The Atari 2600 - The Granddaddy of Gaming! - Tech Retrospective
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ต.ค. 2020
- Released in 1977 The Atari 2600 ( or Atari Video Computer System) may not be the first video game console ever but it is the most important, iconic early video game systems. Selling over 30 million systems the Atari VCS provided many people with their first great experience with home gaming.
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I owe my dad for pretty much shaping my life. I wanted a cassette player for Christmas one year. I got a very nice one but it was the component type that needed to be plugged into a receiver which I didn't have. He returned it and came back with an Atari 2600. Made me want to design games and got me interested in computer programming. Love you, Dad.
I have a 2600 story. I was at my sister's house, and she had a shed she wanted to clean out because the roof leaked, and it flooded. The shed had a dirt floor and almost completely buried in the mud was a 2600. I dug it up and disassembled it. I washed the circuit board in the sink and cleaned every connector that I could with a pencil eraser. That night we hooked it up to a tv and played games on it! I can't believe how durable these things are.
I still have my Atari 2600 that I bought new in 1981. I think I paid $70 to $75 for it.
One of my favorite games I had was "Yars Revenge".😎 Anyone else have that cool game back in the day?🙄
Heck yeah! Great great game and so much fun! But my absolute favorite was kaboom!
Yes it was awesome
“Yars Revenge” might be the PEAK of the Atari 2600.
Yep. I remember it came with a comic book.
The first videogame with an easter egg.
The 2600 was way before my time, but I can appreciate its place in gaming history.
Me too😁
A footnote, at best. Everybody had a crap atari in the basement that was played on a rainy day for like 10 minutes before mom agreed to take us to the mall. They weren't as cool as people make them out to be. They were and always will be garbage.
Nice video, very well done. As someone who grew up with the Atari and was there during the video game crash, it always makes me crazy when people say that E.T. brought down the video game crash. That is just completle nonsense. Do people really think us kids pinned our entire expections on just a couple of games? For all of the great Atari games they had plenty of clunkers too. We just moved on, and heck when Ms. Pacman came out Pacman was a distant memory. What really caused the crash was Parents just didn't allow us to upgrade our systems. They cost a lot of money and when the Atari 2600 started to show it's age and then upgraded consoles like the 5200 and ColecoVision came out , many parents said NOPE, you already have a video game console in the Atari 2600. When someone in the neighborhood got a 5200 everyone was in awe and they were the "Rich" kid. etc. Such nonsens that ET and Pacman crashed the video games.
I believe the video games crash was simply a mix of market oversaturation and overproduction by companies who didn't see the market was already full. As you said, home computers and consoles were expensive and weren't generally thought of as disposable products. The initial 'wow' factor and fascination of early console/computer games soon wore off.
The video game crash was mainly thanks to retail glut, a flawed retail system for game stocking, and Atari not getting any royalties from third party developers. Back in the day, if a game didn't sell as much as expected any unsold stock would be sent back, and games were generally over-ordered to the point many game devs and pubs went bankrupt. Small developers who made bad games were damaged far less than highly acclaimed companies like Imagic, because very few third parties were able to get their games on mass market shop shelves. Regardless though, the over-ordering of quantities and how retails functioned resulted in many games ending up in bargain bins, because they didn't have a place to send the games back to thanks to frequent bankrupts.
Atari was owned by Warner Communications, and they had a December 1982 meeting which sent shockwaves to the industry. Atari revealed a profit increase from 10% to 15%, but Warner was expecting an increase to 50%. A large part of this is because Atari games didn't sell nearly as well as Activision and Imagic games, and because Atari saw no royalties this meant they no longer could make much money from software, which is critical to having successful hardware. Not even Pac-Man could help with profit, despite selling a whopping seven million copies, because Atari and shops overshot how well the game would sell, resulting in Atari not making much money from the game, or at least not enough to reach the 50% increase. Combined with the eventual rise of superior computers and corporate politics between the big three, and you have the market come crashing down just like that. If it weren't for Nintendo and them establishing set rules on making games, the North American video game market would most likely have stayed a computer centric one.
