floors. The player can traverse through different doors that ascend and descend, but none permit the player to go in both directions. Throughout the mansion, the player may encounter such enemies as vampire bats, tarantulas and a ghost, which cause the player to lose a life upon contact. The game has nine settings of varying difficulty. For example, setting 1 has a room where walls around the room are lit by matches while all others are completely dark. Further challenges introduce locked doors, which require a master key that is also hidden within the mansion. Other difficulties add extra enemies and enemy abilities such as the bats stealing a carried item and placing it at a random location around the mansion. A scepter can be found inside the mansion as a collectable item, which prevent enemies from chasing the player on most levels of difficulty. The ghost will still give chase on higher difficulty levels regardless of whether the player has the item or not. Development Haunted House was developed by Atari. It was programmed by James Andreasen, a graduate of the University of Colorado in Boulder who worked as a software engineer at MSI and Atari. Working titles for the game included Mystery Mansion and Graves Manor. The game was developed for the company's Atari 2600 video game system, then named the Atari Video Computer System. For sound and graphics, the Atari 2600 had its Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) which authors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost described as a programming challenge, allowing for only a relatively small number of unique features. The Atari 2600 did not allow for such services such as graphic rendering, forcing programmers to draw the entirety of each frame of the game's display. Like other games such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982), the environments in Haunted House are hard-designed and loaded into the game, and are small compared to the other games such as Pitfall! (1982) where the worlds are consistently generated by code. Haunted House was among the first video games to use player-controlled scrolling between large portions of the visual space. To save further memory for the randomly placed items in the game, the locations of the urn pieces are generated through polynomial counters, creating numbers that are counted in unusual orders. Sound effects were common in Atari 2600 games, though the frequencies that the TIA could generate would miss most