While not nearly as obviously exciting as Superman, the last two VCS games to come out in 1979 push boundaries in their own technical ways. Backgammon and Video Chess are both attempts to bring their respective strategy board games to a platform not suited for the necessary thought processes or even displaying the game boards. Up to this point bringing these types of games to the platform hadn’t really been attempted – the closest is Codebreaker, but that doesn’t have nearly the level of variables as these two and is a much simpler game to display. Both Backgammon and Video Chess have intertwined development histories, but for my purposes, we’ll be talking about them separately.
For the unfamiliar, the game of backgammon dates back millennia, with 5000-year-old precursors having been discovered in modern day Iraq, in what was once Mesopotamia. Rulesets similar to the modern game have been written about as far back as the 400s, and it has only changed marginally since. Backgammon occupies interesting territory, as it’s both a strategy game and a race game. Players are tasked with racing around the board to bear their pieces off the side first. The pieces are laid out to have equal numbers on both the players’ inner and outer sides of the track, and pieces are moved with dice rolls. Rather than moving a piece the cumulative number on the two dice, however, players move with each die individually; if they roll for example a 2 and a 6, they must move pieces two times and six times, if possible. Rolling doubles means the player must move that number four times if possible. Pieces of the same color can share a column, but a piece can only move into a space occupied by the other play if there is only one opposing piece, or blot, there already; in that instance the opponent’s piece is “hit” and removed to a central holding area, where it must be reentered on that player’s next turn if the dice rolls allow it. Once all your pieces are in the final quadrant of the board, you can begin bearing them off.
Though not as popular a choice for early computer scientists to convert as chess, checkers or nim, backgammon did eventually have some interest as a way to develop algorithms and showcase the power behind their machines. Backgammon is a unique challenge since it’s also a dice-based game, making it harder for the computer to plan several steps ahead as in chess or checkers. One of the earliest known backgammon computer programs was written in 1974 by Hans Berliner. Known as BKG, this PDP-10 computer-based program was developed in the BLISS computer language at Carnegie-Mellon University for the study of AI. Berliner would improve upon it for several years until BKG 9.8 managed to beat a world backgammon champion in July 1979 – albeit thanks to favorable dice rolls. As new microcomputers entered the market in the 70s and 80s, backgammon would continue to pop up on new platforms… including home game consoles.
Backgammon is the sole software outing from Craig Nelson for the VCS. Nelson didn’t actually work in the same software development group as other game developers, such as David Crane or Jim Huether, but rather in engineer Bob Brown’s advanced projects group. Nelson had initially worked for Brown as a summer hire in 1977, as Nelson had experience playing games like Colossal Cave Adventure over the Arpanet and had even written a flight simulator with his roommate that allowed for air combat between two terminals. At the time Brown was working on a follow-up to Atari’s Video Music machine that reduced its component count and brought Nelson in to assist. That project was killed when Atari bought a competing company’s machine that could run dedicated console games off of carts known as the Game Brain; Nelson created a Video Music cartridge but ultimately the whole thing was shelved in 1978. The following year Nelson had finished school and Brown hired him back in for his new group.
What was an advanced projects group doing writing VCS software, you may be wondering? Well, Brown had been involved in the development of the VCS platform in the first place (among other pieces of hardware), but as Nelson explained it, once it was clear there was a lot of money to be had in the VCS Brown lost the political fight to stay involved and was shuffled off to work on “Phoney,” a high speed modem that could be used to make videophones. Brown was able to carve out a niche for the VCS itself with Backgammon and Video Chess, as their group was allowed to use 4 kilobyte cartridges and the games would most likely need that extra space. Larry Wagner, another VCS engineer and the main developer on Combat, took up Chess, and Nelson was assigned Backgammon.
