Ed Fries Makes Halo for the Atari 2600

We're totally serious, we may be slightly late to this one, but we're totally serious. Ed Fries, former VP at Microsoft, and according to his own biog, "Co-founder of the Xbox Project" has developed a version of Halo for the beloved and ancient Atari 2600.

"Last fall I was in Philadelphia," writes Fries, "speaking at a small video game conference. On the way to the airport I was talking about writing games for the Atari 800 in the early 80s and someone suggested that I read the book Racing the Beam about programming the Atari 2600. It sounded cool so I did.

"After reading the book I thought it might be fun to play around with writing some of my own code for the machine. I hadn't written 6502 assembler in almost 30 years but it turns out it's pretty easy to pick up again since there are so few instructions. I wasn't sure what to write so I created a little Master Chief from Halo and made him run around the screen. Then I created an Elite for him to shoot at. At this point it wasn't my intention to make a full game. I was just screwing around."

That screwing around has resulted in, well, in Halo for the Atari 2600, complete with cart!

Fries lays out - in some detail - the reasoning behind his version of the game here.

Check out the project's own site and its Facebook page too.