Can we talk about [ATARI] for a few? Is that cool?

citizen059

So it's all over the news today that it's the 40th anniversary of the founding of Atari.

I know for a lot of people when they think about retro gaming, they're thinking of their NES or SNES with fond memories.

Well, I never had either of those. I didn't have a Sega of any kind. I had this:



In fact, I still have it. It's in my closet right now, with my 120~130 games. It needs a little work...contacts could use some cleaning up, reset switch is flaky...but it works, dammit. I'm not letting go.

My fascination with gaming began with my 2600 and eventually led to PC gaming when I was in high school, which put me on the path to my current job as a PC tech at a college. Maybe that's why I keep the Atari around...because I know that's where a big part of who I am comes from. That, and the fact that I invested a good ten to fifteen years of my life in the games...arcade conversions, original titles, Activision games...oh man, Activision games and those patches. sigh

Anyway, I know I can't be the only one here that spent hundreds of hours with an Atari of some kind. So, y'know, if you want...let's hear your stories.


Of course, if it's nostalgia you're after you can get plenty of that over at atariage.com/

It'll remind me of the fact that as a kid, I used to look at those full-color Atari catalogs advertising...

Spoiler:

the 5200:



...and the 7800:




Not to mention when my parents would take my brother and I to Toys-R-Us and I'd stand in the gaming aisle and wish they'd buy me the ill-fated Lynx or Jaguar.

azith28

The 2600 was my first experience with video games. My dad purchased one for some unknown reason. I don't recall ever being into video games before that, (I was probably like 5 years old or so). We played Combat and asteroids until i got sent to my room for fussing at my dad for using things like angles and math to kick my ass in diagonal bounce mode of combat. What followed was years of blowing into the cartridges and bending the power wire just so to get it to work properly cause it had a loose connection in it that developed in later years.

It lead to other gateway systems. An intellivision, a trist at a friends house with the atari 7800 and colecovision, a nintendo, a genesis, SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, Gamecube, Xbox and my current ownership of PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360.

Thanks atari.

Griswold

I spent a ton of hours playing Atari when I was growing up, thanks to having way older siblings that had procured a 2600 (probably before I was born).

Some of my favorite games include Kaboom!, River Raid, Super Breakout, Missile Command, and Q-Bert.

histronic

Pac-Man was so great.

Edit: Little fun-fact about Pac-Man (because I did a report on the evolution of video games/systems in middle school) --- Pac-Man was originally named Puck Man but developers changed the name due to vandals scratching out part of the P to make a different word.

Toxic Pickle

Atari 2600 was my first experience with home gaming as well. It happened when we had gone to a pizza place and played Combat on one of the arcade systems... I hadn't wanted to leave because that game was awesome and, while in the car, I lamented that I wished I could play it at home. My mom's friend, who was in the car, mentioned that it could be played at home on this thing he owned. He brought it over and my love affair with video games began.

Never owned a 2600 myself, but I owned the 4800 (I think? The one that had the keypad controllers), Intellivision, and from then on into Nintendo and beyond.

40 years though, holy shit.

Stormwatcher

The 2600 was the first big hit here in Brazil too. We never got any other model, though. The SMS and also the NES with its many clones were the next big thing.
Of course I loved it back then. But I have no patience to 2600 games anymore. That's kinda sad for me.

skeldare

Spider-Man on the Atari 2600 was my first video game experience. Good times.

azith28

I remember playing through E.T. and thinking it was a pretty cool game. Obviously i was brainwashed.

skeldare

azith28 wrote: »

I remember playing through E.T. and thinking it was a pretty cool game. Obviously i was brainwashed.

You must've had really low standards back then.

citizen059

My mom got my copy of E.T. at a yard sale. No box, no manual. I had to figure it all out on my own.

I played the hell out of that game, and while I didn't think it was spectacular I had no idea it would eventually be at the top of the list as One of the Worst Games Ever and be considered partly responsible for the near-destruction of the home console market.

But what did I know, I was just a kid.

