/vr/ - Retro Games

OP I encourage you to read about the video chip
its pretty interesting - they were at the bleeding edge of consumer affordable technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Interface_Adaptor

tl:dr the hardware limitations basically made it so initially there would be a basic mirrored symmetric playfield with a player sprite on top, like Pong
Over the life of the Atari 2600 developers got really clever with manipulating how the lines were drawn on screen

Either way to your initial questions, the playfield pixels were 4 times the width of the sprite pixels, which is why they are so blocky

>>8292226
This console have a few gems

Solaris for the Atari 2600