And here we are with what I consider to be the best of the initial Atari 2600 titles. This was the one that actually came with most 2600 consoles from the launch until The Shittiest But Also Best Selling Pac-Man took its place so for people who got in pre-Pac Man and Space Invaders boom this was probably the first Atari game they even touched. And Atari smartly made sure it made a good impression before people realized most the rest of the dross they could buy were math equations or hangman.

This also might be why Combat is going to be one of the rare times that the contemporary opinions were actually more muted than the modern consensus. At the time Combat didn’t get an outsized reaction, but as the years turned into decades this is one of the early games that people - myself included - still think has obvious value and stands out as a multiplayer title, and I fully agree.

Its actually a combo of a few popular Atari games, namely Tank and Jet Fighter, and unlike some of the other ports from these couple years it retains the vast majority of what made the arcade versions good. Because it borrows from a few different titles the different variations all actually feel unique instead of just an attempt for the marketing department to put a big number on the front of the box. I also have to give it credit for not even bothering with a half-assed single player mode and a terrible CPU opponent. This is multiplayer only bay bay, and for my totally-didn’t-keep-up-with-productivity-since-the-70s money its pretty close to being the gold standard of multiplayer shooters at least until after T H E C O L L A P S E happened and Japan took over the gaming industry for good.

While I may be an elderly millennial, I was roughly a negative decade old during the Atari 2600’s time on top, but I do have some memories of playing it. We were always a few years behind on console generations when I was a kid, being a working class family living during trickle down and the dot com bubble and all that fun stuff, so I was 7 when I got a NES even though the SNES had already been out for a bit, and before I had a NES I distinctly remember messing around with one of these woodgrain beasts that my parents had, who definitely were not gamers beyond that.

I had to be 5 and that was many, many brain eating drugs ago so I don’t have a lot of super distinct memories of it, but I do remember sitting there on the floor waiting for Mystery Science Theater to come on WGTW (The One To Watch!) while playing Outlaw with my dad.

The original Outlaw was the better named response to Midway’s GUN FIGHT [/fight milk voice] and wow they must have really been punching themselves for getting beat to the most obvious possible title. Outlaw was programmed by David Crane who has a wonderful resume that includes founding Activision with the other people I’ve mentioned a hundred times in here, and designing Pitfall. Its a wild west gunfight shooter where you move your cowboy shaped splotch around the small map, usually with an obstacle in the middle you have to shoot around, and attempt to maneuver yourself into getting a good shot at the cowboy shaped splotch in front of you.

The strategy of the game is that you can only move or shoot, not both, and when you take a shot you are motionless until the bullet either hits or misses. I love when really simple things like that end up adding enough layers to a game to stay entertaining. Its yet another one that is forgettable without a human to play, but - and this might be my first real hot take of the 70s - its one of the most amusingly competitive games on the system. You could take this game right now and remake it with like Drivekick’s aesthetic and they would be playing Outlaw at whatever gathering of the fightgalos replaces EVO.

I’ve already mentioned bartop breakout clones were a secondary baby sitter of mine during my youth, and I will probably keep mentioning it because I don't have a shrink, so its nice to see the console originator of the concept here and still holding up well.

Although I guess saying it holds up is overselling it since its such a basic concept that is executed well enough here in the port despite some limitations, but the core gameplay works so it doesn’t matter too much.

Any port limitations make sense when you realize that not only did the guy who programmed this, Brad Stewart, win the job after beating coworker Ian Shepard in a game of the original arcade Breakout, but that Stewart didn’t have access to any of the arcade games original designers because giving credit to the people who actually made the fucking game was not an accepted practice yet. I’m sure he wouldn’t have found much help from the arcade dev team though, full of a bunch of nobodies like Nolan Bushnell, Steve Bristow, and some guy named Wozniak or something.

Fun fact; did you know that Steve Jobs was involved in the early prototyping and development of the arcade version and apparently acted like a giant fucking dickhead who pocketed more money than anyone else even though he delegated the lion’s share of the work to Wozniak? Go figure!