In my block we were the firsts to get an Atari 2600 back in the day and our neighbors flocked to our house to play Pacman while listening to Pacman fever.😂
My parents still have their 2600 with a bunch of games, all near mint condition, still in the wooden chest it was in back when I played it as a kid.
Still mint because nobody played that piece of crap even when it was new.
@@User0000000000000004 I did.. by the way, it turns out my stepdad threw it away because a part in the Atari didn't work, he threw it ALL away..
I has this on a black and white TV when I was a kid because my parents thought it would ruin their floor model color TV. I had the first release version.
They didn't really think that, but it sounds like an excuse I'd use to keep my kids out of the living room with that crap.
I must start the Atari video game consoles documentaries from this working my way to the 7800.
Thanks for making it.
God bless.
I still have the Magnavox Odyssey.
The OG
I put a thumbs-up on your reply because you really love your machine and that's awesome! But it is not the Original Gangster of home video game consoles
@@rexsterlingbuchanan2929
True...there was the 2600, and many hundreds of TV plug ins.
But it was the 1st non-Atari that had some credibility.
I had the Astrovision which for me was the Atari 2600 but it had flimited games. The cowboy game that came with it was awesome.
@@chandlerscaringia5260
I played that at my cousin's.
And some other friends had Intelevision and the 2600.
Back then we couldn't buy all systems...lol.
@@rexsterlingbuchanan2929 How isn't it? It was the first. I had the voice box for the Odyssey 2, which really made it feel better than the Atari. And, Magnavox Odyssey 1 came out before Pong.
True. The word console was never used to describe any machine until the late 90's. In the 80's everything was an Atari.
No it wasn't! Maybe for kids who didn't know how to speak. But an Atari was an Atari. NOBODY on EARTH called a Colecovision or anything else an Atari because it wasn't an Atari. Stop spreading these lies, you jerks. This is factually incorrect. Never, ever, ever did ANYONE call anything but an Atari an Atari. BTW, the word you're looking for is demonym. Which the Atari definitely was NOT.
The thing that really made the VCS/2600 dominant in the second generation of game consoles was Space Invaders. For the first few years it was out, it was relatively expensive and the games were simple, mostly ports of Atari's arcade cabinets of the 70s. But the price came down a bit, then Space Invaders was a giant hit in the arcades and Atari had the licensed home port. Their version was not the most accurate port, but *was* really fun and addictive. It moved a huge number of consoles for Christmas 1980.
This is something that the modern licensed compilations of 2600 games all miss, because none of them have the Space Invaders cartridge. Some of the older plug-and-play consoles have *a* Space Invaders but it's not the real 2600 cartridge. That's because Taito never liked Atari's Space Invaders and they demand that modern console ports resemble the arcade Space Invaders more closely. It's a pity, because it's easily the most historically important cartridge on the console and to *me*, it's the iconic version of Space Invaders. Well, the physical cartridge isn't hard to find at all.
1:30 Ah yes Candle Cove, that was my favorite show to watch as a kid
What they created was amazing.
No it wasn't. It was cheap, half-assed, and fun for about 5 minutes, if at all. You've obviously never played any games on one before.
@@User0000000000000004 oh look someone using the name of a fucking movie character is giving a shit hot take. Ooooh
Nice video. Great work. Just subscribed!
Just disconvered your channel great stuff👍👍👍 cheking the videos
The atari 2600 was my first videogame system
Greetings from Mexico
My first gaming console was the Atari 7800. I was so excited for its backward compatibility with 2600 games. I had a pretty decent library and I wished I had kept it. But once I got the NES, there was no looking back.
