A discussion: What's the most remarkable thing about the 2600?

[Crazy Climber]

On 8/30/2022 at 2:03 AM, Keatah said:

What do you believe are the most remarkable or positive things about the 2600?

 

I guess for me I find it quite remarkable that it's still my favorite system.

 

Sure, a lot of that has to do with nostalgia but it's pretty remarkable that so many of us share that. I'm quite nostalgic for Hanna Barabara's wacky races too but I'm not a member of a forum that discusses or creates new episodes  

 

There has to be a reason...

[BassGuitari]

The first thing that comes to mind for me is how many "eras" in gaming it spanned. The games went from simple, blocky affairs like Indy 500, Air-Sea Battle, and Outlaw to "Poor Man's Nintendo" games like Secret Quest, California Games, and Xenophobe. Its library can be clearly delineated into four or five periods of game development, each a leap from the last.

 

The second thing that comes to mind is how much weird s@!# came out for it. This is a library that, among the all-time heavy-hitters like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Super Breakout, boasts such oddities as Mangia, Bachelor Party, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eli's Ladder, Glib, and Chase The Chuckwagon. Those are pretty tough to come by, but there's plenty of weirdness even in the realm of obtainability, like Revenge Of The Beefsteak Tomatoes, Tax Avoiders, Name This Game, Skeet Shoot, Communist Mutants From Space, and double-ended cartridges. The breadth and sheer diversity of the Atari 2600 library wasn't really matched (on consoles) until the NES had been out for a while. And then there are the peripherals! Trak-Ball, Track & Field, and Starplex controllers; Faster Blasters, Unroller Controllers, and Joy-Sensors; Foot Pedals, Exus Foot Crazes, and Amiga Joyboards; Booster Grips, Grabber Balls, and Stick Stands; Keyboard Controllers, MagiCards, and Compumates; Superchargers and Kid Vids; Game Brains, Romscanners, and Videoplexers. Even a light gun!

[AlecRob]

Þe way it produces graphics is really wonky yet impressive in how much it can do with so little. 

[Keatah]

How effortlessly it plays its games. Granted they are rather simple compared against later consoles and computers. What I'm saying is the rock-solid framerate is a huge bonus. Feels very "real-time".

 

Remember how some computer games (toward the end of the 8-bit era) would slow to a crawl at certain times? Not so with the 2600! 2600 seems to never get stuck working too long on a certain part of the "game program". Reminds me a little bit of how early spaceflight computers operated, they had to progress from here to there in x amount of time regardless of what they were doing.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Keatah

[+x=usr(1536)]

29 minutes ago, Keatah said:

How effortlessly it plays its games.

A huge part of this, IMHO, comes down to how approachable the hardware is.  Insert a cartridge, power on, grab a joystick and start playing.  Sure, there are games that have complex controls (Space Shuttle comes to mind), but there's nothing intimidating or overwhelming about the machine itself.  It's largely self-explanatory, and practically invites someone to play it.

 

I'm pretty far from railing against modern gaming devices (computers included), but a great deal of that approachability seems to have been lost.

[Velvis]

On 11/2/2022 at 9:53 AM, glazball said:

Lots of great comments here, and though I don't think this is the MOST remarkable thing about the 2600, I do find it remarkable that many "retro" gamers completely shun the Atari.  It's almost as if retro gaming began with the NES.  And lately, I've noticed many, many comments that even NES is too antiquated and SNES is where it all began.  "Super Metroid is gaming perfection, Metroid was just a necessary step to get there."  Rinse and repeat for Legend of Zelda or whatever.  Without the Atari 2600, I would argue that none of these games would even exist.

I kinda think if you didnt grow up playing the 2600 looking back on many the games just look and play way to primitive. On the NES the graphics and sound are so far beyond the 2600 that it is far more appealing to someone not looking through the lens of nostalgia. In addition Nintendo as well as their most popular titles have been and are still a part of modern gaming. Someone who played the latest console version of Super Mario Bros or Zelda would be more inclined and interested in those same games on the NES. The 2600 doesnt really have that same sort of connection to modern gaming.

 

 

 

 

[+x=usr(1536)]

35 minutes ago, Velvis said:

The 2600 doesnt really have that same sort of connection to modern gaming.

It may be more accurate to say that the connection isn't there with modern gamers, not necessarily modern gaming.  While it certainly makes sense that someone who grew up in the NES era wouldn't necessarily have the same fondness for the machine as someone who grew up in the 2600 era, all that really demonstrates is that nostalgia is a moving target.  Commentary from around teh interwebz suggests that the NES is becoming the next system to be considered primitive now that those who grew up in the SNES / Mega Drive era have disposable income and nostalgia of their own.  No surprise there.

 

In terms of modern gaming, however, the 2600 is incredibly relevant.  It introduced and/or popularised a great many concepts that remain active today.  Granted, without an interest in gaming history, it may appear primitive - but only looking at the graphics and sound dismisses the historical significance of the system, and it feels as though a great many gamers don't care to learn about how they came to be where they are now.

