Looking back 30 years

[5drew00]

I remember when the Atari 5200 came out 30 years ago in 1982 when I was 12 starting Junior High and my best friend told me about a 5200 TV commercial showing all the games for the system! I had owned a 2600 since my birthday in 1981 and wanted a Colecovision because of Donkey Kong, Turbo, Zaxxon, etc, but the 5200 did look like a SUPER system!

 

I did NOT get the 5200 or Colecovision for Christmas 1982 because they were expensive. A year later my cousin got a 5200 and I LOVED the games but NOT the controllers which were flimsy and unresponsive making Pac-Man impossible to play!

 

Instead for Christmas 1983 I got an Atari 800 computer which had SAME games as 5200 and accepted 2600 JOYSTICKS! YAY! In hindsight I should have gotten a Commodore 64 computer which lasted YEARS longer than Atari computers!

 

Now 30 years later I am enjoying playing Classic video games Arcade, systems, and computers with emulation on Xbox and PC including 5200! Xbox controller works WELL with ALL the games including 5200! A good controller could have saved 5200, because the GAMES ROCK!

 

And Atari should have kept several games EXCLUSIVE to 5200! Why did they make inferior 2600 versions, too?

 

Atari 7800 was too little too late it should have come out in 1984 to beat Nintendo!

 

Looking back 30 years Atari 5200 was never the successor to 2600 Atari and fans hoped for but lives on today in emulation!

[ilovethevectrex]

ive never played an atari 5200, but ive heared many things about them :/ i think the reason they made all of the 5200 game on to the 2600 is because they still wanted to sell the game in a decent amount because the 2600 was much more sucsesfull :/

[craigm71]

The only connection I had with the 5200 was when I was young, my next door neighbor had one, I had a Coleco Vision at the time so I was amazed in the graphics of Pac-Man and I played the heck out of it.

 

I don't recall complaining about the joystick.

 

Before then and actually after that, until I got into Retro, I never heard of the 5200 anywhere.

[atari5200dude82]

I Got my Atari 5200 in 1984. I loved it every since.

[onthinice]

I think the 5200 is a great controller. It took me a few times to figure it out and once I did it became one of my favorite systems to play.

[Charlie_]

I loved playing a friends 5200 when I was a kid. I always envied it and wanted one, but it just cost too much for my family.

Another friend across the street had a Coleco Vision. I liked it too. We played Smurf and Donkey Kong a lot. No matter how good the CV looked the games didn't have that Atari game-play feel. Still had much more fun with the VCS than the CV. Whenever I got the chance to play the 5200 at this kids house I jumped on it.

We had lots of fun. I never remember hating or complaining about the controllers. It was just the way they were, we learned to use them and had lots of fun.

Always wanting one when I was a kid is why now ,as an adult, it is my favorite console.

[datacipher]

Hello all,

 

It's a pet peeve of mine when current reviewers go on and on and on about the controllers.

 

Only myself and one friend had 5200's....they didn't even sell them in my hometown in Canada, so we both had to get them on trips the US!

 

He got his first, and yes, the first time I picked up a controller to play Pacman, I was shocked and unable to play at all!!! It took a few minutest to adjust....we quickly figured out that you had to try to smoothly preset the joystick, and soon we all were playing competently. Ideal? No, far from it, but I became very proficient at it, as did everyone I know.

 

With PacMan, Galaxian, DIg Dug, Centipede, Defender, Joust, and football, I was very happy. My buddy also had Buck Rogers.....

 

Great system, and had Atari simply released self-centering controllers, and the Superpacman, Tempest, Jr. Pac, millipede, stargate, etc protoypes we all now know were out there....the system would have taken off!!

 

What held them back in my opinion was not the lack of a 2600 adaptor initially, it wasn't the controller, it wasn't the fact that it was an Atari 8 bit....it was simply the fact that the original line-up was lackluster. Centipede...and the great defender helped......then Dig Dug and Joust were awesome....with moon patrol, mario bros, and the newest releases never even had time to take hold before they pulled the plug....along with the protoypes...finally the catalog would have been starting to rock!

[thegamezmaster]

I loved playing a friends 5200 when I was a kid. I always envied it and wanted one, but it just cost too much for my family.

Another friend across the street had a Coleco Vision. I liked it too. We played Smurf and Donkey Kong a lot. No matter how good the CV looked the games didn't have that Atari game-play feel. Still had much more fun with the VCS than the CV. Whenever I got the chance to play the 5200 at this kids house I jumped on it.

We had lots of fun. I never remember hating or complaining about the controllers. It was just the way they were, we learned to use them and had lots of fun.

Always wanting one when I was a kid is why now ,as an adult, it is my favorite console.

 

 

I know what you mean about CV not having the Atari game play feel. I have both but still feel the same way today! Had a 5200 when they first came out, a ton of games and accessories, wish I still had them!

Edited August 28, 2012 by thegamezmaster

[ledzep]

I loved playing a friends 5200 when I was a kid. I always envied it and wanted one, but it just cost too much for my family.

Another friend across the street had a Coleco Vision. I liked it too. We played Smurf and Donkey Kong a lot. No matter how good the CV looked the games didn't have that Atari game-play feel. Still had much more fun with the VCS than the CV. Whenever I got the chance to play the 5200 at this kids house I jumped on it.

We had lots of fun. I never remember hating or complaining about the controllers. It was just the way they were, we learned to use them and had lots of fun.

Always wanting one when I was a kid is why now ,as an adult, it is my favorite console.

 

I agree about the feel. I had a 2600 as a kid and went to the arcades a lot. My best friend had a 5200 and an Intellivision. While I loved the 5200 (wanted one but had an Atari 800 already and most of the games were on both) I could never get into the Intellivision. The games felt wrong and I hated them except for a few like Utopia (we liked to play that one by blanketing our islands with factories and having the citizens always sick, haahaha), Swords & Serpents and Major League Baseball. But the action games always felt slow or wrong or clunky or whatever. And talk about crap controllers, the Intellivision had the worst I've ever seen in terms of gameplay, I hated the goofy disc, I hated the coiled cords, everything.

 

Maybe I'm biased because I grew up with arcade games and the 2600 so I expected all games to act that way. In my view the arcade games are the best, they are the way video games should act and function. So whatever home console gets the closest to that? The best. I can't remember who had a Colecovision when I was a kid but I remember kind of liking it but not really interested, I was always more drawn to the Atari stuff.