I’m sure that’s not news to you, I guess that’s just what was blocking my mind from finding a strong connection between assembly code analysis and other forms of indirect study.

Andrew, good point on the terminology. My vote is that “developers” would be the best fit in that case.

He uses visual art vocabulary (abstraction/realism) while not mentioning in any way that Combat is a game
we’re fixed on the surface (“their necessary use of abstraction”) rather than the workings of the game

Well, actually, I meant abstraction in broader terms than just visuals. The mechanics of operating the tank, and the game itself, are a necessarily abstracted version of real tanks in combat, and more abstract in their mechanics and gameplay than today’s more realistic games.

the GTA:SA creators, despite working under very similar corporate pressures as Atari programmers were to produce a popular console game, are consciously creating a work for the ages?

Not that it matters to the historical significance of a work, but yes, I’d bet today’s developers are taking themselves more seriously than the Atari VCS programmers. Besides the order-of-magnitude increase in complexity, there’s just much more discussion these days about games as an art form, comparison to cinema, yada yada yada. I’m sure there’s plenty of un-self-conscious game designers out there today, but I’m sure many think more seriously about their work than they used to — even though I believe all along they could have validly thought so. Just a hunch.

So I’m hardly going to wait around for permission from Atari VCS programmers themselves before looking at some of the actual games and code from the most important early game console.

Of course! Apologies if I gave the impression you shouldn’t. Without being condescending, I’m just saying it’s fun to think about how the original developers probably didn’t imagine such scholarship would happen, because I’m guessing they thought of their work as simple and even goofy; yet the more we think about it, as you are, we realize it was more than that.

But rather than continue nitpicking here, your points are well-taken, and I don’t mind my comments being held up as a useful example / reaction point.

First off, I’m just taking about the analysis of a public artifact, the binary code. The design documents for a game and the source code would be more highly guarded, but external analysis of binary code (by competitors, for instance) wouldn’t have been unthinkable even back in the day – once Activision was formed and Atari got some competitors, anyway.

Also, there are plenty of analogous situations in literary studies. As you mention, notes describing the structure of a story or novel also exist in some cases and are consulted by scholars. It’s also very common for scholars to pore over manuscript and typescript drafts, and to read personal letters that were never intended to be public.

The humanistic study of code is definitely new; I’d say it was unique to new media (creative computing) rather than being unique to game studies, but I think we basically agree about the novelty of looking at executable programs in this way. Studying something besides the final work, something that wasn’t anticipated by the programmer/author/creator, isn’t entirely unprecedented, though.

I don’t think that nullifies the validity of studying code as a part of game studies, but it is an unusual situation. It’s not to say that the mindset of the coder/author has to be one that expected such intense study, but at the same time it’s a study of something which was meant to be, in the end, invisible.

I’m not sure if analogies to literature or film studies really hold in this case. Perhaps it’s a bit like viewing raw footage before some very heavy editing took place, or finding an author’s notes in which he designed the structure of the final story? There are problems with either idea, and in the end I think that code study is mostly unique to game studies.