 

As I said before: nostalgia is a moving target.  We'll see the same thing happen with the NES and its descendants over time, regardless of how they may have impacted gaming.  It's just how things flow.

[Keatah]

11 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

A huge part of this, IMHO, comes down to how approachable the hardware is.  Insert a cartridge, power on, grab a joystick and start playing.  Sure, there are games that have complex controls (Space Shuttle comes to mind), but there's nothing intimidating or overwhelming about the machine itself.  It's largely self-explanatory, and practically invites someone to play it.

I tend to agree. The mechanical switches make sense and are clearly labeled. Cartridges go into the slot. And controllers plug into the DB9s. Simple enough. And the game matrices make sense too. The manuals were written in a way that taught you how to play if you wanted to get into some subtleties or learn additional rules.

 

Super complex games like Space-a-Shuttle I consider showcases and cultural tie-ins. Space colonies and space shuttles were all the rage. The shuttle captured the imagination of kids with its promise of weekly flights to orbiting hotels and factories and stuff. No doubt popularized by Popular Science and Mechanics Illustrated and Popular Mechanics pulp publications.

 

The VCS tied into a lot of this futurism just by being "electronic" and "on tv" and "made with microchips".

 

But back to the accessibility, I remember getting a Samsung flatscreen around 2008-2010. And I had to read the manual to figure out how to turn the fucker on! There's this area in the lower-right corner of the gaudy plexiglass frame that you have to touch just right. There is no indication on the screen's frame where to touch! It's also one of those soft-switches that always draws a watt in order to monitor the switch. 2600 doesn't have operational problems like that.

 

11 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

I'm pretty far from railing against modern gaming devices (computers included), but a great deal of that approachability seems to have been lost.

I'm not sure exactly why or how it's lost. But it is.

 

There are times I think that a lot of modern electronics are over-designed because of make-work and the need to follow a certain design language that someone says is cool. A lot is done to justify jobs. The junior engineer, the over-artistic stylist, somebody writing that design language, companies making the soft-switch parts and peddling them to other companies claiming how revolutionary they are, the HR departments and vice-presidents hiring all this busywork.

 

But I blame junior engineers the most - because they do so many things because they can. Because of novelty and not practicality.

 

1970's tech didn't permit a lot of the nonsense and busy-ness we have today. We didn't have the quickening caused by the internet either.

 

I'm not really ragging on new tech, but merely pointing out some differences. I absolutely enjoy and appreciate the modern microprocessor of today. Their huge caches, multi-cores, active interconnects that do processing on signals as they traverse around those cores, 5GHz entry level speeds, billions and billions of transistors, big-ass instruction sets, (remember when RISC was all the rage?) Don't get me going on modern storage solutions. What you can buy at Amazon far exceeds the sci-fi of yesteryear.

 

And it's fun to immerse oneself in and explore the stark difference between a 13th Gen i9 and standard 6502.

 

For the record I play 2600 today mainly out of nostalgia, 60%. The other 40% is good gaming.

Edited December 30, 2022 by Keatah

[Flyindrew]

5 hours ago, Keatah said:

 

 

There are times I think that a lot of modern electronics are over-designed because of make-work and the need to follow a certain design language that someone says is cool. A lot is done to justify jobs. The junior engineer, the over-artistic stylist, somebody writing that design language, companies making the soft-switch parts and peddling them to other companies claiming how revolutionary they are, the HR departments and vice-presidents hiring all this busywork.

 

But I blame junior engineers the most - because they do so many things because they can. Because of novelty and not practicality.

 

1970's tech didn't permit a lot of the nonsense and busy-ness we have today. We didn't have the quickening caused by the internet either.

 

 

Wow, I was just thinking the same thing last night. About 3 months ago I bought a new smart TV to use for modern and retro gaming. How many times so I turn the damn thing on and there is drama with regard to updates being downloaded and pop up screens. I thought it was so much better back in the 80's when you just turned your TV and Atari on by a switch or knob and it was the end of the story.

 

 

[oky2000]

It was a system that was pushed hard many times. Also has the best ever version of Space Invaders thanks to all the great gameplay options added unique to that version.

[Zoyous]

I think most of my favorite aspects have already been mentioned a few times, but just to underline those points from my own perspective... the 2600 has a beautiful color palette and a fast and silky smooth framerate. And like someone mentioned above, although its sound capabilities were limited, developers still managed to create some very iconic sound effects.

 

Like a lot of kids, I was also very impressed with the Intellivision and Colecovision, but the 2600 could just move things around so smoothly, and the games tended to be more fast and intense than on those systems. (Nowadays of course I can appreciate not only the different approaches that each console took, but also appreciate the fact that there were significant differences that gave each platform a distinct personality - compared to today's main consoles which may have different architecture but whose output is largely indistinguishable unless examined with specialized tracking software and magnifying tools.)

