At APh (the consulting firm that designed the Mattel Intellivision, wrote its system software, and most of the early games for it) the biggest insult you could give to a programmer was to tell them their Intellivision game looked like an Atari game.
This was NOT a slam against the Atari programmers. It was a reference to the graphics hardware limitations of the 2600, which made it ridiculously difficult to do things that were easy on Intellivision.
Not that Intellivision was a walk on the park...the mode most games used for the colors of things that were not sprites was demented, but at least the hardware sprites and their collision detection, along with the system software that automatically handled animating a sprite and moving it at a fixed velocity, saved us from many nightmares that 2600 programmers had to endure.
The 2600 had sprites, but they had limitations. I don't recall with absolute certainty what they were (when Mattel decided to do Atari games and some of that work was contracted to APh, I was not involved--I was working on games for what would have been the next generation Intellivision if the industry had not collapsed and laid me off, so my 2600 details are mostly what I remember Hal Finney and the others involved in the Atari games telling me), but my recollection is that there were limits on how many sprites could occupy overlapping vertical positions, and getting their horizontal position right involved software timing, so you had to do things like make sure different code paths took the same number of clock cycles. That is not fun.
Calling them "sprites" is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. They were colored boxes. :) Turning them into any sort of recognizable graphics was required developers to "race the beam" to update registers constantly to render more objects per line than the hardware directly supported.
If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy It's Behind You (http://bizzley.imbahost.com/). It talks about porting R-Type (side-scrolling space shooter) to the ZX Spectrum... and similar fun around squeezing down high-end (for the time) arcade games to run on hardware that shouldn't really support it - a great read!
This was NOT a slam against the Atari programmers. It was a reference to the graphics hardware limitations of the 2600, which made it ridiculously difficult to do things that were easy on Intellivision.
Not that Intellivision was a walk on the park...the mode most games used for the colors of things that were not sprites was demented, but at least the hardware sprites and their collision detection, along with the system software that automatically handled animating a sprite and moving it at a fixed velocity, saved us from many nightmares that 2600 programmers had to endure.
The 2600 had sprites, but they had limitations. I don't recall with absolute certainty what they were (when Mattel decided to do Atari games and some of that work was contracted to APh, I was not involved--I was working on games for what would have been the next generation Intellivision if the industry had not collapsed and laid me off, so my 2600 details are mostly what I remember Hal Finney and the others involved in the Atari games telling me), but my recollection is that there were limits on how many sprites could occupy overlapping vertical positions, and getting their horizontal position right involved software timing, so you had to do things like make sure different code paths took the same number of clock cycles. That is not fun.