The Atari 2600 at 45: The Console That Brought Arcade Games Home

On Sept. 11, 1977, Atari unveiled the Video Computer System (VCS). It wasn’t the first game console, or even the first console to accept cartridges. But the Atari 2600, as the VCS came to be called, did what no other system could: When connected to a television set, the 2600 brought real Atari arcade games home. And it transported you to an array of virtually unlimited new worlds right from your living room or den.

Everyone is used to this now, but back then it had never been seen before. I first got mine in 1979, and there was nothing like it. Let’s take a trip back and look at this fantastic—and sometimes maligned—console at the beginning of the home video game revolution.

Press Reset

Atari was already flying high by the mid-1970s, having launched the coin-op video game industry with Computer Space and Pong. But it had nothing in the home yet—that fell to Magnavox, which was selling Ralph Baer's brilliant Odyssey. Originally designed in 1967 and launched in 1972, the Odyssey played 12 different games on your television; it didn't have color, so you put plastic overlays on the TV that acted as playfields for the simple black-and-white graphics.

Three years later, Atari scored a hit with its Home Pong console. The company soon followed up with plenty of variations, including Super Pong 10, Super Pong ProAm, Stunt Cycle, and Video Pinball. Sears sold its own Tele-Games Pong jointly with Atari and also released Taito's Speedway IV. Coleco unveiled the Telstar, and Magnavox released more streamlined Odyssey models.

By the end of 1976, dozens of dedicated TV game consoles flooded the market as Atari, Magnavox, Coleco, and others jostled for position in what turned out to be a quick boom and bust cycle. Once you got tired of the built-in games in any of these systems, that was it; you couldn't add new ones.

Atari was already working on a solution. Al Alcorn, Jay Miner, Joe Decuir, and some other engineers designed a cutting-edge console with an 8-bit, 1.19MHz MOS 6507 microprocessor, a more affordable variant of the MOS 6502 that would soon appear that same year in the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001, two of the first personal computers. The 2600 hardware design also featured a custom graphics chip designed by Jay Miner and Joe Decuir called TIA (codenamed "Stella"), while a MOS 6532 contained the system RAM and processed controller input. Most importantly, the 2600 would accept cartridges that stored additional game programs in either 2KB or 4KB of ROM.

To stay afloat and raise enough capital for launching the 2600, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell sold the company to Warner Communications for $28 million. The deal closed in October 1976. The next month, Fairchild beat Atari to the punch with its microprocessor-based Channel F, an impressive game console with color graphics and the ability to accept cartridges, unlike all the other TV game systems on the market—and just like what Atari was already working on. Soon, RCA released the Studio II, which had built-in gamepad buttons and also accepted cartridges. Magnavox unveiled the Odyssey2, which came with a built-in membrane keyboard for writing your own game software. Bally and Allied Leisure announced their own systems.

All came up short next to Atari. For $189.95 (in 1977 dollars), the 2600 came with two joysticks, two paddles, and the pack-in cartridge Combat, which delivered two-player facsimiles of Atari’s 1974 and 1975 coin-ops Tank and Jet Fighter. The 2600 also came with a metal switch box that let you connect the system to the back of a television so that you could switch between “TV” (whatever normally displayed on channel 3 or 4, whichever was weaker in your area) or “Game” (the 2600).

For the launch lineup, Atari released eight additional games, including Video Olympics, with its 50 Pong variations; the target shooting game Air-Sea Battle; and the top-down racing game Indy 500 (above), complete with its pack-in Driving Controllers. All eight games were available separately.

The Key to Success

Thanks to the 2600’s cartridge slot, you could never get bored of the system—all you had to do was buy another game, or ask your parents to. Some early cartridges were mediocre (anyone out there love Basic Math?), but other games were fun despite their simplicity. It’s tough to beat two friends shooting up the carriages, and each other, in Outlaw. Or watching your guy go “splat” in Sky Diver because you didn’t open the parachute in time. Or launching out of a cannon in Human Cannonball, missing the target, hitting the ground, and seeing “Oh No” in crude letters appear above his corpse. (Hey, it was the late 1970s.)

