Games That Push The Limits of the Atari 2600

Considering the huge limitations of the 2600, the Pitfall games really were an incredible achievement. The programmers were basically wizards in those days.

Unless you were there when it was new, it's hard to appreciate just how damn magical the 2600 was. Popping in a new, unknown game, and watching the blocky graphics pop up, not really knowing what to do (since we never had the manuals), was an experience like no other. The hours I spent on Adventure, Yar's Revenge and Robot Tank.

I am amazed how the utterly sparse technical specs of the Atari 2600 could amass such a library. Especially for a machine designed to play only Pong-like games.

The best Christmas present I ever got was the VCS with Space Invaders back in the day

The reliance on the programmer to manually control everything, including the drawing of the screen, made the system a challenge to program, but it also made it extremely flexible and allowed it to remain competitive far beyond its original scope. I have to admit that I never considered Superman or Adventure - though fun - as being games that pushed the envelope, but for the time I guess they did. Pitfall utilized some very clever code to squeeze way more screens into the space than would seem possible. David Crane is a genius. There's a lecture on YouTube somewhere where he explains how he did it (it was a polynomial counter that could be reversed to give it the previous output, which he then used to describe and draw the screen). He was able to store an entire screen, in a sense, in only ONE BYTE...

God I'm old... but I LOVED Adventure and Haunted House. So fun to hear those sound effects again! Great vid!

Absolutely love Pitfall II. One of my first games as a kid. C64 version though. Seems quaint about 35 years later, but I clearly remember being blown away by how big the game world was.

6:42 Wonder if those "kids" are still alive? They'd be like 50 now. I remember when my father bought the Atari 2600 back in 198x. Tutankhamun was the first game I beat.

That superman game remains the best superman game of all time which is really really sad.

Programmers were a different breed of person back then. The less resources a computer platform had, the more intelligent a programmer had to be. I remember having to learn the actual chip architecture and instruction set in order to code games back then.

Solaris was my favorite. Its like playing Super Star Trek from the 70s, but as an arcade game. Space battles, rescuing people from planets, managing fuel, finding your way to the destination. I can play that all day. It's a very satisfying experience. I'd go so far as to call Solaris a sacrament of classic gaming.

The faux wood trim on my 2600 always matched the faux wood paneling on the walls of my parent's basement. Is there anyone in my age group who didn't have the faux wood paneling in their basement? If you didn't, you at very least knew someone who did! Classic stuff, and a great video! Keep up the great work!

This was a great video. I was an avid 2600 owner and player back in the 80’s and this explains very well how limitations were overcome without large amounts of dry technical material. I’m a heavy technical user but this video was very enjoyable to watch. Well done.

I play some of those games still today.....Pitfall, Ghost Manor, Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Defender, Amidar, Smurf....just great.

Solaris graphics were incredible. Pretty much the Crysis of the 80s

This video taught me a lot. I love how you explain the tricks used. I was also unaware of just HOW limited the VCS was in its pong console like design.

The first time I ever had an Atari VCS was some time back in 1989...at the time I lived in Cockermouth, Cumbria. Needless to say, the only place I could get the slimmed down version (* never knew that modified version came out in 1986 - thanks for that information) was in Carlisle. I do recall when I was growing up though that there was a shop on the high street in Cockermouth that did sell some Atari VCS cartridges, and I was always fascinated by the artwork on the cartridges themselves - indeed, I did get hold recently of that book about Atari Art. Back in the day, you used your imagination. As far as the hardware that the Atari VCS had...I'd like to do some digging into that...I'm a lso a massive fan of the Atari 8 bit computers, and loved the hardware (I did play around with it, writing machine code programs involving VBIs and DLIs) - I remember Jeff Minter writing an article in whichever magazine of those years - he was saying that Atari computers were ideal for lazy programmers. Certes, it was very easy to do hardware scrolling with these machines. You needed geniuses like Tony Crowther to deal with it on the c64 though. This is an awesome channel, and I thank you.

Overall you picked great titles to showcase the 2600 at its finest. I’d just add a few points: 1. The 2600 version of Space Invaders also had an awesome 2-player simultaneous co-op mode that is simply unrivaled even on most later consoles. 2. Enduro was a race car driving game ahead of its time, emulating various road conditions such as day, night, fog, and ice. 3. Some of the paddle games supported 4-player simultaneous play, such as Warlords, long before the Nintendo 64 would standardize 4-player local play. Some of these games still stand the test of time today, being very enjoyable despite the limitations of the console.

The 2600jr was a huge success in Eastern Germany after the wall collapsed because it was offered cheaply in mail order catalogues alongside cheap games released under the own brands of the catalogues. These were mostly bootlegs and ROM hacks of older games with a quirky German title. However I fondly remember Solaris. I never had it but often borrowed it from a friend at school. I play it from time to time up until today, it has aged well.

Hey, they even ported freaking After Burner on the VCS. It was called Radar Lock there of course since it was not done with license of Sega.