Great job very thorough
$11,000 houses. What a great time to be alive. Your dad could provide for the family and your mom made sure you had good healthy home cooked meals and would even be home to help you with homework. Miss those days
The Return
My very first game system was the Fairchild Channel F. With the overlays and the ROM carts, it was pretty cool! The "controllers" were a bit wonky, but they worked.
My second game system was a Mattel Intellivision. I bucked the trend of the time and went with Mattel instead of what all my friends had, the 2600.
But, I do still have fond memories of the Fairchild Channel F!
Love my 2600 still. Have a Harmony cart with 500 + games on it. Awesome!
You never play that POS. Be honest. These things are like driving a 1920s Model T today. You can do it, but who wants to? There's nothing rewarding from the experience.
@@User0000000000000004 Thank you for knowing my life so intimately that you can tell what I do and don't do, my interests and pastimes and what I like. I bow my head in shame that I posted an opinion that I shouldn't have. Thank you for enlightenment. I will toss my 2600 out immediately and wait for further instructions from you as to what I should like.
@@User0000000000000004quit being a jerk
The Atari 2600 VCS home video game console is my original home video game system. Atari made the 2600 a very player friendly device which means that the game cartridges vary from simple games for young children to moderately advanced games for mature gamers. I have owned my Atari 2600 VCS since I had bought it in 1981.
I have a working 1st model Atari VCS. It is the pride of my collection.
The 1 dislike was left by Darth Vader, since you made him feel "not as iconic"
The other dislike is from ET...
very informative
There is probably some young people watching this and asking 'why would you want to switch from color to black and white'? The forget that televisions were once black and white.
Nobody forgot that, but it's a valid question why anyone would be buying a video game system and attaching it to a black and white tv. You have money for the former, but not the latter?
The VCS/2600 was my first game console. My mother bought it due to a recommendation by a doctor to improve my hand eye coordination. Unfortunately that system was lost during a move. But a few years ago I found one for $20 with 34 games, and I snagged it up.
I still prefer to call it the vcs, but nowadays I can't anymore because atari made a linux computer which took that name, so now I'm stuck calling it the 2600 to avoid confusion.
Ahh, the memories of getting this at Christmas and playing that crappy basketball game until 2am....shoot from anywhere and bam! You were Michael Jordan!
Some of us played this game BEFORE Michael Jordan.
I don't really remember the great video game crash of 1983 as something that people were aware of at the time. I do know that my atari started to lose a lot of appeal to me as a kid around that time. I do know that my friends had a few and we played them as much as we could but it just wasn't the same in 1985. I went many years not even thinking about video games until NES came along. That was one of the coolest things we seen because it offered arcade quality graphics which was something atari couldn't do.
By 1985 the VCS/2600 was already ten years old. That's a lifetime in technology terms. Home computers were extremely popular and used newer technology, with better graphics, sound and huge amounts of memory. Hardly surprising it didn't impress you. 1985 was also the start of the 16 bit era of home computers. (Yes, the older TI99/4 technically had a 16 bit CPU, but only had an 8 bit address bus and 8 bit memory, and >>256 BYTES
A few years ago, I hosted a TV show where me and a guest discussed current armed conflicts while playing Atari Combat.
Hold on.. I have a medal around here somewhere for you.
@@User0000000000000004 Thanks. I certainly deserve one for having to deal with obnoxious trolls.
We always called the Atari just that. But nothing else was the Atari. There was Coleco, pong, there were knockoffs too.
You called the atari the atari because it was an atari? Wow. That's um.. amazing dude. Sort of like you'd call a Nintendo a Nintendo or a TV a TV or a Genesis a Genesis? Wow. You speak english good. Thanks for the update.
Here in Brazil we received the Darth version. And various clones of course.
I recieved one for Christmas the year they came out...
I have the original 6 lever wood grain one still. And 50 games still in the boxes.
Because it was boring as hell and you never played it? Cool.
Do a video on the MYSTIQUE games!
