Atari 2600 - 40 years - The Bear and Badger

davyK

OK so I'm a month late. The 2600 was released on September 11th, 1977. It didn't get released in Europe until some time in '78.

In work at the mo (tea break) so I'll post later about memories and also about the still thriving community which includes homebrew titles. Ed Fries (project Xbox) wrote a 2D version of Halo for it. But suffice to say the 2600 played a huge part in me picking IT as a career. That little box means quite a bit to me.

Any memories, thoughts? Would like to hear them.

retroking1981

At work myself so will have to wait until this evening to go into depth.

Big fan though.

Olimite

I had one when it was still known as the VCS. My mum used to let me play it way too much (probably just to shut me up).

g.man

Couldn't afford one back then, but had a wealthy mate who had one, and also had dozens of cartridges for it. Space Invaders was the bomb. Adventure was grand, but it was all about Yar's Revenge for me. I was pretty pretty good at that.

great memories

g.man

poprock

One of my earliest memories is of my Dad bringing home an Atari 2600 (I think). I can clearly recall helping him lift it out of the car boot and taking it inside. As is the nature of really early memories though, much of it is fuzzy.

I can’t clearly remember which version of the console it might have been. It was wood veneer, definitely. I don’t recall joysticks, but I do remember the paddle controllers. And I only remember actually playing Pong, or a variant thereof.

Console plugged into the telly, and sat on the carpet. Me and my Dad sat on the floor with a paddle controller each, and Pong in black and white on the TV screen.

Now, I know from historical stuff on the web that the original consoles all came bundled with joysticks, and that there wasn’t actually a version of Pong for the early machines. So what exactly we had is a bit of a mystery to me. Most likely it was a bit later in the console’s lifecycle. Maybe it was second-hand? I dunno. But I remember being entranced. I was immediately hooked on the magic of actually controlling something on the TV screen. Lifechanging stuff.

Olimite

poprock wrote:

One of my earliest memories is of my Dad bringing home an Atari 2600 (I think). I can clearly recall helping him lift it out of the car boot and taking it inside. As is the nature of really early memories though, much of it is fuzzy.

I can’t clearly remember which version of the console it might have been. It was wood veneer, definitely. I don’t recall joysticks, but I do remember the paddle controllers. And I only remember actually playing Pong, or a variant thereof.

Console plugged into the telly, and sat on the carpet. Me and my Dad sat on the floor with a paddle controller each, and Pong in black and white on the TV screen.

Now, I know from historical stuff on the web that the original consoles all came bundled with joysticks, and that there wasn’t actually a version of Pong for the early machines. So what exactly we had is a bit of a mystery to me. Most likely it was a bit later in the console’s lifecycle. Maybe it was second-hand? I dunno. But I remember being entranced. I was immediately hooked on the magic of actually controlling something on the TV screen. Lifechanging stuff.

Do you not remember these then?

Must have been available at launch as I used to play Circus Atari and Night Driver (I think) with them.

Kow

My folks promised me one but never delivered on it. Still not sure I can forgive them.

poprock

Olimite wrote:

Do you not remember these then?

Aye, that’s what I mean. I do remember the paddles, but I don’t remember having joysticks. According to Wikipedia etc, launch consoles came with both.

I guess I vaguely remember a lot of things about the Atari, but my clearer gaming memories only really kick in with the Spectrum era.

cockbeard

I got one around 86-87, was amazing. Loved the way that Space invaders claimed to have 112 games on it, and Combat claimed a couple of hundred as well iirc

RamSteelwood

My first console, a second hand one of these, and came with a few games (including ET which was awful even then). Asteroids was prob my fave, though combat was cool too, and obvs space invaders got a decent run out.

Pop - can only assume you never had the joysticks if you don't remember them - they were pretty horrible even for then and the pain of using them is still etched into my brain!

cindemon

2600 was the 2nd console I owned as a kid. Personal faves was Yar's Revenge & Joust.

TheBoyRoberts

Man what a system!

I had a (well folks) had a Grandstand - never got a 2600 :-(

One of my mates dad had a 2600 and even had this massive multi cartridge adapter that i rember would take 10 carts - overkill for sure, but man was it impressive!

I did watch that Charlie Brooker's "How Videogames changed the world" a few months ago.....by the end of the program I'd drank too much and had ordered a Game Boy, 1st Gen PS1 and my now pride and joy.......premo condition 2600 which now sits "front and centre" in my "Console Grace Yard"!