Warlock82

My friends had an Atari. I would go over to their house to play Mario Bros Then they would come over to my house to play Commodore 64 (which usually meant Ghostbusters ).

Madpanda

I had a 2600 as a kid, I remeber playing a lot of stargate, vanguard, firefly, river raid etc. I also had fun with numbers which was babbys first intro to oxymorons.

I collect retro games and recently started building up my atari collection. Most of my original carts still work fine and its the only system I didn't trade in to funcoland to get a newer system.

Right now I have an s-video modded 7800 which plays 2600 games and has quite a nice collection on its own.

We sometimes talk about atari in the retro gaming thread.

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/159344/buying-retro-console-hardwaresoftware

skeldare

Madpanda wrote: »

I had a 2600 as a kid, I remeber playing a lot of stargate, vanguard, firefly, river raid etc. I also had fun with numbers which was babbys first intro to oxymorons.

I collect retro games and recently started building up my atari collection. Most of my original carts still work fine and its the only system I didn't trade in to funcoland to get a newer system.

Right now I have an s-video modded 7800 which plays 2600 games and has quite a nice collection on its own.

We sometimes talk about atari in the retro gaming thread.

http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/159344/buying-retro-console-hardwaresoftware

Took me a minute to realize you were talking about the other name for Defender II and not

anoffday

Atari 2600 was my first gaming experience as well even though I'm 26 and it was before my time. I think I started playing it when I was around 3 because my older sister had got it before I was born. So it holds a special place in my heart. To be honest though I don't think I could go back and enjoy those games today though. Favorite system of all time would be SNES, my second system.

Axen

I think I too was about 4 or 5 when my household got their first Atari. Actually it was my older brother's. He worked his ass off doing al sorts of odd jobs around the neighborhood and saved up enough money to pay for most of it. As I recall my parents floated him the rest. First game he bought (and the first game I ever played) was Pitfall. I remember my fragile tiny toddler mind being fucking blown away by it.

My own first console was an NES though. I never asked for it, didn't even knew they were a thing and wasn't exactly big in to video games. Yet my parents brought one home for some reason. Wasn't Christmas or my Birthday either. I never did ask them why they bought it.

MalReynolds

My parents used to bring stuff home from yardsales to sell on eBay, back when eBay was a reliable way for them to make mad bank (and still be happily married, godammit, eBay, thanks for the divorce that no one bid on). All of us children had various jobs around the house when their van would roll into the driveway at 12:00, loaded with tons of shit. My brother and I would bring in books and clothes, my sisters would bring in puzzles and board games. I also had a second job.

To hook up and test all electronics that entered the house. Even as a seven year old, I had a knack for looking at things and figuring out just how to get them to connect to other things and show a picture, and show sound, and sometimes catch on fire. I was tenacious in my duties, and eventually, I won every version of an Atari for my hard work, as my parents had more than enough to sell. I also got spare Atari cartridges. Now, this was back in... let's see, I'm 25 now, that's when I was 7, so, about 18 years ago? Is that right? 18? Fuck, I feel super old. In that time differential I could enlist in the army and realize that the police didn't automatically show up if I drank.

The Atari system I probably spent the most time with, though, was the Jaguar. I had very little frame of reference as to what was 'good' and what was 'bad', because to a naive young mind, if it was good enough for the shelves, it was good enough for my hands, and any glitches in the game revolved around user error. Which means Kabuki Warriors was User Error, The Game. I do have fond memories of blasting through Wolfenstein 3d, and Alien Vs. Predator, and confusingly playing a soccer game, which might have been Fifa World User Error. I especially loved that each game came with a placard to go over the obscene, calculator based controller, where each of the 10 buttons had a different function. And boy was it fun when I'd get a game without the placard, trying to figure out just what the fuck everything did, and later finding that not all games utilized all buttons.

I never did clear AvP, and looking back, I can hardly blame myself. The game was beyond difficult. There was no instruction to do anything. I'd wander around as the Colonial Marine getting killed, and then wander around as the Predator (which had some weird RPG aspects built into it where you got new weapons based on honorable kills) getting killed, and then wander around as the Alien getting killed.