The Atari 2600 Jr. was released in time for Christmas 1985 (in California, at least). How do I know? Because that's when I was given mine (I still have it and it still works... after replacing the power brick, RF adapter, and cleaning up the dust out of the switches).
Question for @7:01. What are those brown whoopie cushion looking things on the chip board? And why do they look like whoopie custions?
Boy, this format feels familiar 'WINK'
The "Darth Vader" console, the first to be called the 2600, came out in the fall of 1982.
You forgot River Raid!
That was my 2nd favorite game with pitfall being my 1st. I spents days routing the fastest way to win. I broke a world record and even took a picture off the screen. I did get the picture developed but never sent it in for the explorer's patch being i didn't care at the time.
May I suggest watching "Atari: Game Over"
I grew up in that era and Pong was the first console in my house followed by the Atari 2600 then and 5200. I'd like to see a video on the 5200. Yes the 5200 had lots of problems. Another video idea is about the 1983 video game crash.
Oh those controllers! Never worked well at all!!! Great graphics though!
4:36 discounting 1972's Magnavox Odyssey?
Have you addressed the Atari 8 bit line?
I don't remember Atari being like Xerox. It was the most popular system, but we didn't call other systems Atari. There were several Atari clones, though.
Nobody remembers it because it never happened. It was not a demonym for video game console. It was an Atart because it was an Atari. Every other console was called what it was like Coleovision or Nintendo. You're absolutely right and everybody else just doesn't know how words work.
I have a bunch of 2600 games.....but only have them because I have the Coleco Vision expansion that plays them.
And yes....have the E.T. game.
There’s a great Netflix documentary about that ET game and how it destroyed the company
@@Meatball2022
Yes. I saw it when it came out.
@@Dangic23 I remember as a kid being so tremendously disappointed at the lack of quality of both pacman and et. The et game made absolutely no sense to me. I begged my parents for it, then maybe played it five times before getting angry
@@Meatball2022
True...lol.
I was telling my kids how frustrating and pointless it was.
There were no objectives....and continously falling in the pit was end game....lol.
I'm surprised I never threw it away.
@@Dangic23 the Netflix thing shed a light on why that was such a mess. As a kid - obviously no idea why it was a mess. All I knew was that it was a mess. Haha
I honestly don’t remember anything at all about it.
Atari's greatest success that became their biggest albatross.
Yeah. Those birds suck.
We didn't call every home console Atari and we never called Atari the 2600.
Neither did anyone else. This guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
@@User0000000000000004 : He's just a kid. We got our first Atari in 1978, I remember it well....I was ten. I had already played my friends Odyssey II and we had a pong "console", the APF TV Fun!
I was blown away seeing the first demo of the Intellivision in 1979. It was the soccer game and right then and there, I was sold on the "running man".
No, I’ve had many looks at an Atari. This ain’t my first look, SON!
I am almost 30, and my mom still calls all video game systems "a NINTENDO"..
My stepdad won money arm wrestling to help buy the Atari 2600. Where there's a will there's a way.
If your stepdad needed help to buy an Atari product, you grew up poor. VERY poor.
Atari Pac-man wasn't a bad game. We thought it was really neat. I don't know why people say it was a bad game.
Atari Pac-Man was a horrible game, compared to the arcade version. You were just too young to know any better.
@@jnnx Maybe, but then how many people had a mega expensive arcade cabinet in their living room to play it on? An Atari 800 couldn't do what a contemporary Cray supercomputer could do, but how relevant is that to most people playing games at home?Context is important.
They say that because it was a bad game. I first encountered it when I was 6 and even as stupid as I was at that age, I knew it sucked.
@@another3997 You can't play video games on a Cray, that's not what they do. I knew a couple friends with cabinets. One got Contra the year it was released for his birthday. He was rich. Lived in a mansion. LIke one of those kids in an 80s/90s Disney film. Just because you didn't have one doesn't mean other people were also poor.
