Krull

Atari's Krull, from 1983, is a film licence, based on the fantasy picture of the same name that reached cinemas that same year. The practice of the day was straightforward: buy the rights, produce the game in a few months, get it into shops while the film is still running. The Atari 2600 suited that model perfectly, because cartridges could be manufactured quickly and cheaply.

Technically the 2600 is a machine of extreme limits — a few hundred bytes of RAM, no frame buffer in any modern sense, an image assembled scan line by scan line in real time. Every game on the console is therefore an abstraction: characters are a handful of pixel blocks and the player supplies the rest from the box art and manual. Krull follows that logic, and its sections are designed as short, separate challenges you move between rather than one continuous world.

It is single-player, and the catalogue files it as an adventure, though in practice it mixes reflex sequences in the way console film adaptations of the era usually did.

You can play it directly in your browser, which is the sensible way to sample 2600 software now — original hardware and cartridges have become collector items. Thirty seconds are enough to see how high the ambition was set and how low the technical floor lay. 1983 is also the year the American games market collapsed, and the flood of quickly produced licences was one of the causes. From that angle Krull is more interesting as a historical document than as an evening's entertainment.