Second Playthrough | Birthday 1993: Entering the world of Video Games

Only about a decade and a half late!

As a young child (living in the house I now am back in, renting from my father - we lived her originally until I was 9) my father had an Atari 2600 that he kept in the attic. He would bring it down on the occasional weekend day and let my sister and I take turns playing with on the family TV. This was my first taste of video games and I was hooked immediately. 

In August 1993 I turned 4 years old and my present from my parents was that Atari to have as my own (only like 16 years after the system came out, I was a retro gamer from the beginning!).

1. Missile Command

Initially I had 6 games for the Atari. The game I played the most was Missile Command, I would spend hours shooting missiles out of the sky. I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that the Atari 2600 version was woefully inadequate versus the arcade version - heck I didn't even realize until later that I was playing a game about trying to stave off nuclear annihilation! I simply loved shooting down those missles, and it was a game I could play on my own long after my parents and my sister grew bored and left to do other things.

Going back now, Missile Command is actually kind of hard to play - mainly because like most Atari games they expect you to have read the manual and to figure stuff out on your own so it was difficult to know where to begin. Once you figure out how to use the switches and numbers at the top of the screen to choose your game 'mode' and get into the action though it is pretty simple: the missiles fall from the sky and you move your target indicator around the screen with the joystick and fire with the button. If your missile explosion catches the falling missile it will be destroyed, otherwise you miss. If the missiles find their way to the ground they can destroy your cities (or your main base with enough hits) eventually ending the game.

2. Combat

Combat was a close runner up, especially the Tank game against my sister - although my dad preferred the Jets (he rarely played, but when he did I happily played that game mode). Combat is arguably a better game than Missile Command (even at that age I could tell) and I even enjoyed it more, but it was a two player game and as I mentioned, my father (my mom never played) and sister would eventually get bored and go do other things and Combat was no longer an option - when I had someone to play with though this was awesome!

I've tried to get Combat out recently and play but unfortunately it is much harder to find people to play with now. I have one friend at work into retro games enough to have gotten to play with twice (a few other friends are gamers but to them Retro means N64/PS1 or maybe SNES or NES but they can't stomach older unfortunately). Everyone I talk to about Atari games speaks highly of Combat though and I do enjoy it when I get a chance to play - I also have one of the Atari Flashback consoles and it has Combat 2 on it (I don't think that ever actually came out on the 2600, was only planned).

3. Donkey Kong

I don't remember playing Donkey Kong much on the Atari 2600, I remember we had it and it was the main reason we eventually got it for the Game Boy (and later for other systems) but maybe even then I realized how crappy it was (on the Atari at least). More recently with internet research I have come to learn that the Atari 2600 port was basically intentionally made bad by Coleco as they wanted people to get the version on the Colecovision (which just happened to be their console - talk about conflict of interests).

I pulled out Donkey Kong recently and tried to play it and basically couldn't - the controls are crap, the graphics are horrible even for the Atari (hard to tell what's going on) and having played the Colecovision version (which wasn't that much more powerful than the 2600 really) I can see how they basically put no effort into this game.

4. Video Olympics

The only game I ever really played in Video Olympics was of course Pong, I didn't get to play this much as 1) Combat was better and if I had another player we usually played that and 2) One of our paddle controllers didn't work really well so one player was always at a disadvantage.

5. Circus Atari

I never knew (until later) that Circus Atari was based on the gameplay of Breakout and to be truthful I didn't play Circus Atari much.

6. Bowling

I don't recall playing Bowling much back then, I've plugged it up recently and was not very impressed so I doubt I was then either. It seems to be a faithful representation of the real game of bowling - but the fun in bowling is being with friends, drinking and having a good time - a pixelized representation of it with very little skill involved (or at least it seems to just be luck, didn't try that hard truthfully) wasn't the most fun. They can't all be winners!

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Where to play them now:

There are several options for playing Atari 2600 games now, the best is to get an actual Atari 2600 (or 7800 or heck a Colecovision with the adapter will play the 2600's games too) and an older TV and go to town! 

Alternatively you can download emulators and play on the computer, but the controls are just not the same (unless you mod or get a modded Atari controller that can plug in USB).

There is also the Microsoft Game Room service on the 360. I can't say I've used it but there are quite a few good (and not so good) Atari 2600 games on there.