Originally published at: I am enjoying the Atari 2600+ experience
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I never had one. My parents refused to buy us one for some reason. If it were about half the price it is, I might be tempted to get one just to see what I missed out on.
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it will be 
This stuff never holds up in price and used will be on the market too.
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The ‘10 Games in 1’ cartridge includes iconic games such as Adventure, Combat, Dodge ‘em, Haunted House, Maze Craze, Missile Command, Volleyball, Surround, Video Pinball and Yars’ Revenge.
No ET, I see… 
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I saw it at the local game store.
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I guess they didn’t all end up in that landfill, then!
Actually, there is an arcade near me and they have all the major consoles, including the Atari, and they have the ET game, so I guess they still exist…
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Unless you’re really desperate for the actual experience, the Atari 50 collection is probably a better deal. Games from all of their platforms, with interviews, design and marketing docs too.
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The MyArcade Atari GameStation Pro is the best at $80, the SD cards lets people load 1000s upon 1000s of games for many platforms. Essentially a RetroPie for $80.
Its not this. This is ONLY 2600/7800 and is meant for the Atari experience at its purest.
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I wanted one, and ended up with an Intellivision, which at the time I thought I got the raw end of the stick. But later I learned that it was more powerful and had better, more complex games than Atari ever had.
The problem was with friends not getting the hang of that weird disk controller, and the fire buttons were way less ergonomic, hurting your thumbs after a long game of Astrosmash.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced D&D Treasure of Tarmin were AMAZING early dungeon crawlers. Too bad being licensed they haven’t been part of the official re-releases (I don’t think?) But you can find the ROMs out there.
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I shouldn’t complain about what we got instead, either. We got an Apple II+, and I learned how to program in BASIC, which gave me a huge head start on most of my classmates. I’m just now not as familiar with some of the games that most of my fellow Gen Xers consider a big part of their childhoods.
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Man, I learned BASIC in Middle School on an Apple IIe and loved it. I was doing pretty advanced stuff compared to my peers, I figured a way to do some very crude animation like make an orb on a staff “glow”. And I made a missile move off the wingtip of an F-16 in a very short Choose Your Own Adventure.
I did some fun stuff in HS too.
Too bad I didn’t stick with it. I did take some C+ courses, but the language was just not intuitive for me and i thought I’d do better as a designer. Oh well.
Great review, but are there any other pitfalls besides the painful nostalgia of the controller?
My copy of Pitfall is coming. Pitfall 2 has special chips and doesn’t work yet.
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I had to learn FORTRAN in college as an engineering major. It wasn’t that different than BASIC, but it felt like a step backwards in many ways. I then wrote a program in Visual Basic (the DOS version) for my first employer after college. Jesus, I’m old. They ended up using that program until at least 2005 or so.
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I loved that game… I was terrible at it, but I loved to play it anyways…
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I always used to stop him right before the campfire and say “Come, warm yourself by the fire for a bit.”
I was in college when my mom told me Ms Tickle (the computer teacher) told her she was still using my old work as examples for her classes.
Which was one part cool, and one part sad as those Apple IIe’s were horribly outdated when I was using them!
I knew some older programmers who were paid well because they knew older legacy languages that were still holding the foundations of Fortune 500 companies together.
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Played the 2600 heavily in my youth. Many hours of joy, worn away joystick rubber, and the resultant sore hands.
Today’s market trends have me fervently in the camp of “nostalgia is a seductive liar”. I’ll happily spend my time elsewhere and not try to recapture my youthful perceptions and experiences.
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For those interested in the technology of the 2600, this video explains how it was possible to produce games on a machine with just five monochrome sprites and no video memory:
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I had an Intellivision too, it was a lot of fun. The best game was baseball. Incredibly basic with stick-men but the gameplay was fantastic. My brother and I used to have amazingly spirited, competitive clashes.
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