This year marks the 45th anniversary of the original Atari VCS (or Atari 2600). If you’ve always wanted to have access to those classic Atari games right on your PC but weren’t sure where to go or what to do, Jon has you covered! By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have hundreds of original titles fully playable at your fingertips!
The Atari VCS launched in 1977 with nine simple, low-resolution games in 2 KB cartridges. The system’s first killer app was the home conversion of Taito’s arcade game Space Invaders in 1980. The VCS became widely successful, leading to the founding of Activision and other third-party game developers and to competition from console manufacturers Mattel and Coleco. By the end of its primary lifecycle in 1983–84, games for the 2600 were using more than four times the storage size of the launch games with significantly more advanced visuals and gameplay than the system was designed for, such as Activision’s Pitfall!.
In 1982, the Atari 2600 was the dominant game system. Amid competition from both new consoles and game developers, a number of poor decisions from Atari management affected the company and the industry as a whole. The most public was an extreme investment into licensed games for the 2600, including Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Pac-Man became the system’s biggest selling game, but the conversion’s poor quality eroded consumer confidence in the console. E.T. was rushed to market for the holiday shopping season and was critically panned and a commercial failure. Both games, and a glut of third-party shovelware, were factors in ending Atari’s relevance in the console market. Atari’s downfall reverberated through the industry resulting in the video game crash of 1983.
