I've never seen an actual Atari 2600 in person before. I finally get to try one out and play some random games my Dad found for me. #atari #pacman #atari2600 #cool #combat
Mad respect to a kid in the 2020's taking an interest in the Pioneering days of gaming. Being born in 81, playing on an Atari was probably my first experience with video games.
Back in the day, the Atari 2600 actually had six switches. I'm not sure which two they've eliminated. I got one for Christmas in 1977, when I was exactly your age, and to me and my friends it was the greatest thing ever!
I was born in 1974 and had so many 2600 games. Adventure and Haunted House were some of my favorites but the most abscure game I had was Porky's, based on the movie of the same name
How about I explain this for the questions of the first game of why there was a shark it’s let’s say it’s a evolved for freshwater and now guppies are part of its diet now
I got mine in 1981/82. It had six switches. Still have it but not sure which one of the three I own it is. Talking of Vader, last year I picked up a four-switch version like yours but where the woodgrain has been replaced by a black bezel. This is affectionately called "the Vader" by collectors.
Nice to see the Atari 2600 still picking up new fans after all these years. Even when I was born, 1986, the NES was the new hotness and by the time I was old enough to _really_ get into gaming, it was the SNES and Sega Genesis. Despite playing games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country on my SNES, I'd often play on my cousin's Atari and be charmed by how well those games played despite looking so primitive. And the same rings true to this day: a good game is a good game, no matter how the graphics look!
Would correct you on the RAM claim. The Atari only has 128 bytes of RAM, which means it has to store the entire game state in 128 values that can hold any value from 0 to 255. The NES that came after had 2kb or RAM. The cartridges had ROM chips ranging from the common 4kb to a few or maybe just one game with whopping 64kb of ROM. This was achieved with a technique called bank switching, which means that there's a chip in the cartridge that routes the CPU data requests to memory space of the cartridge that is out of the range that the CPU can normally use.
The graphics may look primitive today, but they were impressive back in the late 1970s. You have to take into consideration that before this (that general time period), home video games didn't exist. None, nada, ziltch. TV was for watching. Period. Also, nobody owned computers. There were arcade machines in places like department stores, movie theaters and such, but they were huge, bulky machines. To be able to hook a relatively small box up to your TV and see moving, color graphics that you could control, was incredible. The first home video games were literally B/W and only played Pong. A rectangle on each side of the screen to represent a paddle, a line down the center of the screen to represent the net, and a small square for the ball. Early consoles didn't even print the score on the screen, it was a digital counter on the console itself. Early ones also didn't output sound to the TV, it came out of a speaker on the console itself. When the Atari 2600 came out, it was a huge step up, in color, in graphics quality and in sound. Also, the fact that you could just plug in a new cartridge and have all new games to play. Finally, not all Atari games are as simple as these. Raiders of the Lost Ark was an early adventure game requiring multiple steps to finish it. Mountain King required you to collect 1000 points in diamonds, go to the bottom, steal the crown and then take it to the highest peak, without having it stolen by a bat. Games like Starmaster and Phaser Patrol had you flying your ship to different sectors, battling enemies in a first-person perspective, taking damage and docking for repairs. You could even play chess against the computer, although on the higher levels, it could take a LONG time to decide on a move. Think of it this way: Today you play VR games and think they look great. 30-50 years from now, you'll probably be able to put your mind inside the game, like The Matrix, and kids then will look at today's VR games and think "What a primitive piece of junk!"
When the Atari 2600 came out it was the state of the art gaming console. There was nothing else even close in the late 70's. And believe it or not the Atari Pac-Man game was extremely popular when it came out, mostly due to the popularity of the arcade Pac-Man game. Also of note the original Donkey Kong game was released on the Atari, which had an interesting character named Mario.
Dad - you’re teaching your son well! And son - great sense of humor! You’re a lucky kid - appreciate your pops. If you haven’t tried two player Maze Craze yet - that’s easily my favorite vs. game. (I particularly like the version where you first have to catch the three robbers, and you can leave fake walls.) On an unrelated note, who did the remix of Ice Ice Baby on your “Hidden Arcade” short?
Thanks! If you click the little box in the lower right corner of that video. It will show the song. It says Zumba remix ice ice Baby. My dad picked it. 😅
FYI, it had 128bytes of RAM. Far less than 2KB. Also, Dragonfire was one of my favorites and my brother loaned the cart to some guy at school and I never saw it again.
the cover art contributed massively to the games selling . The arcade cabinets then were also covered with designs that lent to the games attractiveness and appeal its strange how that works .
I was of the NES and master system generation being 40 I didn’t play much Atari though I briefly had an intellivision of a neighbour but just didn’t compare.
Combat had some crazy game modes that I really enjoyed as a kid. My favorire was the mode where one was a large airplane and the other player three tiny airplanes. Oh, and I remember how Pitfall 2 had blown my mind the first time. A game with BGM was something unheard of at that time. Some jingle as you won, maybe, but a constant BGM while you played? That was mindblowing.
Pitfall 2 had a special custom chip that David Crane designed. It streamed the music to the 2600's sound chip, which played it back essentially as digitised music, like a CD with much worse quality. Equally the chip would stream to the graphics chip, providing the level data at exactly the right moment. The 2600 processed the gameplay and told the cart what to start sending, and it did, the console just copied this stream of graphics to the graphics chip. I dunno a lot about the custom chip but it must have been very clever, on a level comparable to the 2600's chips themselves. All 3 of them!
It sounded in the beginning like you were jut going to be ragging on the game system, and that wouldn't have been cool. But you gave it an honest shot, and had some fun with it. Props to you! The Atari wasn't all that great in the graphics (especially in the early days), but the game play was often a lot of fun ... more fun than a lot of the later systems that chose to spent much more time on incredible graphics, but none on game play.
