Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 is the game console that made home video games a thing. 2027 will be the machine’s fiftieth anniversary, so it’s a good time to discuss it. I also know that some younger folks are laboring under the mistaken belief that the Nintendo Entertainment System was the first big game console, so this post is also for them.

Atari launched the 2600 in 1977 as the Video Computer System. Like the previous generation of home video games, like Atari’s own Pong, the 2600 displayed games on a CRT TV. Unlike the previous generation of games though, the 2600 played any number of different games on plug-in cartridges.

Here’s the 2600, my current one.

The machine sold for about $200 in 1977, or about $1,000 in 2025 dollars. It came with two joysticks, two rotating “paddle” controllers, and one game cartridge, Combat. Eight other games were available on launch, each costing about $30, or about $160 in 2025 dollars.

The 2600 wasn’t the first home game console, or the first one that played cartridges. But it was the first really successful one, and it established the home video game market that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft rule now. I wrote before that the Commodore 64 was the best-selling home computer of all time, selling 12 to 17 million. In comparison, Atari sold 30 million 2600s.

Atari

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in 1972. Bushnell also founded Chuck E. Cheese in 1977, partly as an outlet for Atari’s coin-op arcade games.

Atari started with coin-op arcade games. Their coin-op games included Pong and Breakout, which was prototyped by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who soon founded Apple. Some of the games like Asteroids and Tempest used vector graphics, and a few later ones were even 3D wireframe games like Star Wars.

Atari moved into home video games with a home version of Pong in 1975, but single-game machines were expensive to develop and didn’t sell long. In contrast the Fairchild Channel F, introduced in late 1976, could play different games on ROM cartridges. Atari’s subsidiary Cyan Engineering created the 2600, which similarly played cartridges, with a little help from folks who’d contributed to the Channel F.

Bushnell needed capital to launch the machine, and he sold Atari to Warner Communications and stayed on as Atari’s chairman and CEO. However, Warner also brought in Ray Kasskar from Burlington Industries to help with Atari’s products. In a turn reminiscent of John Scully firing Steve Jobs from Apple, Kasskar fired Bushnell and took over as chairman and CEO. Bushell bought Chuck E. Cheese from Atari as he exited.

The 2600 sold well initially, but sales exploded when Space Invaders arrived on the machine in 1980. Wikipedia says that 1.25 million copies of the game were sold in 1980 alone, and that console sales quadrupled.

In 1979 Atari also introduced home computers, the 400 and 800, and sold around 2 million of them. In 1982, Atari introduced the 5200 game console, based on the 400/800 architecture. But the 5200 didn’t run 2600 games and didn’t match its success.

Then in 1983, the video game market crashed. Wikipedia reports that the “home video game revenue peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent).” Two notoriously bad 2600 games - Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial - are often implicated in the crash.

Atari lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and Warner partnered with Namco to reorganize Atari’s coin-op business as Atari Games Corporation. This was the Atari that made Gauntlet and the arcade version of Tetris. Namco soon sold its stake though, and different owners passed the company around until the end in 2003.

Warner sold Atari’s other businesses - home video games and home computers - to former Commodore chairman Jack Tramiel, who formed Atari Corporation. Tramiel’s Atari soon launched the Atari ST, a home computer with a Motorola 68000 CPU, to compete with the original Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga.

Tramiel’s company also released new game consoles after the crash, the Atari 7800 and the Jaguar, but the Nintendo Entertainment System (1985) and later the Sony Playstation (1994) captured the home market. In 1996 Atari Corporation was sold to JTS Corporation, then Hasbro, and basically became a brand name that licensed Atari’s classic IP.

the 2600

The 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM and a MOS 6507 CPU, a cheaper version of the 6502 common in 8-bit computers. Game cartridges had up to 4K of ROM, or more with bank switching. The 2600 didn’t have an operating system - when you turned the machine on, it started executing the instructions on the cartridge ROM.

The 2600 had a custom graphics and sound chip, the Television Interface Adapter (TIA). Unlike other computers, the 2600 didn’t have enough RAM to represent the 2D display internally. Instead, programs drew each line of the display individually as the CRT’s electron gun swept across and down the screen. This was done by setting registers in the TIA, and the program’s instructions had to be carefully synchronized with the electron gun.

For sound, Wikipedia says that the TIA “is not a musical chip” and only provides “detuned notes and the odd tuned frequency.” Some games do have music though, and the machine plays electrifying sound effects.

