Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming

By Jamie Lendino

The sprawl of Adventure. The addictiveness of Breakout. The intensity of Space Invaders.

Once upon a time, you could only experience this kind of excitement at the arcade. But in 1977 that changed forever. You, and maybe a friend or a sibling, could instantly teleport from your own living room to a dazzling new world-with nothi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steel Gear Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732355262

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Introduction

Video games can be complete, self-contained worlds, populated by thousands of real-life players and computer-controlled characters. Often rendered in high-definition and now even 4K, with incredible real-time sound and adaptive music scores, they’re living, breathing empires. If you get bored, you can flip between different games, and different worlds, just by pressing a few buttons on a wireless controller—all while sitting on your couch or on the floor, in the comfort of your own home.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Video games had to start somewhere. And the game industry as we know it today began in earnest with a certain console, one with faux wood grain across the front, and that instantly loaded programs from durable plastic cartridges. Although the Atari 2600 wasn’t the first game console, or even the first that was cartridge-based, it’s the best-known game system in history—or at least the best-known among people of a certain age. It certainly was the best-selling one for many years, with some 30 million purchased during its 14-year run. Atari launched the 2600 (then named the Video Computer System, or VCS) in the fall of 1977. But it wasn’t until early 1980, when the company released its port of Space Invaders, that the 2600’s place became cemented in industry lore.

The 2600 was groundbreaking in a way nothing before it had been, and, in many ways, nothing after it would be. In 2006, Wired magazine named it one of the top 10 gadgets that changed the world. You can draw a straight line from the Atari 2600 to the PS4, the Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch. It essentially created the game industry we have today. The way it did so is all but inseparable from its hardware design and software. Although arcade games were first, and there was a distinct golden age of coin-op games in the late 1970s through the mid 1980s, what has endured is console gaming at home.

Over the years, along with all the Atari Flashbacks, anthologies, and collections, and articles celebrating the system, there’s been some pushback. Sometimes it’s from the newer 8-bit fan crowd that started with Nintendo rather than Atari, which is understandable. But there’s also a general sense among some folks that although the Atari 2600 may have been the first popular console, it wasn’t all that, and the real innovations came later.

I want to put some of that to rest by taking a closer look at where the Atari 2600 was at its most innovative, and how it set the direction for the console industry in ways that reverberate to this day. This is by no means the first book on the 2600; Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s excellent 2009 book Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System drills down to several specific games in particular, and shows how development on the console progressed from the earliest pack-in game Combat through David Crane’s Pitfall! and Parker Brothers’ Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Other books have sought to put the 2600 in wider context with lots of other console systems to tell a broader video game history, such as Steve Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games from 2001, and Phoenix IV: The History of the Videogame Industry by Leonard Herman, published in 2016.

What I want to do is tell how the 2600 influenced the way the video game industry developed, during the years it mattered most: 1977 through 1984. As such, this book is not a straight history of Atari in general. Instead, this book aims to capture the experience and excitement of owning an Atari 2600 and playing its games. It will celebrate the development of both a platform and an entirely new entertainment industry.

This book will also evaluate every significant game on the Atari 2600’s own merits and its greater influence on the industry as a whole. When appropriate I’ll compare arcade conversions with the original, along with occasional mentions of versions on more powerful home platforms, but that’s not the main focus. Other games appeared on the Atari 2600 before there were any other home versions, or in some cases, were entirely original concepts that had never been seen or played before. Still others, when placed up against what you could find in the arcade or, say, on the later ColecoVision or Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), will often not measure up—at least in graphics and sound, if not gameplay.

Rather than belabor that last point, I’ll do my best to thread the needle and focus on each 2600 cartridge itself: why it was significant, what made it fun to play, how it fit into the greater context of the burgeoning game industry, and the relevant programming achievements given limited hardware resources. Atari’s first cartridge-based console was notoriously difficult to program. But as we’ll see, with the right know-how, the 2600 could soar.

