Published 31 minutes ago
Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he’s not working or watching anime, he’s either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.
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While technically not the first home video game console, the Atari 2600 was the console that really made the whole thing commercially viable. It wasn’t like the Pong consoles of years past that only played, well, Pong, it was an entire …
Published 31 minutes ago
Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he’s not working or watching anime, he’s either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.
Sign in to your DualShockers account
While technically not the first home video game console, the Atari 2600 was the console that really made the whole thing commercially viable. It wasn’t like the Pong consoles of years past that only played, well, Pong, it was an entire system of interchangeable cartridges that brought a veritable galaxy of games to your living room TV. Yes, the games are primitive by today’s standards, but back in the day, they were truly the next generation of home entertainment.
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A large portion of Atari 2600 games were ports of arcade titles, and like those titles, they weren’t really meant to be “beaten” so much as played until your eyeballs fell out. Simple as they were, those games were around $40 a pop, so even back then, you needed to try and squeeze as much replay value as possible. Out of the console’s sizable library, these entries in particular were quality choices for burning through a long weekend and beyond.
10 Pole Position
The Closest The 2600 Got To 3D
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Namco | ||
| Arcade, Atari 2600 | ||
| August 1983 |
Obviously, in the Atari days, 3D graphics simply weren’t a thing. The closest you could get were some of the vector wireframe games on PCs, but the 2600 definitely couldn’t handle that. While true 3D wouldn’t happen for a hot minute, though, the 2600 could manage a surprisingly decent facsimile in the form of Pole Position.
Pole Position was one of the earliest racing games, placing you behind the wheel of a Formula One car to compete in both regular races and time trials. There are no particular gimmicks like items or boost pads or anything like that; it’s just pure speed on a mostly-straight track, plus the occasional rival to avoid. Thanks to some crafty rendering tricks, the game had full color and a pseudo-3D track, which was very impressive for its time.
Since it’s a very traditional racing game, Pole Position can get quite technical. Your score increases faster the faster you go, but if you throw caution to the wind, you’ll go flying off the track or rear-end another racer. It’s a game of observation and concentration, which I assume isn’t terribly different from real Formula racing.
9 Yars’ Revenge
Hope You Don’t Mind Flashing Lights
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Atari | ||
| Atari 2600 | ||
| May 1982 |
Atari didn’t really have much in the way of mascots, at least by today’s definition. If there was any particular reason for this, I don’t know; other publishers like Namco had their stars, but Atari just didn’t seem to bother. That said, there was one character Atari kept in its back pocket for a rainy day: the titular Yars of Yars’ Revenge.
Yars’ Revenge is a horizontal shoot ‘em up game, backed by a ridiculously in-depth backstory involving the fly-like Yar people and their interstellar conflict with the Qotile. You don’t really need to know all that to play it, though. What you do need to know is the precise order of operations that goes into progressing, including flying through the neutral zone in the middle and attacking the enemy shields on the right, leading up to dropping a missile right in their faces.
It’s one of those games you need to read the instruction manual to really get, because it’s not super apparent what has to happen at a glance. Once you do get it, though, it’s quite fun optimizing your movements and attack strategies, whittling down the shield while hiding in the neutral zone. The game also has various difficulty and speed settings if you want to mix things up.
8 Missile Command
Many Many Missiles
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Atari | ||
| Arcade, Atari 2600 | ||
| April 1981 |
A lot of games in the early days of the industry had warfare as a major recurring theme. The world was still in the midst of the Cold War, after all, so missiles were at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Bit of a dark subject matter, but a perfect opportunity for Missile Command to find a home on the Atari 2600, where it did quite well for itself.
An Atari arcade original, Missile Command placed you in control of an anti-missile defense system in the crosshairs of an infinite missile bombing run. Using your own missile batteries, you need to aim and shoot down each incoming missile to protect your six cities, while also contending with bigger innovations from the enemy like smart missiles that avoid your fire and bomber planes.
