My Introduction to Gaming

Christmas, 1979: an exciting time when two children eagerly anticipated the opening of presents, new toys to play with, and the visits from nearby relatives who came to share dinner. This Christmas was especially exciting, with a toy unlike any they’d owned before.

I’d like to remember it that way. The truth is, I don’t recall exactly when it appeared. All I know is that it was a rectangle, black and brown, with an iconic logo and a strange name.

That toy was the Atari 2600.

Released in North America in 1977, the Atari 2600 was an 8-bit gaming console with a meager 128 bytes of RAM and a simple one-button stick joystick. Its price was not so low, coming in at $190, which would be approximately $970 in 2023. It came with two joysticks and one game cartridge – Combat. Eight other games were sold separately. You could say it wasn’t a very auspicious start.

Indeed, the console only sold somewhere between 350,000 and 400,000 units in its first year. The second year’s numbers weren’t much better. Coupled with the new competition from the Intellivision, another cartridge-based game system, the outcome looked bleak.

That is until Taito agreed to license one of their more popular arcade games, a game called Space Invaders, to Atari. The release of the game in 1980 doubled Atari’s sales. Other games followed, including the hugely popular Pac-Man.

But not all games started out being sanctioned by Atari. A new company decided to enter the cartridge-making game and released two popular games of its own – Kaboom and Pitfall. Atari, not being too pleased with this upstart, sued for intellectual property infringement. The two companies later settled out of court, with Atari accepting an arrangement to be paid a licensing fee for the games.

That other company? It was called Activision.

Unfortunately, the Atari 2600 declined soon after that, though it did continue to sell into the late ’80s, finally being discontinued in 1992.

While a majority of the games created for it wouldn’t hold up today, for two children, the Atari 2600 was their introduction to the world of video games.

Next week, we’ll talk about a few of the games I remember playing on the Atari. Some were good. Some were not.

Until next time, bye for now!