8-bit Noir

My kids and I have been playing a fair bit of Atari 2600 games lately using the Stella emulator, which works for Mac, PC and Linux—what platform doesn’t love Atari 2600? When playing the 1980 classic Night Driver I was struck by how much that game reminds me of all those film noir inspired scenes that feature the darkest night lit only by a feeble set of headlights. My first thought was “that’s some 8-bit noir, right there,” and my next thought was “that would make a pretty seamless GIF.”

Now compare this with a similar GIF I made from Robert Siodomak’s The Killers a few months back as the Hardboiled class was just getting started.

Opening scene of Robert Siodomak’s The Killers

It would be fun to try and find and piece together all the scenes with a shot like this throughout film history. I bet there would be a ton.

Anyway, the idea of animated a scene from an Atari 2600 game is now an animated GIF assignment over at ds106 called Animate 2600, give it a shot if you have the 8-bit grit to do it.

Also, a quick note on how I did this. I have all the 2600 roms for Stella locally, so downloaded a trial version of Screenflow to capture a few seconds of the gameplay and then exported the video. The trial version of  Screenflow adds a watermark to any exports, so I made the Stella window as small as possible and moved it to the upper left-hand corner of my screen. I still caught a bit of the “D” from the “Demo” watermark, but luckily I was able to airbrush it out in GIMP. It is a few extra steps which can be annoying, but Atari 2600 games are pretty ripe for the GIFing.