Atari 2600

We had an Atari when my kids were young, but I don't remember which one it was. One has to remember that the graphics were in their infancy stage.

Yes, my dad bought one for my brother back in the day. I was too young to play videogames competently enough at the time, but I enjoyed pretending to play or simply watching other people play.

I remember the rudimentary graphics, but as long as the game doesn't try to emulate real life (car racing, basketball, E.T, etc.) and instead opting for more "abstract / imaginative" style like Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, etc. they looked fine, really. Because our children minds can make up anything from a seemingly simple stuffs.

NO...MY PARENTS WERE HIPPIES...THEY BOUGHT MY SISTER AND I A USED ODYSSEY II.

The neighbor kids, Ross and his older brother Jeff, got one for Christmas in the early '80s. My older brother was good friends with both of them, so he got to play it all the time. They were about 4 and 6 years older than me, so I only ever got to play it once. The game was Combat and I was thoroughly amazed by it. I could have played it all day.

Around '82 I had a friend named Chuck who lived on the other end of my street, and he had one. When I first went to visit him all I wanted to do was play Atari, mostly Pitfall.

Then the Video Game Crash happened, though I wasn't aware of it at the time. As a result, things got wicked cheap. In 1985 when I was 10, my older brother showed me a flyer from Zayre or Kmart, advertising the Atari 2600 for $35. I'd been saving my allowance for a long time and had $40, so my brother and I convinced our parents to take us to Bangor so I could buy it. When I took it to the counter we noticed a bin with Atari games for $0.99 each, which amazed Will, because he remembered Jeff shoveling driveways all winter just a few years prior, to save up $60 to buy Missile Command. I bought Defender, Space Attack, Armor Ambush, and Star Raiders. When we got home Ross and Jeff came over and Jeff gave me Missile Command for free, since they'd sold their Atari and he had no use for it anymore.

That "Darth Vader" version of the 2600 that I bought in '85 is long gone, but I currently have five 2600s, including a first-year production one that was made in Sunnyvale, California (colloquially known as a "Heavy Sixer," which is the most sought-after version), which is the one that's front and center in this picture:

https://imgur.com/a/wBwkCCM

As for the graphics, they were great for the time. The 2600 was introduced in 1977. An example of state of the art graphics for the time is, e.g., arcade Space Invaders (introduced in 1978), which, like most video games back then, wasn't even in color. The 2600 was downright amazing for a home console in 1977, especially since successful home video games up until that point had been, e.g., Pong consoles, which only played Pong variations.

The 2600 didn't become a cultural phenomon until Space Invaders was released for it in 1980, when its hardware platform was already 3 years old:

The 1980 Atari VCS (Atari 2600) version [of Space Invaders] was the first official licensing of an arcade game for consoles and became the first "killer app" for video game consoles after quadrupling the system's sales.[13][70] It sold over two million units in its first year on sale as a home console game,[71] making it the first title to sell over a million cartridges.[72] The game went on to sell 2.5 million copies,[73] then over 4.2 million copies by the end of 1981, and over 5.6 million by 1982; it was the best-selling Atari 2600 game up until the Atari version of Pac-Man (1982).[74] Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 had sold 6,091,178 cartridges by 1983,[74] and a further 161,051 between 1986 and 1990,[75] for a total of over 6.25 million cartridges sold by 1990.

Still have it and all my cartridges and it still works. 👍👍

And if you took the rubber covering off the joysticks, it helped you to be able to maneuver better. 👍👍

I did. Well, it was technically my parents', but I was the only one who played it with any regularity, anyway.

It's aged pretty badly, really. I can still play the games I used to have for NES, Genesis and later systems and have as much fun as I used to, but only like 10 games from that era still hold up at all, and even those outstay their welcome pretty quickly.

I remember the first Easter egg in the game Adventure. You had to push an invisible dot through a wall to gain access to a secret room where it said “Created by Warren Robinet” in flashing letter.

My buddy had an Atari 2600.

While he was playing video games the rest of us were outside doing things and having fun.

I'm sure he was having a blast too.

I never got into the whole video game thing back in the 80s - or any other decade for that matter.