Gen Con 2025

We went to Gen Con again this year, and I played with James, Nick, Diego, and Julio, our comrade from the D&D Open last year. There was more gaming this year - seven games - and less exhibit hall, costumes, and food.

Zac and and a few friends from his crew kindly ran Pirate Borg for us. Zac's game is always our favorite at the con.

James, Julio, and me playing Middle Earth Role Playing with our GM Richard, which I haven’t played since the 80’s.

Some games were in Lucas Oil Stadium, near the conference center. Here Diego, James, Nick, and I are playing D&D in the stadium’s west club room.

Games on the actual field.

Spiderman picking up his event tickets at the will call window.

Inigo Montoya at the stadium.

I picked up just a few books this year, but Margaret Weis signed hers for me.

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.