Venetian Blinds Demo is not a game but a technical demonstration of the technique known as 'venetian blinds,' developed by programmer Bob Whitehead to get around the Atari 2600's limit on simultaneous sprites by alternating a single sprite's horizontal position between different values on each scan line. That same trick was what made it possible, among other things, to display the full eight-square-wide board in Video Chess despite the hardware only supporting a few sprites per line. More than a playable experience, it's a piece of technical archaeology that illustrates just how far Atari 2600 programmers had to go, inventing creative engineering solutions to get around the brutal limitations of the original 1977 hardware.
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