Writing a computer game has always been hard. It is only the nature of the difficulty that changes. A modern game is as much about graphics, sound, and storytelling as it is about programming. But in the early days of computers, writing a game was a challenge because of limited graphics, slow CPUs, and tiny memory capacity. If you wanted to write a game for an early microcomputer, you generally wrote it in assembly language. BASIC was available on many machines, but it was usually too slow for anything requiring fast animation. Assembly language was fast, but it was also difficult to write, debug, and port to another machine.

RCA — in particular [ Joseph Weisbecker ], the architect of the 1802 — introduced the COSMAC VIP into the primordial 1977 home video game market. In addition to using ready-made games, the idea was that you could create your own. But writing games in 1802 assembly language would be beyond most of RCA’s customers. [Weisbecker] devised CHIP-8, a tiny virtual machine.…