Combat. 2 player game to sell more game consoles?

[ussexplorer]

I remeber playing combat for the first time. I looked at the instructions and realized it was a two player game. I thanked my lucky stars the used system I picked up from a yard sale included additional single player games. Now knowing for many years that Combat was the first game to be included make me ask this question. Why not put a single player game into the system? To sell additional VCS units? To sell at least one more single player cart at $30.00? Seems to me Atari knows what they was doing.

 

Laters,

 

Josh

[Brad2600]

Combat and say....Asteroids would have made a great combination for people purchasing a brand new 2600 back in the day. 2 carts for the price of 1!

[jsoper]

Combat wasn't one of the of great 2600 games, but IMHO it was a very good choice compared to the rest of the first generation stuff. It was something the family could jump into right away on Christmas morning and didn't have a learning curve like Adventure. What if Flag Capture was the pack-in? Or Video Olympics ("We payed $250 to upgrade from the Pong machine to THAT?").

 

Wouldn't it be fun to make 10000 copies of Pitfall2 and Solaris, go back in a time machine, and hide them in the first VCS production shipment? Imagine what the meetings would be like over at Intellivision hq?

[liquid_sky]

I think it was because combat is a simple game that the whole family can play, son can play father, and try to show the fatheer that the 2600 was indeed a good investment, for example.

[sku_u]

When Atari first came out with the VCS, Pong was still very much alive and well. Pong was primarily a two player interactive game. Mayber the PR folks at Atari felt that releasing a two player game would be more accepted.

[Room 34]

Of course, when the system FIRST came out in 1977, it was primarily being sold through Sears stores. Sears packed in Target Fun (Air-Sea Battle), not Combat.

 

Personally I always thought it was STUPID that Combat was the pack-in because I almost always played Atari by myself (only child), and I never got any use out of Combat at all!

[liveinabin]

The VCS was marketed as a family entertainment system so a 2 player game pack-in kinda makes sense. I think if they included a 1 player title with the first (popular) console ever, parents might have seen this gaming phenomenon as a little antisocial (well, they did anyway - but that isn't Combats fault:) ).

[Room 34]

Well, I certainly wouldn't recommend packing in a one-player-ONLY game. But it would've been nice to include one of the many games that offer both 1 AND 2 player options.

[ElectricTroy]

When I FIRST got Combat, I played it for hours. I was just absolutely stunned by the graphics and being able to control them.

 

Later I never played it at all, but for a first impression of a videogame, it was very, very good one.