The Hyundai Santa Fe’s Taillights Remind Me Of Something Very Specific One Of You Already Guessed

Yesterday, I wrote perhaps far too much about how the current Ford Bronco’s rear indicators look like curly brackets; that was, of course, important journalism, perhaps the most important journalism possible. In the comments, many of you suggested another notable taillight that needs to be addressed: the low, wide taillights of the current Hyundai Santa Fe. These are taillights that have captured the attention of even more staid, non-taillight obsessed publications and have been ones that my non-car-geek friends have pointed out as being interesting. So let’s talk about them.

Even more important is the fact that the design of the Hyundai Santa Fe taillights reminded me of something very specific; and, perhaps even more tellingly, one of our commenters called it out yesterday, a testimony to either the remarkable perception of our wise commentariat or my embarrassing predictability, or, more likely, some combination of the two.

First, though, let’s look at these taillights:

The Santa Fe’s taillights are interesting in many ways. First, they’re quite low. We’re talking Volkswagen Vanagon-level low. And the reasons they’re so low are pretty much the same reasons as why the Vanagon’s lights were so low: to get the biggest, widest, tallest hatch possible on the back of the car, to maximize loading space. That means the hatch has to be the full width of the car, with room for the support struts behind it, and as tall as possible, so the only place for taillights is down low.

So that explains the location and general wide and short proportions; what about the pattern?

According to Head of Design for Hyundai North America, Kevin Kang, the pattern in the taillights is part of an overall H-based design theme used all over the vehicle (emphasis mine):

“Conveniently, the “H” from Hyundai has a boxy shape (despite how it appears in the Hyundai logo), and the designers seized on this to make “H” a design theme seen throughout the vehicle, including the front and rear light treatments, the front climate vents and even the ambient lighting across the dashboard. There are even compound H shapes, such as on the front, with each DRL forming its own H and then a bar across the front, creating an overall H. He told his designers to give people something to distinctly remember about Santa Fe after they left it. Indeed, the first thing you will likely remember about the Santa Fe are those “H” headlights and tail lights.“

So, they’re supposed to be Hs, or, as George Bernard Shaw would confusingly write, “aitches.” But the particular way this H looks reminds me of something far, far more specific, as this perceptive commenter noted yesterday:

Dammit, yes, William, yes it is. Absolutely, 100%, you unscrewed the access flap of my skull and looked inside and saw this:

Yes, the Atari 2600 version of the game Mouse Trap! Specifically, it’s these that were what the Santa Fe taillights reminded me of:

Those are supposed to be dog bones. And they sort of do look like dog bones, just like they sort of look like the H-pattern in the Santa Fe taillights. So, yes, that is exactly what I was reminded of. Yeah, it’s pretty geeky, but we’ve come this far, so why not dig into why those dog bones look like that?

I mean, look at the cats and mouse in that screenshot; they have a lot more detail than those dog bones, right? The arcade version of the game managed to draw the dog bones at about the same level of detail as the dogs and cats and mice:

So why can’t the old Atari 2600 do the same? Well, there’s a good answer, and the answer is a great reminder of how incredibly limited the Atari 2600 was, and how clever the programmers were that made the games for it. So, let’s dig into it!

Here’s the key thing to know about the 2600: it was designed to play games like Pong and Tank, simple games that, at their most complex, looked like this:

So, two players (tanks), a simple maze, and two “missiles.” That’s it. Oh, and a ball for Pong-type games. That’s all the Atari 2600 was ever intended to do, so that’s all its visual capabilities were: it could draw two players, two missiles, a simple background (called a playfield), and a ball.

And that’s all that any game actually uses! Even ones that have remarkably complex graphics find clever ways to use these five basic elements. Mouse Trap, for example, breaks down like this:

Now, you probably still have some questions: how can that one cat-player be repeated so many times? And why are the playfield pixels all so wide compared to the player ones? Well, the answer has to do with brutal limitations.

You see, back in 1977 when the 2600 (originally called the VCS) was designed, computer memory was crazy expensive. That means that if the 2600 were to have enough memory store a whole screen at a time, it would have been as expensive as a new AMC Gremlin. So that was out of the question. So what could they do?

They could make do with a lot less. Specifically, they could only have enough memory to store one scan line of the display.

That one scan line could hold this much information: playfield pixels (but only 40 of them, which is why they’re so wide, and really only 20, because half the screen would either be mirrored or duplicated, though programmers did figure out how to get around this for asymmetric playfields), the two player sprites (8 pixels wide, and these could be duplicated on the line 2 or 3 times, or widened), and the missiles and ball, both of which could be widened from one pixel to 4). Each of those could have one single color per object, out of a respectably large palette of 128 colors.

So, those dog bones look the way they do because playfield pixels were four times as wide as the resolution of the player sprite pixels, which means the smallest “dot” looks like a hyphen.

The way a full screen was drawn was that the 2600 “raced the beam;” this means it sent data to the screen based on where the CRT television was actually “painting” the screen, from top to bottom, one line at a time, 30 frames every second. So, it would send the contents of one scan line, then, as the electron beam was moving down to the next line to draw that, the 2600 could change the data for that next scanline, meaning pixel patterns and colors could change from line to line, allowing for an actual screen image to be drawn!

This limitation actually gave the 2600 a ton of flexibility: colors could change line-by-line, patterns of pixels, locations of objects, and so on. That’s how a machine designed to draw two rectangular paddles and a ball could produce images that looked like this:

So, to recap, the reason the Hyundai Santa Fe taillights remind me of the dog bones in the Atari 2600 version of the video game Mouse Trap is because computer memory was crazy expensive in the 1970s.

Glad we cleared that up.