Reliving the Magic

In comparison with today’s consoles, gaming on a 2600 is so simple: Set the television channel, insert the cartridge, power up, and start playing. There are no updates to download or loading times to sit through; no endless backstory videos, tutorials, or create a character screens; and no choosing from six different screens of options, settings, and detail levels. The controller has one Fire button. Although the 2600 is comparatively inflexible—you can’t stream games, use it to watch Netflix, transfer saves, or even save games at all—it’s also exceedingly easy to understand. You have a system, some controllers, and a stack of game cartridges. Knock yourself out.

The difference between gaming then and now can’t be overstated. Leaderboards back then were on paper, if they existed at all. In Atari 2600 games, there are no narrators or voice actors. There are no loot boxes and no achievements, aside from the odd Activision cloth patch you had to mail away for. You usually unlock new portions of the game with your score. Gaming on the 2600 is immediate and visceral. You could get lost in Ms. Pac-Man or Berzerk for hours—and still can, today—just trying to beat your high score. It’s pure twitch response, and depending on your mood and approach, can be thrilling, or even just Zen. I may be in the minority, but I often find today’s games’ realism and immersion overwhelming. And I can certainly do without waiting half an hour for a patch to download, or for the console to load and install an OS upgrade, before I can start playing.

Hopefully, you also have some free time you can carve out without interruptions. I can’t imagine the number of arguments I would have avoided with my parents had the 2600 had a Pause button. If you were doing well in a game, the last thing you wanted to do was shut it off to go eat dinner. With no pause on most games and no saves, you’d have to start over from the beginning. And because nearly all of the games depended on your reflexes and skill first and foremost, it could be difficult to replicate your earlier efforts.

After the 2600’s heyday, for a while—mostly during the 1990s and 2000s, and especially after MAME hit the scene in 1997—I preferred to play the arcade versions of relevant games when available. It was the childhood dream, after all: free access to your favorite arcade machines at home, whenever you wanted, and no more wishing that such-and-such cartridge was just like the arcade (and then being disappointed when it wasn’t). But if I think back to my own childhood, although I spent a lot of it in local arcades and corner bodegas—basically wherever I could find a coin-op cabinet and had some quarters—I still spent the most time in front of the television with the Atari 2600. The 2600 offered a unique experience, with gameplay, graphics, and sound like nothing else. And something clearly kept me coming back to it even after the ColecoVision, the NES, and other game consoles took the lead.

Arcade conversions weren’t even the whole story. The 2600 had plenty of superb original games, such as Yars’ Revenge and Haunted House. Other greats (Activision’s Kaboom!, Imagic’s Demon Attack) were released on the 2600 first before being ported to other platforms.

Why Read This Book?

Let’s face it: Some people think the 2600 sucks. A big part of the problem is the perception that it wasn’t powerful enough to run proper arcade conversions, as well as that the games were too simplistic. There were a lot of cartridges that not only don’t stand the test of time now, but didn’t play well even then. Others were passable upon release, but seem extremely dated now. All of this isn’t even counting the several hundred low-quality cartridges that flooded the market in 1982 and 1983 and contributed to the so-called Great Video Game Crash.

The trick to understanding and enjoying the 2600 is to sift through the games with the 20/20 hindsight that comes from several decades of experience and growth. This way, when someone asks you why you care about the 2600, or puts down the system in some way, you can smile and remember that a) lots of us did this at the time, and b) we loved the system anyway, especially in its glory days, and before more advanced consoles took over. Of course the 2600 isn’t as sophisticated as the NES; it came out eight years earlier. Of course it’s not as powerful as the ColecoVision or (in some respects) even the Mattel Intellivision, which came out in 1980 but never sold nearly as many units as Atari. And of course the 2600 wasn’t as flexible as the Atari 400/800, the Apple II, or the Commodore 64, but it took several years for those home computers to deliver the same kinds of arcade coin-op conversions.

None of the above mattered. The 2600 had the games. And it had them in bountiful supply, years before other systems caught up. It became the template for all successful game consoles.