Nelson admits he knew nothing about backgammon at the start, but learning the rules of the game wasn’t the hard part. The first challenge was getting the machine to display the board, done through a hand-coded computer cycle routine like practically all VCS games. Nelson says that fortunately he didn’t know it was supposed to be difficult and was able to get the board working. More difficult was working within the 128 bytes of memory the VCS has to display the screen, keep track of the score, calculate moves and evaluating the positions of the pieces on the board. In the end Nelson gave up on trying to keep the board displayed at all times and allowed for it to be blacked out for a few moments while the computer considers its next move; since the CPU doesn’t have to take precious processing cycles to draw the screen, it can use these newly available resources to calculate what it will do next. This would become the standard solution for VCS takes on traditional strategic board games; Video Chess uses it at length, as will the 1980 releases 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Video Checkers and Activision’s separate Checkers cartridge.
Nelson said the game fit rather nicely into the 4k of space thanks to efficient flowcharting. The game works like this: when the computer rolls the dice, it will generate all the legal moves, and then determine which moves to make based on a weighting system Nelson had put into place. Some of these moves were obvious, like the level of exposure a piece has to the other player, but to determine more subtle move considerations Nelson worked with Julio Kaplan, a chessmaster who was already working with Atari on Video Chess. Kaplan, it turned out, was also a backgammon expert and very interested in computers attempting to translate these ancient board games. For the weighting system, Brown designed a program on their LSI-11 – a cost reduced PDP-11 CPU – that would process a training moveset and try to set the weighting to make the correct moves. Kaplan would then play the game, and when the computer made a bad move, he would tell it the correct move and the weighting would be readjusted to make the moves he suggested. Eventually this took too long, so once all the pieces had passed each other on the board Nelson implemented a canned mode where the computer would choose the moves that would move the most pieces across the most quadrants and bear the most pieces off the board. He said it probably played a pretty poor game, but it would make surprising moves and people seemed to think it was rather devious and enjoyed beating it.
And indeed, playing this as a backgammon newcomer, the computer does indeed make for a decent foe. Nelson designed the game to use the paddle controllers, which made his bosses happy, and they work incredibly well to move the highlighter around to different columns. The computer is even willing to pull some devious moves – such as establishing what’s known as a Prime by occupying six consecutive columns that makes it impossible to move pieces past – and will even set these up in the entry points from the bar, creating a shutout. At the same time, the computer is entirely beatable if you keep yourself from getting locked down. And not content with standard Backgammon rules, Nelson added a few common variations to the game. The first – and default – ruleset involves the use of the “doubling cube.” In some circles Backgammon is played as a gambling game, but since experienced players can get a solid idea of who will end up winning within the first few turns, the doubling cube can be used to double the value of the “bet” in the game – signified here by a number in the upper left corner. After the first player moves, their opponent will be required to offer to double the wager to the game. If the first player accepts the offer, and the opponent is also fine with it, the bet increases and control of it moves to them; if the opponent refuses, the the game ends. Pushing reset begins a fresh game. You can play Backgammon with or without the cube, in case it’s confusing – or ultimately unnecessary, since it’s not like you’re gambling real money against your VCS. The cube may be a handier option if you’ve got a friend really interested in playing the game for money, but instead of having a board available you’ve got this.
The other additional ruleset is known as “acey-deucey,” and the manual insists it’s a common form to the US Navy. This variation is unique in that all the pieces start in the bar and must be entered in from dice rolls; additionally any blots that get hit and returned to the bar do not need to be brought back onto the board before the player moves other pieces, too. The other big change is that if a player rolls and a 1 and a 2 – the titular acey-deucey – the player is allowed to move the 1 and 2 before selecting whichever doubles on the dice they find most useful and moving their pieces an additional four times. If this isn’t enough, the player is then allowed another roll after any doubles – including if they get one from an acey-deucey. The doubling cube is an option for these games as well, and all of these variations are playable with two players if you want to shut the computer out entirely. Acey-deucey is actually a really nifty variant that adds an extra layer of chaos to a game that’s already defined by the dice, and games can turn around entirely with a few lucky rolls giving a player those extra moves. It’s not faster paced, per se, but it feels more active.