 

Also, there's something about the limited input of the standard joystick that could occasionally lead to a very elegant simplification of an intimidatingly complex control scheme (looking at you, Defender! 😄). Regarding the paddles, I also thought it was really cool that the paddles came in pairs.

 

Lastly, the limited technical specifications were met with gusto by developers with bold, experimental, ambitious ideas that, more often than not, were successful.

[danny_galaga]

On 8/30/2022 at 5:03 PM, Keatah said:

What do you believe are the most remarkable or positive things about the 2600?

Three things come to mind straight away.

 

1- It's fast "booting", you get into the game instantly. No loading, no artificial delays, no bios.

2- The variety and genres of games early on. Several would've qualified for AAA status if the term existed back then.

3- That a tank & pong system could be so versatile and long lived.

 

There's more no doubt, but I leave that 4ya'll to uncover.

Yeah, number 3 for sure. That they hadn't envisioned it could run something like Space invaders 😊

 

Oh, and it was the end of an era of electrical engineers designing games. By the early 80's games were being designed by programmers. 

Edited January 2, 2023 by danny_galaga

[zzip]

On 12/30/2022 at 4:55 AM, Keatah said:

But back to the accessibility, I remember getting a Samsung flatscreen around 2008-2010. And I had to read the manual to figure out how to turn the fucker on! There's this area in the lower-right corner of the gaudy plexiglass frame that you have to touch just right. There is no indication on the screen's frame where to touch! It's also one of those soft-switches that always draws a watt in order to monitor the switch. 2600 doesn't have operational problems like that.

Ugh, my Dell work monitors have those fake buttons.   And they don't respond to touch half the time.    There will be times when my display doesn't wake up after lunch,  and I'll try to power off the monitor and it does nothing and I'll have to resort to yanking the plug to get it to switch off.

[Keatah]

The 2600 doesn't have any unnecessary complexity. It isn't infected by the internet. It isn't infected by silicon valley tech fads or ugly user interfaces. Or everything having to be wireless, wi-fi, or touch based. No connectivity and no updates. It isn't full of API stacks and protocols. And it's spartan simplicity prevents modern design bloat from creeping in.

 

Not saying that's by design. Back then we just didn't have that stuff. The 2600 is an example of what can be done without all that complexity. And it's remarkably consistent - you can tell a 2600 game by it's sound and graphics relatively easily. Even today's ARM-enhanced games are very 2600'ish.

 

With complexity out of the picture a certain level of purity is achievable. A level that modern AAA games struggle with.

[Keatah]

On 1/2/2023 at 2:53 AM, danny_galaga said:

Oh, and it was the end of an era of electrical engineers designing games. By the early 80's games were being designed by programmers. 

Yes that's right. Programmers are pretty good at it too, no doubt. Both knew how to handle the hardware and get the most out of it.

 

Then I would say we moved into artists in the 16-bit era, with everything being big on sprites and parallax scrolling and whatnot. Somewhere along the way we got to corporate types directing game studios (the modern AAA unity shit I despise so much).

Edited January 3, 2023 by Keatah

[MrMaddog]

7 minutes ago, Keatah said:

The 2600 doesn't have any unnecessary complexity. It isn't infected by the internet. It isn't infected by silicon valley tech fads or ugly user interfaces. Or everything having to be wireless, wi-fi, or touch based. No connectivity and no updates. It isn't full of API stacks and protocols. And it's spartan simplicity prevents modern design bloat from creeping in.

 

Not saying that's by design. Back then we just didn't have that stuff. The 2600 is an example of what can be done without all that complexity. And it's remarkably consistent - you can tell a 2600 game by it's sound and graphics relatively easily. Even today's ARM-enhanced games are very 2600'ish.

 

With complexity out of the picture a certain level of purity is achievable. A level that modern AAA games struggle with.

 

Hell, I feel the same way about the Atari Flashback X that's hooked up to my "modern" TV.

 

I finally resubscribed to Game Pass (back on financial footing again) and w/o months of usuage, the friggin' Xbox acts up without it's damn updates.  And that's when I switch over to play some Atari...

[MrMaddog]

On 11/2/2022 at 9:53 AM, glazball said:

Lots of great comments here, and though I don't think this is the MOST remarkable thing about the 2600, I do find it remarkable that many "retro" gamers completely shun the Atari.  It's almost as if retro gaming began with the NES.  And lately, I've noticed many, many comments that even NES is too antiquated and SNES is where it all began.  "Super Metroid is gaming perfection, Metroid was just a necessary step to get there."  Rinse and repeat for Legend of Zelda or whatever.  Without the Atari 2600, I would argue that none of these games would even exist.

 

It's this major divide between Generation X & Y, another Ewolk Line if you will...

 

And the idea of another generation who grew up with the 16-bit and even later Nintendo games who consider the 8-bit originals to be a "draft copy" makes me laugh.  Hell I wouldn't be surprised to see kids today who grew up on Minecraft & Roblox say, "Nintendo...what's that?"

[MrMaddog]

 .

Edited January 3, 2023 by MrMaddog
Deleted post, just remove please...