Fun times.

User Error 2 was pretty good, though.

citizen059

You know what I miss?

The idea that anytime I got my hands on an Activision game, it most likely meant you were going to be playing something awesome that was just pure quality from start to finish. There was just something intangible about the Activision titles that a lot of other developers couldn't touch.

Henroid

We had like three 2600's when I was a toddler/child. My mother had worked at Atari during the 80's, even when I was on my way to being born. I guess that's how we got them. I've been surrounded by video games my whole life. I remember very very few games on the Atari sadly, I can't pretend to have that good a memory.

citizen059

I'm going to go play some Yars' Revenge, just because.

harvest

Atari made me hate Pac Man

Scotty

I woke up Christmas morn, walked out of my room and around the twinkling tree to see that 'Santa' had brought me an ATARI 2600. I distinctly remember it was Missile Command on the screen of my parents old television with the knobs that clicked when you turned them to change channels.
I sat down, picked up the joystick, and my lifelong love of gaming began. I must have rolled the score over so many times on Asteroids that it had to be a record. (I was king)

citizen059

Just heard that the 100 game pack for the Atari iOS app is free today only. Kinda late to get that email though.


No big deal though - already have the app and the games on the iPad anyway.

citizen059

Just for the hell of it, I pulled my Atari collection out of the closet today to get a photo of it.

Text link, ~1.7mb photo. Had to take three and put them together to get the panorama.

Click Me. Do it now.

Linespider5

My father has a massive Atari collection. We don't even really know what's there. It's basically an Underdark of boxes and oversized plastic containers filling about four or five rooms in the basement, as well as under the stairs, and 75% of the garage.

We really don't know what's all there.

There's certainly a ton of the old stuff, including Pong and Super Pong, and hundreds upon heaping hundreds of cartridges, numerous Atari ST machines (including one with Jack Tramiel's autograph), Jaguars, Lynxes, and weirder stuff, like the Atari TT030 and something called the Falcon that I'm not really sure actually exists.

I played a lot of ARCHON on the Atari 800XL. In my opinion it's still the most perfect version that no one has managed to replicate. I would pay respectable cash for a true Archon remake that was the same colour palette and silhouette design, but, alas. Lots of wondrous games. Vanguard is still mindblowing to me.

The Jaguar always gets a spot in my heart simply because Rayman basically wouldn't exist unless the designers had to figure out a way how to make a fluidly animating, detailed sprite that would work on the Jaguar's memory allotment. That's why Rayman doesn't have limbs, because the Jaguar kind of sucked, and Michel Ancel is a genius.

citizen059

Where is this collection located? I would really like to steal admire it.

Linespider5

Pretty sure you could take all you can carry. But anything you drop will magically be teleported back to a random location in the maze.

Lawndart

One of the things that makes me spectacularly old is my love for Atari, but honestly when I think of Atari I think of their arcade games more than the 2600.

Because, god damn, was Atari one of the greatest arcade developers of all time.

Actually, I'm pretty confident that the "one of" can be safely removed.

The Anonymous

Man, I still have my Lynxes and the games I had for it from when I was a wee little Anonymous. Blue Lightning, RoadBlasters, Paperboy, even this WWI flight sim called Warbirds...I played the shit out of those back in the day.

...maybe I'll try to get past level 1 in Batman Returns one more time.

azith28

Linespider5 wrote: »

My father has a massive Atari collection. We don't even really know what's there. It's basically an Underdark of boxes and oversized plastic containers filling about four or five rooms in the basement, as well as under the stairs, and 75% of the garage.

We really don't know what's all there.

There's certainly a ton of the old stuff, including Pong and Super Pong, and hundreds upon heaping hundreds of cartridges, numerous Atari ST machines (including one with Jack Tramiel's autograph), Jaguars, Lynxes, and weirder stuff, like the Atari TT030 and something called the Falcon that I'm not really sure actually exists.