In this book, I don’t discuss some top-selling 2600 cartridges like Donkey Kong, BurgerTime, and Zaxxon. Although many 2600 owners had these, they weren’t particularly good home conversions. They certainly weren’t influential milestones for the console and the fledgling game industry. A few other popular games were well done, but didn’t necessarily drive the conversation further, so I left those out as well. Activision’s Spider Fighter is a good example of a solid (even underrated) game that nonetheless doesn’t offer enough of a different shoot-’em-up experience compared with, say, MegaMania, which does significantly innovate and iterate on the Space Invaders formula. I do look at the two most infamous games to hit the platform, Pac-Man and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, because it would be impossible to chart the trajectory of the 2600 without mentioning these unfortunate cartridges.

That leads me to Atari itself. By now everyone has heard of Atari’s various achievements and management-related imbroglios. Others have tackled this subject with far more institutional knowledge, and there’s significant material out there from a business and entrepreneurial point of view. There are excellent books that single out specific Atari 2600 cartridges as part of the arc of video game history, that mark significant milestones in game development (and we’ll cover all of those here). But what this book will do is take us through the trajectory of the 2600’s rise and fall from our point of view as gamers, and examine how it was influenced by the culture of the time, and how that culture in turn was informed by the 2600.

Conventions

In this book, I refer to the Atari 2600 as such throughout, including the launch and first five years when Atari officially called it the Video Computer System (which was usually abbreviated to VCS). When Atari released the 5200 SuperSystem in mid 1982, it rebranded the VCS as the 2600, and just about everyone calls it that now. Switching between the two terms during the appropriate time periods in this book would be unnecessarily confusing, as I refer back or look ahead while addressing a particular game or other topic. Besides, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many incorrectly called it the Atari or playing Atari for short; few bothered to say VCS even then.

There’s no one right way to approach tense, as in the written word, with a subject like a vintage game console. It may have been designed and originally played 30 or more years ago, but it’s also true you can collect for it and play the games today. For this book, I use the past tense when discussing how something was made or events that happened back then, but use the present tense for how the games work (which was true then and now).

Release dates for 2600 cartridges are an exceptionally tricky subject. Most internet resources list just the year a particular game hit the market. Going back to materials published around the time of release, some manufacturer catalogs were overly optimistic about the month of release, store ads weren’t always accurate, and magazines may have covered an announcement or even reviewed a game that still wasn’t available to the public. And the copyright dates on the cartridges and in the manuals are no help; some are off by a year or more. With all that in mind, I did the best I could to nail the launch dates using a variety of sources, including television and newspaper ads, books, and compiled internet resources (which often disagreed wildly with each other). It doesn’t necessarily matter for our purposes what exact day a game hit store shelves or mail-order catalogs back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, releases tended to roll in over a period of weeks and even months as stores received stock, ran out, and so on. A game release wasn’t as super precise and to-the-second, where everyone knows something is out immediately thanks to the internet—with the possible exception of the absolute biggest titles well into the 2600’s life cycle when millions of consoles were already sold, such as Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man. We don’t need a narrative that says, Two weeks later, Activision countered Atari with X, when the games would have had the same historical significance for the industry even if the dates were swapped.

A lot of people say the 2600 was influential, but comparatively few break down exactly why. And for those who do, it’s often as part of an academic discussion, and not always put in the proper context for pop culture at large, or for its tremendous impact on video games today. This book aims to tell that story.

1 | Beginnings

Home video game consoles date back not to the Atari 2600, or even the company’s dedicated home version of Pong in 1975, but to the mid ’60s—before even arcade video games existed. The Magnavox Odyssey, originally conceived in 1966 by Ralph Baer, was the first true home game console. Baer, a lifelong inventor and electronics engineer who defected from Germany just before World War II to serve in the American effort, was the first to recognize the potential of the television set as a screen for other purposes.

From the outset, Baer designed the Odyssey to connect to a television set. Several prototypes later, with the last being the now-famous brown box prototype, Magnavox agreed in 1971 to manufacture and sell the system. The production beige-and-brown Odyssey, released in September 1972, consisted of an architecture with just 40 transistors and 40 diodes, and could display three square dots on the screen at once. The system came with two controllers and 12 games, though it didn’t use cartridges. Changing games required inserting the printed circuit board that contained the game you wanted to play and then attaching the appropriate included plastic overlay to the television screen to simulate the correct playfield. The machine itself could only display graphics in black and white.

