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!

Air-Sea Battle is another example of what I talked about in Sky Diver's blurb. The single player isn’t even worth mentioning, but as a competitive game its a relative blast.

You control either an anti-aircraft gun, a bomber, a submarine, or a ship depending on the game mode, or I guess a clown murdering gun if you are playing the shooting gallery variant, and are tasked with shooting down enemies quicker than your opponent can while avoiding the obstacles that try and prevent your missiles from hitting their target. It gives you the option to either have missiles that you guide manually or ones that just follow the initial trajectory which adds more strategy than you’d expect, I promise.

You might remember Canyon Bomber and Human Cannoball - both games with lightly similar mechanics to some of Air-Sea Battle’s gameplay - faltered there by having limited replay value. The Ship vs Bomber two player variant is specifically the stand out, and to this point was probably the most involved two player game on the console.

Obviously most Atari games either don’t hold up well or need caveats in order to recommend them, but the biggest caveat is that a lot of them gain an extended shelf life if you play them with somebody else. I try to approach this dumb time wasting project of mine with one leg in the contemporary context and one leg in [extremely Serial Experiments Lain voice] haha present day haha present time [/voice] but even as an aging millennial I can’t see many people who decided to stay home instead of going out partying with our parents before they thought of giving up their dreams and having children just sitting down and tucking in to some pre-NES games instead of, I don't know, dropping acid and listening to prog rock while contemplating the oil shortage.

I think that formula changes when you play against someone else though. Even something a simple as Sky Diver, a 40 year old game where you throw yourself out of a plane and have to pull your chute at the last moment and hit a target without getting smashed on the ground in an amusing looking way, is a great option for when you have people over and an Atari 90-in-1 Plug In your grandma bought you from QVC because she knew you 'liked video games' and it said video game on the cover. The spirit of competition smooths out a lot of edges, and while Sky Diver is fun enough on its own, its more fun when you have other people to viciously mock for not judging the wind correctly in a game from 20 years before they were born.

Hey look, we are finally getting to the games that are pretty alright and don’t need a ton of qualifications before you can sort of recommend them to people under 50.

Like a lot of these early launch Atari titles, Indy 500 is an amalgamation of some of Atari’s arcade racers which they thought were necessary to help them stand out from all the other pong boxes on the market and it worked! For a while this was the high water mark of console racing games and honestly for all its simplicity it holds up, I mean its not any more simplistic than most mobile racing games when you think about it.

As is standard, there are a few slightly different game modes here to and a couple different tracks - including the treacherous and amusingly nicknamed DEVIL’S ELBOW - and all of them are pretty fun as well if not entirely drastically different from each other. While I’ve never gotten a chance to mess around with this one with the original driving paddle jawn, the controls are still shockingly responsive for this old of a game. There is a game mode where you race but on ice and your car actually slides around, but not in the frustrating icy surface way that would come to plague platformers and such going forward. There is also a demolition derby-ish mode and a tag mode which are all just different enough to add give things a good variation. Overall just a really solid racing game from 43 god damn years ago.

Superman is one of the earliest coulda-woulda-shoulda games. A game that you can tell would have been a borderline classic if they just did this or changed this or, in Superman’s case, if it came out a year or two later. Its one of, if not the first, home console games based on an existing IP - I’m still not googling it to see if my assumptions here are right, sorry, contribute to the Patreon I don’t have if you want accurate well researched content piggy - and certainly the first Superman game, so they went real ambitious with it.

You can tell that ambition by how it becomes a quickly flashing graphics cycling mess the minute more than two things are on screen at once. But there really wasn’t anything like this on the Atari yet, not even close. Superman has scrolling continuous maps to go through, each one a little different, there are short cuts you can take, its hard to say its non-linear but its the closest thing to non-linear you get on this console for a little while longer. Its actually closer to the game Adventure than it is to any of the action or arcade games on the 2600.

