Atari Video Computer System, one of the most but surely the most permanently successful video game consoles of all time turned 40 years old on 11 September.

Atari, Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in the early 1970s. The company manufactured slot machines before their home video game was released in 1975: a version of Pong, originally an arcade game, which would connect to a television set. It was not the world’s first TV game (the precedence of Magnavox Odyssey is beyond dispute), but clones of Pong would spread all over the world.

After such antecedents it is easy to understand why it was Atari that busted the video games market open with the cartridge game console, Video Computer System (VCS, model no. CX2600) although this product was not without forerunners either.

One of the key American players in the microelectronics market, Fairchild released a videocart console called Fairchild Channel F (also called Video Entertainment System) in November 1976. Channel F, designed by Jerry Lawson, made decent success during the seven years of its manufacturing, however, the games that were published did not supersede the standard of first generation (Pong type) TV games.

Anyone who lived in the United States in the second half of the 1970s wished to add some interactivity to their furniture-size television sets and bring the experience of arcade games into their own living-rooms. This was what Atari offered with incomparable intensity.

Renamed Atari 2600 in 1982, Atari VCS was manufactured until the early 1990s and entered the history of video games as one of the most important and most popular game consoles.

At the initial stage the Atari VCS posed a great challenge to computer manufacturers as well. It is no coincidence that Commodore introduced its VIC-20 home computer in 1981 with a commercial saying „Why buy just a video game when you can buy a real computer?” to compete with Atari.

Later on an expansion for the Atari VCS was released and it could be transformed into a primitive general purpose computer (CompuMate). The Atari VCS was a machine of humble capabilities (it was based on the 8-bit MOS 6507 microprocessor, it only had 128 bytes /!/ RAM memory, and the games available for it initially came on 4-kilobyte ROM-based cartridges, which were upgraded to 64 kilobytes with time), but it could generate a screen with a palette of 128 colours.

The first games released for the first consoles would be called party games today; two players could engage in a tank game in Combat (1977); two pixel cowboys could fight a duel on the screen in Outlaw (1977); while Video Olympics (1977) was a collection of Pong variants.

The world’s best arcade games were soon published for the Atari VCS. Millions of units of a slightly dumbed-down version of Space Invaders (1980), originally a Japanese shooting game, were sold and seven million copies of Pac-Man (1982), also a hit arcade game from Japan, were purchased.

The games published for the Atari VCS also reflected changes in American popular culture through their often psychedelic colours and surreal gameplays. The protagonist of Haunted House (1981), the first horror game, was a pair of pixel eyeballs.

The Communist Mutants from Space (1982) evoked the anti-Communist thrillers of the 1950s in the period of the Cold War and the arms race.

Not only the machine but game programmers also became part of popular culture. Turning 60 years old this year, Howard Scott Warshaw, created the hit game Yars’ Revenge (1982), in which an insect-like creature relentlessly attacks a space base that resembles a piece of abstract artwork. This game reappeared this year in one of the episodes of the television series the Walking Dead.

The game E.T. (1982) was also designed by Warshaw. The loveable extraterrestrial keeps falling into holes in this game, which was dubbed as the world’s worst game programme, and stocks of unsold copies were dug up by a veritable archaeological expedition in New Mexico.

Peripherals released for the machine would reserve a separate article, and it is just mentioned here that a firm called Hubotics sold a robot called Hubot (1983), a mobile, talking computer entertainment centre, which incorporated the console.

The Atari Video Computer System has become a legend.

It had a number of facelifts; the veneered box was replaced by a dark black one (Atari 2600, “DarthVader”), and then it came in a thin box (2600 Jr.). Its clones and retro consoles inspired by the Atari VCS appear in shops every now and then.

Its users (link is external) have created living communities (link is external) and new games have been published for the 40-year-old hardware even in 2017.

The 40-year-old Atari VCS is one of the “celebrities” of the exhibition (The 8-bit) Makes no difference to me organized by the John von Neumann Computer Society (NJSZT) and Károly Nagy private collector. We can even pay a visit to the console on its birhtday at the Youth Centre in Újpest, Budapest or from November we can view it at NJSZT’s Exhibition on Computer History in Szeged.

 

Gábor Képes