Atari Alumni

The 2600’s game library, compared to the libraries of other videogame systems, is by far the strangest and most varied. The sheer number of games, which totals over 1000 cartridges by some estimates, coupled with the fact that pretty much anyone could make a 2600 game (there wasn’t really any licensing system, a mistake that [...]

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The 80’s are back! Yes, Atari has decided to relaunch its classic game console at a $30 price point.
The offer also includes a T-shirt featuring the original Atari VCS 2600 - which is often described as one of the most iconic machines in the history of video gaming.
“Flash back to the 80’s! [These] are the [...]

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The Atari 2600 was not without software. The first mainstream videogame console sold over 30 million units on the strength of both its newness and the breadth of its game library, which numbered in the hundreds… as in, several hundreds. But the rush to publish games for the Atari 2600 was also the system’s greatest [...]

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Though the first Atari console may have been released over 30-years ago, there have been a countless number of commercials released for the games that continue to live on, thanks to YouTube. Continue reading to see five of our favorites.
Watch them here »

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Ben Heckendorn, master of stuffing old gaming consoles into portable packaging created what is arguably his most intricate project yet, a homemade laptop filled with Atari 800 guts. This throwback to the early days of video games sports an 8-inch TFT screen, dual speakers, full QWERTY keyboard, 2-player controls, cursor control knob, CompactFlash “disk drive,” [...]

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The Atari ST was a home/personal computer system released by Atari in 1985. The “ST” allegedly stood for “Sixteen/Thirty-two” which referred to the Motorola 68000’s 32-bit internals with 16-bit external busses. Other theories say that ST really stood for “Sam Tramiel”, the son of Atari owner Jack Tramiel.
The Atari ST was a competitor to the [...]

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Videogame names don’t come much bigger than Nolan Bushnell. The legendary entrepreneur cemented his place in history with the founding of Atari almost 40 years ago, bringing arcade classic Pong to the world and spawning a multibillion-dollar industry. Bushnell spoke with Yahoo! Games about the timeless appeal of Atari’s newly-remixed Missile Command, and pointed out [...]

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Seawolf is based upon a 1976 arcade game by Midway, in which you are a submerged submarine firing torpedoes at ships patrolling the surface. The arcade game was Black and White, primitive, and in my opinion, not very fun. You had a time limit instead of a lives system, not that anything could kill you, [...]

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The Atari 2600, originally called the Atari VCS, is the godfather of modern videogame systems, and helped spawn a multi-billion dollar industry. Atari sold over thirty million of the consoles, and together with other companies sold hundreds of millions of games. Cartridges for the system were produced across three decades, and there are still new [...]

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About 12 years ago, my wife and I pulled her original Atari 2600 out of storage and hooked it up to our television. We set it on the floor, next to my Sega Genesis, and showed it to our kids.
“What’s that?” One of them asked.
“This is how we started playing video games at home when [...]

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