You are tasked with rebuilding a destroyed bridge, going around and scooping up Luthor’s goons to drop into jail which itself is a fun little distraction, capture Luthor himself, and then get back to the phone booth before anybody realizes your elaborate disguise is a fake. If you get Kryptonited you have to find Lois Lane and make out with her which I’m almost certain was so well animated for the time that some degenerate cartoon pervert rubbed one out to it in these pre-anime days. The goal is to do all these things as quickly as possible and I mean you can bang it all out in about a minute if you know what you are doing, so after that it becomes a paper weight more than a cartridge game, but even with all the shortcomings this was a solid glimpse into where gaming was going and its worth it for that alone.

Surround, otherwise known as Competitive Snake or Hey Isn’t That Just The Game From Tron No Not the Disc One The Other One With the Neon Motorcycles Wait Didn’t This Come Out Like Four Years Before Tron Did Tron Rip This Off I’m So Confused was one of the original nine launch games and one of the better ones.

Like most of those launch games, and I feel like this is another thing I’ve said a bunch of times in this along with ONE OF THE ACTIVISON GUYS MADE IT, its based on an Atari arcade game called Dominos which itself was essentially a clone of another arcade game named Blockade which makes a lot more sense than calling this Dominos. Surround is a solid title though as it accurately explains how to win the game. You lead your snake as it increases in length against another snake as it increases in length in a came of cat and mou- er snake and snake until one of you is trapped. There is also a completely useless “video graffiti” mode which just lets you move the snake around and, uh, I guess draw? Had to try and squeeze as many quote unquote game modes out of this concept as possible.

Anyway, Surround's gameplay is obviously decent because the main conceit stayed relevant well into the sitting in front of a Wawa playing snake on your Nokia Blue Phone while waiting for your high school weed guy era of gaming, but its hard to fully recommend due to both the snakes being the same color which just seems like a hilarious oversight for a game that you would think would want you to be able to tell your tail apart from your opponents easily.

Canyon Bomber is upside down breakout and while I can get at least partially down with almost any kind of breakout clone, probably as an old holdover from having a dad who spent a lot of time in bars so I spent a lot of time being babysat by bartop arcade jawns in the 90s and maybe a good shrink would change that but this is America and Joe “I Would Veto Medicare For All” Biden is the nominee for the supposed good guys so haha who the fuck can ever afford a shrink, wait what was I saying oh yeah even as someone who likes simplistic breakout clones this one hovers a little too close to simplistic. And I’m grading on a hell of a scale here.

Canyon Bomber’s main problem is a lack of variety, as you not only can’t control the actual bombers but also don’t have a whole lot of variation in the canyon layout itself. This leads to a kind of funny quirk where the alternative game mode, the Sea Bomber, that they just threw on there to be able to say there were 100 games on one cartridge or whatever is actually the airquote deeper gameplay. Of course, that positive was already being overshadowed by the similar and superior Air-Sea Battle. Still a decent enough title for this early era of console gaming.

Video Olympics, otherwise known as 50 Shades of Pong. Pretty bold of Atari to market 50 slightly different versions of pong as the Olympics but these were the old carny days of gaming as opposed to now, the new carny days of gaming. I’m sure because you have been made jaded by shitty marketing practices in modern gaming you immediately went “there is no way there are actually 50 games on there” and ding ding same as it ever was same as it ever was!

A more accurate description would be saying its 8 pong games with different color schemes and layouts that each can be played by different amounts of players and with marginally different rule sets usually revolving around whether or not you catch or just hit the ball. The differences between the 8 actual different pong interpretations are self explanatory. In Hockey the goals are a bit forward from the side of the screen, in Quadrapong you can have four players, Foozpong has you moving whole rows of blockers, etcetera etcetera etcetera. The most notable thing to me here is that there is actually a single player against a computer opponent mode and I don’t really remember there being a lot of pong clones out there that actually had single player. Even with any differences though its all pong though and is exactly as fun as you think pong is.

The first time a Philadelphia Flyer was on the cover of a video game though so, bonus points from West Philadelphia. I actually met Bernie Parent once when I worked at a retail sporting goods store in South Jersey, he showed my manager his Stanley Cup ring and she thought he must have been one of the Flyer's dads because it said "Parent" on it. Thats what I tell people was the reason I quit that job as opposed to the real reason of having a terminal case of 'being too hungover to go to work more than two days in a row.'

