continues to this day

It would be nice for the channel to not use so many generic images to graph everything. More if they are not even from the correct era.

Had 420 likes until I ruiinede it and made it 421 LOL

Shaw and Crane were, in my opinion, the best Atari game programmers. Their games were on another level. River Raid was one of my favorite games, just a great game!