How to play Halo 2600 online
- Move Master Chief: arrow keys
- Fire: Space bar
- Restart the game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it. Useful before a boss fight.
Gameplay
You control Master Chief through 64 screens divided into four zones: an outdoor area, a Covenant base, an ice world and a final boss area. Each screen is a single room, much like in Atari’s Adventure. Enemies shoot at you in the style of Berzerk. One hit kills you, and your enemies too, unless you have picked up a shield. You have three lives.
Weapons and power-ups are scattered around the map, and finding them is half the game. The rooms are connected like a maze, so it pays to remember the route. Once you finish the game, Legendary mode unlocks: a harder run through the same world.
Tips
- Find a shield first. Without it every hit is fatal, so explore carefully until you have one.
- Don’t rush into a new room. Enemies often start shooting as soon as you enter. Step in, see where they are, and be ready to back out.
- Draw a map. With 64 screens it is easy to get lost. A simple sketch on paper, like players did in the 1980s, helps a lot.
- Use save states. The original cartridge had no saving, but the emulator does. Save before each new zone.
How Halo 2600 was made
Ed Fries programmed Atari 800 games as a teenager before a long career at Microsoft. In 2000 he oversaw the purchase of Bungie, whose Halo: Combat Evolved became the Xbox’s defining launch game. After leaving Microsoft in 2004, he read Racing the Beam, a book by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort about programming the Atari 2600, and decided to try it himself.
At first he only wanted to see if he could draw Master Chief on the console. The 2600 has just 128 bytes of RAM, so even that was a puzzle. With encouragement and help from the Atari homebrew community, the sprite grew into a full game. Fries said that working within such tight limits “felt more like writing poetry than it did like writing regular code”.
Halo 2600 debuted in July 2010 at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas, as one of four new 2600 releases from AtariAge that year alongside Duck Attack!. Reviewers called it a “technical marvel”. In 2013 the Smithsonian American Art Museum included it in its exhibition “The Art of Video Games”.
