Yes you are old.
30 years ago this month saw the entertainment industry saw the launch of a new concept that would change the future of television usage. The Atari 2600 debuted and our young world was changed forever. While the system never rivaled the graphics and fun of arcades at the time, in start contrast to console playing of today, I think all in my generation remember the day they flipped the score on Asteroids.
Technically I didn’t have an Atari. My partents bought me the Coleco Vision and it had an Atari expansion unit that played the 2600 games. I enjoyed the Coleco games more as graphically they were better and had devices such as a steering wheel which accounted for many hours playing Turbo, but I did play my share of Atari games. Pitfall, Bezerk, Combat, The Empire Strikes Back, and the largely forgotten Raiders of the Lost Ark were but a few of my favorites.
So take a trip with me down memory lane and tell me what your favorite games for the system were.
Billy Ocean, Student Council Treasurer 
I don’t remember which system(s) this game appeared on, but my favourite game was always Oink. It was a variation of Brick in which the player was a wolf trying to get into a house with 3 little pigs.
For the Coleco Vision, BC and Smurfs Paint were my faves. BC was based on the comic strip. The goal was to ride a primitive unicycle around a mountain strewn with potholes and other obstacles. Smurfs Paint allowed you to put Smurfette in the compromising positions we all know she loves to get into once the Sun goes down over Smurf Village.
Today, all these games are available through emulation and multigame packs on new systems and standalone tv top systems. Its just not the same as plugging in that old system into a crappy 17″ television set and playing until your eyes burn.
Long live the 8 bit video game system!
It was all about the Activision games: Pitfall, Pitfall II, Decathlon, River Raid, the list is endless. Activision knew how to make a decent game within the severely limited constraints of the 2600.
My dad was a computer programmer, and as such there was a rule that no “game computer” would be in the house – if you couldn’t program it, it wouldn’t be around. As such I had home computers instead of video game systems.
Still, I got to play on some old consoles at friends’ houses and such, so I didn’t miss out on this stuff completely. For Atari, I think Pitfall tops the list. Asteroids would be second. Centipede and Defender would be in there for third and fourth, but I can’t decide which one would be which place. Combat would definitely round out the top 5, though – I loved the tanks.
Have you ever tried to go back and play an actual 2600 these days? It’s embarrasing that we ever got so excited about those games, sometimes. A few years back, a friend bought one at a garage sale along with a few games. When we played it, I couldn’t get over how incredibly slooooow Combat is. It was painful. Still, the really good ones like Asteroids prove that you don’t need super-realistic-3D-high-def graphics to make a game fun.
my brother had the atari and intellivision systems, and i somehow inherited colecovision when i was younger. baseball was where it was at for coleco, with the monstrous controller used to play it. i also pwned at zaxxon, which was one of those hilariously impossible games to play.
Zaxxon was 3D! Sorta…