Finally, by flipping the left and right difficulty switches, players also get the option to set up the pieces on the board however they want and to specify what specific dice numbers they want, respectively. This is useful if you’re just learning the game, want to practice specific situations, or just want to get the game unstuck on the rare occasions you get locked into only an illegal move and the game won’t let you continue. In normal play, however, the switches aren’t terribly useful.
Once completing Backgammon, Nelson started work on a VCS speech synthesis program, but once Ray Kassar took over as Atari’s president he dissolved the entire advanced projects group. He had an offer to go to the coin-op development group, but between Kassar’s flippant attitude towards developers and what Nelson described as the sleazy corporate culture of sex and drugs that had existed at Atari up to that point, Nelson turned it down and left with Brown to work on a talking watch project for Hitachi. After bouncing around for a couple years working on a few different projects, the two of them would eventually return to the VCS as the co-designers of the Supercharger add-on under their own company Arcadia (shortly renamed to Starpath), where Nelson was in charge of software development.
Regardless of technical challenges, backgammon did show up on several platforms: The Channel F saw a version in 1977, as did the MP1000 and Intellivision in the fall of 1979. The Channel F game is the most basic of the lot, featuring no computer opponent to speak of. While it plays reasonably well with two people, it’s hard to recommend it over just getting a board and learning how to set it up. It does feature both the doubling cube mechanic and Acey-Deucey, so it does have those going for it.
The Intellivision conversion, titled APBA Backgammon and developed by APh summer hire Kevin Miller, excels at certain aspects of the game over its VCS counterpart but doesn’t have the same features. Specifically, there’s no no Acey-Deucey and no doubling cube to be found here. It does change the control scheme to only jump your cursor between spaces you have pieces already, which streamlines things immensely. Once you’ve highlighted what you want you push the button on the keypad corresponding with the dice roll number you want to use and the piece will move automatically. The keypad also provides options to take back a move, finalize your turn, or move two pieces at once if you rolled doubles. You can even use the side buttons to bring up the pip count, or current score, of the game. ABPA Backgammon does feature a computer opponent, and a pretty competent one at that. Rather than blanking the screen, the game will simply make noises while the computer considers its next move, a process that takes about as long as the VCS version’s computer blanking does. Coincidentally, this was a launch game for the first test markets that the Intellivision was sold at in November 1979, alongside Las Vegas Poker and Blackjack, Armor Battle and Math Fun. Not the most stacked lineup, but if the goal was to showcase the unique controller and how much more sophisticated the platform was over its competition it is a valiant effort, one could say the outcome was mixed given the then-recent VCS releases of Superman, Video Chess and Backgammon. They may be prettier, but Armor Battle aside they’re not markedly different from what Atari was selling. At any rate, despite the missing options like the doubling cube or acey-doucey rules from the VCS version, the Intellivision does have an excellent take on the board game. It’s pleasant to look at, pretty easy to play once you know the controls, and can be a nice challenge for a new player. This also is one of the first titles in Mattel’s licensing effort for its games – in this case, Mattel got the American Backgammon Players Association official license for the cartridge. Later games had more famous licenses, such as NFL Football or NHL Hockey, but that entire track for the company started here. And Backgammon got a bit of a second wind late in the Intellivision’s life, being included on the Triple Challenge cartridge alongside Chess and Checkers in 1987.
The MP1000 Backgammon cartridge is most notable perhaps for being one of the rarer games on the platform. Coincidentally also coming out around November 1979, this version features a computer opponent and numbers each position. To move a piece, you input the column number on the keypad and then the number of spaces it’s going to move. The joystick allows you to pass your turn if you have no moves, roll dice by pushing up – including for the computer, which can’t roll on its own – and review the last move made by pushing left. The computer doesn’t seem to be particularly special, but the move lookback feature is pretty nifty.
