8-Bit Beginnings: Art of Atari Book Review

Late film critic Roger Ebert once argued that video games can never be considered art. "No one in or out of the field (of video gaming) has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets," he stated. Whether you agree with Ebert’s reasoning or not, plenty of art has definitely been created over the years to help sell the concept of video games to the general public. Such is the thesis of Art of Atari, which was written by Tim Lapetino and published by Dynamite Entertainment in 2016.

Art of Atari begins with an overview of the company’s complete history, followed by more detailed examinations of Atari’s early approaches to its brand identity, its first coin-op arcade cabinets, and its first home consoles. Lapetino devotes most of his book to the art that was produced for the home console games and the artists who contributed their talents to establishing Atari as a pioneering leader in video game entertainment. The book concludes with a list of Atari projects that never made it past the prototype stage, and a selection of advertisement and promotional art.

Cover art for Asteroids (Atari 2600) by Chris Kenyon.

Plenty of art books have been published about the many different areas where art has been utilized. What makes Lapetino’s book so unique is that he approaches the history of the video game company Atari wholly from the perspective of the people who created the artwork that was used to sell the hardware and software that Atari produced. Of the dozens of people Lapetino profiles and interviews in this book, he doesn’t include anyone who actually programmed the video games, the coin-op arcade cabinets, or the home consoles. While this sounds like a gaping omission for a book about one of the earliest video game companies, Lapetino nevertheless demonstrates how crucial visual artists were to encouraging people to play video games back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. The following paragraph, which appears early in the book, puts everything into perspective:

At a time when on-screen game graphics were much less sophisticated. Atari needed artwork and graphic design capable of stirring the imagination. “The games were simple so you had to create as much of the context with reality as you could,” explained art director Steve Hendricks. “We had to implant the visual image in the gamer's mind. We would work with programmers who came up with the game concepts.” Exciting advertising, contemporary package design and lush illustration would differentiate Atari and capture attention on store shelves, but this whole constellation of creative parts became more than just a way to move merchandise—it became a crucial aspect of the overall game experience. Box artwork often served as a player’s first exposure to a new title, coloring her interpretation of the gameplay within. Art and design brought this first generation of home video games to life, allowing players to see more than just the simple pixels on screen. Hand-painted artwork allowed gamers to bridge an imagination gap—instead of crude. blocky graphics, they could visualize gunfighters, space nebula, and roaring lndy cars—creating a rich imaginary world populated by fantastic characters and drama, a familiar doorway to enter this new world of TV bytes and pixels.

Of course, advertising has been using art and artistic technique to sell products for as long as there has been advertising. Yet in the case of early video games, art was used to create appeal to the video games that technology alone could not provide. Even stranger still was that at the time, the gap between what the artwork depicted and what game actually looked like was expected, not rejected. As one Atari artist Marc Ericksen explains in the book, “As an illustrator, I was always extremely conscious of the idea that we were hired to take the imagery on the screen and make it into something it was not. It was always in the back of my head — ‘What would the kids think?’ It wasn’t like I was fooling anybody, because the kids knew the games. There was never any being upset at this being on the cover versus that on the screen.”

Cover art for RealSports Baseball (Atari 5200) by D. Smith.

I grew up during the early years of video games (the Atari 2600 was my first home console), so I could identify with many of the topics and references that Lapetino mentions in his book. However, I think that he should have included at least some art that was produced by Atari’s rivals and third party developers for comparison. For example, Activision became the first third-party video game developer for the Atari 2600 in 1979. Even though Activision was created by a group of former Atari programmers, their initial approach of video game art was vastly different than Atari’s. As you can see from the pictures below, Activision just produced simple drawings of their games’ graphics and put them on the box covers.

A selection of box covers for Activision Atari 2600 games. 

Another area that could've been explored in more detail was Atari's connections to Warner Communications (now known as Warner Media), which bought Atari in 1976. Warner used Atari to create games based on creative properties that it owned, such as Superman and The Dukes of Hazzard. DC Comics was also owned by Warner and Atari later partnered with DC to create comic books that promoted a series of video games called Swordquest, which ran from 1982 to 1984. Art of Atari devotes an entire section to Swordquest, but it doesn't discuss the Atari/DC comic book series called Atari Force, which ran from 1982 to 1986 and was used to promote sci-fi themed Atari games such as Berzerk and Star Raiders. Atari Force does appear twice in the book as examples of promotional art, but no details are provided about how this comic book came to be and which artists worked on it.

Art of Atari is a fantastic book for both experienced gamers who remember Atari during its golden age and younger gamers who only know about the company through re-releases of its greatest hits. Regardless of your background, the book provides an engaging and informative insight into how the birth of a new entertainment medium could not have happened without art.