The original arcade version was controlled with a trackball, but the 2600 version used the regular joystick. The effect was about the same, and it was always fun to see just how long your cities could hold out before being inevitably overrun by falling missiles.
7 Defender
Take To The Skies
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Williams Electronics | ||
| Arcade, Atari 2600 | ||
| June 1982 |
From the beginning of the industry to the current day, there’s always been a universal truth of game design aesthetics: everyone likes to pilot a cool spaceship equipped with lasers. Don’t even act like it isn’t. Williams Electronics understood this quite well back in the day, which led to the creation of one of its definitive arcade titles, Defender, which was then ported to the 2600.
In Defender, you have full vertical and horizontal control over a spaceship flying above a futuristic city that’s beset by invaders. With your signature rainbow-colored laser, you shoot down invaders from above while also protecting the city’s citizens from being abducted. The entire city scrolled horizontally in a loop, with a map up top showing you where exactly the action was going down.
The gameplay of the 2600 version is mostly identical to the arcade version, though obviously the graphics aren’t quite as impressive. As long as you have the big rainbow laser, though, the rest of the art is kind of immaterial. It doesn’t have to look flashy to be worth booting up over and over again.
6 Pac-Man
Not The Best Version, But Still A Classic
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Atari | ||
| Atari 2600 | ||
| March 1982 |
In the 1980s, Pac-Man was the uncontested king of gaming, devouring quarters in arcades all over the world. It went without saying that a home port would sell like hotcakes, and the Atari 2600 port sure did, though it was also heavily panned by critics and considered a contributing factor to the Crash of ‘83. Even sub-par Pac-Man is still Pac-Man, though.
Pac-Man is… well, you don’t need me to explain what Pac-Man is. Eat all the dots, dodge the ghosts, eat a power pellet and get your payback. The very bones of the game have entered cultural osmosis, and even though the 2600 port wasn’t quite as good as the original arcade version, it still carried the same basic formula that worked.
The maze layout is a little simpler than in the original, though you could use the 2600’s toggle switches to alter the speeds of Pac-Man and the ghosts, as well as how long power pellets last. It didn’t matter if it wasn’t a perfect one-to-one port, it was Pac-Man you could play at home, and every kid wanted Pac-Man you could play at home.
5 Asteroids
Dang Space Junk
Released 1979
Multiplayer Local Co-Op
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows, Atari 2600
Developer Atari, Inc., Atari Corporation, Atari, Activision, Sega, Taito, Accolade
Publisher Atari, Inc., Atari Corporation, Atari, Activision, Sega, Taito, Accolade
Genre(s) Shoot ’em Up
Did you know that “asteroids” specifically refer to the small floating rocks orbiting the sun, while a “meteoroid” is specifically a rock that moves through space on its own momentum? I guess that’s why the rocks in the game Asteroids are just kind of floating around instead of actually flying directly at you.
Another arcade classic ported to the Atari 2600, Asteroids has you controlling a small ship in the midst of a field of massive space rocks. By firing your laser at them, the asteroids break up into smaller chunks, but the chunks then start moving faster and bouncing off of one another. You need to destroy all the asteroids to clear the stage, but the more you destroy, the more hectic the screen becomes as smaller targets fly to and fro.
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The physics on the 2600 version are a little bit different from the arcade version, likely due to software limitations, but it’s no less hectic, and certainly no less fun to lose yourself in for a good while.
4 Dig Dug
What Lurks Beneath The Crust?
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Namco | ||
| Arcade, Atari 2600 | ||
| October 1983 |
Besides Pac-Man, Namco had quite a few burgeoning IPs under its belt back in the olden days. Unlike Atari, Namco’s characters had a bit more… distinctive shaping to them, making them more easily recognizable at a glance. Another of Namco’s most recognizable characters is the titular protagonist of Dig Dug (or Taizo Hori, as he’s apparently known in Japan).
