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50 Years of Atari
Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2022 10:18 pm
by Strider
June 27th (today as I post this), marks 50 years since Atari was founded by
Nolan Bushnell and
Ted Dabney. Technically speaking, the Magnavox Odyssey was the first console I ever got to play around on, but I have very little memory of it outside of photos and stories from my parents, and most of what I personally remember about it comes from years later, once I was old enough. I knew the Atari name before we had a 2600 thanks to our local arcade, but the 2600 is where it really started for me. Like so many of us, the Atari 2600 was the first console I really remember, and gave me countless hours of entertainment. I remember absolutely loving games like Pac-Man, Combat, Adventure, Pitfall, Yars Revenge, Frogger, Missile Command, Asteroids, Space Invaders, the list goes on and on. The system and it's games are iconic, even 50 years later. Heck, I even played the crap out of ET becasue I was too young to really realize how "bad" it was.
I have many fond memories playing on the 2600 with friends and family, and even sneaking out of bed late of night, taking a small portable B&W TV into my walk-in closet, hooking my 2600 up to it, and staying up all night playing games.
Do you have any fond memories of Atari , the 2600, or any of Atari's others offerings? Did you really think ET was so bad to deserve all the hate it gets? I even owned and loved another of Atari's failures, the Jaguar!
Edit: I've been playing Atari Vault over on Steam far too much today.
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50 Years of Atari
Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2022 3:33 am
by Scott Robison
I thought ET was that bad. Not a fan. I loved the port of Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator, Frogger, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Asteroids...
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:39 am
by Cyber
Atari was not available on the market in my country, but we had chineese knock-off of Atari 2600 named Rambo. It was pretty accurate copy of Atari 2600 and it had about hundred of games built in. Lucky for us, because cartridges was not available on the market. And despite the fact it was available in eraly 90's along with NES, Spectrum and early IBM PC clones, we still loved to play it. I remeber that some of the Atari 2600 (Rambo for us back then) games we found unique for ourselves in terms of gameplay. Simple graphics was not a problem for us at all.
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2022 4:48 am
by Cyber
Oh, I also remeber we called Rambo a 4 bit console. Why you ask? Well, we had NES/Famicom clone named Dendy which was known to be 8 bit, and we had Sega Mega Drive which was known to be 16 bit. And 8 bit console was inferior to 16 bit console in terms of graphics and sound. Rambo looked inferior to NES/Famicom/Dendy both in terms of graphics and sound, but it was not known how many bits it is. So we decided it to be a 4 bit console. )
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Wed Jun 29, 2022 7:07 am
by Edmond D
I remember being "lost" (to my parents) in a mall in Detroit on a family Xmas trip in 1978. I had fun glued in front of the demo machine playing combat; my parents not so much as they searched for me. ?
I never had a 2600, but of course there were always friends who had a unit and I got to play it from time to time.
Somewhere in my crawlspace collection is a CD with some of the classic 2600 titles that ran on a PC. I'll get to it again someday....
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2022 5:00 pm
by Strider
On 6/29/2022 at 2:07 AM, Edmond D said:
I remember being "lost" (to my parents) in a mall in Detroit on a family Xmas trip in 1978. I had fun glued in front of the demo machine playing combat; my parents not so much as they searched for me. ?
I never had a 2600, but of course there were always friends who had a unit and I got to play it from time to time.
Somewhere in my crawlspace collection is a CD with some of the classic 2600 titles that ran on a PC. I'll get to it again someday....
My first exposure to the 2600 was at a friends, his family was one of those that always had to have the latest and greatest things, we got ours later for Christmas.
? I used to have a huge CD-Rom collection, but got rid of all but a few many years back. Wish I had kept more of them. However I did find two CD's that somehow managed to survive the purge just a few days ago, both Atari.
Circa 1999, Windows 95/98.