Great runthrough! I was born in 1987 and this was my first system that I was playing in the Early 90s, it was obviously already considered terrible by then, but it's what I started out with as a 3-5 year old. I'm impressed to see kids your age even having the patience and understanding to put up with a 2600 for as long as you did. I've been a lifelong gamer and prefer retro gaming to modern gaming, but even I can't tolerate Atari stuff anymore. I also had a Commodore 64 at the same time as my Atari, which was a far better gaming platform and had way better graphics and sounds, but the games took forever to load (literally 10 minutes to start some of them up)
That's why a lot of people had fast loader cartridges. They didn't do much to speed up loading loading original disks, but they worked great on cracked games.
I have to note that there are multiple species of freshwater shark and several which can swim in both fresh and salt water. So, in fact, that could be a shark in freshwater.
Cool to see new generations introduced where it all begun basically! Was never nuts about Atari, even though I'm almost 32, and grew up on N64, GBA, SNES, and PS1. I can always appreciate what the Atari brought to the table; if there was no Atari, there would be no NES, SNES, N64, or a PS1 for that matter.
Lol.. I remember those days. I got an Atari 5200 and was jazzed with that one (Pole Position, Pacman, Berserker were the best), then didn't see, hear, nor touch a gaming console until I got my hands on a SEGA Dreamcast which I loved.
Good to see a 12yr old enjoying old Atari games with family like this. It's kinda like a fun history lesson too, seeing the first ever popular console, what games were like when the technology was way more basic. The best two player Atari games are still fun though and none of that is important when you're playing 😀
@@geeare80why66 You should check out the homebrews still being made for it! 45+ years later and some homebrew coders are doing really cool things with it.
River Raid with a paddle? I've only ever used joystick. I honestly didn't even know you COULD play it with a paddle. (You're in a canyon is why hitting the "land" kills you. Assume the ships shoot you down with guns or missiles.) Also remember that the 2600 version of Pac Man is pretty much the worst version ever made .
There was the Atari 2600 and later the ZX Spectrum. No other console or system could reach the magic of these two systems for me. Not the C64 or the Amiga, nor the NES or the Super NES. I can't explain what it is, but I had the feeling playing pioneer's stuff back in the 70th and early 80th. I still love and play both systems.
The driving controller, and the analogue paddle used for Kaboom and Breakout etc, are 2 different controllers, though they look the same. The principle difference for the player, is that the driving controller can turn round and round endlessly, where the analogue paddle can only turn through a certain range, around 300 degrees or so, with a stop at each end that you can't go past. Same as a volume knob, if you know what one of those is, and actually the exact same electrical component. The technology inside them is different too, they use different methods to detect movement, but that's not very important. Point is, they're not interchangable. Early purchasers got 2 joysticks and 1 pair of paddles. I think you always got that. The 2 paddles shared 1 controller port, so you could plug in 4 paddles altogether, and a few games even supported that. The driving controller you'd have to purchase yourself.
I have a Sunnyvale Heavy 6 and a regular one and the Flashback 9. Pac-Man was ok back then because it could be played at home without pumping tons of quarters in at the arcade. I loved and still love Combat. Pong, Break Out, Cosmic Arc, Space Invaders, Berzerk, Food Fight, Moon Patrol, etc. The Flashback system with ROMS added on my big screen in HD is the way to go now but I still crank up the Heavy Six on a 26 inch CRT sometimes.
I came out the same year as the Atari VCS(2600), Commodore 64, Apple ][, "Smokey And The Bandit", "Star Wars", "The Rescuers", "Pete's Dragon"(original) and many more things! Oh and "Slow Hand" Lp "Album" by Eric Clapton! 😁😁
There's actually 6 switches. Early models had them on the front. Later ones, Atari moved the Player 1 and 2 difficulty switches to the back and made them unobtrusive little switches you might miss. The woodgrain is some unfathomable phenomenon of the 1970s. EVERYTHING had woodgrain then, it was really classy. The same way as in the 1980s everything was black and chrome. Coooool! The console actually has 128 BYTES of RAM. That's it! Your game needs more than 128 variables, you can't do it! The cartridges, though, were 2K or 4K ROM in the early days. Later on they figured out how to put another chip in the cart that could switch around 4K banks of ROM, a primitive "mapper" to put it in Nintendo-speak. Even smarter carts had RAM on board, maybe 1 or 2 whole kilobytes! Since the cart didn't have a read / write line, because it was intended for read-only memory, you had to use one set of addresses to read the RAM, and another to write to it. Engineers were CLEVER back then. I could go on and on about the graphics system. But basically it was invented for the games that were in arcades in the '70s. So, Pong, Breakout, and Tank. "Tank" was turned into the famous Combat cart that came with the early systems, giving not just Tank but aeroplanes and all sorts of mad stuff, all in just 2K. It must be the most playable game per byte ever written! So when later games came along they were really pushing it, the console wasn't meant to have more than 2 sprites and a chunky, blocky background on screen, it wasn't intended for hi-res. Only having 2 sprites means some games alternated them per TV frame, giving the famous flicker. In Pac Man, all 4 ghosts were drawn with just 1 sprite, alternated over every 4 frames. Looked terrible but Atari explained it by saying "they're ghosts, of course they're faint and flickery." Anyway. There's the famous STELLA.DOC you could read to understand the hardware. It makes you appreciate how smart they were to get so much out of so little, out of a console that wasn't meant to have games that filled the screen with detailed stuff. The really smart programmers at places like Activision managed to re-use sprites so effectively there was no flicker, just as long as they were each on their own vertical section of the screen. Fishing Derby is a good example of that, only 1 fish sprite, and possibly the shark, on each group of horizontal lines. 1 or 2 sprites.
Cartridge art was a THING in the 1980s. They used the same style as sci-fi comics to try to attract the same crowd/interest group and it largely worked. Asteroids was my first Atari game and it was freaking GREAT. ^_^ Jungle Hunt's boulder and cannibal stages were frustrating and terrifying to 4-year-old me. XD
I recently let an 11 year old try Adventure on a AtGames handheld Atari and to his credit he gave it an honest try. His favorite game is Mario 64 on the N64 so he is open minded about old games. I gave him a copy of Wave Race 64 and that was more to his liking.