As for your opening statement your friend must have lived in an area where that was their thing..... Like asking for a soda pop do you say may I have a cola?. Nobody in the areas where I ever grew up called at coleco and Atari or called a Sega Genesis and Atari or called a c64 and Atari. The Atari was a complete separate system.......
My dad called everything Atari. Every game console I got for a present my Dad would always say How do you like the Atari. Colecovision, Intellevision, Sega Master System......... all called Atari 🤣🤣🤣
@@chandlerscaringia5260 And my neighbor's mom called nintendo cartridges "nintendo tapes" and we'd always joke about forgetting to rewind them before they went back to blockbuster. No normal people anywhere used Atari as a demonym for video game consoles. Didn't happen.
I spilled a coke on my grandparents 2600 when I was like 3-4.
Also for any of those reading along the word arcade came from before the 20th century where they had Penny arcades and Nickel Arcade places for people to enjoy way back before the 1900. So that were pinball arcade before there were video game arcade just so you know
Yeah, you can't trust any information on TH-cam because you're not listening to facts, you're listing to facts as the person talking understands them, which is almost always poorly.
I hate how the lable side of the cartridge is facing the wrong way.
Since when and in what reality is the 6502 "a compatible version of the Motorola 6800"?!? The first digit in the name is a '6' and the third is a '0'. What else? Did somebody gloss over the Wikipedia pages for the 6800 and 6502 and spend only a couple of clock cycles "researching" and thus miss the details? Okay I do have a slight issue with misleading impression I get at first, with the way it is written at this moment. But it is clear that these CPUs are not able to run the other's code.
"Quickie":
Key people from the 6800 team left Motorola and birthed the 6501 and 6502 (oh, "MOS" has the same first two letters in their name!). The 6501 was a pin-compatible drop-in for the 6800 meaning that you didn't a new circuit board. But you needed new software (e.g. new ROMs). There were architecture changes and as a result different instructions.
The 6502 was the "lawsuit proof" version that needed its own circuit layout. And Moto did take MOS to court. The 6501 went bye bye and the 6502 (like it needs to be said) lived. Two Steves from Silicon Valley made a "computer" named after fruit that was very DIY (needed a user supplied case and everything else) and a year later in 1977 they had a mass produced version "][" (and ][+ and //e and //c and IIGS and IIc+ .. lets pretend the /// never happened). Commodore bought MOS and then in '77 they opened a PET store.And around that time I learned to ride a bike. Fascinating history.
How about put this in a wiki-page. You seem to know a lot.
You would be hard pushed to deny that the 6502 wasn't heavily inspired by the 6800, even if it wasn't code compatible. As for computer history, other people were using the 6502 at the same time as Jobs and Woz... they didn't invent the hobbyist computer. They just grabbed the spotlight. Just like Gates and co didn't invent DOS, but made a fortune from a product they bought and renamed, which was itself based directly on DRI's CP/M, even using the same function names in the code. Popular history is full of such misconceptions and inaccuracies.
If it wasn't a version of the 6800, then why was MOS sued by Motorola in 1975 for patent infringement? (read wikipedia page for a couple of clock cycles)
@@User0000000000000004 from the various interviews and what I picked up attending a Vintage Computer Festival, it comes down to “oh so we are loosing our talent to a competitor, albeit small? Hmm smaller is better, easier to beat up. Oh, they took company IP (design documents or specs or something like that .. Chuck Peddle made it clear that was a no no but someone did it anyway)? AND the 6501 is hardware compact drop-in? (Not software.. need new ROMs with 650x opcodes but no new board design needed)? Sue ‘em!”
So even if it was all original work, there is the plausibility that MOS benefited having Moto non-public documentation.
Sour grapes.