In both the arcade original and the 2600 port, Dig Dug would burrow his way down to the Earth’s subterranean layers to hunt down lurking monsters, plugging them with his drill pump thing and pumping them up until they popped. Since the monsters can move freely through the dirt, it’s very easy for them to gang up on you, so you had to move creatively, corner them in tunnels, and occasionally drop rocks from on high.
Dig Dug was a wildly successful game thanks to its addicting loop and hidden depths, not to mention its cute character art. The main enemy type, the Pooka, still gets used a lot for Namco’s retro-styled advertising campaigns and collections.
3 Breakout
Apparently About Escaping From Prison?
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Atari | ||
| Arcade, Atari 2600 | ||
| November 1978 |
As I mentioned before, early home video games were usually pretty light on story, mostly relegating what story they had to the instruction manual. This sometimes led to weird little disconnects between what a game looked like and what it was actually about. Breakout, for example, is apparently about a prison inmate attempting to break the wall of their cell. Very slowly.
Breakout is the origin point of the break-breaker genre of arcade games, in which you bounce a ball off a paddle to gradually destroy a large wall of composite bricks. Not unlike Pong before it, Breakout was all about putting English on the ball, carefully aiming and receiving it to get it going right where you wanted it to go on the wall. You got a few lives to play with, but the best players could clear an entire board with one life and no missed shots.
The 2600 port of Breakout had a slightly smaller wall to break down than the arcade original, but other than that, the game was largely the same, not to mention a formative tentpole for the entire gaming industry going forward.
2 Joust
Ostrich On Ostrich Combat
| Developer | Platforms | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Williams Electronics | ||
| Arcade, Atari 2600 | ||
| October 1983 |
Here’s a fun fact: in the original novel of Ready Player One, Wade battles against an AI in a round of the 1982 arcade game Joust to receive the first part of the easter egg. I don’t know why they changed it for the movie, I thought the Joust battle was pretty cool. Oh well, there’s always the Atari 2600 port of the game to enjoy.
Joust is a competitive platformer in which you, a knight mounted on an ostrich, must leap and fly across the battlefield and defeat enemy knights by poking them from above with your lance. Sounds simple on paper, but what throws a lot of first-time players off is the game’s tricky physics. It’s not like Super Mario Bros.’ fine movement; your mount swiftly accelerates as it runs, and its flight is based on how quickly you mash the button, so you need to carefully time and aim your jumps to be above your opponent when you collide.
Joust is plenty of fun to play by yourself, though it really shines with two players. You and a buddy can clear endless waves just for the fun of it, or harass and interfere with one another in a battle for bird-mounted glory.
1 Space Invaders
Perfect With 2L Of Shasta And A Rush Mixtape
Released April 1, 1978
Developer(s) Taito
Publisher(s) Taito, Midway Games, Atari
Franchise Space Invaders
Platform(s) Arcade, Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Nintendo Game Boy, PC, Nintendo Entertainment System, WonderSwan
Between the advent of Pong and the arrival of Pac-Man, the definitive arcade experience was Taito’s Space Invaders. It was the quintessential video game, simple in concept but deviously difficult in execution, the kind of game everyone thought they could easily master before being swiftly humbled. Like most monsters of the arcade, Atari knew it had to have it, and so it made its way to the 2600.
Space Invaders is an old-school battle between humankind and hostile forces from beyond the stars. Several Invaders drop down from the top of the screen in a left-to-right sequence, and as you shoot them down, they gradually increase in speed while occasionally taking potshots at your shields. You always think you can get all of them, but when there’s only one ship flying at max speed, it suddenly turns into a mad rush to snipe them before they reach the surface.
While the arcade version is still considered the definitive way to play, the 2600 port did quite well for itself. In fact, it was the very first instance of an arcade game being licensed for home consoles, and players loved playing it over and over at home just as much as they did in the arcades.
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