Back in this era they had game testers determine if the gameplay was fun. If it wasn't they changed it. Today they just focus on the best graphics and nothing else.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 Obviously i've heard of those games. But nobody been playing Pokemon for years. And Fortnite isn't a kids game. Its rated for teens due to violence.""Beginning January 30, Fortnite players using the August 2020 13.40 app build previously available on iOS, Mac, and Google Play can no longer spend V-Bucks and must be over 18 to play," Fortnite's official handle tweeted.Jan 27, 2023"
I'm pretty young myself, having been born in the late 90s, and i love playing the Atari 2600. I also have a 6 year old son who is showing a lot of interest in playing Atari as well. He's been really into Haunted House
@@paranoidgenius9164 No need for forgiveness at all! All of us Atari VCS-loving folk are getting old and making errors and forgetting things we wouldn't have before. I just wanted to make sure Grady and others here knew it had even less RAM.
In river raid you have to imagine the green is actually hill/mountains and you are flying low over the river. That's why you crash onto the green. You can crash into ships because your flying low over the river.
there is a cheat code rebuild the bridge I think it does. its like up, down, up, down, right, left or something like that. I never used the cheat code though. for SuperMan. The X-ray vision also does help. X-ray vision is when your in ANY screen & push the button down to see the next screen to you left, right, up or down before to go that way with Superman. I never played Supeman in 2 player mode but you can do it that way. I always have the A-B switch so Louis lane come out & kisses me to give my power back after a Kryptonite satellite hits me. the Helicopter will move the 3 pieces of the bridge around to other parts of the city it also carry's Louis lane around sometimes & holds the Kryptonite satellite back sometimes.
I am an old man (just below 50). So I was around when the Atari 2600 came out. I am going to tell you a secret: I didn't like it when it came out... I still rather play outside then on an Atari 2600... The controller is horrible. Before anynone says it is because I don't love videogames, just know that everything changed with the NES! I felt in love and never stopped playing videogames! I have a huge collection, a dedicated room but Atari has only an historical significance for me... I never had fun playing an Atari game...
As someone who was 7 when the Atari came out, I think you were very fair. I don't know if you have played more, but you should play Demon Attack and Adventure, which is the grandfather of adventure games like Zelda.
@@geeare80why66 I can totally understand that. I think you do a great job. You're not just being snarky. You have substance and are telling stories and making points. I'm sure your videos will get even better as you get older. Best of luck, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family.
Always keep in mind that the Atari 2600 only had a whopping 128 Bytes of RAM. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, 128 single bytes without and k, M or G preceding the B. And you had to "race the beam" in order to produce colourful graphics. This means you had to time the writing of colour information according to the way the screen was drawn. And still there were and in fact still are amazing games produced for the Atari 2600. E.g. check out Solaris (classic!) or Madieval Mayhem (modern homebrew).
Wasn't expecting much, but you nailed the style and humor most retro gaming content struggles with, and you have a natural understanding for what makes a good game with these insane limitations. Don't know if anyone mentioned it, but the 2600 was only designed to play Pong and Combat. You only have two monochrome sprites, two "missiles", and a square ball. Plus a mirrored playfield. And the sprites only exist on one scanline at a time, so even something as simple as Space Invaders involves racing an electron beam at over 14,000 mph, and calculating what your playfield would look like if the 2600 cpu could remember as many sprites as you're going to trick it into displaying anyways- it's too primitive to keep track of it's own limitations. Check out Halo if you want to see what a modern Xbox developer could do with those limits and a 4k ROM.
@@Freshbrood Pac-Man 4k has a far superior 8kb version, and it's a problem that's not limited to that title. (Granted, it's less a problem and more a dream come true.) Which games would you recommend? 21st century only. The idea was to show the system is far from dead.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 All and any of the homebrews. Particularly by CHAMP games. I am currently programming Mortal Kombat for the 2600. Really it's the MK2 engine with the MK1 roster. i've got quite a lot done and am close to releasing a v.03 demo.
I sh!t my britches with the Buck Rogers intro. I wonder how many youngsters have no idea what the intro was. P.S. PacMan for the Atari sucked, but it didn't kill Atari... in fact, PacMan was the #1 best selling cartridge for the Atari. Nope... E.T. is responsible for killing the Atari.
Look here little whippersnapper, the Atari 2600 was all we had back then and we liked it! Well, until we played a truly awful game. Then you pretended to like it because even a bad game was a new game.
If you read the manual for River Raid, it's a special prototype plane that flies only 6 inches off the ground... for some reason. Hence it will smash into land or ships if you don't avoid them. Atari in the '70s was famous for their programmers taking a lot of drugs. Weed and woodgrain. The 70s, man! Air-Sea Battle is the sort of thing the console was designed for, another 2K game. You might catch your dad smirking at one point during the game, me and him know why! Dragonfire is an example of how, even though the graphics are rubbish, you can be right on the edge of your seat, concentrating by the millisecond to get away with your points. I think as a kid you appreciate the console pretty well.
back then we could not have imagined what games would look and play like in 2023 much the same way you may think the older technology looks strange, we would have not believed how the technology scaled to something like microsoft flight simulator and the photo-realistic graphics this sort of thing. sure. the same thing will probably happen to you- perhaps in 40 years from now when games no longer load from any kind of hardware medium but are uploaded to your mind or whatever, future generations will look at what you have now as curious timepieces
Well kid the way those cartridges worked isn't magic, Same as NES,Super NES,GameBoy,Sega,etc. In them is a chip, You can't see the chip on most cause it's hid with a small black lid and when you put them in the Atari it depresses that lid BUT I do recall some cartridges had a exposed chip, I don't know if that's cause they was cheaper games (cause they tended to be diffrent shaped cartridges than the standard) or cause they but longer chips in them..Been too long ago to remember the titles but some had exposed chips.