I played a lot of ARCHON on the Atari 800XL. In my opinion it's still the most perfect version that no one has managed to replicate. I would pay respectable cash for a true Archon remake that was the same colour palette and silhouette design, but, alas. Lots of wondrous games. Vanguard is still mindblowing to me.

The Jaguar always gets a spot in my heart simply because Rayman basically wouldn't exist unless the designers had to figure out a way how to make a fluidly animating, detailed sprite that would work on the Jaguar's memory allotment. That's why Rayman doesn't have limbs, because the Jaguar kind of sucked, and Michel Ancel is a genius.

You might wanna do some ebaying rather then giving it away. That sounds like an awesome collection. Take some photos of it and post them to entertain us

TheSonicRetard

So to celebrate Atari's 40th birthday, I ordered Pitfall for the Atari Jaguar, and it arrived yesterday. I already have several versions of the game (Sega CD, 32X, PC, SNES) but the Jaguar Version is surprisingly great. It looks like it runs at a higher resolution than the other ports, and it has a nifty save feature not present in any other version.

The Jaguar gets no love. In fact, much of atari outside of their 2600 gets any recognition, mainly because they transitioned into a hybrid gaming/computer company which made them virtually invisible in the US. Stuff like the Atari STe, the Atari 8-bit, and Atari Lynx are all worthy of praise, but nobody ever talks about them. stun runner on the lynx in particular is great.

Magic Pink

histronic wrote: »

Edit: Little fun-fact about Pac-Man (because I did a report on the evolution of video games/systems in middle school) --- Pac-Man was originally named Puck Man but developers changed the name due to vandals scratching out part of the P to make a different word.

Not quite true, they were just worried that vandals WOULD do that which, of course, they would have. He was Puck Man in Japan because "puck" is basically their version of "chomp".

Magic Pink

skeldare wrote: »

azith28 wrote: »

I remember playing through E.T. and thinking it was a pretty cool game. Obviously i was brainwashed.

You must've had really low standards back then.

Oh, whatever. ET was a perfectly fine game. It was the Atri 2600 for christ's sake, what were people expecting in a game? The thing shipped with Combat and Gunslinger easily some of the worst games on the system. But that's because the games were all pretty bad.

citizen059

Compared to today's games, yeah. A lot of the 2600 catalog doesn't hold up.

I think ET was made in five weeks, though. That's all the time the developer was given.

azith28

Of course it doesnt hold up. thats not the point.

There are times when nostaglia trumps gameplay. In certain cases, it becomes like an obscenely bad movie, and you can practically see the MST3K guys appearing at the bottom.

'You foul square, how dare you force your squareness on the princess square.'.
'So im flying a jet down a river canyon. But somehow the idea of flying UP instead of into the side of the walls doesnt occur to me. What am i, afraid of heights?'.

SteevL

E.T. was such a weird game, but I still managed to play through it on all difficulties back then. That's what happens when you're a kid and have plenty of time to throw at the incomprehensible. I didn't even realize it was considered a bad game until I got on the internet in the mid-90s.

Anyway, I see this is a month-old thread, but the 2600 was also my first system. I had played it a few times when people brought it over to my house, and my dad got us one as a way to soften the blow of news that we were moving to another state. Eventually I got an Atari 7800 because I genuinely wanted it, despite having a lot of friends who already had the NES and knowing how great of a system that was. I found a way to enjoy my 7800, but I did get an NES not long after.

lionheart_m

Man...I dumped so many hours playing with my Dad's (I think it was his...) Atari. I can only recall Combat, Pacman, Enduro and Raiders of the Lost Ark. We had a TON of games. I think I still do...I might try to get a pic up later when I get back home.

Metal Jesus

H.E.R.O. by Activision will always be my favorite Atari 2600 game. It was a fairly late release, but if you haven't played it before, I highly recommend it. Love that game!

And since somebody brought up E.T., here's a photo of an E.T. Trophy of Shame: