When I first started getting serious about programming in the early 00's, I thought, I'll figure out how to code a game for the 2600. Those games are so simple,

When I first started getting serious about programming in the early 00's, I thought, I'll figure out how to code a game for the 2600. Those games are so simple, it must be easy to work with. I couldn't have been more wrong. Imagine coding a game without sprites, objects, threads, or anything really. At a high level, coding a game on Atari 2600 consists of timing the toggling of the beam that is racing left to right and back throwing light onto the tv screen. You literally build screens off that! On the plus side, when that finally clicked, a lot of the mystery of how a computer worked finally made sense and I could now understand the abstractions on top of abstractions that allow me to just instantiate a sprite instead of having to manage hardware directly. I never did create that game.