Atari Alumni

In today’s HD, Blue-Ray, 3D, massive multiplayer, next-gen gaming universe, it’s hard to imagine any influences from the classic Atari 2600. What you might not realize is that it isn’t the 2600’s successes that influenced modern gaming, but its utter failures; mainly those really weird experimental controllers floped as quickly as they were released. We’re [...]

[Read more →]

The video game crash of 1983 was the sudden crash of the video game business and the bankruptcy of a number of companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America in late 1983 and early 1984. It brought an end to what is considered the second generation of console video gaming.
This [...]

[Read more →]

In an industry where an obese plumber can become a cultural icon, it’s no wonder that in video games, weird is normal. However nutty they get, these oddities were never as strange as the ones for the Atari 2600. Ironically the most bizarre of these came out around the crash of the video game industry, [...]

[Read more →]

We’ve all heard of the Atari classic Space Invaders, right? Sure, of course, because we’re not a pack of pop-culturally ignorant mother-scratchers. The same can be said about Dig-Dug and Breakout and Asteroids. These are the major titles, the games we all know and love to play.
Then there are the minor titles that only the [...]

[Read more →]

Most people don’t realize that I didn’t get my start at the San Francisco Chronicle as the universally beloved pop culture critic that you know today. I was actually a Chronicle paperboy in the early-to-mid 1980s.
My best friend Bryan and I had adjoining paper routes in Burlingame, and we would spend most of our profits [...]

[Read more →]

In an industry where an obese plumber can become a cultural icon, it’s no wonder that in video games, weird is normal. However nutty they get, these oddities were never as strange as the ones for the Atari 2600. Ironically the most bizarre of these came out around the crash of the video game industry, [...]

[Read more →]

This top ten list based on my opinion these are the ones to have and the ones to avoid. I base these on graphics, ease of play, how addicting the game may be and how much thought was put into to game itself. While I did not play every single game in the atari line [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Long before Nintendo conquered the world with the NES in 1987, Atari ruled the video game landscape with their 2600 and 7800 consoles in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Since those games couldn’t rely on graphics or elaborate storytelling, they needed gameplay hooks that were compelling. Most were also either arcade games or similar [...]

[Read more →]