Early videogames are foundational to the modern game industry, yet studying them is not straightforward. These games’ development is distant in time, their source code and knowledge of their creation frequently lost, and sometimes only fragmentary evidence remains – the precise conditions that archaeologists are used to working with.

Not all game prototypes are created equal. Over forty years ago at the start of the game industry, people were creating prototypes whose purpose was not a direct evolutionary step towards a finished game. Based on oral history and access to a set of unique physical and digital artifacts, we document some non-prototypical ways that prototypes were used at that time. Moreover, we examine this human-technology interaction in terms of the archaeological study of another human technology – stone tools – to refine our understanding of what a game prototype is.

Is AI always the best choice for every task? We conducted two user studies, one large-scale and one small-scale, to attempt a testing-related gameplay task, where the goal was to maximize the code and data coverage of a set of Atari 2600 games. This particular problem was previously addressed using an AI-based system published by Ganesh et al. in the 2023 IEEE Conference on Games. Our new, human-derived results not only replicate the coverage shown in the previous AI-based study, but more importantly, by using humans for gameplay we were able to get those results with much less time, effort, and resources.

FrAG is a Framework for the Analysis of Games, allowing us to harness game-playing AI techniques to assist in the reverse engineering of historical video games for which the binary form of the game is the only thing remaining. Moreover, FrAG allows us to perform this task at scale, and search for patterns of game development that might otherwise be overlooked. Game development is done by humans, of course; our interdisciplinary approach is not exclusively technical, and also involves the field of archaeology and its well-established theories of humans and technology. Here we present FrAG’s architecture along with our preliminary results using the framework on a test suite of Atari 2600 games.

The Atari 2600 was a prominent early video game console that had broad cultural impact, and possessed an extensive catalog of games that undoubtedly helped shape the fledgling game industry. How were these games created? We examine one development practice, code re-use, across a large-scale corpus of 1,984 ROM images using an analysis system we have developed. Our system allows us to study code re-use at whole-corpus granularity in addition to finer-grained views of individual developers and companies. We combine this corpus analysis with a case study: one of the co-authors was a third-party developer for Atari 2600 games in the early 1980s, providing insight into why code re-use could occur through both oral history and artifacts preserved for over forty years. Finally, we frame our results about this development practice with an interdisciplinary, bigger-picture archaeological view of humans and technology.

How did game programmers use early game development tools, and how does this fit into the bigger picture of how humans use tools and technology? To help answer these questions, we embark on an interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeology and computer science.