Atari 2600 and other old gaming systems

[Ashful]

Continued from another thread...

Again, being a younger guy, I grew up with video games as a primary medium of entertainment.

So did I! First we had Pong, released by Radio Shack, and then an Atari 2600! The original Nintendo hit when I was in middle school, I burned countless hours on the 8 x 4 levels that were the original Super Mario Bros.

Funny side story, I recently pulled out and refurbished my old Atari 2600, and now my 15 year old son is absolutely hooked on Space Invaders and Pitfall! He honestly said, "these old games are way better than the newer games." I was so proud.

I just bought him Donkey Kong, so he could see from where Mario originally came, we'll probably get to play that next weekend.

The weak spot on the 2600 was the joystick, lol.

I think the old ones were more durable than the replacements you can buy today. My older sister was our town's Pacman whiz, she played that game up over a million points more than once, as in more than 8 hours of solid play, before she'd get bored and just switch it off.

So of course, when I got the old Atari out and set back up with brand new joysticks (since my childhood dog had chewed on our originals), I had her over to give it a whirl. She snapped the internals on both new joysticks within ten minutes.

Space invaders in the local bar/restaurant down the street from where i grew up.
Do do do do do do do do shoot shoot shoot bang. Do do do do do do. Loved that game.
Fed a lot of quaters in that machine.

My forte was Defender. You could only move up/down, but there were buttons to accelerate forward on the screen or fall back, if I recall.

Asteroids was similarly popular at the same time, and the kids next door were very good at it, but I never really mastered that one.

When Pitfall came out, it felt like the "future", by comparison to that first generation of 2600 games.

 

[bigealta]

Oh Crap, It was Asteroids, not space invaders.

 

[stoveliker]

No gaming console at our home in the early 80s. But a PearCom (indeed, an Apple clone).
I wrote my own Pong on there in Basic.

Green monochrome screens have some nostalgia for me.

 

[Ashful]

I just picked up a copy of Donkey Kong for my 15 year old, who didn't believe me that Mario was a spin-off character from an older game about a gorilla.

"Who ever heard of Donkey Kong?"

Oh, you've missed so much.

 

[Max W]

No gaming console at our home in the early 80s. But a PearCom (indeed, an Apple clone).
I wrote my own Pong on there in Basic.

Green monochrome screens have some nostalgia for me.

Going back a little ways, I took a class in Basic. We signed up to get time a Digital PDP 8m. It had all of 8K memory! Inputed on a telletype terminal and saved work on paper tape that we cut, rolled and paper clipped. My first program was an extremely simple random number generated guessing game. Stayed with it that term but never progressed all that far.

We had a Comadore 64. The kids played Pong and a duck shooting thing. At our daughter’s college library she showed us these orange monochrome screened computer terminals. We looked at a newspaper story from Dublin on this thing she said was the internet . Other early computers at our house were Apple llc and lle’s.

 

[Ashful]

Some of my friends had the Commadore 64, I was always a little jealous, they were pretty cool. We had a TI-99 at that time, which kinda sucked by comparison.

The Atari console I have today is actually the second one from my childhood, a 1980 model VCS with the wood grain trim, and four main switches up front. Our first one was one of the original 6-switch configurations, only made 1977-79 and pretty rare today, I guess we should have taken better care of it!

CalecoVision came out summer 1982, I remember a few friends had that, and it was pretty neat. Looking back, I wonder if Atari started marketing their console as the "2600" and ditched the wood grain in response to the Caleco looking newer and cooler. Google tells me those changes came right after the CalecoVision release, and just in time for the Christmas 1982 shopping season.

1977 Atari VCS (heavy-6)	1980 Atari VCS	1982 Atari 2600

Of course, you could always find "2600" somewhere in the model number of those older consoles, but that was never used in the branding or marketing of the earlier models. It wasn't until the release of that all-black 1982 model, which had "Atari 2600" silk-screened on the front, that everyone started calling them 2600's.

I remember learning BASIC, but never really did anything terribly useful with it. By the time I started working in my profession (early 1990's), DOS batch file programming was the main way of automating simple chores, and I learned that very well. So well in fact that it's still my go-to today.

 

[all night moe]

Yup. Somedays, I miss my youth.
Fun times.

 

[NickW]

We had a Commador vic20 when I was a kid which was before the 64 I think...? My wife and I still have a functioning Super Nintendo that we break out once in awhile. I have a hard time playing on anything newer... Too many buttons.

 

[djlew]

Funny enough, my aunt gave me her 2600 collection which had about 30 games, mostly the classics and some obscure titles, with manuals and that hard case. I wasn't even into the 2600 at the time. I grew up with a Super Nintendo and a Nintendo 64. Throughout my adulthood I've been collecting video games. My mancave is basically a video game room of stuff I've acquired over the years. Some of my favorites are a complete in box Colecovision Adam Computer, loose Virtual Boy with a few games, photos with the (now previous) voice of Mario. I love how everything has a story.