 Atari
Who could imagine today that four-bit graphics
and 16 colors could have ever amounted to so much damage? Even with
its display of shockingly rudimentary graphics, Atari was light-years
ahead of the competition, opening up a brave new world of cathode rays
. . .
First released in the UK in 1977, the Atari, with
its wood grain console, plastic paddles, and stubby rubber joysticks,
had become a fixture in the living room of every middle class home by
mid-1978. The range of games was a bit basic - Tennis,
Outlaw, Breakout and Space War - and they
came on chunky cartridges as big as a modern Game
Boy. But they were
hugely addictive, and mums and dads soon realized they just had to get
used to life without television as children lay transfixed in front of
a screen full of slow-moving blocks.
For a time, the word "Atari" was synonymous with
video games. Nobody said, "you guys wanna go over to Brent's and play
video games?". No, it was always, "You wanna go play Atari?". It
wasn't the first home video game system (the Odyssey predated it by
five full years), but the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) was the
cultural turning point.
As the 80s dawned, the videogame industry
continued to thrive, with Atari still leading the pack. When the
company released a home version of Space Invaders, Atari
2600 sales hit their highest level to date. Atari's Space Invaders
cartridge earned the company over $100 million, and home video games
had their new official king. Within two years, more than 25 million
consoles were sold, earning more than $5 billion (more than half of
Warner Bros income at the time). New accessories were added, from the
keyboard control of Brain Games, Codebreaker and others
to Indy 500's driving control to assorted Trak-Balls, new
joysticks, and cheating helps like the rapid-fire Blaster.
 Atari's
first serious challenger was Mattel, who introduced a home videogame
system of its own called Intellivision, which included games such as
baseball, poker and blackjack. It was more expensive than Atari but
boasted better graphics.
Thanks to a group of disgruntled Atari employees and an upstart
company called Activision, third-party game designers began adding new
titles to the Atari VCS/2600 line-up in 1980. Imagic, Coleco,
M-Network, Parker Brothers and several others contributed to a library
that eventually included several hundred games. Many were conversions
of arcade smashes like Asteroids, Defender, Centipede,
Missile Command, Frogger, Warlords, Dig
Dug, Donkey Kong and others, but there were
several original hits as well. Among them:
 Adventure
A quest to find and recover a golden chalice, fighting dragons and
avoiding a thieving bat along the way.
Haunted House
A pair of eyes searched a spooky lair for the pieces of a treasure.
Ghosts, spiders, and other nasties attacked, and your tiny candle
could blow out at any minute.
Kaboom!
A masked robber dropped bombs toward you. Catching them got
harder and harder as the bombs dropped faster and faster.
Pitfall!
Pitfall Harry scampered through the jungle, hunting treasure and
jumping over crocodiles, rolling logs, pits, scorpions and other
threats (a sequel, Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns, expanded the
adventure into one of the most elaborate games created for the
2600).
Raiders of
the Lost Ark
A quest based on the movie of the same name, as Indy tried to locate
and recover the Ark of the Covenant.
Superman
The Man of Steel flew around Metropolis, trying to round up Lex
Luthor's gang and put back together the bridge they sabotaged.
Video
Olympics
50 variations on the Pong formula, from Quadrapong to
Foozpong to Soccer, Volleyball, Handball and Basketball.
Yar's Revenge
Your heroic insect chewed away a shield, then fired a missile at the
exposed enemy.
The console's biggest cartridge success was no big surprise.
Namco's Pac-Man had become a worldwide sensation in 1980, and
Atari naturally wanted a home version. The 2600 game arrived with
great fanfare in 1982, and based on name recognition alone, it quickly
became the best-selling title in the VCS/2600's history. But even
those who bought the game and played it faithfully until the wee hours
of the morning recognized that it didn't really quite exactly look
like the arcade. A later release of Ms. Pac-Man offered a more
faithful version, but even so, ColecoVision was starting to look
better and better.
Regardless, 2600 Pac-Man was an unqualified smash - the fact
that you could play Pac-Man at home was all we needed to hear.
The 2600 continued to score big through 1982 and 1983, but ironically,
it was about to become a victim of its own success. Third-party
cartridges flooded the market, hoping to cash in on the video game
craze. Many were both rushed and rough, and interest in the machine
waned. Atari was already hurting from disappointing sales of its
E.T. game after spending an astronomical amount for the license,
and when gamers suddenly switched over from home game systems to home
computers (used, of course, to play games), the entire video game
market crashed.
Atari's video game division was sold in 1984, including the 2600, its
short-lived graphical improvement the 5200, and the unreleased 7800.
With the success of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid-80s,
the 7800 was finally released, and a handful of new 2600 games
continued to be produced. The 2600 finally ended its production run in
1991, after a 14-year career - the longest of any home video game
system to date.
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