Atari 2600 - Your story

[mattbarton.exe]

Hi, guys. Bill Loguidice and I are writing a book about the history of gaming platforms, and of course the atari 2600 will get its own chapter. In addition to giving the usual info about system specs and games, we wanted to include some personal stories and anecdotes from fans of the system. In particular, we're wondering what drove you to the platform--was it commercials, friends, or demonstrations in stores? Did you also have a PONG machine or spend lots of time in the arcades? How did you feel about the competition? Did the system make you want to program your own games? We're basically trying to capture the flavor of what it was like to be a committed 2600 fan back in the system's heyday.

 

Please note (or don't reply to this) if you do not wish to be included in the book.

 

Thanks,

 

Matt

[kennetzel]

I would be glad to participate. What drove me to the system was Space Invaders. I was hooked on the game when it first hit the arcades. I am 54, so I remember when the arcades had the one obligatory Pong machine, a Space Invaders game, and the rest were pinball machines. Oh, there were some arcades that had Lunar Lander and Space war too...but as I said, mostly pinball. Every chance I had I would go to the Space Port at our local Thruway Mall and play Space Invaders. I would hit an amusement park, find the arcade just to play space invaders. Forget the rides...Space Invaders was why I went. I did have a Pong machine...It was not THE Pong, but one of those cheap replica's...it was cheaper. Played it for hours. As time went by, I heard Atari was going to have a Space Invaders cartridge come out. I decided right then that I would HAVE to have an Atari VCS. My wife and I just got married and got our first credit card. And the first charge on the card was the Atari VCS my wife bought me for my birthday that year (1980) and included was the Space Invaders cartridge she picked up extra. Back in the day, that was a pretty hefty investment, but we took the plunge. I was hooked playing Space Invaders all hours of my free time. And Combat was a lot of fun too. I had a good friend back then and him and I would play Atari all day on a weekend. Even my wife got into it.

 

As time went by, I picked up a pretty good library of games...Asteroids, Missile Command, Phoenix, Centipede, Raiders, Adventure...etc. I had three trays filled with games. We would run Atari parties...get a crowd over and play Atari while eating pizza. Mini tournaments and endurance sessions. My brother in law broke one million on Missile command during one of those. It was like movies of today...they hit the theater, and then the DVD comes out...well a new arcade game came out then, and you waited with baited breath for the home version to come out, which was usually for the Atari. It was an exciting time.

 

As far as Atari's competition...as far as I was concerned there was none. I would get angry over Intellevision commercials...trying to convince me that they were better than Atari because they had and exploding planet. Big woop...Atari HAD Asteroids. Atari was king, and there was no competition.

 

There was the time the game broke. The left fire controll kept firing, joystick plugged in or not. Had to take it in to get repaired. Sears, who took it to fix, lost it and about ten other games sent out for repair. It took six months to settle that displute, all that time I was without it. Talk about withdrawel. No more parties, no something to do when garbage was on TV, nothing to do on those nights I couldn't sleep...I went nuts until Sears finally replaced the game.

 

My interest started to wane when Pac Man hit the shelves. I was getting into computers, and Pac Man was so poor, I started feeling Atari's time was comming to an end. Slowly, but surely, it ended up in the bottom of the closet with my wife asking me over the years "Are you ever going to get rid of this thing?" and I always answered with an adament NO. Good thing too...my daughter and her fiance play all the latest games. .They keep trying to get me to play them. These new controllers confuse the heck out of me, I can't figure them out and the end result is I screw up big time and I leave it. What happened to the simple stick or paddle controll. So about six months ago, I pulled out the Atari...cleaned it up, plugged it into an old TV set and it worked like the day I got it. And I have been playing it daily ever since...getting new games on Ebay and elsewhere. I have it, I play it, I enoy it till this day...2013. Yes, graphics improve...but the play remains a challenge and I am enjoying it all over again. Long live the 2600.

[Serious]

My first console was an Odyssey 2. I loved it, but I was secretly jealous of my friends who had Atari VCS's because of the arcade conversion titles.