In Bowling, you are Captain Craig Bowling, the intrepid captain of the ENS Ten Pin, a soon to be decommissioned ship from the now peaceful Earth’s previous war torn history. As your last command as captain you are tasked with taking a rag tag group of prisoners and political dissidents with engineering and demolition experience off world to dismantle the once proud ship. However, once you reach the wrecking grounds, you begin to realize that the apparent benevolent government may have more in common with the oligarchs they were thought to have overthrown than anybody realizes. You pilot your ship through 100 levels of fast paced action, dodging class traitors and the technological monstrosities created by the billionaire elite on your way to re-liberate Earth and show the workers once and for all that there is only one way to free itself from its wealthy masters; a strike. Craig is a nuanced character that okay I can’t keep this up. Its a Bowling game.

Its actually the last game Larry Kaplan programmed for Atari before telling them to shove it. There are no real physics so its pretty easy to cheese your way to perfect games on the easier difficulties where you can move the ball anyway you want, but throwing a ball at some things you need to knock down is one of those basic concepts that at its core is really hard to fuck up and make not at least passably entertaining in video game form. It fits well in the “Atari games you could play with your friends while couch locked on edibles” category that I personally find to be very important. Also the ball is actually the closest to circular I’ve seen any balls be in an Atari game so far so 10/10 1979 game of the year.

Casino, which would have been more accurate if it was titled Card Game, is a collection of three games - blackjack, five card stud, and solitaire poker, programmed by, you guessed it, Bob Whitehead. Its funny that they went to the well this quick with another blackjack game because it functions very similar to the standalone Blackjack game, but its better looking and the inclusion of the two poker games would have made it a much better choice for your bored parents in 1978.

The poker games are the better part of the package, and even though its a four player game it is sort of unwieldy the way it handles it considering you are all looking at the same screen. This ends up making Poker Solitaire the most entertaining portion of the cart but in the 70s all there was to do is gamble, experiment with drugs, and listen to prog rock so Casino ended up serving a purpose.

Some of my favorite games to look at from this long ago are ones like this that had people at the time saying how bad the graphics were. Usually I just think its funny because the difference between good and bad graphics during the early eras of gaming are so negligible that its amusing that people still had revulsive reactions to some of them, but in Street Racer’s case its pretty justified.

Even by Atari 2600 standards, which considering this was a launch title in 1977 weren’t even technically set yet. Like this was Atari’s standard up to that point and people still went ‘eyyeuuch.’ One of the reasons this ends up not being in the basement of the 70s Atari titles is that it gave the player a ton, relatively, of different gameplay options. The titular game mode sees you just racing upwards in your sort of car and trying to avoid other sort of cars while scoring points for not mashing your sort of cars together, then there is Slalom, self explanatory, Dodgem which is similar to the default gameplay except instead of sort of cars they are sort of obstacles and you actually leave the bottom of the screen, Jet Shooter, which turns you into a sort of helicopter to shoot at sort of jets, Number Cruncher, which gives you points for running over numbers, and Scoop Ball which has you picking up square balls to put in receptacles. I can’t say any of them are worth playing now or anything and it looks like total shit but its a four player game with multiple gameplay modes, what a bang for your buck this must have been, even in the three years before the economy became permanently destroyed.

Basketball is an early basketball title, surprising I know, that while not the first home basketball video game - I think there was one on the Odyssey that beat it to the punch - it is the first one on Atari systems.

Its a 1 vs 1 representation of a lesser known basketball variant named Squareball. You would assume it will be just completely irredeemable but actually it ends up being sort of fun, weird flashing stanky leg characters and all. This might be the first sighting of a janky but entertaining game. The ball- er square dribbles and you can pass it to yourself. Best of all there aren’t any glaringly predatory and anti-consumer microtransactions so its automatically superior to any basketball game made since roughly 2014.

Basketball also might be one of the first console games to show up in a movie as it makes an appearance in the film Airplane, which was one of the last great pieces of American art. And I mean the scene where someone is playing the video game in the Air Traffic Control terminal, and not the hilariously problematic Basketball in Africa scene that will always get my dirtbag socialist ass cancelled by woke corporate liberals for laughing at.