Edit:

Link to the multi cart adapter

http://atariage.com/forums/uploads/monthly_03_2016/post-38603-0-53833500-1458423803.jpg

TheBoyRoberts

cindemon wrote:

2600 was the 2nd console I owned as a kid. Personal faves was Yar's Revenge & Joust.

There's a documentary available for free on xBox Live which covers the "ET in the desert" story - major part of the doc focus on Howard Scott Warshaw who wrote ET and Yar's - can't recommend enough if you're a big Yar's fan.

Diluted Dante

I have a VCS, which I got well after the fact. I've got a fair stack of games for it, but the plug is knackered now.

cindemon

TheBoyRoberts wrote:

cindemon wrote:

2600 was the 2nd console I owned as a kid. Personal faves was Yar's Revenge & Joust.

There's a documentary available for free on xBox Live which covers the "ET in the desert" story - major part of the doc focus on Howard Scott Warshaw who wrote ET and Yar's - can't recommend enough if you're a big Yar's fan.

Will make time for that, cheers for the shout.

poprock

Yeah, that documentary is cracking viewing. Languished in funding hell for a while before being picked up by Microsoft as an exclusive.

Skondo

I remember going with my Mum, Dad and Sister to stay with some friends in Bishop's Stortford. They had great names - Herminie and Maximillian, but they liked to be known as Mini and Max. One of their sons introduced me to the 2600/VCS. I can't quite remember when this would have been, but I'm guessing around 78/79. I remember having so much fun playing Kaboom!, Pac-Man, Pele's Soccer and Combat (27 video games). Later I remember playing The Empire Strikes Back. I desperately wanted an Atari, but my Father said they were too expensive.

One Christmas I opened a very large box that contained a Video Game System from Dixons, but I cannot remember which one. I was extremely disappointed because we couldn't get it to work. Dad returned it to Dixons to swap for another one and that didn't work either. So, we returned to Dixons and Dad requested a refund. He didn't say anything and didn't ask me anything, but we walked straight to the local Television Parlour and he bought me an Atari. As much as I wanted it, I protested, as he had told me they were too expensive. I felt slightly guilty as I kept thinking how expensive they were, however I soon forgot this as I immersed myself in the joys of Combat.

I never had many games, but remember having the following:

Combat
Frogger
Kaboom!
Pole Position
Pac-Man

We obviously swapped games at school and I know I borrowed Phoenix, Joust (great joystick breaker), River Raid, Grand Prix, Adventure and Yar's Revenge.

Diluted Dante

Your Dad sounds like a legend.

JonB

Never owned one, but I remember playing on it a lot and quite a few games so we must have borrowed one for a while at some point. Never used the paddles, just those hand-aching joysticks.

Simple games, but having lots of modes in each really helped with the lastability, even if they were mainly tiny variations.

Combat was definitely a favourite. I also remember playing Asteroids and Phoenix quite a lot. I think I liked Phoenix because it was about 5 different levels and I could actually get to the 'end'.

dynamiteReady

The 2600 was host to the definitive home version of Centipede. That game was cool.

Lets be honest though, even back then when it was high tech, there were some ropey games on that shit.

davyK

The Atari 2600 then. Having a dedicated pong console was OK but it was a fad for most. But for some of us it was a glimpse into what home gaming could be. The arcade was great but it wasn't accessible.

I can remember the ads appearing in mail order catalogues and newspapers and was interested in it but one summer during a city centre walkabout with my brother and two cousins we came across a 2600 set up in a shop with Combat. We played until we were chucked out - the price - £100 - may as well have been £1million - well beyond my parents' reach. Then I learned those same parents - bless them - had been paying into an endowment scheme that would mature when I was 16. And £100 of it would be mine. It was several months away but the day came in August '82 when the money was in my hand.

My father was sceptical to say the least and it must have broken his heart to hand me over that money and then walk with me around the corner from the bank into Boots and lay down the £99.95 for the 2600. But he was true to his word.

It was a sensation at home - even with my father. My brother and I played Combat a lot - and immediately the challenge of booking TV time arose. A clapped out b&w TV appeared in our bedroom some time after that (you had to draw the curtains and turn off the light to make out the picture - but it worked). Remember the 2600 had a B&W mode.

Cartridges were expensive but as luck would have it there was a promo offer - send off your console receipt for an Asteroids cartridge. That game was close to being worn out as my bro and I hammered that cartridge every day for a year. Others carts popped up with birthday money and when my cousins got one second hand with a pile of games a healthy swap system sprouted up.

They stayed over at times and they were epic multi-player marathon sessions on that old b&w TV.

The 2600 fired my interest in how it worked though - I could see the limitations of the system. It was particularly troubled when more than 2 sprites were positioned at the same height on screen which caused flickering and I wanted to know why. At the same time school started a Computer studies course and my working life was laid out at that point - one have I enjoyed and have consequently gained a decent living at. I'm glad my father saw that investment come to fruition - that the 2600 wasn't a fad and that it set me on a road that saw me earn a modest level of success.

Sadly I sold it a few years later - in theory to partially fund an 8bit micro but the money ended up in the tills of several pubs instead.

Glad to say i have since procured a replacement and after starting to collect carts again found out about the Harmony cartridge - a marvellous piece of tech that holds an SD card onto which I can copy as many ROMs as I like for playing after selecting from a neat menu system. I have it perma-setup in my gaming den with a CRT. It doesn't get regular use but it does get booted up from time to time. I've used it in two office gaming events - Tank Pong and Kaboom! and both events went down a treat.

davyK

@poprock - one of he 2600's launch titles was Video Olympics - a cart containing 50 variations on Pong. So it's likely you played that.

A basic console came with a set of two paddles and two joysticks. It also came with Combat in the box. Paddles are wired in pairs so paddle games can support up to 4 players. Indeed - the highlight of the Video Olympics cartridge is Quadrapong mode which sees each player assigned one edge of the screen - each guarding their own goal. It's a clear predecessor of Warlords - itself a classic 2600 game that the arcade game was developed from.

@g.man - Yars' Revenge was indeed the Daddy. A great old game that started as an attempt at porting Star Castle but when the dev realised it wasn't feasible he created this little gem instead. Howard Scott Warshaw was that dev - the same guy who coded ET. I played a lot of Yars as well.

retroking1981

@davyK there us an interview with Howard Scott Warshaw on episode 77 of The Retro Hour Podcast, definitely worth a listen mate.

davyK

atari 2600 launch titles:

Air Sea Battle - several timed target gallery style games that were popular in the arcade at the time with a military theme. I was never a big fan of it but it had a couple of 2 player versus modes that were worth a go.

Video Olympics- pong with 50 variations. Different field layouts and up to 4 players catered for. Apart from Quadrapong another highlight was volleyball which is played from a side on view not unlike the famous "Tennis to Two" which many claim as the first ever video game.

Star Ship primitive first person space shooter. A timed shooting gallery into-the-screen style of game that also appeared in arcades at the time. Has aged really badly. Atari pulled this one from its catalogue in the early 80s.

Surround Imagine 2 player versus mode of Snake. Great old game and still pretty enjoyable despite the ear-splitting sound effects. Features a Video Graffiti mode which is a primitive drawing toy. I remember my cousin drew a picture of a cock and balls with this on-screen much to our amusement.

Basic Math primitive educational game no doubt developed as a marketing ploy - also used a numeric keypad controller that was an attempt at selling more peripherals. Best left as a footnote in history

Combat Atari's port of the arcade game Tank - which incidentally was the first arcade video game that used a micro-processor instead of discrete logic.

The Atari did OK after launch but may have gone nowhere except for a little game called Space Invaders. Atari took a punt, paid a licence and the developer produced a cracking port that is still a playable game today with some entertaining 2 player turn-based and simultaneous modes. Apparently the developer experienced burn-out after this and is probably still embittered as he was a salary man at the time - before the royalty scheme came in to stop devs leaving and setting up indie houses such as Activision.

The 2600 market exploded after this and Atari started coding up ports of their own IP and licenced games from the likes of Namco and Stern. Of course many of these ports were simply too much for the hardware but some are still decent efforts (Berserk springs to mind as a decent attempt). However the Activision legal precedent opened the floodgates to far too many freeloaders and the whole thing collapsed under the weight of mediocrity, ludicrous marketing and sales targets, the advent of the home computer, and a level of fad burn out - known as the video game crash circa 1983 - long after the machine should have been retired.

Bushnell had wanted to replace the 2600 by '78-'79 as even by then it was aging but management after the Warner buy-out got rid of him and whored the ancient hardware into the ground. They made a packet but lost it too in the mid 80s.

The 2600 hardware was designed to play Pong and Tank. Two hardware sprites, 2 missile sprites and 1 ball sprite. The hardware can auto detect collisions with these objects and display some primitive background graphics but that's it. There is no screen buffer - devs have to time the graphics being drawn in synch with the CRT electron beam. Time for game logic , scores , collisions etc has to execute in the time it takes the CRT beam to move from the bottom right of the screen to the top left. A monumental technical challenge. What developers achieved on this platform was simply incredible and it was only their ingenuity that kept the platform viable at all in the 80s.

