Adventure for the Atari 2600 Can the Block defeat the Duck?

Anyone who owned an Atari 2600, and there were many, remembers with great fondness the bats, bridges and mazes of Adventure. This probably remains one of the simplest, yet most enjoyable game designs ever loaded into 4K of memory. Yep, that's right 4 kilobytes of memory total: well, there were 128 bytes of memory for variables.

Most programmers know that the more limitations you put on a design, the more likely the result is going to be inventive. It must be in order to overcome the limits of the hardware and still provide interesting gameplay.

Adventure did this with the items that could be picked up. The magnet, for example, caused keys and other items to float towards the player. The bridge allowed players to pass through walls, which is one of the keys to defeating the lower difficulty level. There are numerous tributes to this game on the web, and it has been mentioned more than once in popular webcasts.