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50 Years of Atari
Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2022 10:38 pm
by John Chow Seymour
My first home console was a 2600, specifically the "Sears Telegames" model. It surely was an odd time in retail history when a company thought they could sell more units by letting the Sears department store put their store brand on onto their video game system. Sears was truly the Amazon of their day, NA's largest retailer; if you could get a product in Sears it was your ticket to success. But the 2600 sold better than even Atari expected; turns out they would have done just fine even without Sears' help.
My favorite game was probably Joust, as a kid I played against any neighborhood kid whom I could coerce into playing against me, and when none were around, I played against the computer.
Another favorite was Adventure. Most games back then just got harder and harder until they weren't humanly possible anymore. But Adventure was a story with a set of puzzles and mazes to solve, and an ending - you could "beat" the game. And I did! It was the first game I ever "finished."
We had Pitfall and Asteroids, both of which I know are famous, but I did not enjoy either one of those.
I got an NES for Christmas when I was 6 years old, and set it up next to the Atari - and continued to play both for several more years. I think the arrival of the SNES is what finally caused me to pack the Atari away.
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Sat Jul 02, 2022 11:17 pm
by Strider
On 7/2/2022 at 5:38 PM, John Chow Seymour said:
My first home console was a 2600, specifically the "Sears Telegames" model. It surely was an odd time in retail history when a company thought they could sell more units by letting the Sears department store put their store brand on onto their video game system. Sears was truly the Amazon of their day, NA's largest retailer; if you could get a product in Sears it was your ticket to success. But the 2600 sold better than even Atari expected; turns out they would have done just fine even without Sears' help.
My favorite game was probably Joust, as a kid I played against any neighborhood kid whom I could coerce into playing against me, and when none were around, I played against the computer.
Another favorite was Adventure. Most games back then just got harder and harder until they weren't humanly possible anymore. But Adventure was a story with a set of puzzles and mazes to solve, and an ending - you could "beat" the game. And I did! It was the first game I ever "finished."
We had Pitfall and Asteroids, both of which I know are famous, but I did not enjoy either one of those.
I got an NES for Christmas when I was 6 years old, and set it up next to the Atari - and continued to play both for several more years. I think the arrival of the SNES is what finally caused me to pack the Atari away.
Joust! That was one of my favorite games on NES, I actually never had it on the 2600.
Honestly, if I had to pick just a couple games to play on the 2600, Yars Revenge was probably my favorite to play by myself, and I really don't know why, but I loved that game. When it came to playing with friends it was almost always Combat and Warlords, we played those into the ground before we had an NES to play. I did the same thing as you when we got our NES, I played it side by side with the 2600 for quite some time. Eventually the 2600 just got pushed out becasue I started playing more on computers.
I could have sworn our 2600 came from Sears, but it wasn't the Telegames model they sold, just the standard 2600, but I could be misremembering. I just know we bought just about everything from Sears back then. Our Sears was in a mall at the time, and they had a Toy's R Us right next to it, and my parents would let me go into the Toy's R Us and get lost in the video games while they went into Sears. Different times back then. lol
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 3:05 am
by BruceMcF
On 7/2/2022 at 7:17 PM, Strider said:
I could have sworn our 2600 came from Sears, but it wasn't the Telegames model they sold, just the standard 2600, but I could be misremembering. ...
The Sears Telegames I see on Ebay is a Pong knockoff ... we had a very similar unit except it was branded as a Tandy.
50 Years of Atari
Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2022 5:42 am
by Strider
On 7/2/2022 at 10:05 PM, BruceMcF said:
The Sears Telegames I see on Ebay is a Pong knockoff ... we had a very similar unit except it was branded as a Tandy.
I've seen the Sears "Telegames" 2600's for sale in second-hand shops and such, just never owned one. The more I think about it the more I'm thinking my parents picked up ours at Toys R Us, it was right next door to Sears and we were there a lot as well.
I do remember that games at Sears sometimes had different packaging, they didn't look as cool, I think they even lacked cover art on the carts themselves if I recall correctly.
Edit: A trip down memory lane...
