Video Chess

Video Chess is a strategy video game simulating the board game chess. The game is played from an overhead perspective against a computer opponent, with the player's goal to use their pieces to corner the opponent's "king" piece into "checkmate".

The player uses a cursor to select and move pieces, rather than using chess notation. If an attempted move is illegal, the move is blocked with a warning sound. If the right-most switch is set to A, the computer plays as white; setting it to B lets the player play as white. With the left switch, selecting A allows the board to be set as the player pleases, whereas selecting B sets up the board for a regulation chess game. Eight different difficulty levels have the computer-player take a variable amount of time to determine its moves, ranging from a few seconds to ten hours.

The box art of the first production run of the Atari 2600 features a chess piece, though Atari was not yet contemplating designing a chess game. A man from Florida supposedly sued Atari on the grounds a chess game was not available for the platform yet the box art suggested so. Video Chess programmer Bob Whitehead said he was not aware of such a lawsuit.

At first, the console's strict hardware limitations seemed to preclude it hosting a chess program. The console's Television Interface Adaptor chip can only display three sprites in each scanline, or six (such as in Space Invaders) with the right programming. The eight-piece-wide chess board exceeds this limitation. Whitehead developed a technique he called Venetian blinds, in which a sprite's horizontal position is alternated between two values at every scanline, while the hardware outputs video signal.

Video magazine praised it as "a reward for Atari owners" which even basic chess players "should find rewarding for many hours of enjoyment". The reviewers were surprised that the gameplay was limited to a single player, and noted the high retail price of US$40 (equivalent to $180 in 2025), but they praised the programming which prevents illegal moves, and which includes more advanced chess concepts like castling and en passant capturing which had not yet become standard in all chess video games.

In June 2025, the game briefly returned to technology news headlines after a hobby experiment showed an Atari 2600 emulator running Video Chess defeating OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o in a casual blitz match. Tech outlets such as PC Gamer, PCMag, CNET, and The Register described the result as a humorous reminder that large language models are not specialized chess engines, contrasting the 1.19 MHz MOS 6507's alpha-beta search with ChatGPT's conversational heuristics.