Atari’s Jay Miner designed the TIA, and later the custom chips for the Atari 400/800 and the Commodore Amiga. The book “Racing the Beam” discusses the 2600’s hardware using case studies of six games, and discusses the TIA in detail.

A modern game controller is cluttered with controls - a joystick, a directional pad, the main buttons, trigger and bumper buttons, a menu button, a rumble motor. The 2600’s controller had a joystick and a button. The joystick connected to the console through a nine-pin port that could accept paddles or a trackball instead, and the port became a standard on other home computers and game consoles of the era.

Antenna terminals were the only input on many televisions in 1977, and you connected the 2600 to your TV through an RF modulator box that screwed onto the terminals. Getting around to the back of your TV and screwing on the little box was a part of the 2600 experience. The picture could be staticky though, and nowadays a lot of old 2600s are modified to send composite video to the TV’s RCA jacks, which produces a nice picture.

games

Atari and third-party developers made hundreds of games for the 2600. Atari alumni formed Activision and Imagic, and Activision was the most successful third-party developer. But many others joined in, including the toy companies Coleco, Parker Brothers, and Mattel.

The most typical 2600 games were coin-op conversions - clear levels by shooting aliens or whatever until you die three times. Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and many others fit this mold. Some games did buck the trend though. Adventure, for instance, started as an effort to adapt the mainframe text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure to the 2600, a machine highly unsuited to it.

What were the best games? Atari Age has a long-running thread, Top 100 2600 games of all time, and some good souls on the thread tabulate the games mentioned there. The most recent update I can find gives the top 10 as:

1. Pitfall!
2. Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
3. Adventure
4. River Raid
5. Missile Command
6. H.E.R.O.
7. Yars’ Revenge
8. Space Invaders
9. Asteroids
10. Ms. Pac-Man

Six of the games are Atari cartridges, and four are Activision, including the top two.

Wikipedia lists the best-selling 2600 games. The top 10 are:

1. Pac-Man
2. Space Invaders
3. Donkey Kong
4. Pitfall!
5. Frogger
6. Asteroids
7. Defender
8. E.T. - the Extra-Terrestrial
9. Ms. Pac-Man
10. Demon Attack

The list makes sense - Demon Attack is the only one that surprised me. Most are coin-op hits, and the video game crash games Pac-Man and E.T. are there.

my experience with the 2600

I had the all-black “Vader” 2600, from 1982, and I played hundreds of hours on it. By then toy stores sold bargain bin cartridges for a few dollars each, and over time I picked up thirty games or so. In those days every other house with kids also had a 2600 and a pile of games, and you also could share games easily.

What games stick with me after forty years? Atari’s space shooters were staples - Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Missile Command. Chopper Command, Atlantis, and Star Trek were also favorites.

But I think the best game was Montezuma’s Revenge, an Indiana-Jones-type adventure like Pitfall, but less repetitive, faster moving, more cheerful. The cartridge is hard to find used nowadays, but you can play it in your browser at atarionline.org. If you just look at the first screen, you can already get a feel for much more fun than Pitfall it is.

The first 2600 game, Combat, still stands out for me because it’s a two-player game, and dueling your friends can still be a riot despite the game’s simple graphics. The “tank pong” variations are the ones to try. Combat is also interesting because the 2600 and Combat were developed together, and Combat’s requirements guided much of the 2600 hardware design.

One game, Mountain King, has stuck with me because it’s weird. Your stick-figure explorer runs around inside a mountain looking for the Flame Spirit and Golden Crown he needs to escape. You can jump in an arc, and if you jump again as you land, you’ll go into a higher arc. If you rejump high enough, you’ll reach a weird area above the mountain that changes unpredictably as you move around it, “glitch heaven.” This thread discusses whether glitch heaven is an intentional part of the game, but I always thought it was an obvious programming error, like the RAM’s contents being rendered as the mountain.

What about the crash games, Pac-Man and E.T.? Pac-Man’s gameplay is fun independent of how it looks, and anyway it doesn’t look any worse than Space Invaders, which was the 2600’s killer app just a few years before. On the other hand, I found E.T. incomprehensible, but in fairness I never read the manual.

Although the 2600’s sound looks modest on paper, I think it had great sound effects: your helicopter’s rotor blades in Chopper Command, the alarming drone of Gorgon deathrays blowing up Atlantis, and the squish of Panama Joe falling to his death in Montezuma’s Revenge.

The sizzle when you’re electrocuted in Berzerk is my favorite though.