But soon, the 2600 saw higher-quality games, such as an excellent and colorful 1978 conversion of Breakout, Atari's famous coin-op designed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs a couple of years earlier. And Superman and Adventure (both 1979) both set the template for multiscreen, open-world exploration, finally breaking video games out of their fixed-playfield boundaries. The dragons in Adventure looked like ducks, but no one cared.

The 2600's hardware was built to a low price point, much lower than that of the first three personal computers, the Apple II, the Commodore PET 2001, and the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80. Although the 2600 featured superb 128-color graphics, its TIA chip only allowed for two players, two missiles, and a ball on the screen. And the chip could play just two voices of audio simultaneously (either music, sound effects, or both).

The system also had just 128 bytes of memory, which isn't enough to store this sentence, much less a game, and it had no frame buffer, so it couldn't even remember what it had just drawn on the screen. But clever Atari engineers soon began to figure out ways to bypass the system’s tight hardware limitations. They discovered programming tricks that could fool the hardware into displaying far more sprites, with more detailed graphics, than the system was designed for.

Air-Sea Battle was an early example, but the real achievement was Rick Maurer's version of Space Invaders (1980), which became the killer app for the platform. Released less than two years after the game became a coin-op arcade phenomenon, Space Invaders turned the 2600 from a nifty gadget into something everyone wanted, so they could play it at home instead of going to the arcade.

Riding High

Mattel tried to compete by launching the Intellivision, a solid system with numerous hardware advantages over the 2600 that especially helped in sports and strategy games. Mattel secured licenses from all the major sports organizations such as the NBA, NFL, and NHL. It eventually sold several million units, but it never threatened the 2600’s lead. Other efforts such as the Bally Astrocade, the Magnavox Odyssey2, and the RCA Studio II found few takers.

Atari kept going. Its stellar 1981 conversion of Asteroids didn’t look exactly like the arcade—no 2600 game did—but programmer Brad Stewart shrewdly filled in the asteroids with bold colors to compensate for the lack of sharp vector graphics. He also pioneered the use of bank switching, a technique that let the 2600 access more than the 4KB of cartridge ROM it was designed to harness. Asteroids was the first 8KB cartridge. The stellar Missile Command, Warlords, and Yars’ Revenge soon followed.

The 2600 itself also saw several iterations, all 100% compatible with each other. The original black-and-woodgrain “heavy sixer,” named for its thick metal shielding to pass FCC regulations when connecting to a television set, gave way to a more crisply angled “light sixer” (1978) and “four-switch” model (1980), which moved the difficulty switches to the back. The 1982 “Darth Vader” traded the woodgrain look for all black, and was also the first one to get the 2600 name, which everyone has called it since.

The Market Splinters

Famously, Atari kept its formulas secret—and even its employees, refusing to give them credit in games. In response, the Adventure cartridge contained the first popular Easter Egg, a hidden feature that showed programmer Warren Robinett's name in a special room if you executed exactly the right steps, a wonderful protest in retrospect.

Four other key Atari engineers were upset with their treatment at the hands of the company. After all, their creations were earning Atari millions, and they were each making around $22,000 per year, with no prospect of royalties. So they quit and banded together to form their own company.

Activision, launched in October 1979, was the first independent, third-party console game developer. It quickly became known for quality titles with fast gameplay and zero flicker, such as River Raid, Chopper Command, and the groundbreaking Pitfall!. Plus, Activision always made sure to credit each game developer on the box and in the manual.

Imagic, Parker Brothers, and other third-party developers soon followed, launching terrific games for the 2600 such as Demon Attack, Atlantis, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, as well as a number of arcade conversions like Frogger and Q*Bert.