Pac Man was the best selling game ever released for the Atari 2600. The actual game that caused the crash was E.T. -- that was the game that got returned in the millions and sent to the infamous landfill. Pac Man was mediocre, but it wasn't a bad game. And it's sequel, Ms Pac Man for the 2600 was a home run. I think you may be confusing the 5200 version which was downright unplayable with the analog joystick.
@@LakeHowellDigitalVideo I think you're confused. Pacman for the 2600 sure did sell well. And so did ET - 2.6 million copies sold. Sales were not the point. You have access to google, you may as well use it. :) Just looked it up on my end to confirm I wasn't confusing the numbers myself. "It ended with a flood of low-quality games (eg: Pacman 2600, ET) which caused retailers and consumers lose faith in video game consoles, with most video game companies filing for bankruptcy and abandoning their consoles." "Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was released in 1982 and is partially responsible for the video game crash of 1983. The game sold 7 million copies making it the best selling Atari at the time. However shortly after the game was released sales dropped and many who owned the game returned it." "In fact, 12 million copies of the less-than-perfect Pac-Man were produced for the Atari 2600 console, even though only ten million people owned the system. All this led to a loss of consumer confidence and a crash for the ages." So on, so on...
first time viewer, got to say i don't know where you got your facts from but so many were wrong, for example the last official atari release was acid drop in 1992 so 15 years not 12 (in the usa it was '91 so 14 years) not 12, although of course unofficial games are still being produced to this day.and only the very early games were 2k as memory prices fell games generally got bigger.
"Then I suffered huge updates, long load times, scummy micro transactions and useless loot boxes in my modern games, and suddenly the Atari 2600 didn't look so bad."
@@DaveMoorland-zv3tn ehh I would argue ps2 is the most impactful selling 155 million units 30 million really isn’t that much in my opinion. And 2d/3d has change the way games have been played for decades now. 8 bit/ 16 bit applied to what 3 generations? You do know it’s okay to disagree I would use some foul choice words but to this a kids channel who is just trying to have fun lol like i said it’s not that deep it is okay for us to disagree I promise you I don’t give a damn what you think lol
@@DaveMoorland-zv3tn lol wasant your argument that Atari was the most influential console/successful console ever i argued it was not pretty simple idea
You need to play more games. There are some pretty fun games. The arcade versions had better graphics, but this was the first console where you could play at home and swap out the games. Most of the games were arcade ports, but some were made for the Atari. You need to try Pitfall and Pitfall II. They made games from 1977 to about 1992. The game crash was not just about pac-man and E.T. (Which were rushed) There were some many third party companies making crappy games. But, there were a lot of fun games too! If the joysticks are working right your controls would be better.
Mad respect to a kid in the 2020's taking an interest in the Pioneering days of gaming. Being born in 81, playing on an Atari was probably my first experience with video games.
Same here. Born in 1983, and the first video game I played was Combat on my grandfathers Atari. I must have been 5 at the time.
Absolutely hilarious video! I have good faith you're gonna go far on TH-cam, kid! You've earned yourself a sub!
I like the Atari 2600. I actually played the Atari back in the 1980's. The graphics were simple, but fun to play.
Back in the day, the Atari 2600 actually had six switches. I'm not sure which two they've eliminated. I got one for Christmas in 1977, when I was exactly your age, and to me and my friends it was the greatest thing ever!
2:15 Nice job adding that Buck Rogers effect.
this kid just crapped all over my childhood and i found it hilarious 🤣🤣
I was born in 1974 and had so many 2600 games. Adventure and Haunted House were some of my favorites but the most abscure game I had was Porky's, based on the movie of the same name
Haunted House looked really cool!
How about I explain this for the questions of the first game of why there was a shark it’s let’s say it’s a evolved for freshwater and now guppies are part of its diet now
Nice vid it's great you gave the games a proper go.
Thanks! Im going to try commodore next!
I got mine in 1981/82. It had six switches. Still have it but not sure which one of the three I own it is. Talking of Vader, last year I picked up a four-switch version like yours but where the woodgrain has been replaced by a black bezel. This is affectionately called "the Vader" by collectors.
Nice to see the Atari 2600 still picking up new fans after all these years. Even when I was born, 1986, the NES was the new hotness and by the time I was old enough to _really_ get into gaming, it was the SNES and Sega Genesis. Despite playing games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country on my SNES, I'd often play on my cousin's Atari and be charmed by how well those games played despite looking so primitive. And the same rings true to this day: a good game is a good game, no matter how the graphics look!
"Ugly" woodgrain?!?! You wish your generation had such style and beauty!
And the shark is for thematic tension!
Would correct you on the RAM claim. The Atari only has 128 bytes of RAM, which means it has to store the entire game state in 128 values that can hold any value from 0 to 255. The NES that came after had 2kb or RAM. The cartridges had ROM chips ranging from the common 4kb to a few or maybe just one game with whopping 64kb of ROM. This was achieved with a technique called bank switching, which means that there's a chip in the cartridge that routes the CPU data requests to memory space of the cartridge that is out of the range that the CPU can normally use.
We prefer to write that as 2 KB, 4 KB.... capital K and capital B.
Small b means bits. B means Bytes.
Hot stuff.
true@@louistournas120
Props for giving something way before your time an honest chance.
The graphics may look primitive today, but they were impressive back in the late 1970s. You have to take into consideration that before this (that general time period), home video games didn't exist. None, nada, ziltch. TV was for watching. Period. Also, nobody owned computers.
There were arcade machines in places like department stores, movie theaters and such, but they were huge, bulky machines. To be able to hook a relatively small box up to your TV and see moving, color graphics that you could control, was incredible.
The first home video games were literally B/W and only played Pong. A rectangle on each side of the screen to represent a paddle, a line down the center of the screen to represent the net, and a small square for the ball. Early consoles didn't even print the score on the screen, it was a digital counter on the console itself. Early ones also didn't output sound to the TV, it came out of a speaker on the console itself.