It would have been too expensive to provide game backgrounds electronically, Baer said in a 1983 interview. The plastic overlays were the solution.¹ And because the Odyssey couldn’t display or keep track of scores, the system came with a small cardboard scoreboard that players could use to track their progress. Magnavox also sold a separate $40 electronic rifle that came with four additional games and overlays. The company sold roughly 85,000 systems and 20,000 rifles before the end of 1972.² Sales stalled after that, as television commercials at the time made it sound as though you had to have a Magnavox television to use the Odyssey, which was confusing to customers.

On June 27 of that year, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney incorporated Atari in Sunnyvale, California. Bushnell was inspired by playing Spacewar!, the world’s first software video game, which was created by Steve Russell at MIT in 1962. In 1971, the duo released the Spacewar!-derived Computer Space, the first commercial arcade game, under the name Syzygy Engineering. But it was Pong, designed by new hire and employee number three Al Alcorn, and released several months after Atari was officially launched—and several months after the Odyssey was released, though there’s some debate about this—that put Atari on the map.

Pong was a revelation. It arrived at a time when most Americans had only seen screens display images received from a broadcast network or projected from slides or a reel of film.³ In comparison, Pong was interactive, viewer-commanded television, Leslie Berlin wrote in Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age. Bushnell grew accustomed to people asking how the broadcast networks sensed Pong’s knobs had been rotated.⁴

Nonetheless, the game looked a lot like something you could play on the Odyssey. It turned out Bushnell had seen an Odyssey demonstration, thought it could be improved upon, and described the console’s Table Tennis game to Alcorn—without telling Alcorn where he got the idea for the design. Baer’s employer (Sanders and Associates) and Magnavox ultimately sued Atari in 1974 for infringement; eventually the case was settled for $700,000 and Atari became an Odyssey licensee.

After Pong, Atari released many more coin-operated machines to grow its business. Some expanded on the Pong concept (Pong Doubles, Super Pong). Others, including Tank, Hi-Way, and Jet Fighter, went in a different direction, and served to broaden the definition of video games. Several times, the company struck gold: The paddle-controlled Breakout, released in 1976, was an immediate hit, as was the steering-wheel-and-gas-pedal-equipped Night Driver later that same year.

As the 1970s wore on, demand for arcade games grew. They began to supplant and in some cases replace the pinball machines in bars, resorts, amusement parks, and shopping centers. At first, video games offered less play time with each quarter, which made the owners of said establishments bring in more revenue per machine.⁵ But video games rewarded strategy, persistence, and monetary investment in a way pinball machines didn’t. Video games also adapted to your skill, getting tougher as you became better at them, and video games had less chance built into them than pinball machines. If you became good enough, you could play a long time on a single quarter.⁶

So at the same time Atari began to dominate the arcade, the company set its sights on a possible way to play Pong at home. After all, families with kids wouldn’t go to bars to play coin-op games, and represented a tremendous untapped market. In 1975, as soon as it could do so profitably, Atari designed and released a version of Pong for home television sets, and it became a hit. The company then sold a slew of variations on the same concept: Super Pong 10, Super Pong ProAm, Ultra Pong Doubles, and more. Atari also tried its hand with a few unique titles like Stunt Cycle, Game Brain Console, and the ill-fated (and now quite collectable) Video Music system. Other manufacturers soon jumped in, including Coleco and Nintendo. The market for these consoles skyrocketed, peaked, and faded quickly. By the start of 1977, dedicated home TV games were already looking old, and more like a fad than an enduring concept.

But there was something else in the works, something that would lead to a revolution in gaming. Separate from the arcade machine and dedicated home console development, Bushnell began to back a small group of engineers who worked under the name Cyan Engineering in Grass Valley, California. Atari ended up buying the group in 1975 and renaming it the Grass Valley Research Center. Nolan and Atari President Joe Keenan decided to develop a cartridge-based system.⁷ Two engineers from the Cyan group, Ron Milner and Steve Mayer, began to shop microprocessors and eventually developed the first 2600 prototype. New hire Joe Decuir debugged that system and breadboarded a new gate-level prototype.

