Midnight Magic

Midnight Magic is a pinball game for the Atari 2600, published by Brøderbund Software in 1986. Digital pinball was popular on home consoles because it could be built from very little: one table, two flippers, a ball and physics convincing enough that the player believes the bounces. That last part decided whether a game worked or not.

The Atari 2600 was among the hardest platforms on which to attempt it. The console had minimal memory and its image was assembled line by line as the screen was drawn, so displaying a full table with obstacles, targets and a smoothly moving ball demanded careful, inventive programming. The fact that it appeared as late as 1986, when the 2600 was long past being the strongest machine available, shows in how much its authors extracted from hardware that had been considered exhausted years earlier.

Play is the classic loop: keep the ball alive, hit targets, push the score higher. Support for more than one player means alternating turns and comparing results directly, the traditional form of pinball competition. Here the game starts directly in your browser, so trying it takes no preparation at all. For anyone exploring the late Atari 2600 catalogue this is one of the more successful attempts to deliver pinball on the console in genuinely usable form.

Console pinball had one practical advantage: it needed no explanation. Anyone who had played a real table knew immediately what to do and could concentrate on scoring. That is why digital pinball turned up on every platform from eight-bit machines onward, however widely the fidelity varied between them.