When the Atari 2600 came out, it was a huge step up, in color, in graphics quality and in sound. Also, the fact that you could just plug in a new cartridge and have all new games to play.
Finally, not all Atari games are as simple as these. Raiders of the Lost Ark was an early adventure game requiring multiple steps to finish it. Mountain King required you to collect 1000 points in diamonds, go to the bottom, steal the crown and then take it to the highest peak, without having it stolen by a bat. Games like Starmaster and Phaser Patrol had you flying your ship to different sectors, battling enemies in a first-person perspective, taking damage and docking for repairs. You could even play chess against the computer, although on the higher levels, it could take a LONG time to decide on a move.
Think of it this way: Today you play VR games and think they look great. 30-50 years from now, you'll probably be able to put your mind inside the game, like The Matrix, and kids then will look at today's VR games and think "What a primitive piece of junk!"
rocking the 'Buck Rogers' flashback transition angle, I love it!
Is that Duck Rogers in the 24 and a half century?
It took Nintendo's Mega Man to be the first game where the graphics looked better than the cover art.
Great video! Entertaining and wholesome!
capcom's*
Hey, now, who doesn't love a man in an ill-fitting jumpsuit blasting through space-Hawaii, helmet askew, as he runs on a a laser grid floor?
When the Atari 2600 came out it was the state of the art gaming console. There was nothing else even close in the late 70's. And believe it or not the Atari Pac-Man game was extremely popular when it came out, mostly due to the popularity of the arcade Pac-Man game. Also of note the original Donkey Kong game was released on the Atari, which had an interesting character named Mario.
There was Intellivision.
Awesome video! Keep up the great work!
Thank you!
What is funny is that when this kid is 30, the video games of that time won't look much different than they do now.
Great job on the video! I grew up playing Atari 2600 and so many of the games are still classics. I enjoyed watching you have fun just like I did.
Dad - you’re teaching your son well! And son - great sense of humor! You’re a lucky kid - appreciate your pops. If you haven’t tried two player Maze Craze yet - that’s easily my favorite vs. game. (I particularly like the version where you first have to catch the three robbers, and you can leave fake walls.)
On an unrelated note, who did the remix of Ice Ice Baby on your “Hidden Arcade” short?
Thanks!
If you click the little box in the lower right corner of that video. It will show the song. It says Zumba remix ice ice Baby. My dad picked it. 😅
He’s got good taste. Thanks for the info - and give maze craze a try sometime.
FYI, it had 128bytes of RAM. Far less than 2KB.
Also, Dragonfire was one of my favorites and my brother loaned the cart to some guy at school and I never saw it again.
That exchange was the best "Dad - goldfish are freshwater fish."
the cover art contributed massively to the games selling . The arcade cabinets then were also covered with designs that lent to the games attractiveness and appeal its strange how that works .
really enjoyed watching father and son enjoying quality time over some Atari 2 player games. Dragonfire is one of my all-time favorites on the system.
Dragonfire was awesome!
I was of the NES and master system generation being 40 I didn’t play much Atari though I briefly had an intellivision of a neighbour but just didn’t compare.
thats funny buck rogers theme
Haha! Thank you!
Born in 78, dont remember a time before i had my 2600! We grew up together!
Combat had some crazy game modes that I really enjoyed as a kid. My favorire was the mode where one was a large airplane and the other player three tiny airplanes.
Oh, and I remember how Pitfall 2 had blown my mind the first time. A game with BGM was something unheard of at that time. Some jingle as you won, maybe, but a constant BGM while you played? That was mindblowing.
Pitfall 2 had a special custom chip that David Crane designed. It streamed the music to the 2600's sound chip, which played it back essentially as digitised music, like a CD with much worse quality. Equally the chip would stream to the graphics chip, providing the level data at exactly the right moment. The 2600 processed the gameplay and told the cart what to start sending, and it did, the console just copied this stream of graphics to the graphics chip. I dunno a lot about the custom chip but it must have been very clever, on a level comparable to the 2600's chips themselves. All 3 of them!
It sounded in the beginning like you were jut going to be ragging on the game system, and that wouldn't have been cool. But you gave it an honest shot, and had some fun with it. Props to you! The Atari wasn't all that great in the graphics (especially in the early days), but the game play was often a lot of fun ... more fun than a lot of the later systems that chose to spent much more time on incredible graphics, but none on game play.
Atari was awesome!
Great runthrough! I was born in 1987 and this was my first system that I was playing in the Early 90s, it was obviously already considered terrible by then, but it's what I started out with as a 3-5 year old. I'm impressed to see kids your age even having the patience and understanding to put up with a 2600 for as long as you did. I've been a lifelong gamer and prefer retro gaming to modern gaming, but even I can't tolerate Atari stuff anymore. I also had a Commodore 64 at the same time as my Atari, which was a far better gaming platform and had way better graphics and sounds, but the games took forever to load (literally 10 minutes to start some of them up)
That's why a lot of people had fast loader cartridges. They didn't do much to speed up loading loading original disks, but they worked great on cracked games.
I have to note that there are multiple species of freshwater shark and several which can swim in both fresh and salt water. So, in fact, that could be a shark in freshwater.
the best game for the paddle was kaboom that the kid will love
Kaboom is so awesome.
Cool to see new generations introduced where it all begun basically! Was never nuts about Atari, even though I'm almost 32, and grew up on N64, GBA, SNES, and PS1. I can always appreciate what the Atari brought to the table; if there was no Atari, there would be no NES, SNES, N64, or a PS1 for that matter.
Not too bad, lol.
You could also get keyboards for the 2600.
Lol..
I remember those days. I got an Atari 5200 and was jazzed with that one (Pole Position, Pacman, Berserker were the best), then didn't see, hear, nor touch a gaming console until I got my hands on a SEGA Dreamcast which I loved.
