fifth entry in Microsoft’s vaunted line of first-person shooters. Fans of the series with a taste for retro games might prefer a Halo game made not for the Xbox 360 but for the 33-year-old Atari 2600 console.

Released at the Classic Gaming Expo in July, Halo 2600 is a two-dimensional demake that takes key elements of the official Halo games — the Master Chief character unloading bullets into rooms full of Covenant grunts — and compresses them down into a simpler gameplay formula.

A tiny Master Chief wiggles his way around rectangular rooms, firing one bullet at a time, left and right, into a few scattered enemies. With 64 unique rooms and a variety of foes, it’s a bit more complicated than your average Atari game from the 1970s, but not by much.

Halo 2600 was designed by Ed Fries, the former head of Microsoft Game Studios and one of the key players in the launch of the Xbox and in Microsoft’s acquisition of Bungie Studios, the developer that created Halo. (Halo: Reach, released Tuesday, is Bungie’s final title in the series.)

Fries is a lifelong gamemaker with roots in classic consoles.

“Programming is a lot like poetry,” Fries says. “There’s meter and rhyme and all these restrictions around which words you can choose and where you can put them. Programming the Atari 2600 is like haiku.”

Classic gaming group Atari Age made a limited run of Halo 2600 cartridges that it hawked at Classic Gaming Expo. Though the cassettes sold out, Halo 2600 can be played in Flash form.

Halo 2600 might be called the ultimate fan project based on the popular videogame series, which began in 2001 and revolutionized the first-person shooter genre, spawning countless imitators and a loyal fan base. With its arresting mix of 8-bit characters and old-school gameplay, the retro game serves as a timely reminder of the aesthetic evolution of videogames, which have gone from simple, blocky imagery to cinematic visual wonders, thanks to the ever-increasing processing power of game consoles.

The Atari 2600 was the dominant home game machine in America for nearly a decade, from its launch in 1977 through the arrival of Nintendo in 1985. As a kid in the ’70s, Fries owned an Atari 2600, but he had never programmed for the console. His first games were for the Atari 800 — a supercomputer compared to the 2600, which was only intended to last for one or two holiday seasons before being replaced with something more powerful.

As the 2600 soldiered on into the ’80s, game designers had to come up with a wide variety of programming tricks to squeeze more and more juice out of the aging hardware. Some of the most ingenious methods were chronicled in 2009 book Racing the Beam, a fascinating look at the 2600.

“In today’s age of ever more powerful, complex, gluttonous computers, returning to a lithe, simple platform that has to be programmed in assembly can be a breath of fresh air,” says Racing the Beam author Ian Bogost in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Embracing and then overcoming the incredible constraints of the machine, I think that motivates a lot of developers to pursue the 2600. Some want to tame it as a personal victory.”

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Authors: Chris Kohler

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