The Atari 2600 and the Crash That Nearly Ended Console Gaming

The Atari Video Computer System, later renamed the 2600, did something no console had managed before. It separated the machine from the game. Earlier home systems had their games built into the hardware, so when you tired of them you bought a new box. Cartridges meant one purchase and a growing library, and that single decision created the business model every console has used since.

A machine with almost nothing in it

The hardware was severe even by the standards of 1977. It had 128 bytes of memory. Not kilobytes. There was no frame buffer, meaning the console could not hold a picture of the screen anywhere, so the program had to produce each scan line while the television beam was drawing it.

Programmers called this racing the beam, and it explains everything about how these games look. The chip could display two players, two missiles, a ball and a background pattern, and that was the entire vocabulary. Anything more complicated had to be created by changing those few objects between lines, in the microseconds available.

The result is that Atari 2600 programming was closer to a stunt than to normal software work. It also means the surviving games are worth respect. Air-Sea Battle and Combat are two of the launch titles, and Combat in particular is still a genuinely good two player game. Two tanks, a maze, ricocheting shots and nothing else.

The games that stretched the hardware

Two cartridges show how far the machine could be pushed. Adventure, written by Warren Robinett, put an object based quest into a console game for the first time. You carry keys between castles, a dragon chases you, and a bat steals your items and moves them somewhere else. The player is a single square. It works anyway.

Adventure is also where the industry's first hidden signature appeared. Robinett concealed his name in a secret room because Atari did not credit its programmers on the box, and the practice of hiding such things in games has been called an easter egg ever since.

The other showcase is Yars' Revenge, the console's best selling original title, which used the hardware's limitations as its visual style. The flickering barrier and the neutral zone of scrambled pixels are literally the game's own code being displayed as graphics.

Arcade conversions filled the rest of the shelf. Berzerk and Phoenix both survived the transfer well. Pac-Man did not, and that failure turned out to matter more than anyone expected.

How the bottom fell out

By 1982 the console market in North America was worth billions and everybody wanted in. Cartridges were manufactured by anyone who could afford a plant, quality control barely existed, and shops filled with titles that had been written in weeks. There was no approval process, because Atari had never established one.

Two Atari releases became the symbols of what followed. The 2600 conversion of Pac-Man was rushed, flickered badly and sold in enormous quantities, disappointing millions of buyers at once. The tie in for a hit film, developed in a matter of weeks to reach the Christmas season, was worse and shipped in equally optimistic numbers.

The collapse was fast. Retailers were left with unsold stock, cut prices to clear it, and then refused to reorder. Publishers folded in a wave through 1983 and 1984, and the American home console business effectively stopped being a business. It only recovered when Nintendo returned in 1985 with strict licensing control over who could publish, which was a direct answer to what had just happened.

The people who left and what they built

One consequence of Atari's refusal to credit its programmers was that several of them stopped working there. A group left to found Activision, which became the first company to publish games for a console it did not make. That is an ordinary arrangement now. In 1979 it was a novelty that had to survive a lawsuit before it became normal.

The third party publisher is arguably the 2600's most important legacy, more so than any individual game. It separated the people who make hardware from the people who make software, and every platform since has been built on that split.

It also contributed to the flood. Once it was established that anyone could publish a cartridge, anyone did, and no mechanism existed to sort the competent from the opportunistic. The same innovation that gave players Activision's carefully made titles also gave them shelves of unplayable filler.

What the crash actually proved

The usual summary blames one bad film licence, which is too neat. The market did not fail because of a single cartridge. It failed because supply outran demand, quality was unpoliced and every party assumed growth would continue.

Two lasting consequences came out of it. First, platform holders took control of what appears on their systems, a rule that persists on every console today. Second, the centre of the industry moved. While American consoles were collapsing, home computers in Europe and consoles in Japan carried on without interruption.

Playing 2600 games now

Two things surprise newcomers. The first is speed. These games are quick and unforgiving, because they were designed by people who came from coin operated machines. The second is silence. There is no music, only beeps, and the absence changes how the games feel.

A good starting point is Frostbite, an Activision title from the later years of the console where the design is noticeably more refined than in the launch cartridges. The rest of the library is on the Atari 2600 platform page, and if you want context for what came after, the retro collection covers the machines that took over once the crash cleared the shelves.