Then, in an effort to raise enough capital to finish, release, market, and distribute the console, Bushnell struck a deal with Warner Communications executive Manny Gerard for $28 million. Warner completed acquisition of all of Atari’s assets on October 4, 1976.⁸ Enthusiasts and Atari alumni will forever debate what would have happened had this deal gone down differently, or not at all. But as it happened, the deal with Warner provided the needed capital and set the stage for the 2600’s retail launch.

It wasn’t a moment too soon. In November 1976, Fairchild released the Channel F, the first cartridge-based game console, in an attempt to one-up all the hardwired game systems hitting the market. The Fairchild F came with tennis and hockey built-in, as did many competing systems at the time, though Fairchild released additional microchip-based games in Videocarts, plastic casings that looked like 8-track tapes.⁹ The Channel F also featured real color graphics, so you didn’t have to fuss with color plastic overlays the way you did with the Odyssey. The system wasn’t as powerful as the 2600 would become, but it still lifted the game industry out of the dark ages of ‘dedicated obsolescence’ to the new frontier of ‘programmable awareness,’ according to a story in the March 1983 issue of Video Games magazine.

RCA followed in January 1977 with the Studio II, a black-and-white-only model targeted at the education market. The console included two 10-button gamepads integrated with the console, rather than wired or detachable controllers you’d hold with your hands some distance away. It came with five built-in games and also supported cartridges. At the same time, Magnavox announced the Odyssey², which added color graphics and memory, two wired joysticks that were more similar to the 2600’s than to those on the original Odyssey, and a full QWERTY membrane keyboard. Bally and Allied Leisure also announced new consoles early in 1977.¹⁰

None of these systems offered quite the right combination of attributes for long-term success. Atari did with the 2600, thanks to its already-strong brand in the arcade, and some key design decisions early on. Eventually, it would launch the company—and the video game industry—into the stratosphere.

The Microprocessor Revolution

A video game, by definition, is something you play on a screen. It’s composed of video (the television, monitor, or display), audio (synchronized to the video), and some input method of interaction—hence the later term interactive entertainment. Today, we play video games across all manner of devices, including computers, TVs, phones, tablets, handhelds, and more. But back in the 1970s, the only way to play a video game was through a cathode ray tube—either one mounted in an arcade cabinet, or one that received a broadcast signal from the air for regular television.¹¹ There were handheld electronic games in the mid 1970s, but they usually employed some combination of LEDs, like Mattel’s Football or Missile Attack, or a vacuum fluorescent display, like Coleco’s orange Alien Attack (1979). The latter were also often found in VHS and Betamax video cassette recorders.

Atari’s success with the 2600 was bringing video games to home television sets in what was then a uniquely compelling way—with color graphics, two-channel sound, easy-to-use controllers, score tracking, and extra-smooth animation. The company’s breakthrough game console was made possible by the rise of microprocessors, which were much more powerful than the discrete logic required to build single-purpose coin-op games and earlier dedicated home consoles.

People often think of computers first when the subject of microprocessors comes up. The first microprocessor-based personal computer kit, the Altair, was announced in 1975 and cost just $399, although that was for a base model that barely did anything on its own—and being a kit, you had to put it together. Other manufacturers, such as IMSAI, made similar competing machines that also sold well.

Soon after, in 1977, the first Trinity of home computers all hit the market, at roughly the same time as the 2600. The Commodore PET 2001, Tandy’s Radio Shack TRS-80, and the Apple II were all designed around microprocessors, and came fully assembled and ready to hook up to a TV or monitor (the PET 2001 even had a monitor built in). All three were low-cost revelations compared with mainframes and minicomputers; together, they kicked off the personal computer revolution. But purely from a home-entertainment standpoint, they were expensive and relatively difficult to use. The TRS-80, based on a Zilog Z80, cost $649 with a 12-inch monochrome monitor and a cassette recorder for storage. The 6502-based