Unfinished Business: Atari 2600 Retrospective

Welcome to the second part of what you didn’t know was a four-part series when it began in January 2017.

But instead of finishing this post 5 years ago as planned and following up with some special footage shot that same year and never published (I swear I only have 3 unproduced videos for the blog, and the other two are both Funspot arcade tours).

The next opportunity to not wait until now to send out the post came about a year-and-a-half later, when I was cleaning up unfinished business for the blog’s 10th anniversary. Needless to say (as I often say needless things), this business remained unfinished.

So now, I bring you a solo-mode retrospective for my very first, hand-me-down game system: the Atari 2600. Or VCS as it was known in some circles.

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Combat, Air Sea Battle

These launch titles served pretty much the same role in the collection: pvp and explaining just what Atari considered a “game.”

You see, the packaging on several releases for the Atari 2600 touted the cartridge counting potentially dozens of “games.” While even a few of years later such a thing would be considered a multicart aking to the Action 52, during these early days, the definition was much more fluid. I went over this in the original post, but since it’s been 5 years, I’ll give you a quick refresher here.

In Combat, for example, the default “game” had you and a second player maneuvering tanks through a small maze to line up and land as many shots as possible on the other player before time ran out. Changing the “game” would provide some different layouts before going into alternate modes. One such mode had your shots ricochet off walls, providing new opportunities to hit or be hit once you and your competitor have become too good at defensive maneuvering. Another set of “games” had you using tanks that only become visible when shooting. While still more modes change the game entirely into variations on low-speed dogfighting in aircraft.

Air Sea Battle on the other hand, was not a direct battle between players. Rather, it was a contest to see whose anti-air batteries could take down the most planes. Changing the “game” here provided different mixes of aircraft to shoot down.

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River Raid, Pitfall!

Back when Activision wasn’t a joke so pathetic you laughed to keep you from crying, they made primo Atari 2600 games.

I only had two of them, but they got an oversized share of the playing time. I probably would have had Pitfall all figured out if I had bothered to map it, I was too busy complaining about how some hazards killed you while others simply deducted points.

River Raid, though, passed for a masterpiece compared to the other games on the system. Easy to control, clean graphics, intuitive gameplay. It seemed possible to get to the end, but the amount of time I was allowed to use the Atari in one go was sadly not sufficient to accomplish the task.

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Arcade conversions

Arcades fascinated me as a kid, as they had video games that were even more whiz-bang than the ones you could see at home. They were also verboten to me by my parents, so arcades had that going for them, too.

Bringing the arcade experience home in any form provided a tiny, poorly rendered, and years obsolete window into the magical world of arcades that perhaps would have been better served by the Master System. Not that anybody my way had ever heard of it, but it could have been an option.

I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to get through Berzerk and never getting there. I was luckier in determining how to progress in Frogger II: Threee Deep, but that didn’t make it easy to accomplish… or an actual arcade game despite being the direct sequel to an arcade game. The original Frogger was much less demanding, as was the ugly-as-sin ports of Donkey Kong and Pac-Man and the reasonable recreation of Space Invaders.

The surprising crown jewel of this collection within a collection was Super Breakout. Not only did the game faithfully recreate all the fun modes of its arcade counterpart, it had a large variety of sound-effect sets, one of which was randomly selected each time you started a new game. It would play a brief jingle to let you know what it would sound like, and I often made a few repetitive concerts hitting reset over and over until I got the sound set I happened to want at that time.

A close second, and probably what anyone would have picked, was Ms. Pac-Man. You know, before Namco erased her from existence. Unlike regular Pac-Man, the lady of the house brought the goods, with no flickering sprites, a laundry list of maze layouts and, you know, COLOR.

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While the collection also featured several sports games, all of them were beyond terrible. If nothing else, Atari ownership has taught me how much further sports games have come come compared to shoot-’em-ups.

Sports aside, there were still more games in the collection. Including one that has a reputation unlike anything else on the system… but that story must wait for a while longer.