Good to see a 12yr old enjoying old Atari games with family like this. It's kinda like a fun history lesson too, seeing the first ever popular console, what games were like when the technology was way more basic. The best two player Atari games are still fun though and none of that is important when you're playing 😀
Atari is cool! The games were fun. 😁
@@geeare80why66 You should check out the homebrews still being made for it! 45+ years later and some homebrew coders are doing really cool things with it.
Love the buck Roger intro
River Raid with a paddle? I've only ever used joystick. I honestly didn't even know you COULD play it with a paddle. (You're in a canyon is why hitting the "land" kills you. Assume the ships shoot you down with guns or missiles.)
Also remember that the 2600 version of Pac Man is pretty much the worst version ever made .
Didn’t know that about the sega controller. I don’t think I’ve ever actually played an Atari but definitely a Pac-Man fan. 🙌🏽
Great video!
No Darth Vader would have used to the black faced version that came later. Most people call that model the Darth Vader.
nice variety of games! since you seem to enjoy the head-to-head competition... try some 4 player Warlords!
Freshwater sharks exist in RIo San Juan (located between the Nicaragua/Costa Rica frontier)
He talks about the games like he grew up with them.
Is he a timetraveller?
Way to kick butt the first time with fishing derby! Grats!
There was the Atari 2600 and later the ZX Spectrum. No other console or system could reach the magic of these two systems for me. Not the C64 or the Amiga, nor the NES or the Super NES. I can't explain what it is, but I had the feeling playing pioneer's stuff back in the 70th and early 80th. I still love and play both systems.
I enjoyed your video
Gotta try some bump n jump. Utopia was also fantastic.
In River Raid, you're supposed to be flying down a canyon. That's why you die when you hit the walls.
The driving controller, and the analogue paddle used for Kaboom and Breakout etc, are 2 different controllers, though they look the same. The principle difference for the player, is that the driving controller can turn round and round endlessly, where the analogue paddle can only turn through a certain range, around 300 degrees or so, with a stop at each end that you can't go past. Same as a volume knob, if you know what one of those is, and actually the exact same electrical component.
The technology inside them is different too, they use different methods to detect movement, but that's not very important. Point is, they're not interchangable. Early purchasers got 2 joysticks and 1 pair of paddles. I think you always got that. The 2 paddles shared 1 controller port, so you could plug in 4 paddles altogether, and a few games even supported that. The driving controller you'd have to purchase yourself.
I have a Sunnyvale Heavy 6 and a regular one and the Flashback 9. Pac-Man was ok back then because it could be played at home without pumping tons of quarters in at the arcade. I loved and still love Combat. Pong, Break Out, Cosmic Arc, Space Invaders, Berzerk, Food Fight, Moon Patrol, etc.
The Flashback system with ROMS added on my big screen in HD is the way to go now but I still crank up the Heavy Six on a 26 inch CRT sometimes.
I came out the same year as the Atari VCS(2600), Commodore 64, Apple ][, "Smokey And The Bandit", "Star Wars", "The Rescuers", "Pete's Dragon"(original) and many more things! Oh and "Slow Hand" Lp "Album" by Eric Clapton! 😁😁
I'm 13 seconds in, and you're already wrong. It has 6 switches. There are 4 in front and 2 on top.....The original had all 6 in front.
There's actually 6 switches. Early models had them on the front. Later ones, Atari moved the Player 1 and 2 difficulty switches to the back and made them unobtrusive little switches you might miss. The woodgrain is some unfathomable phenomenon of the 1970s. EVERYTHING had woodgrain then, it was really classy. The same way as in the 1980s everything was black and chrome. Coooool!
The console actually has 128 BYTES of RAM. That's it! Your game needs more than 128 variables, you can't do it! The cartridges, though, were 2K or 4K ROM in the early days. Later on they figured out how to put another chip in the cart that could switch around 4K banks of ROM, a primitive "mapper" to put it in Nintendo-speak. Even smarter carts had RAM on board, maybe 1 or 2 whole kilobytes! Since the cart didn't have a read / write line, because it was intended for read-only memory, you had to use one set of addresses to read the RAM, and another to write to it. Engineers were CLEVER back then.
I could go on and on about the graphics system. But basically it was invented for the games that were in arcades in the '70s. So, Pong, Breakout, and Tank. "Tank" was turned into the famous Combat cart that came with the early systems, giving not just Tank but aeroplanes and all sorts of mad stuff, all in just 2K. It must be the most playable game per byte ever written!
So when later games came along they were really pushing it, the console wasn't meant to have more than 2 sprites and a chunky, blocky background on screen, it wasn't intended for hi-res. Only having 2 sprites means some games alternated them per TV frame, giving the famous flicker. In Pac Man, all 4 ghosts were drawn with just 1 sprite, alternated over every 4 frames. Looked terrible but Atari explained it by saying "they're ghosts, of course they're faint and flickery."
Anyway. There's the famous STELLA.DOC you could read to understand the hardware. It makes you appreciate how smart they were to get so much out of so little, out of a console that wasn't meant to have games that filled the screen with detailed stuff. The really smart programmers at places like Activision managed to re-use sprites so effectively there was no flicker, just as long as they were each on their own vertical section of the screen. Fishing Derby is a good example of that, only 1 fish sprite, and possibly the shark, on each group of horizontal lines. 1 or 2 sprites.
Ugly wood grain? How dare you!!!
Cartridge art was a THING in the 1980s. They used the same style as sci-fi comics to try to attract the same crowd/interest group and it largely worked. Asteroids was my first Atari game and it was freaking GREAT. ^_^ Jungle Hunt's boulder and cannibal stages were frustrating and terrifying to 4-year-old me. XD
I recently let an 11 year old try Adventure on a AtGames handheld Atari and to his credit he gave it an honest try. His favorite game is Mario 64 on the N64 so he is open minded about old games. I gave him a copy of Wave Race 64 and that was more to his liking.