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For a time, there was no stopping Atari. If you were a kid in the early 1980s, you had to have a 2600 and the latest games. Here, let Jack Black tell you:

What Goes Up…Well, You Know

Then it all went south. Many people erroneously blame E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial as the reason the market sank. It certainly wasn’t a great game, with its crude graphics and frustrating pits. Anything less than perfection would have made a mockery of Atari’s $20 million deal with Steven Spielberg, but it wasn’t a terrible cartridge. Still, it fueled the urban legend—since proven true—that Atari had buried thousands of extra copies of E.T. and other games in a landfill in New Mexico in 1983 when the market crashed.

I still maintain that more than E.T., the biggest problem, and the reason the entire video game industry began to shift against Atari, was its disappointing conversion of Pac-Man. The company compressed the development process into just five weeks, limited the programmer to 4KB even though 8KB would have been affordable enough to mass-produce, and then cranked out 12 million cartridges even though only 10 million 2600 consoles existed, on the projection that millions would go out and buy a 2600 just to play it.

The result, launched in March 1982, was a disaster. All the charm of the coin-op was gone. The sound effects clanged and bonged. Pac-Man ate “video wafers” (rectangles) instead of dots, and a square vitamin instead of different fruit. The monsters lacked eyes, had poor AI, and flickered like crazy. Pac-Man didn’t face up or down, only left or right, so he just slid up and down the board. Even the scoring was wrong. We all played it constantly anyway, but in a single masterstroke, Atari shattered its invulnerable image.

Around the same time, the tide began to turn for arcades. Many began closing, unable to attract enough customers. Players started to get sick of playing the same games over again, and for home consoles, a glut of poor-quality cartridges hit the market as everyone tried to cash in on the video game “gold rush.” The problem was that it was already ending, thanks in large part to the rise of powerful home computers like the Commodore 64 that could play games just as well and do all sorts of other things. Three new consoles, the ColecoVision, the Vectrex, and Atari’s own 5200 SuperSystem, launched in 1982 to advance the state of the art, with far superior hardware to the 2600 and near-perfect conversions of hit arcade coin-ops. All three consoles crashed and burned within a year—along with the rest of the video game industry.

Plenty more excellent games came out for the 2600 around this time, including Phoenix, H.E.R.O. (above), and a much better conversion of Ms. Pac-Man that (almost) made up for Pac-Man. But it wasn't enough. Atari lost more than half a billion dollars in 1983 and went from 10,000 employees to just over 100 by the middle of the following year. Many thought video games were a fad, but Nintendo soon changed everyone’s mind in America with the NES, and the rest is history. The new Atari Corporation scrambled to lob more machines over the net in response, including one last 2600 model that was much slimmer and less expensive, to no avail.

Atari Forever

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the 2600 is how much has happened since. The homebrew scene lit up in the 1990s with excellent titles such as Oystron (1997) and Conquest of Mars (2003). All kinds of people began hacking existing titles, such as “fixing” the original 2600 Pac-Man release in various ways, or adding the missing voices to Berzerk Voice Enhanced (courtesy of Mike Mika, who also programmed the Game Boy Color version of Yars' Revenge in the late 1990s and is working on the upcoming Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration).

Today, you can play excellent conversions of Scramble, Warlords, Galaga, Star Castle, and other coin-op games that many believed were impossible to do properly on the platform (head over to AtariAge and check 'em out). And of course, the new Atari VCS console recalls the original design and features downloadable games, apps, streaming services, and more.

The story of Atari has many twists and turns over the years, but it includes several undeniable achievements. Among other things, Atari launched the coin-op arcade revolution with Pong, it launched the home console industry with the 2600, and it created the first true gaming PCs with the Atari 400 and 800s. Now that everyone plays video games at home and it’s a billion-dollar industry, you can easily argue that the 2600 had the biggest impact of them all.

Jamie Lendino is an executive editor at PCMag and the author of Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming. He’s also written books on coin-op arcade games, Atari computers, and PC and DOS games.