There are two other contemporary console conversions of backgammon I want to touch on that are a bit unusual. The first is the Backgammon game for the Bally Professional Arcade. A first-party cartridge combining the game with checkers was advertised in 1979, but ultimately never came out. Some years later the prototype for Checkers turned up, and reproductions were offered up for sale by enthusiast Mike White circa 1985, but as of this recording the Backgammon game is still missing. The console did still get a version of the game, however. In January 1981, the independent game developer Wavemakers produced and sold a Bally BASIC version of Backgammon on cassette tape. This is actually a pretty solid rendition of the board game with a decent computer opponent for a beginning player such as myself. The only awkward part of the game is that if you miscount the number of spaces you try to move a piece, the computer will plop your piece back at its starting point and punish you by using up that die. Punitive, but you can’t be terribly choosy with a version written in BASIC using 1.8 kilobytes of RAM.
Finally, the European version of the Odyssey2, known as the Videopac G7000, received a Backgammon conversion in 1983. This version uses some specific timing tricks to get the screen to display as many objects as it does properly, and as such doesn’t run on its American counterpart. These tricks also mean it doesn’t run properly in emulators, as they aren’t accurate enough to get the display to work. This is unfortunate, but there’s something to be said about using techniques so exacting to push a platform to its absolute limits… for Backgammon.
While Superman and Video Chess got a lot more attention in late 1979, Backgammon did still get highlighted in advertisements – initially as a game “coming soon” at the time Superman was first being sold before appearing in ads around November. The game was also mentioned in the October 1982 issue of Vidiot in the middle of a writeup of the major hardware platforms at the time. Atari had seemingly taken to branding it as part of a “Classics” line with its other traditional board game titles Video Chess, Video Checkers, Othello, and 3D Tic-Tac-Toe. 1982 was also the last year Warner-era Atari included Backgammon in its catalog listings, but the game continued to sell at least some copies in the system’s twilight years. According to internal documents, Atari sold a bit over 16,200 copies of Backgammon between 1986 and 1990, with the game’s sales peaking at about 15,000 copies in 1988. Not a big title by any means, but enough of one that the company got to move some product.
And while Backgammon didn’t have the same degree of editorial coverage as its fellow releases, it did get a review in the November 1979 edition of Creative Computing magazine. David Ahl wrote that the game was a good choice for someone learning to play the game, and provides a good challenge to a beginning to intermediate level player. As someone who literally learned to play backgammon for this series, I will agree – it’s a remarkably intuitive take on the game, even if the instructions in the manual leave something to be desired. I don’t know who exactly is flipping on their VCS to play any of these traditional board game releases these days, but Backgammon is a pretty impressive achievement for a machine designed to run Pong. If nothing else, you have to give Nelson accolades for pulling that off.
Sources:
Craig Nelson, correspondence with the author, September 4-16, 2019
Atari: Business is Fun, Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel, 2012
Creative Computing, November 1979
Vidiot, October 1982
Atari Corp. 2600 Sales figures, 1986-1990
Cartridge Shipment Memo, Mattel Electronics dated Nov. 30, 1983
Weekly Television Digest, Feb. 13, 1978, March 6, 1978
APBA Backgammon, Blueskyrangers.com
BKG: A Program that Plays Backgammon, Hans Berliner, July 1977
Release date sources:
Backgammon (Channel F), December 1977 – Des Moines Register, December 18 1977; Colorado Springs Gazette, December 29 1977; Syracuse Herald Journal, December 11 1977; Weekly Television Digest, October 24 1977; December 10 Fairchild order form; Spokesman Review, December 3 1978
Backgammon (Atari VCS), November 1979 – Brownsville Herald, November 22 1979; Creative Computing, November 1979; Kittanning Leader-Times, November 20 1979; Lowell Sun, December 1 1979; The Herald News, November 21 1979
Backgammon (MP1000), November 1979 – Janesville Gazette, November 21 1979
APBA Backgammon (Intellivision), November 1979 – Modesto Bee, December 10 1979; Mattel cartridge shipment memo, November 23 1983; Allentown Morning Call, February 17 1980; Blue Sky Rangers game list
Backgammon (Bally Arcade), January 1981 – Cursor, January/February 1981