Friend of TheFeed and MIT media studies professor, Ian Bogost and collaborator Nick Montfort, have a new book out that the truly elite and awesome among you will want to have.

Racing the Beam is a look at the the technical side of the Atari 2600. Turns out that the grandfather of console gaming featured hardware that was already obsolete when it was released, but the huge install base of the system (basically, everyone who was gaming in the mid to late 70s) forced programmers to work with the tech they had, and thus develop innovations and creative solutions that otherwise wouldn't have been needed.

Bogost, who recently created the iPhone game JetSet (interview here), says, "The minimal but exploitable design of the VCS showed how long unexpected tricks and techniques could continue to be developed on a platform, over more than a decade. It showed that there's more to a console than is understood when it's first released."

Here's the Amazon link. I give it three thumbs, way up.