I wrote that the 2600 isn’t a music machine, but games did have music. For instance, Frogger plays a full theme before you jump into traffic. Mountain King sometimes plays “In the Halls of the Mountain King,” raising or lowering the volume depending on how close you are to the Flame Spirit.

playing the 2600 in 2025

These days it’s easy to play 2600 games in your browser, or by downloading an emulator and some game ROMs.

If you want to experience the actual hardware, and play with the classic 2600 joystick, consoles sell on eBay for $50 to $350 as I write this. Often they come with a pile of games. Some have the composite video mod, which I’d recommend over the RF modulator unless you’re hell-bent on the most authentic 1977 experience.

ATW Con 3

We had ATW Con 3 this year, another long weekend of gaming in Appleton. We had a full house at the Chateau Strelow this year - Amy, Henele, James, Nick, Tracy, and me. Thanks to everyone for coming, some from quite far away.

We mostly did RPGs again. We made new D&D 2024 characters and Nick ran his own adventure in Waterdeep for us. Here we are playing Nick's game.

We also played Traveller for the first time. We made Traveller characters together in a late-night session, and James ran an adventure for us the next day. Here we are playing James's game.

We played another of my Hollin D&D adventures again this year, the last "Master of Revels" game.

Here are some of our fancy maps from this year, the Hollin Mooncalf and the Mooncalf's opium den labyrinth.

For downtime we also played a little Liar's Dice and Jabba's Palace, which was a favorite from ATW Con 1 a couple years ago.

For food we hit Fratello's, Author's Kitchen, Osorio's Latin Fusion, and Stone Arch Brewpub as people left town on Sunday. We ate in more this year, particularly breakfast, so we could get games rolling earlier in the morning.

Trump is a dangerously stupid, racist, sexist, fascist liar: part 3

Voting for Trump tomorrow? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Arguments here.

Commodore 64, Pool of Radiance

I picked up a couple of Commodore 64s and I’ve been test driving them with Pool of Radiance, the classic AD&D CRPG. The Commodore 64 and Pool of Radiance are both new to me.

The Commodore 64

The Commodore 64, introduced in 1982, was an 8-bit computer like the Apple II and Atari 400/800. The machine was a giant of the home computer era: Wikipedia says “between 12.5 and 17 million” were sold, that it’s the best selling computer of all time, and that it had a massive software library of almost 10,000 titles.

The 64 had a MOS 6510 CPU, a variant of the same 6502 that Apples and Ataris had, running at about 1 MHz. For perspective, a modern 2024 CPU runs at 3,000 times that clock speed or more, and does more each clock cycle than the 6510. The Commodore 64 had 64 kilobytes of RAM, thus the name, whereas a PC in 2024 can have 1,000,000 times that.

The 64 also had custom graphics and sound chips, the VIC II and SID, which were “instrumental in making the C64 the best-selling home computer in history.” The VIC II supported screen resolutions like 320x200 and 160x200, and up to 16 colors. Again for comparison, a modern GPU in 2024 supports 4k resolution with full color, but also supports 3D rendering and can do substantial parallel computing beyond just graphics.

Commodore sold the 64 from 1982 until the company went bankrupt in 1994. The first model, the “bread bin,” looked very similar to Commodore’s previous computer, the VIC-20. A more streamlined “64C” model was introduced in 1986.

The 8-Bit Guy has a series of videos about Commodore’s machines including the 64, focusing on tech. Commodore’s business history is also interesting. For instance, Commodore’s home computer price war in the early 80s drove Texas Instruments out of the market. Jack Tramail was Commodore’s chairman, and his move to rival Atari set up the competition between the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST in the 16-bit era.

Commodore 1541 floppy drive, floppy emulators

The 64’s floppy disk drive, the Commodore 1541, is notable in its own right, or at least notorious. It was slow, 8 times slower than Atari’s drive and 50 times slower than Apple’s. IEEE Spectrum said “the one major flaw of the C-64 is not in the machine itself, but in its disk drive.”

Working floppy drives are getting hard to find, but you can use a floppy drive emulator instead, which looks like a floppy drive to the 64 but uses modern storage. I’m using the Ultimate-II+L, which uses USB sticks for storage.

My setup

I picked up two Commodore 64s from eBay. The first is a nicely refurbished bread bin, but went on the fritz after about a week. The second is the streamlined 64C model, which is working well.

I also picked up two 1541 floppy drives from eBay. Neither worked for me at first. The web suggested that formatting a blank disk with them might reset them and make them work again. That actually did make one of my drives work, but it went bad again after about a week.