 

My dad finally bought us an Atari VCS when I was 10, and we played marathon sessions of Missile Command. "If it flies, it dies!!" I remember my dad yelling. He won't even touch a video game these days.

 

Around this time, I was "designing" video games in my elementary school classes, instead of doing my work. This mostly involved drawing pixelated-looking sketches, and imagining the game mechanics. This was what first got me to want to be a programmer (so I could create these games).

 

My love for the Atari took a hit upon the release of Pac-Man. It was such a terrible game, and such a huge disappointment. I remember feeling like Atari ripped me off (even though my family didn't buy the game). All of my friends and other families we knew felt the same, and the enthusiasm that everyone seemed to have for Atari games never seemed to be the same after that.

 

We later got a Colecovision, which seemed amazing at the time, due to the quality of the arcade conversions, but most of the games were still on the Atari, so I kept playing it.

 

I lost interest in video game consoles for a while after the Commodore 64 came out, and I was able to really invest myself in learning to program, but my interest in the Atari 2600 returned, later, when all of my friends became willing to sell me their games for $1 a piece. During the NES days, it seemed like everyone I knew was practically giving away their Atari games.

[Mirage]

The Atari kiosk in LaBelle's department store playing Asteroids in 1981!

 

I could barely reach the controls, but I reached up to that joystick and the game beat me merciless time after time. Amazing being able to control the graphics on the screen to the ominous sounds. From then on, the constant begging probably made Christmas seem further off to my parents than it did even to me.

 

Finally, Christmas morning came, and after all the gifts were opened and I realized there was no Atari, I sat there a bit shocked. My mom snuck away and brought out "one they forgot". I opened it up to find... Asteroids! I'm pretty sure I screamed, and my dad brought out the VCS from the bedroom (we called it a VCS then, not a 2600). We only had Combat and Asteroids, but the time I spent playing those two games was more magical than any of the game plays in the 30+ years since. My own video games in my own house, imagine that! When I returned to school, I found that many of my friends and acquaintances had received Ataris too, so we started going to each other's houses to play and sometimes borrowing each other's games. Soon, we were scheming on what games each of us should request for birthdays and such so we could maximize the number of games we collectively had to play. In addition to the head-to-head action, we would eventually collaborate on solving Raiders of the Lost Ark and the SwordQuest games.

 

Only now that I'm an adult (at least physically) do I realize that my parents didn't have much money at all at the time, so that gift is all the more special. But, that investment paid huge dividends that there's no way my parents could have predicted or would even understand now. It was the most magical part of my childhood. I owe that simple little console a lifelong love and hobby.

[racerx]

My parents bought a used VCS with 8 games for my sister and me for Christmas of '79. Heavy sixer, still had the box. (Still have the console, sadly the box has been lost to the mists of time). None of us called it a VCS or 2600, it was just "Atari" or "the Atari." Sure, some kids had Intellivision and eventually Colecovision. One neighbor even had a Vectrex. But it was the Atari "tapes" that got brought to gradeschool and swapped around.

 

We never had a lot of money growing up, but my parents managed to be on top of leading edge electronics, somehow. Before the 2600, we had some sort of Pong game. We had a huge honking top-load VCR when they came out, and a video camera (with the VCR unit worn slung over a shoulder). I'm pretty sure both of those cost about 1000 bucks in early 80's dollars.

 

I spent a lot of quality time with the old man playing Atari, even though I typically doled out a beatdown equalled only by those my son gives me in Halo or CoD.

[sqoon]

We were poor and could not afford VCS when it first came out. However, my financially better off uncle always got all the toys and refused to share. He was basically selfish. I remember him having HO scale trains and RC planes, but we never got to touch, only watch him play.

 

Christmas of 1977, we visited their home, and he had the VCS along with Combat and Target Fun. Wow. I had never seen such a thing. I was in awe, but he would not even offer me the opportunity to play, despite the fact that I was not a little kid, and how could a little kid damage the CX-10 controllers anyway? Along he went, playing Target Fun with his son-in-law, but never an offer to let me play. Talk about mean.

