Brain Games

Brain Games is among the earliest Atari 2600 cartridges, dating from 1978, when the console had only just reached the market and nobody was entirely sure what it could be used for. Atari itself published it. The game aims somewhere quite different from the action titles of the period: it is a set of memory and attention exercises, educational and family-oriented content intended to present the console as something more than a machine for bouncing a ball around. Attempts like this were common in the opening years, because manufacturers were hunting for reasons why someone uninterested in games might still want the hardware in their living room. