Atari Games

The Atari Video Computer System went on sale in September 1977 and was renamed the Atari 2600 in 1982. By the standards of anything that came later it is barely a computer: a MOS 6507 processor at 1.19 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM — bytes, not kilobytes — and cartridges that usually held two or four kilobytes of code. It had no frame buffer at all. The Television Interface Adaptor chip generated the picture one scan line at a time, and the program had to feed it the right values in step with the electron beam sweeping across the screen. Programmers called this "racing the beam", and it meant that the game logic and the display were welded together in a way no modern hardware requires.

Tiny cartridges, huge influence

Within those limits the 2600 produced genuinely original games. Combat shipped with the console in 1977 and defined two-player couch competition. Adventure turned a text-adventure idea into moving graphics and famously hid the first video game Easter egg. Yars' Revenge became the console's best-selling original title, built around a shimmering "neutral zone" that was really the game's own code drawn to the screen. The machine also created the third-party games industry: a group of Atari programmers left to found Activision in 1979, and their output — Kaboom!, Barnstorming, Chopper Command, Megamania, Seaquest, Stampede — is still the sharpest work on the platform. Imagic followed with Atlantis and Cosmic Ark. Arcade conversions were hit and miss: Asteroids and Phoenix came out well, while Pac-Man is remembered as a case study in how badly a rushed port can go.

Playing Atari 2600 games in your browser

The 2600 is the easiest platform to emulate in a browser, simply because the original hardware is so small. 147 of the 182 titles in our catalogue run directly in the page — click play and the game starts, with no download and nothing installed. The original controller was a single stick and one button, so the keyboard maps onto it comfortably; a USB gamepad works too.