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The act and experience of programming is, at its heart, a fundamentally humanactivity that results in the production of artifacts. When consideringprogramming, therefore, it would be a glaring omission to not involve peoplewho specialize in studying artifacts and the human activity that yields them:archaeologists. Here we consider this with respect to computer games, the focusof archaeology's nascent subarea of archaeogaming.  One type of archaeogaming research is digital excavation, a technicalexamination of the code and techniques used in old games' implementation. Weapply that in a case study of Entombed, an Atari 2600 game released in 1982 byUS Games. The player in this game is, appropriately, an archaeologist who mustmake their way through a zombie-infested maze. Maze generation is a fruitfularea for comparative retrogame archaeology, because a number of early games ondifferent platforms featured mazes, and their variety of approaches can becompared. The maze in Entombed is particularly interesting: it is shaped inpart by the extensive real-time constraints of the Atari 2600 platform, andalso had to be generated efficiently and use next to no memory. We reverseengineered key areas of the game's code to uncover its unusual maze-generationalgorithm, which we have also built a reconstruction of, and analyzed themysterious table that drives it. In addition, we discovered what appears to bea 35-year-old bug in the code, as well as direct evidence of code-reusepractices amongst game developers.  What further makes this game's development interesting is that, in an erawhere video games were typically solo projects, a total of five people wereinvolved in various ways with Entombed. We piece together some of the backstoryof the game's development and intoxicant-fueled design using interviews tocomplement our technical work.  Finally, we contextualize this example in archaeology and lay the groundworkfor a broader interdisciplinary discussion about programming, one that includesboth computer scientists and archaeologists.

Entombed: An archaeological examination of an Atari 2600 game