The Atari 2600 turns 30 this month
Electronic gaming didn’t start with the Atari 2600. In fact, the first console I ever had was a Coleco Telstar Arcade; my sister and I got it for Christmas in 1976 or 1977. For its time it was a wonderful new toy, having three videogames in it, one game for each side of the triangle the machine was built into. Back then kids were mystified by little red LEDs in games like Mattell Football or Merlin. To be able to play games on a television was just mind-blowing since the only way you could do it back then was in an arcade for 25 cents a pop on machines that cost hundreds of dollars.
Back when I was a kid I used to take things apart and figure out how they worked, but unlike today where you can get arrested for breaking the DMCA, I used to take apart calculators and tried to understand what made them tick. My first “hack” was with this Telstar. I found that every time you reset the racing game it would start from a cycle of patterns, and if you know where the cars start from, you can play the entire game without crashing once. The Telstar was nice but lacked diversity.
On Christmas Eve 1979, my dad brought home an Atari 2600. I had been egging him on for one for a while because the Telstar Arcade had gotten tired real fast. The only game in the box was Combat, but what a huge difference it was than the Telstar. A joystick, better sound, more options for the game itself, all in this one little cartridge. The problem was that my sister wasn’t too interested in playing a video game, and with Combat being a 2-player game only, I had to find a better game to play alone.
I don’t remember what my first game was, but I think it was Space Invaders. I was bummed that it didn’t reflect the arcade version perfectly, but it was much more economical to play it at home than in an arcade. Still, I think the arcade version was better. It was the first game I remember getting “Atari palm” from, where the corner of the joystick would dig into your left palm after playing so much. I got other games like Surround, Breakout, Superman, Kaboom! and Adventure. I tried the Swordquest series but didn’t like it too much. I loved Frogger. The theme was so addicting my mom used to sing it.
There was a fellow student in my junior high that lived up the street from me whose mother worked for some company related to Imagic. He’d bring over games before they were released like Demon Attack. Oh, how I loved that game. To this day I still fire it up sometimes.
I remember when I first got Asteroids, it was the very first time I pulled an all-nighter. I just played until 6am the following morning. That was my first videogame obsession. Who knew what it would lead into? 
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Pac-Man was hyped like you wouldn’t believe. The fact that another big arcade game was coming to the 2600 was a big deal. I remember the day I picked up Pac-Man and just sat there thinking “this is crap”. I tried to like it but couldn’t. What a terrible let down. So much hype and the game didn’t deliver. Things haven’t changed much, have they?
Pitfall was the first game I bought with my own money and I had a blast playing it. The concept was very simple: just keep moving, grab treasure, and don’t die. The trick was to find the best route using shortcuts. I don’t remember what my high score was, but I had spent a lot of time perfecting the run. Activision had done something that’s akin to today’s Xbox Live achievements. If you send a screenshot of your score, they’ll send you a patch if your score is high enough. Check out the patch gallery at Atariage.com.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first true adventure game. Sure there was Adventure and Vanguard, but I really thought that Raiders put you in the game, you felt like you were doing something epic. For starters, you needed two joysticks. One controlled Indy, the other controlled your inventory slots. I read rumors that a perfect score would grant you the signature of Howard Scott Warsaw, but I never got it, as hard as I tried. There was no internet back then to research it with.
The great thing about the Atari was that you didn’t have to bring the whole console to a friend’s house that already had the 2600, you just take the carts with you. A lot of us traded carts all the time. I still have some of my old carts in a box in the garage.
I eventually sold my Atari 2600 at the Trenton Computer Show in 1986 for something like $25. I was a starving college student then and I already had an Atari 800 computer, so I didn’t really need it, nor did I miss it. Since then I did buy a refurbished one with jacks for S-Video and RCA audio.
If anyone’s interested in looking back at some of the games that were so influential, check out Atariage.com. There you can find ROM images and emulators for pretty much any platform.
To Be Continued Wallpaper
In 2004 I had reproduced one of my favorite Atari 2600 ads “To Be Continued”. I got all hi-res images of the boxes in the original ad and fixed them all up. There are wallpapers for 1024×768, 1600×1200, and 1920×1200.
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