Start of an Industry

Atari 2600, the only video game console that has wood grain printed on it. The Atari 2600 or Atari VCS (Video Computer System) was Atari’s golden child. With the 2600 Atari felt that they were unstoppable in the new video game market they have established. Although rightfully so, every console Atari made after the 2600 could not compete with the numbers that the VCS brought. Now how did the 2600 come to be?

Although not the first video game console, it was the first to popularize the new industry. Atari started off with it’s Pong arcade machine which debuted on November 29 1972. It faced great success and started a trend of home Pong consoles. This was during a time in which semiconductors, chips and rom (Read-Only Memory) were on the rise which meant that a console or computer can be built with less cost and much smaller. With all of this Atari released the 2600 in 1977 with a price tag of $199. What made the 2600 different from the pong consoles was that the console could play different games other than pong with cartridges that have roms on it. Arcades were also on the rise which was perfect since many at the time would love to play these games at home and the VCS offered that. Many arcade hits, like Space Invaders and Asteroid, were released on the system causing the system to sell very well and gross $2 billion dollars in 1980. This would last long since the relatively new market had no quality control or any control at the point, so in 1983 the decline of video game sales and interest would prompt the video game crash of 1983 to occured due to influx and over saturation of other video game consoles from other companies, like the Odyssey 2 or Colecovision, and plethora of horrible made games such as Chase the Chuck Wagon and the Atari 2600 version of Pacman. This cause Atari to lose money and even though they tried to gain interest with the Atari 5200 and the 7800 it was too late. It wouldn’t be until 1985 in which Nintendo would bring back the interest of video games to the United States with their Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

Although very primitive compared with video games now, the Atari 2600 graphics were pretty advanced for the time in which it was released, compared to the Pong consoles it competed against. It had a 1.19mhz processor, 128 bytes of ram, and was able to display at a resolution of 160 x 192 pixels on screen. Now a modern calculator can outperform that and then some, but even with these limitations there were still some graphically and complex games that came out for the system. On the console there is 6 switches: one powers the system on, the other changes the screen to black and white or color, the two in the middle control the difficulty of the game for either of the two players, the other switch controls the different game modes in the game, and the last switch reset the game. The 2600 has two controller ports on the back with controllers that just have one button and a joystick. In the middle of the 2600 there is a place to insert the cartridge.

The Atari 2600 would be forever remembered as the grandfather of video games. It established, and also kinda destroyed, an industry that every year is growing more and more. With the new wave of collectors, the 2600 and it’s different model variations can cost up $80 and up for a working system and wires. The games themselves are pretty cheap because of overproduction and simple nature of the games due to them mostly being arcade ports. The Atari 2600 is personally a fun system to play and try out since gives a sense of nostalgia even if you did not grow up with it. The games are addicting despite them having simple graphics. It would go down in history as the console that started it all.

It has been a great pleasure typing out these blogs and I would like to say thank you for those who read and comment on my blogs it was much appreciated. Thank you!

source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600_hardware