Even if it weren't a finalist for the IGF's Nuovo Award this year, there are plenty of other reasons to feature this new trailer for Ian Bogost's A Slow Year here, chief of those arguments being its lead platform, the Atari 2600.
In a recent interview with UK-based PC game site Rock Paper Shotgun, Bogost described A Slow Year's premise of game poems for the different seasons, which draws on Imagism and the Atari 2600's limitations for inspiration:
"A Slow Year is a set of four small games about attention and the experience of observing things. I wanted to explore the kind of condensation and compression one usually finds in poetry, particularly in Imagism, but also in those poets’ inspirations in east Asian literary traditions, including the haiku. I’ve been calling them “game poems,” and the four of them together form a little collection, like a chapbook.... each of the four games is limited to 1k in size (4k is a standard Atari ROM size), and each represents a season of the year. As games, they each offer a challenge about a familiar, banal idea: watching leaves fall or prolonging a morning cup of coffee, for example. They’re all played in the first person, but in unfamiliar ways.
One requires first-person coffee drinking. Another involves closing one’s virtual eyes in the game. As poetry, they evoke rather than clarify. As images, they are visually evocative in spite of the apparent primitiveness of the Atari as a platform. I hope the game makes the Atari seem beautiful."
Bogost will release A Slow Year as a "limited edition cartridge and poetry set" for the Atari 2600 later this year, and also plans to put out PC and Mac versions via a custom Atari emulator.
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