After that I switched to the Ultimate-II+L floppy emulator, which works well. Of course the emulator can’t read from real floppies, so you’re limited to disk images from the web. But one advantage is that you can easily create as many virtual floppies on your USB key as you want. For Pool of Radiance, that’s been handy for making a new save disk for each save.

My kind neighbors lent me their nice CRT TV to use as a display, which has also been great for other retro machines like the Atari 2600, TI-99/4A, GameCube, etc.

Pool of Radiance

Pool of Radiance is a CRPG published by Strategic Simulations Inc. (SSI) in 1988. Matt Barton called it “...one of the greatest role playing games of all time and probably about the most fun you could have with a Commodore 64 in 1988,” and the CRPG Addict similarly wrote, “Pool of Radiance is the best game I've played since starting this blog.” Pool of Radiance spawned SSI’s series of “gold box” games, which together sold 800,000 copies.

Although many - probably all - previous CRPGs descended from Dungeons and Dragons, Pool of Radiance was the first to use the actual AD&D rules. The game has a long campaign-style story written by TSR, the original D&D folks, set in the Forgotten Realms.

In a little more detail, the player’s party has to clear the small town of New Phlan of the monsters plaguing it, while they slowly learn about the “Boss” driving them. The map of Phlan and its surroundings from the game’s journal booklet, and the map of the slums from the hint book, give an idea of the scale of the game.

The game

Here’s the physical game. The game comes on four double-sided disks, and you have to swap disks frequently while playing.

The game comes with a decoder wheel, for the copy protection scheme, but the wheel is also used to translate a few clues during the actual game.

To load the game, you use the the classic Commodore 64 incantation ‘LOAD”*”,8’, which loads the first program (*) on the first drive (8).

After loading, you’re treated to a splash screen and music, and a credits screen.

The TSR authors listed there are TSR original gangsters. For instance, David “Zeb” Cook wrote the D&D Expert Set, AD&D 2e, and the Planescape setting.

I’d summarize the gameplay as three parts. The first is navigating New Phlan and its surroundings in the 3D view, which I think is most similar to The Bard’s Tale (which I haven’t played). Many of the 3D views look like cubicle farms to me, but locations can have interesting textures and colors, like New Phlan’s city hall and dock, or Mendor’s library.

When you run into trouble in the 3D view, you’re briefly treated to a Monster-Manual-like portrait of the monster. Here are a few portraits - goblins, orcs, and a basilisk.

From there you go into the second part of the game, combat, shown in a top-down view. Here are some shots of the top-down combat in the two most notorious early-game fights, the trolls in the slums, and the Boss’s mob in Sokal Keep.

The third part is logistics, done with text menus: leveling up your characters, buying and selling equipment, resting, memorizing spells, etc. Some tasks, like redividing money between the party members, take a little investigation and trial-and-error to learn, but you soon develop the rituals and muscle memory for them. Overall though, using the text menus is like doing 80’s style data entry.

My experience with the game

I’ve claimed the rewards for the first few areas of the game - the slums, Sokal Keep, Kuto’s Well, Podol Plaza, the Cadorna Textile House, and Mendor’s Library - and my characters are between 3rd and 5th level. Judging from the hint book, I’ve finished about one-fourth of the game. I’ve become pretty fluent with the game: combat and spellcasting; the cycle of combat, healing, re-memorizing spells, and resting; leveling; managing the party’s money; all that kind of stuff.

Is the game “one of the greatest roleplaying games of all time,” for me? No, at least not so far. The first big part of the game is clearing the slums, a joyless grind full of random encounters. The other areas after the slums are more fun - quicker areas with unique encounters and leads about the game’s larger story. So, maybe it’ll be more fun going forward.

For graphics, the monster portraits are nice, but the 3D views and top-down combat screens are downright ugly. For sound, the sound effects and even the splash screen music are charmless.

I couldn’t stop thinking about two other games while I played. The first is Dungeon Master, which I haven’t played yet. Dungeon Master was a CRPG for the Atari ST that came out six months before Pool of Radiance. The game is a colorful first-person dungeon crawl, and at least visually, it’s the game for 1988, the 16-bit era. SSI seemed to think so too - they soon responded with Eye of the Beholder, a Dungeon-Master-like game using the AD&D rules.