Now try intellivision and colecovision.
I'll try to find one!
7:27 Very literally, tank controls.
3:19 Maybe it's Lake Nicaragua. There are freshwater sharks in Lake Nicaragua. Which is in Nicaragua. Just sayin'.
Back in this era they had game testers determine if the gameplay was fun. If it wasn't they changed it. Today they just focus on the best graphics and nothing else.
Cute delusion. Lay off the AAA bloatware.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 Why do you think kids play Minecraft and Roblox and nothing else ?
@@LelandReview Because you never heard of Fortnite and Pokemon. And you, in your charming innocence, think there can't possibly be young Sonic fans.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 Obviously i've heard of those games. But nobody been playing Pokemon for years. And Fortnite isn't a kids game. Its rated for teens due to violence.""Beginning January 30, Fortnite players using the August 2020 13.40 app build previously available on iOS, Mac, and Google Play can no longer spend V-Bucks and must be over 18 to play," Fortnite's official handle tweeted.Jan 27, 2023"
I'm pretty young myself, having been born in the late 90s, and i love playing the Atari 2600. I also have a 6 year old son who is showing a lot of interest in playing Atari as well. He's been really into Haunted House
Guppies ( _Poecilia reticulata_ ) are fresh waters fish as well 🤣
It didn't even have as much as 2kb RAM!
It only had 128bytes of RAM, that's 1\4 of 1 kB!
ERRO!R!😊 It's 1\8, thankyou RetroDawn!👍
Glad to see someone pointed that out (I was going to comment as much until seeing yours). Note that 128 bytes is 1/8 of 1kB.
@@RetroDawn
8 bits = 1 byte
1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte
One quarter of 1 kilobyte is.......256 bytes......oh yeah!🥴😞
Forgive me, I'm getting old!😊🙏
@@paranoidgenius9164 No need for forgiveness at all! All of us Atari VCS-loving folk are getting old and making errors and forgetting things we wouldn't have before. I just wanted to make sure Grady and others here knew it had even less RAM.
Dude, to play dragon fire you need a cat sitting on top of the TV to bat at the action, ask your dad
In river raid you have to imagine the green is actually hill/mountains and you are flying low over the river. That's why you crash onto the green. You can crash into ships because your flying low over the river.
Imagination has been taken away from modern gaming which I think is a crucial element
I have the dream of taking a high end PC gaming rig back to 1978 to see what kids thing of something like Elden Ring and Doom Eternal.
Why is there a shark? Goldfish are typically found in freshwater! Haha, that's a clever observation from the kid-I hadn't even thought of that!
there is a cheat code rebuild the bridge I think it does. its like up, down, up, down, right, left or something like that. I never used the cheat code though. for SuperMan. The X-ray vision also does help. X-ray vision is when your in ANY screen & push the button down to see the next screen to you left, right, up or down before to go that way with Superman. I never played Supeman in 2 player mode but you can do it that way. I always have the A-B switch so Louis lane come out & kisses me to give my power back after a Kryptonite satellite hits me. the Helicopter will move the 3 pieces of the bridge around to other parts of the city it also carry's Louis lane around sometimes & holds the Kryptonite satellite back sometimes.
I recommend to try some other modern games for the VCS (2600). Champ Games makes some of the best.
Atari crawled so Xbox could run! It's been a wild ride from Adventure to Rocket League!
Mine had 6 switches, and its not ugly!! :D
Still play it today my 2nd favorite system right behind the NES
I am an old man (just below 50). So I was around when the Atari 2600 came out. I am going to tell you a secret: I didn't like it when it came out... I still rather play outside then on an Atari 2600... The controller is horrible. Before anynone says it is because I don't love videogames, just know that everything changed with the NES! I felt in love and never stopped playing videogames! I have a huge collection, a dedicated room but Atari has only an historical significance for me... I never had fun playing an Atari game...
Sharks have a bladder that allows them to swim in fresh water!!!
Little dude , push the black plastic dust cover in the game cartridge, you’ll see the game card .
why not an ATARI 8-bit computer? Much more on par with the C64.
As someone who was 7 when the Atari came out, I think you were very fair. I don't know if you have played more, but you should play Demon Attack and Adventure, which is the grandfather of adventure games like Zelda.
I tried adventure but we didnt film it. Thanks!
@@geeare80why66 what did you think of Adventure? (It's okay if you didn't like it)
@@JimValley i had no idea what to do.
@@geeare80why66 I can totally understand that.
I think you do a great job. You're not just being snarky. You have substance and are telling stories and making points. I'm sure your videos will get even better as you get older. Best of luck, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and your family.
Fresh water sharks exist, especially in Asia and Australia.
Always keep in mind that the Atari 2600 only had a whopping 128 Bytes of RAM. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, 128 single bytes without and k, M or G preceding the B.
And you had to "race the beam" in order to produce colourful graphics. This means you had to time the writing of colour information according to the way the screen was drawn.
And still there were and in fact still are amazing games produced for the Atari 2600.
E.g. check out Solaris (classic!) or Madieval Mayhem (modern homebrew).
Wasn't expecting much, but you nailed the style and humor most retro gaming content struggles with, and you have a natural understanding for what makes a good game with these insane limitations.
Don't know if anyone mentioned it, but the 2600 was only designed to play Pong and Combat. You only have two monochrome sprites, two "missiles", and a square ball.
Plus a mirrored playfield.
And the sprites only exist on one scanline at a time, so even something as simple as Space Invaders involves racing an electron beam at over 14,000 mph, and calculating what your playfield would look like if the 2600 cpu could remember as many sprites as you're going to trick it into displaying anyways- it's too primitive to keep track of it's own limitations.
Check out Halo if you want to see what a modern Xbox developer could do with those limits and a 4k ROM.
*4kb
Thank you!
He just knocked that "Halo" out quick, it's not the best example at all of what 4k can do.
