Everyone, everyone…we missed a birthday, an important one too. On October 14th, 2012, the Atari 2600 turned 35. As one of the oldest game systems (Magnavox Odyssey is a bit older), gamers owe most of the infrastructure of the game industry to the pioneers at Atari.
At this point, most of the major historical notes and oddities have been explored in various books and television specials but this article on Yahoo managed to dig up a few factoids I had not heard of before.
For example, If you bought the system for the price it was then ($200) today, the Atari VCS would be almost $800. With game system demand going down across the board, the next generation of video game console may see a return to prices like this though the loss on system price has been a mainstay of new systems for every company but Nintendo for many years.
The Atari 2600 cost about 100million to develop and the system did not sell that well when it was released (250,000 units its first year). However, a port of Space Invaders that was programmed by a Rick Mauer grossed over 100million on its own. Rick Mauer was reportedly paid about $11,000 for his work and has never worked in the game industry again.
Also in the hardware realm, there are a few interesting tidbits of Atari history that deserve mention. The Atari 2600 had a light gun but only one game that used it – Sentinel. It could also produce digital speech but there were only 2 games that did it: Quadrun and Open Sesame. Considering the system had 128 bytes of ram (middle of the road computers have around 8gigabytes today), this was quite an accomplishment.
The Atari 2600 could get online via a plugin that allowed users to connect to a service to download games they could play. It was created by a company called CVC and the product was called GameLine. While this service was a failure, it pre-dated the Sega Dreamcast by 16 years.
Finally, with all the games produced for the system, there are a few that were made that could be called, “obscure.” Coca-Cola licensed a game called Pepsi Invaders which was relatively under-produced. Copies of the game currently go for around $2000. Air Raid currently has the most expensive game collectible. There are around 13 known copies of the game and they average around $31,000.
Fans of retro gaming may also be interested to read more about games that are still being produced for the system.
Ian Bogost has produced 2 games for the Atari 2600 – Guru Meditation and A Slow year. In these games, Bogost tries to offer some suggestions for different ways video games could have gone. Guru Meditation allows players to balance themselves on a balance board created for the system while A Slow Year allows users to enjoy machine created Haiku along with scenes representing the 4 seasons.
For action game fans, there has also been a 2600 version of Halo. Halo 2600 can be played on the creators website and downloaded in this thread over at Atari age. Copies of the game have gone for as much as $400. There is also a 2600 port of the game Boulder Dash that has reportedly been in development for about 10 years. More information about Boulder Dash for the Atari 2600 can be found at the Atari Age thread for the game's demo.
Pepsi Invaders
Air Raid and Halo 2600
Guru Meditation and A Slow Year
