50 years as a brand, but it’s not the same company, I don’t think.
Anyone have fond memories of Atari games throughout their 50 year memory? I do and will share below. Also, how the heck did they mess up so bad that they were left out of the major game industry today?
My best memories:
My Dad got us an Atari 2600 around 1983-84. Realize I thought it was a brand new system at the time since I was just a kid and whatever Dad said was cool was cool.
We loved it. It came with Pac-man, which we loved. My Mom was great at it and I even remember my Grandma(born in 1918!) playing it with us. We also loved Spider-man, Popeye, Donkey Kong, and Combat!
I don’t think I understood that it was an “older” system when we got it until many years later. I thought it was the latest and greatest technology and had not seen an NES or even high-quality PC machine at that point.
It was also the only system my parents ever got us. We ended up playing DOS and Windows games only after it. Which was actually fine, too.
We got an Atari 2600 circa 1984-ish. Games I definitely remember having were Pac-Man, Pole Position, Combat, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.
I think Combat and E.T. may have actually gotten the most gameplay. Combat was four different games in one that my brother and I would play against each other, and as for E.T., I was only a little kid at the time, I hadn’t seen the movie (still haven’t, actually), and I had no clue what was happening or why, but for some reason I loved the game. I remember enjoying Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I had seen that movie, so I did understand what was happening and what I was supposed to do. I don’t remember ever getting to the end, though.
Similarly to the OP, it was the only game console we ever had, and shortly after that my dad got the first of a long series of PC clones and we were DOS gamers from then on, until I bought myself a Playstation in the late 90s in college.
In September 1984, I started college and I brought with my a Commodore 64 as my computer. My roommate brought an Atari 800. I had a 300 baud modem (which meant that I could read faster than the text downloaded to the screen), while he had a 1200 baud modem.
I remember Dad brining home a 2600 for us in 79’ from JCPennys. It died during the first week we had it.
He took it back to exchange and brought something else home telling us “the guy at the store said this is brand new and is better”. It was. I was the first kid on the block with a Mattel Intellivision and it left the Atari in it’s dust.
An Atari 7800 was the first “real” video game system we ever had (we also had Pong, which played just Pong). I don’t remember too much about it, except that I enjoyed playing Jr. Pac Man on it, which I’ve never been able to find anywhere else. The mazes were massive, there were like six ghosts, and if one of the wandering treats touched a power pellet, they were mutually destroyed.
We had an Atari 2600 in the house. Not sure when it was purchased, exactly. I was born in '78 and only have the faintest memories of it–Combat, specifically. I’d guess I was only around 4. It disappeared pretty quickly, though–good chance it was acquired in a trade for some car parts, and then traded away almost as quickly. I never had another console until an Xbox much later. I did have a Vic 20, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, and a long series of PCs.
The first time I saw an Atari 800 computer playing Star Raiders projected on a big screen, I was starstruck and started jonesing for one so bad instead of my old tired TRS-80.
I never got around to buying one but the memory remains.
We had an Atari VCS when I was a kid. That was what the 2600 was originally called, but we just called it an Atari. Hearing people refer to it as an Atari 2600 gives me approximately the same “get off my lawn” feeling as hearing people refer to the movie “Star Wars” as “A New Hope.”
Ours was an actual Atari, but I remember the game room at church had one of Sears’s rebranded, relabeled versions.
By July of 1983, Pizza Time was beginning to hemorrhage money, reporting their first loss ever at $3 million. Keenan and other board members attempted to stop the bleeding by closing unprofitable units and changing the pizza recipe to entice customers. Bushnell however believed that Sente would cure all of Pizza Time’s troubles once he was able to debut the company, finally free from the non-compete agreement he was still bound by (which expired on December 9, 1983 at 10:08 a.m.) He also refused to let go of Kadabrascope and Zapp’s in order to free up cash for the company.
The successful year-end to 1983 that Bushnell had anticipated never came. As problems continued to mount, Bushnell resigned as chairman and CEO on February 1, 1984. Straddled with debt and losing close to $20 million per month, Pizza Time Theatre Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 28, 1984.
The Atari 2600 blew my mind when I was in junior high. Kids today wouldn’t be able to fathom it, but the mere fact that the TV was now interactive was like a miracle. Prior, it had just been something you looked at while sitting on the couch. Even something basic like Pong. “I’m controlling the movement of that paddle!”
I liked Adventure, Baseball, Hockey, some kind of skiing thing if I remember right, basketball, pac man, the one where you move the turtle (?) across lanes of traffic, the other one with the swinging from vines hanging on trees with the crocodiles beneath, missle command, space invaders, and I see you mentioned Combat.
Us junior high doofuses used to think it was real funny that in Combat, if you positioned one tank behind a stationary tank, and moved the “behind” tank forward, it bounced and the tanks looked like they were, as we called it, boofing.
yeah, but wasn’t Bushnell gone from Atari by then?
I remember him being scared when they were trying to go public and selling to warners who ironically owns all the rights to the arcade andconsole games today