And do not discount that redesign of. Circuit board to take a new CPU is a hurdle of time and money and would cause some to stick with a 6800 design. By having the data pins and address pins and power pins (using the same voltages) in the same place, a 6501 could plop down in place of a 6800 in the socket. The 6501 and 6502 are not interchangeable like that. In fact I heard the 6502 had made so MOS had a “lawsuit proof” design. The new only issue is that 650x code and 6800 code are incompatible. Even the registers and number of instructions differ. Only accumulator “A” (no “B”) for instance. Does 6800 have a “page zero” set of instructions? Stuff like that. But burning a ROM is faster than waiting for a new PCB and software bugs can be tackled quicker and easier than hardware bugs (I’d imagine)
As much as I respect the 2600 I cant f im and enjoyment playing its games
Stella1977
What do you mean most people over 30 know it pretty well? 40 year olds will have been toddlers when the Atari crashed.
Show me a single 40 year old who didn't know someone with a 2600 and I'll show you a liar.
@@User0000000000000004 you're five to ten years off. 40 year olds will have been only one year old at the Great Video Game Crash and three or four when the NES launched.
People over 30. Try people over mid 40s. People in their 30s had Nintendo.
Yup. If you had the atari the year you were born, as of the date this video was uploaded that would make you 43 years old so there are probably quite a few people in their 50s who had the displeasure of gaming on an atari.
Ugh the channel owner needs to delete the troll commenter
Gello and band aid. what are those. Could have said hoover and hoovering.
Pac-Man for the 2600 was TERRIBLE. But my brother and I played it for years anyway.
I'm so sorry.
add 'ease of programming for it' to the list and the 2600vcs scores a zero lol. it's literally probably the worst contraption ever to code for and as such the games all look like crap. that isn't due to the chips. mostly. also the thing already had clones in it's own days when it was new. coleco gemini, that addon thing for the coleco vison, and several others. it sold for like 30 years and undermined ataris own market for their own better consoles sold at the same time severely. :P (like why put the 2600 and the 5200 in the shop at the same time, even worse, put them on the same shelve as the lynx several decades later ;) if you have a crammy old 1970s product with the same company name on it, just pull it when you make something better... :P see they may mostly all have a 6502 derivative cpu. but programming for the 2600... is a different ballgame than programming for the 5200 or lynx or nes or pc engines or snes. it's basically just a cpu with some glorified i/o ports connected more or less directly to an rf modulator LOL. (ok t's slightly more than that but eh. well ;)
Isn't that just an opinion. Why is Atari more important than Magnavox? I think the Nintendo is more iconic than Atari, and PlayStation is more iconic than Nintendo. Wait, no I don't. The most iconic goes to the first. Atari was an iconic machine, it was of great importance. But I would not say more than any other game system. Atari kind of failed when Nintendo came out. But Nintendo is still kicking hard today after the PlayStation and Xbox. I would think the most iconic would be the games on the oscilloscope. I played them back in the 80's at my uncles house. Wouldn't that be the most iconic? That is what made it so they could move a point in an electrical wave.
I think you have some misconceptions about what "iconic" actually means. It doesn't mean the first, or necessarily even the best. Which one is best remembered? Which one do people recognise? The C64 was iconic, the best selling home computer... but it certainly wasn't >>the best
@@another3997 I think you do. This is the definition of iconic.
: a person or thing widely admired especially for having great influence or significance in a particular sphere
So, it does have to be the first if its about influence. The Xbox couldn't influence the Atari.
The Atari couldn't influence the Magnavox.
And the games on the oscilloscope, which started it all influenced everything afterwards.
But they all have great influence, and are significant. But the first is always the most iconic, because everything is influenced off the first.
It doesn't have to be the best, because the next machine will most likely be better. But again, I don't think you understand what iconic means, in totality.
The Atari 2600 was such a revolutionary system but it and it's entire generation have unfortunately aged pretty poorly
Well it is a 46 year old system after all, and it predated most 'home computers' by several years. Technology just came on in leaps and bounds over the next few decades. I remember the LED digital calculators and watches being fantastically futuristic when I was a young kid. 😁
I had the junior. I hated it and the games. 1/10