The 2600 (I never even heard of the other consoles until at least the PS2 era):
Liked: For a callow elementary schooler who got zero respect or dignity from anybody, had no access to anything cool, and was on the goddam rock bottom of every totem pole, everywhere, the concept of “unlimited fun on demand” was paradise. If I could reach the maximum score of 99, I’d do it again. If I couldn’t reach it, I’d get as high a score as possible. Over and over and over and over. It never got old.
Disliked: Little things. Even with blocky graphics, a more descriptive interface would’ve been a good idea. It would’ve also been a good idea to let the players select each game parameter whether than one of several preset parameter blocks. A game menu would’ve also been good, so you didn’t have to cycle past two dozen games every time you accidentally skipped past Polaris vs. Bomber or whichever.
(Oh yeah, leave this here, do I.)
The early modern era (1984-1989)
Liked: Amazing creativity (Newspaper delivery! Futuristic skateboarding! Collecting shiny objects! Rolling a marble! Robot football!) and a refusal to adhere to formula.
Disliked: Merciless. No continues/limited continues was a terrible idea (in fairness, more than a few companies did this). Level of required precision and reflexes could get insane. Nobody ever got good at Super Sprint.
Technology marches on! (1990-1995)
Liked: Old ideas given a fresh coat of paint. The heyday of digitized graphics, which were just unspeakably radical at the time.
Disliked: Expensive. This was where Atari seemed to fully embrace the keep-shovelling-in-the-tokens mindset. For an impoverished college student still not used to the idea of shelling out more than $3 a week, that was a big turnoff.
Clinging to relevance (1996-1999)
Liked: Erm…I sorta liked California Speed in a dumb way, and War Final Assault was not bad for working out my frustrations. Usually.
Disliked: Just outdated at this point, everything they’re doing done better by some other company. Nearly everything has clunky graphics, piles on frustration, costs too much, or is a combination of the three.
by that time it was just atari in name only as atari games (aka the arcade division) was actually a division of midway they just kept the atari brand if I remember the last atari arcade game was “Radikal bikers” a bike racing game where you delivered pizzas on a BMX
Although mark Cerny who was behind most of the mid-80s games like paperboy and 720 is the head designer of the PS4 and 5
Yeah, this is a weird little bit of trivia on the console. The Atari 2600 wasn’t called the 2600 until the 5200 came out in 1982 and they retroactively renamed the original VCS as the 2600 (after their internal manufacturing ID, as I recall) in order to differentiate models.
Eh. I don’t keep track of these things. Corporate structuring and ownership and the difference between a “developer” and a “publisher” was stuff I never had a handle on when I actually cared about video games, much less now. As long as someone was giving me Roadrunner and Pit Fighter, I didn’t quibble.
That said, if we are keeping the discussion to vintage consoles, here’s a quick listing of some of my favorite 2600 games:
Street Racer - Classic “99 fest/how high can you score” game. (I do think Number Cruncher should’ve been best 3 out of 5, but that’s a small quibble.) Gave me the feel of exhilarating speed at a time few other games did. Surprising variety of concepts given the simple theme.
Combat - Move your thing around, blast the other thing. Barely ever needed a second player. Triple plane vs. bomber was a turkey shoot; loved it (I’m sure you all did too ). Played “guided missiles” to death; really sharpened my hand-eye coordination for later games.
Air-Sea Battle - Another 99/score romp. I could spend hours on it at a stretch. Downing planes, torpedoing ships, dealing with those annoying 0-point obstructions, always wanted to shoot just one more.
Baseball - Pitch wonkery! Finding gaps! Unavoidable hit-by-pitches! Unassisted quadruple plays!
Outlaw - I blasted the crap out of more walls here than in Breakout. In the target games, I’d smash the obstacle, nail the target 10 times at point-blank range, snicker at my deviousness, and then wonder if that was actually faster. This game added “ricochet” to my vocabulary. Great stuff all around.
Brain Games - The closest thing to being on a game show without…y’know, needing actual game show skills.
Sure, the graphics were clunky compared to today. They seemed less so at the time. You didn’t need any graphics to enjoy Infocom or adventures written by Scott Adams. (I once complimented the Dilbert guy on this, and he said he liked them too but it was a different Scott Adams). It seemed unreal when Lucasfilm came up with games that had marginally less clunky graphics.
But they were often really fun to play. Games like Joust, Archon, Star Raiders, Shamus, Pharaoh’s Curse, Spy Vs. Spy, Jumbo Jet Pilot, Blue Max, Eastern Front, Imperium Galactium, Seven Cities of Gold… provided me with thousands of hours of enjoyment before Civilization was a thing. To name just a few.
I have it in the full size aracde, along with Battlezone, Tempest, Ms Pac man and Star Wars.
We were too poor to own a game console in the 70s, so I guess I’m making up for it.
Though I liked playing Canyon Bomber and Breakout on my friend’s console. Neither coincidentally nor ironically, I also own Arkanoid in an arcade machine.
I played Adventure on a neighbor’s Atari and I was immediately hooked. I pestered my parents immediately thereafter for one. It took a few years for the prices to go down so my parents finally bought us one.
They wouldn’t let me hook it up to the living room TV because they were convinced it would “ruin the color” whatever that means but we had it in the living room off to the side on a small B&W TV. My favorite games that we had were Yar’s Revenge, Pitfall, a Space shooter from Activision whose name I forget and, yes, ET. I actually liked playing ET. I loved the vrooom sound it made when you stretched his neck.
But our most popular game was a soccer game. That was the one people came over to play. We would set the TV up in the backyard and have tournaments. The game had a quirk where you could go out the bottom of the screen and come out the top so you could do steals that were impossible in soccer but always caused cheers.
By the time I got my Atari, Adventure was hard to find so I didn’t have it right away but at some point my mother found a used copy and gave it to me for either Christmas or my Birthday I forget which. That was definitely my Red Ryder moment that year. I loved it and its Sea Horse looking Dragons that everyone else said looked like ducks.
Oh yeah, I was hooked on my Atari 2600 in the 80s - can’t remember exactly when we got it. Played the hell out of Combat, Pitfall, Adventure, and Space Invaders. I still remember this little hack in Space Invaders: if you flipped the power switch off and on twice quickly, your spaceship would shoot two shots instead of one. That allowed me to cheat my way through the entire game and “flip” the score.
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