ATARI 2600

The birth of an obsession MANUFACTURER: ATARI | YEAR:1977

The oldest machine to make it into your list was a phenomenon, selling millions and remaining viable for over a decade. Atari’s power in the arcade industry provided the system with ready-made hits, and the company innovated by licensing additional games from its arcade rivals, including the million-selling Space Invaders. Nolan Bushnell Atari Inc cofounder

Are you surprised the Atari 2600 continues to attract attention today?

I am somewhat surprised, although the games for the Atari 2600 were well designed, even though the graphics were primitive.

Did the Atari 2600 achieve everything you set out to fulfil at the time?

It heavily exceeded my expectations. When the system was initially designed we thought it would get up to 20 cartridges at most and I felt the machine would have a three-year life. We thought it would need to be replaced with better hardware and more memory within that time frame. Warner thought it was a record player and it only wanted to focus on cartridges. Of all the games for the Atari 2600, which were your personal favourites? I really liked Combat and later on I enjoyed Pitfall! – even though it was not an Atari label game. Combat was the most successful.

What tricks could the Atari 2600 pull off that set it apart from its rivals at the time?

We had no real rivals until much later, but the platform was amazingly flexible.

What aspect of the machine’s development did you most enjoy?

I enjoyed the early design aspects. The trickiest part was keeping the costs down to be able to hit sub-$200.

What do you think about the plans to launch a new Atari console – the Ataribox?

It’s predictable. I’m happy to see the brand has traction.

Allan Alcorn Designer of Pong What do you think makes the Atari 2600 so revered today?

Few consumer products can claim a dedicated following for 40-plus years. I think it is still loved due to it being the first popular game platform and because many new games were first on that platform. It also helped that the initial design goal was to have the lowest manufacturing cost.

We think we know the answer, but as a project, would you say the Atari 2600 was a success?

The Atari 2600 was a very successful project. The hardware architecture was very cost effective, the programming model was very primitive and the machine met FCC emission rules. But it had greater flexibility than we expected as well.

What did the Atari 2600 have that made other games systems shiver in fear?

There was no frame buffer and there was very little support hardware, so it meant the programmers could be more creative.

We asked Nolan this and he said Combat… what’s your favourite Atari 2600 game?

My personal favourite game for the Atari 2600 is Chess. It was technically very challenging to create a very good chess algorithm in 2K of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM, and displaying that many objects on the screen. It was probably our least successful game, though.

Let’s go back to when you were making the 2600, what was your standout achievement back then?

My most biggest achievement on the project was putting the teams together of ‘all-a’ players. Steve Mayer and Ron Milner created the prototype in three months, while Jay Miner led the chip effort. We also had the top product team from National Semi which was led by John Ellis.

Has anything else come running back to you?

I remember going over to consumer engineering on Monday mornings to see who got injured that weekend, because most of the hardware engineers were into motocross and would often break and arm or leg.