I mean, there were fun games with very basic graphics (Combat springs to mind, https://www.free80sarcade.com/atari2600_Combat.php) but there were also way too many uninspiring original games and arcade copies that were just lame.
Now we know why. It's a great article, thanks for sharing @kibwen.
The 2600 is before my time. I grew up with the NES and its library. I do see 2600 nostalgia in older generations, but for me, Pitfall is pretty much the only title worth playing.
But for my money the most fun you can have on an Atari 2600 today is 4-player Warlords with well-maintained paddles.
"adds arcade features such as the launch dragon, multiple fireballs, and a level of polish missing from the original 2600 release."
There are a ton of homebrew games for the 2600 that are super fun.
After many decades I finally managed to try it out, on a real CRT and everything. It's not something you generally want to play for hours or anything like Mario Kart... but it is really really good.
This was definitely the most fun for larger groups of players back in the day.
Despite having awkward controls, “Combat” is also fun due to couch multiplayer. “Jungle Hunt” is similar to Pitfall but faster. I also managed to spend a lot of time playing the 2600 version of Asteroids, but I don’t know if it actually holds up.
There was something about the first generation Activision games that seemed to stand out compared to the rest. Whether simple or complex, they had some hard to pinpoint quality that was just... 'good'. David Crane mentions this in one of the linked videos. "2 line kernel didn't look good. 1 line kernel was harder to do, but looked better, so we just did that". He's referring to doing more work to be able to make visual updates every scan line, instead of every other scan line. This made their games so much more visually sharp and appealing compared to what came before on the same hardware.
The intention was that the CPU would spend 1 scan line updating P0 graphics, then the next scan line updating P1 graphics, and by setting the delay for P0, both player graphics would appear on the same 2-line portion.
So "2 line kernels" were doing it in a way the TIA supported and providing time to do other things like check paddle status (because you're supposed to be programming a Pong game). Of course the TIA has been wonderfully pushed and twisted in ways never imagined by the designer. I think someone even experimented with interlaced 160x400 graphics.
Check this out - a list of 20 Atari VCS games the author thinks still hold up in 2022.
I'm not sure I agree with all the choices, but it's an interesting list nonetheless.
- Adventure
- Riddle of the Sphinx
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Dragonstomper
- Star Raiders
This was also a time (1982) when arcade games (Star Wars, Tron, Zaxxon, etc.) and their graphics were an order of magnitude more impressive than home console games, but Pitfall still had enough playability and complexity to keep it interesting.
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