Today there are astounding home-brew ports that take advantage of advanced coding techniques and the fact that cartridge sizes are not limited by the price of ROM chips. Check out atariage.com if you are interested.

retroking1981

Atari 2600 was my first console.

I got it relatively late, 86/87 at a guess. It was definitely a budget system at the time and had been rebranded under the 2600 name with those red and silver (I think) boxes.

My Dad picked it up from a independent video rental store, it came with Kangaroo which I loved.

Games were fairly plentiful from what I remember, helped by it being an old hat budget system and my Mum being a big boot fair fanatic long before David Dickinson was a household name.

I most of the classics, Combat, Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Defender and Pole Position were all in the collection before long. Some were good ports, others poor but didn't know any better and loved them all. To me they're proper versions.

There was a few sports games in there to, Realsports Soccer and Boxing along with the amazing Ice Hockey from Activision.

It got packed away in 88 when I got a NES though, that was when the hobby really escalated for me.

In the mid 90s with a house full of Nintendo and Sega consoles I set the old Atari back up though, even back then I had a admiration for retro. Even got a few new games from a friend, people in school thought I was mad buying such relics, more fool them.

Anyway, the 2600 was my gateway into gaming, it was quickly replaced and Nintendo was what I consider to be the console that made gaming more than a passing fad for me, but the Atari will always be an important console that I have a huge soft spot for.

Fun fact: I didn't play Yars Revenge (and a couppe of others) until a few years ago from davys recommendation. It's a fantastic game, and definitely one of the best on the system. I certainly didn't expect to still be discovering 2600 games in the 2010s. Great stuff.

davyK

Emulation wise - there is the magnificent Stella. It can even recreate the CRT phosphor effects now. ROMs are everywhere - atariage has quite a few - including home-brew efforts.

For paddle games though you need the original hardware. Though I believe there are some paddle controller adaptors on the market now.

retroking1981

Atari: Game Over is well worth a watch for anyone interested in their rise and fall.

hylian_elf

I’m too young to remember Atari.

davyK

My favourites

Combat & Asteroids mentioned above.

Super Breakout
Kaboom! - pure in the zone gaming.
Ms. Pacman and Jr Pacman - wipe away the shoddy memory of the madness that was the original port.
Berzerk
Warlords
Dodge 'em
Maze Craze
Fishing Derby
Yars Revenge
Missile Command
Video Pinball
Surround
Chopper Command (superior Defender clone)
Demon Attack (top notch 2D shooter - stands out among the crowd)
Megamania - (another shooter - inspired by Sega's Astro Blaster.)
Atlantis - cross between Missile Command and a 2D shooter.
Space Shuttle - sim game with high production values inc. overlays for the console.

davyK

The Pacman port is interesting.

The guy who coded it - Todd Frye - coded up a prototype to prove the console could do it. To his horror management took it more or less as-is and ran with it. They spent a fortune acquiring the licence and even though it sold something like 8m copies (making a pile for Mr Frye who was enjoying the royalty scheme then) it's unlikely they actually made money as they projected selling more copies than there were consoles sold up to that point. Madness.

Many believe parents started to balk at paying $30 for what was a shoddy port - that the kids didn't seem to play as much - and that was the beginning of the end. Subsequent updates - Ms Pacman and Jr Pacman are really well crafted games - came too late.

Many blame the other farce at the time - the ET debacle -for the video game crash. An enforced 6 week project (games usually took 6 months) with another silly licence fee and projected sales.

No one game caused the crash. The thing had run its course and people kept piling money in thinking they could make it work.

The misunderstanding of the tech problems are probably best demonstrated by marketing who kept asking developers to make the ball round in sports games. The old lady needed to be retired - but her replacements the 5200 and 7800 were ill conceived and in the case of the 7800 - kept on ice for far too long and was launched in the face of a rampaging Nintendo. They didn't stand a chance.

The 7800 had a limited launch 2 years earlier (1984) and sold quite well - but management (Jack Tramiel - who was seething at a deal that fell through seeing tech he wanted go to Commodore) at the time wanted to get into the computer market and shelved it. The 7800 was a strong machine and very good at shifting sprites around but its sound capabilities were hampered by a cost cutting exercise and by the time they woke up in '86 Nintendo were on the march.

retroking1981

The 7800 was ready years before it came out, at that time it was actually pretty impressive apart from the sound chip which was the same one found in the 2600, what an odd decision. As was the one to sit on it doing nothing.

The 7800 still managed to outsell the Master System in the US though.

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