How old were you when you played your first Atari 2600 game?

[bones]

Thank god the question wasn't about when you first played with your Wii.

[ATARIeric]

I was 9 back in 77 when I first played an atari 2600 game.

[PressureCooker2600]

Thank god the question wasn't about when you first played with your Wii.

[Shawn]

3 years old. I'm a Prodigy as far as this pole is telling me.

Edited December 22, 2006 by Shawn Sr.

[Dusk2600]

Thank god the question wasn't about when you first played with your Wii.

 

ROTFL, 5th grade

[ZIMM]

Christmas '79. I was 4. After all of the presents were opened there was one last one. We had to go to the basement where it was located. And there it was! With Space Invaders! The greatest Christmas ever!

[joeybastard]

I played it for the first time in '77 or '78 so I was 6 or 7. I didn't get one of my own until 1980.

 

It was painful to wait that long for my own!

[eegt97]

I was 7 or 8 in 81 when I first played at a friend's house. Never got my own, but got the adapter for the 5200 when it first came out.

[Rob Mitchell]

October '77. I had just turned 15 yo.

 

Rob Mitchell

[Foxsolo2000]

I was 9 in 1980 when I first played the 2600 at my friend Jerry's house and it wasn't until Christmas 1981 that I got my very own 2600

[Emehr]

5 years old in 1980.

 

<--still have the original Atari

[Gabriel]

I played it safe and voted as if my first exposure to the 2600 was at the age of 10. But I might have been nine.

 

It was really before videogames were becoming "hot". I had played Tank at local carnivals and loved it. I had also been exposed to Space War and enjoyed it just as much.

 

The 2600 (Sears TeleGames) was in the gardening section of Sears. The monitor was up high and they had Target Fun/Air Sea Battle running on it. I tried to play it a little bit before a Sears employee (a man with greying hair) yanked the joystick away from me and told me that it wasn't a toy (and a similar thing happened a few years later when my mom was shopping for computers and I was checking out an Atari 800 running Missile Command).

[Atarifever]

I believe I was 4 when I played PacMan the first time.

[geosteve]

I was about 12 or 13 when I got one (thats 1980/81) end eventually even got a job mowing my and my neighbor's lawn so I could buy new carts for it myself

 

only wish I'd kept a few of those, had some rarities

[Zoyx]

Let's see, Space Invaders came out for Christmas of '78. That was when I decided I must have and Atari. My parents didn't get it for me for Christmas, so I had to use my own hard earned dollars to buy it in early '79. That would make me 14 at the time.

[JacobZu7zu7]

This is a hard question, my older brother had a 2600 at some point,

but I was only 4 in 1985. So, I recall seeing or playing Pitfall.

I think That's about it. I don't remember if I played it but feels like I did. My old gaming memories are more with the Odyssey2.

Sooo.. the first time I played a 2600 must have been when my mother got one at a sale, when I was about 8? (I think it was Atari 2600??)

I was 2nd grade-ish, I had a female friend over and we played some game my mom set up for us,

Where there's a Frog and Rabbit leaping upwards. It was a blast.

However, my mom threw it away a few days later, so I have no idea what I was playing. lol. Shame, but its okay. I'm proud I was able to play these older games because it takes more thought and challenge then new games do. My vote is 5-9. Give or take

[JacobZu7zu7]

Thank god the question wasn't about when you first played with your Wii.

 

 

LOL.. that's classic. I can't afford a Wii, but Nintendo rocks.

Their machines last the test of time.

[dr. kwack]

I must have been about six. Around summer of 1980- my older brother (who was 9) kept talking about how the kid up the street had "Atari". I had no idea what this (or any video game) was- I thought it was some kind of board game.

 

Around the fall of that year, I laid my eyes upon my first Pac-Man coin-op at the local skating rink and the world changed.

 

I finally played Atari at a little department store in our town- it had one of those huge displays where you could press the button of the game you wanted to play and then try it out for 90 seconds or so. I played Superman over and over and over...

[XZX]

I started playing when I was 8. Four days later I turned 9. I am now 35 will be 36 12-29-1970. This was entered on Christmas Day 2006.

[simbalion]

I discovered the Atari when I was roughly 19-20 years old in 1998. Until then I was an NES brain washee and the only systems I knew of were made by Nintendo and the 2600 was just some sort of odd system sitting in a dusty box at garage sales and flea markets. My first system was a 7800 because it could play both games, but now I have two 2600s, two 5200s, and one 7800.

[Dan Iacovelli]

I got my 2600 when it first came out for xmas,so since it was around 1977 and Iwas born june 13th,1966 I'll would have been 10-14 age bracket.

[dwh]

What if I played an Oddysey 2 first, does that screw up the results?

 

I still remember playing the first killer ap's Space Invaders and Adventure at a friends house.The background music was AC/DC's Back In Black album, so it was around 1980,that made me 13 years old.

(You can put the calculator down, I'm 40 this year)

[bomberpunk]

my first atari 2600 experience was in 1984. i was three.

 

thanks to this, i can roll the score in several games without dying once.

 

i tried wearing a blindfold once in Pitfall, just to show off, but that was a tragic mistake. ha!

Edited December 28, 2006 by bomberpunk

[rheffera]

My first experience would have been in 1997-1998. Yes, thats old in 2600 chronology but i was only 10 back then and the eperience was the same

[bretthorror]

I was in my late teens. I bought a plug n play unit, it turned out to be Activision. I thought it'd be old NES games or something. Either way, I liked them and bought the PS2 Activision/Atari Anthologies, then went ahead and bought a console.