Are you a nearly old fart like me who refuses to grow up? Well if you are, there is a very good chance that you had an Atari 2600 and absolutely loved it as well. That single-button joystick goodness was something that is difficult to believe was considered cutting edge at some point and even more difficult to believe that when inflation is factored in that it cost quite a lot more than a Playstation 5 when it was released.
Despite the fact that gaming at home, especially when every game consisted of squares and you can now fit every Atari game ever made into a file that is smaller than just ONE photo that you take with your camera phone, this system sold like mad. Basically everyone had one of them and Atari became a household name.
I have fond memories of a lot of these games but I am not going to go back and play them lest I ruin my childhood. These games are terrible by today's standards with a few exceptions but here are what my favorites were anyway.
The famous game Breakout probably came first and there is no denying that this game is simply trying to be like that. In the game you control a couple of guys on a teeter-totter of sorts that would fly them up into the air with the intention of popping all the square balloons. The sound effects were repetitive and annoying and the game didn't change no matter how long you played it but we LOVED it!
I'm a huge fan of RPG's and for me, this is where it all began. You had to make your way to 3 castles that had dragons in them that didn't have to obey the laws of physics like you did. You could kill them with your arrow sword, but the problem was that you could only carry one item at a time and the chances of you actually having your arrow sword on you at the time were not great. The idea was to get the chalice back to your yellow castle after navigating the rather huge world that the 3 castles occupied. The game wasn't always exactly the same each time since there was some sort of randomizer that placed various items in different places on each playthrough.
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That dragon never stood a chance vs my sword!
Another Breakout style game, Warlords was the only game I am aware of on the Atari 2600 that supported up to 4 players at once. You needed to have 4 "wheel" controllers in order to make this happen but on the few occasions that I was in a situation where this could happen, it was endless fun. There were number of different game options that included many different projectiles and if you wanted to, you could gang up on one of the other members and controllers were thrown as were tantrums over this game. It was the original "party game" in my world.
This is the only game on the 2600 that I believe has withstood the test of time and is still fun to play today and you can do so without installing anything just by going to this website which also features many of the other 2600 favorites on the same page.
The idea behind this game is simple: get of out the maze as quickly as possible and if you have a 2nd player, get out before they do. The mazes were randomly drawn as far as I could tell so it wasn't possible for your pal to memorize the boards and beat you just by familiarity. The only downside of this system is that since the boards were randomly drawn, every now and then the exit to the maze would be directly next to where one of you starts, and on the other side of the screen for the other. Arguments ensued about whether or not the board was fair on many occasions.
You spoiled brats of today will never be able to understand the joy we felt at a repetitive game that didn't have any clear objectives and basically appeared to carry on forever in both directions on the screen. While I never saw it, apparently the game did have an ending once a certain number of objectives were accomplished and then the game would just freeze. That was the ending to the game. We had very low standards of our games at this point and I don't know if Activision just figured nobody would ever figure out how to win the game or if they just didn't know what to do at that point. It was probably a combination of both of these things.
The Atari 2600 will go down in the recordbooks as being the system that brought gaming to the masses. Consequently, Atari was also responsible for nearly destroying the home console industry because they got seriously lazy in the early 80's because they had completely dominated the market and had no real competition. After a series of turd games being released the masses were upset and many people had vowed off home gaming because of it. Thank goodness that Nintendo came along and set things right in the mid 80's. I can honestly say that when that time came, that very few people were still gaming on their 2600's anymore, even if you were a kid like me. I would imagine we went outside and played sports or something silly like that.
As the years went by and systems got better and better, my parents and many other parents realized the addictive nature of these machines and would limit the amount of time I was allowed to play them each day. I hope that parents are still implementing this to this day because today's games are far more engaging than anything we had back then.