 

Being poor, I waited another 4 years until I somehow talked my father into buying me Sears Video Arcade for Christmas. It was worth the wait. I still have that original system and play it from time to time. Oh, and anyone that comes to my house is free to play any system in my large collection. No selfishness here.

 

As for my uncle, I hold no grudges. He passed away about three years ago from cancer. Such a shame he lived his life as a selfish spoiled brat type. Life is too short for that stuff, for sure.

Edited January 26, 2013 by sqoon

[shadow460]

My first interaction with the 2600 was in a Sears store. My brother and I played Tank Plus at the kiosk, and we had the time of our lives. It had to be 1980. We got our first Atari the year before we got HO scale slot cars and trains, so it had to be 1980, and the CX-2600A had to be brand spanking new on the market. I've opened light sixers with build dates in spring of 1980, so I'm sure the console we got was one of the very first 2600A "Woody" consoles made.

I really don't remember a lot about it. I do recall asking my dad why they didn't fill those big boxes (that the games came in) full of cartridges instead of putting just one game in each box.

 

A few years later after Mom had passed on, my Dad was raving about some new Atari console that could play 2600 games. It was 1984. Instead of the new console, Dad purchased an Arcadia Supercharger and the first ten games released for it. For some reason my Dad was never able to find this new console and we eventually forgot about it. Fast forward to 2005 when I discovered the vast community of classic gaming fans. The collection of games I'd grown up with was long since gone, but I wanted to relive the past. I decided to find out what my Dad had been missing in 1984. I purchased a 7800 and that's when it all started over.

 

I have a couple of favorite Atari memories. The first was when I was perhaps 6 years old. Mom was quite sick at the time but she was able to sit up long enough to play a game or two. I chose Kaboom! and plugged in the paddle controllers. I said, "Mom, here's your paddle," to which she replied, "Good. I'm gonna paddle YOU with it!" Mom smiled jokingly and we played a game or two.

The second, and probably my favorite Atari memory was at Thanksgiving in 2006. My family got together for a small dinner, and Dad told me he had something for me in the garage. He'd found out I was getting serious into Atari collecting I guess. My jaw about hit the floor when he handed me that Supercharger and every single cassette he had kept with it for all those years. I was completely speechless for several minutes. I still have that Supercharger and all those cassettes. I replaced the one instruction book I had lost when I was 9 or 10 and added a couple more tapes and a modded Starpath Supercharger to the collection. The Arcadia one, being unmodified, is almost totally obsolete, but I don't mind it just sitting there. I know I have already enjoyed it for countless hours when I was a young boy.

 

Oh, by the way, that graphic you see at the top left is a sprite taken from one of the hardest levels of a Starpath game. I finished that game for the first time using that old Arcadia supercharger.

Edited January 26, 2013 by shadow460

[Cynicaster]

Atari 2600 Space Invaders and Pac-Man were the very first two video games I ever played in my life, sitting cross-legged on the floor in a friend's living room in front of a big CRT television with a convex screen.

 

I was too young to even think about making games myself, and my video game world began and ended with the Atarri 2600; effectively, there was no competition at all.

[NE146]

Like the poster above, what drove me to it was Space Invaders and my quest to play the arcade game at home. I didn't know about the VCS version until I saw it.

 

I was a child of the arcade (I'm 44 now) and too remember the transition from EM games to wall to wall Space Invaders with cocktails in the middle. At my elementary school on the playground, the talk was all about how there was a mini "Space Invaders" you could buy at the store.. and of course this was a total myth at that point in time. But I was addicted to the arcade game so it's all I dreamed about and looked around for. At the time, the closest thing you could find were electromechanical handhelds, then later the Bandai "Missile Invader" with one single alien in it. but I believed a real life mini Space Invaders existed and I just didn't find it.

 

I traveled from Guam to San Francisco on vacation, then we went to a Sears. And lo and behold they were playing Space Invaders on a display in the TV section. It was NOT really what I was looking for (2600 Invaders is a far fetch from the arcade game obviously) but it sure beat the Bandai Missile Invader. So my mom bought it (a Sears heavy sixer with "Target fun" included), and I kept it in the hotel looking at the box until we went home 2 weeks later.