@@Freshbrood Pac-Man 4k has a far superior 8kb version, and it's a problem that's not limited to that title. (Granted, it's less a problem and more a dream come true.)
Which games would you recommend? 21st century only. The idea was to show the system is far from dead.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 All and any of the homebrews. Particularly by CHAMP games. I am currently programming Mortal Kombat for the 2600. Really it's the MK2 engine with the MK1 roster. i've got quite a lot done and am close to releasing a v.03 demo.
I sh!t my britches with the Buck Rogers intro.
I wonder how many youngsters have no idea what the intro was.
P.S. PacMan for the Atari sucked, but it didn't kill Atari... in fact, PacMan was the #1 best selling cartridge for the Atari.
Nope... E.T. is responsible for killing the Atari.
1:32 it's corn? 🌽😂
Look here little whippersnapper, the Atari 2600 was all we had back then and we liked it! Well, until we played a truly awful game. Then you pretended to like it because even a bad game was a new game.
If you read the manual for River Raid, it's a special prototype plane that flies only 6 inches off the ground... for some reason. Hence it will smash into land or ships if you don't avoid them. Atari in the '70s was famous for their programmers taking a lot of drugs. Weed and woodgrain. The 70s, man!
Air-Sea Battle is the sort of thing the console was designed for, another 2K game. You might catch your dad smirking at one point during the game, me and him know why!
Dragonfire is an example of how, even though the graphics are rubbish, you can be right on the edge of your seat, concentrating by the millisecond to get away with your points. I think as a kid you appreciate the console pretty well.
Bullsharks also swim in fresh water
back then we could not have imagined what games would look and play like in 2023 much the same way you may think the older technology looks strange, we would have not believed how the technology scaled to something like microsoft flight simulator and the photo-realistic graphics this sort of thing. sure. the same thing will probably happen to you- perhaps in 40 years from now when games no longer load from any kind of hardware medium but are uploaded to your mind or whatever, future generations will look at what you have now as curious timepieces
Good point!
Well kid the way those cartridges worked isn't magic, Same as NES,Super NES,GameBoy,Sega,etc. In them is a chip, You can't see the chip on most cause it's hid with a small black lid and when you put them in the Atari it depresses that lid BUT I do recall some cartridges had a exposed chip, I don't know if that's cause they was cheaper games (cause they tended to be diffrent shaped cartridges than the standard) or cause they but longer chips in them..Been too long ago to remember the titles but some had exposed chips.
Bull sharks can live in fresh water, i think?
I think so!
if you thought pac man and ET were bad, try warplock, airlock, and sssnake
4/10 for Pacman 2600? This is one of the two games most responsible for the vidya-game crash! You're awfully generous! :)
Pac Man was the best selling game ever released for the Atari 2600. The actual game that caused the crash was E.T. -- that was the game that got returned in the millions and sent to the infamous landfill. Pac Man was mediocre, but it wasn't a bad game. And it's sequel, Ms Pac Man for the 2600 was a home run. I think you may be confusing the 5200 version which was downright unplayable with the analog joystick.
@@LakeHowellDigitalVideo I think you're confused. Pacman for the 2600 sure did sell well. And so did ET - 2.6 million copies sold. Sales were not the point.
You have access to google, you may as well use it. :) Just looked it up on my end to confirm I wasn't confusing the numbers myself.
"It ended with a flood of low-quality games (eg: Pacman 2600, ET) which caused retailers and consumers lose faith in video game consoles, with most video game companies filing for bankruptcy and abandoning their consoles."
"Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 was released in 1982 and is partially responsible for the video game crash of 1983. The game sold 7 million copies making it the best selling Atari at the time. However shortly after the game was released sales dropped and many who owned the game returned it."
"In fact, 12 million copies of the less-than-perfect Pac-Man were produced for the Atari 2600 console, even though only ten million people owned the system. All this led to a loss of consumer confidence and a crash for the ages."
So on, so on...
first time viewer, got to say i don't know where you got your facts from but so many were wrong, for example the last official atari release was acid drop in 1992 so 15 years not 12 (in the usa it was '91 so 14 years) not 12, although of course unofficial games are still being produced to this day.and only the very early games were 2k as memory prices fell games generally got bigger.
He said "well over 10 years". Seems like his facts are right. 😊
Atari 2600 is the Typewriter of games...you should introduce him trhee good games = Hero,Frostbyte and Cristal Castles
Noiice
It's called "Imagination" kid. We used to have it.
"Then I suffered huge updates, long load times, scummy micro transactions and useless loot boxes in my modern games, and suddenly the Atari 2600 didn't look so bad."
You're not wrong. 😅
They really shouldn’t of made Atari hahaha I guess pac man is good though at least! Nice vid!
If they hadn't made Atari, we would not have the video game industry that we have today. Dumbest thing I've ever heard.
@@feenix219 not that deep bro. And honestly no evidence to back that up you just in your feelings.
@@DaveMoorland-zv3tn ehh I would argue ps2 is the most impactful selling 155 million units 30 million really isn’t that much in my opinion. And 2d/3d has change the way games have been played for decades now. 8 bit/ 16 bit applied to what 3 generations? You do know it’s okay to disagree I would use some foul choice words but to this a kids channel who is just trying to have fun lol like i said it’s not that deep it is okay for us to disagree I promise you I don’t give a damn what you think lol
@@DaveMoorland-zv3tn lol wasant your argument that Atari was the most influential console/successful console ever i argued it was not pretty simple idea
@@DaveMoorland-zv3tn you seem really upset that’s wild to me
You need to play more games. There are some pretty fun games. The arcade versions had better graphics, but this was the first console where you could play at home and swap out the games. Most of the games were arcade ports, but some were made for the Atari. You need to try Pitfall and Pitfall II. They made games from 1977 to about 1992. The game crash was not just about pac-man and E.T. (Which were rushed) There were some many third party companies making crappy games. But, there were a lot of fun games too! If the joysticks are working right your controls would be better.
The Atari 2600 was not an analog world