The other is the original Baldur’s Gate, which came out for PC in 1998, ten years after Pool of Radiance. Baldur’s Gate is also a CRPG using the (second edition) AD&D rules, and mostly takes place in a top-down isometric view like the combat in Pool of Radiance. That’s where the similarities end though. Baldur’s Gate has beautiful graphics and sound, like the pre-rendered isometric scenes, spell animations, and voice acting. Combat is “real-time with pause,” which plays out in real time unless you pause it to issue new instructions to the characters. And unlike Pool of Radiance, the game’s detective story is actually about your characters, and the game can be laugh-out-loud funny.

Incidentally, I notice that while Matt Barton called Pool of Radiance “one of the greatest roleplaying games of all time,” he actually called Baldur’s Gate “the greatest computer roleplaying game of all time.” Even in the 2020’s, a lot of new games are directly modeled on Baldur’s Gate, and Baldur’s Gate still routinely appears on lists of the best CRPG’s of all time.

AD&D

One reason I picked Pool of Radiance to try the Commodore 64 was to learn some first-edition AD&D. I never played AD&D when it was current, from 1977-1989.

Here are the AD&D hardcovers, 1977-1979, all by Gary Gygax.

I have played a little of AD&D’s simpler siblings, Tom Moldvay’s D&D Basic Set and David Cook D&D Expert Set, both from 1981. Those games share some strange features with AD&D. For instance, you get most of your experience points from finding treasure. That’s straight-up weird, and Gygax actually concedes in the Players Handbook, “Gaining experience points through the acquisition of gold pieces and slaying monsters might be questioned by some individuals as non-representative of how an actual character would become more able in his or her class.”

Other strange things in AD&D include “lower armor class is better” and arbitrary restrictions on the maximum level that different races can reach in different classes. For instance, halflings can only be fighters, thieves, or fighter/thieves, and can only reach 6th level as fighters. AD&D has multiclassing, but you have to multiclass your character when you create it. In contrast, In modern D&D you can multiclass over time by choosing a class for each level. For instance, a fifth-level fighter who levels up and adds a level of rogue would get the class features of a fifth-level fighter and a first-level rogue.

If you know the modern edition of AD&D though, D&D 5e, many things about AD&D are very familiar. Many of the go-to spells in 5e are already present in AD&D - Magic Missile, Detect Magic, Bless, and many others. Sleep is already your go-to for shutting down hordes of low-level enemies. As with 5e, clerics and magic users get new spells every other class level - 1st level spells at class level 1, 2nd level spells at class level 3, etc.

What about combat? I’m really not sure at this point. I thought while I was playing Pool of Radiance that the tactical combat was very similar to (a subset of) 5e combat, and that I was mostly seeing the D&D combat I knew - roll initiative, move, attack, cast, maybe bandage/stabilize a downed ally. But, I’ve been surprised by how unhelpful the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide are on combat, so still more to learn there.

Gen Con 2024

I went to Gen Con again this year with most of the regular crew - Buck, Dave, Karen, Lou, Nick, and Rob. James had to miss this year, but my cousin Amy joined us, and we drove back and forth from Appleton to Indy together.

Wednesday night dinner. Dave's old gaming friends also joined us.

For games, I did all D&D again this year. I played some with Amy and Nick, and played the 2024 D&D Open with Buck, Dave, Lou, and Nick. A new comrade Julio brought our Open party up to six. We started slow in the Open but came back to land right in the middle of the rankings, 25 out of 50.

We caught up with Zac at an early breakfast before the Open Saturday morning.

A lot of fun costumes this year...Dr. Evil was my favorite this year.

There was a series of seminars for D&D’s 50th anniversary, with some of the original gangster authors from the day, hosted by Jon Peterson. I was able to catch the seminars with Steven R. Marsh and Mike Carr, and Luke Gygax and Allen Hammack.

Jon signed some of his recent books for me. Steven signed my D&D Expert Set rulebook, and Allen signed my Ghost Tower of Inverness module.

Lunch by Lucas Oil Stadium.

Pinball alley between the convention center and the stadium.

ATW Con 2

We had a second ATW Con this year - a long weekend of D&D, board games, and food in Appleton. Amy, James, Nick, and I were there.

For D&D, we continued Nick's homebrew campaign in Scélan, his Roman-empire-like setting. Here’s Nick's nice world map.

For Hollin, my Elizabethan-London-like setting, we played the second game in my "Master of Revels" mini-campaign.

Root was the big board game this year, but we also played Arkham Horror: The Card Game, Star Realms, and Wizard.

For food, we mostly ate out this year, and upped our restaurant game at Author's, Fratello's, Mai's, and SAP. We also hit a couple of Appleton's friendly local game stores, Chimera and Boardlandia.

Here's Jonathan Frakes thanking the players, from Cameo.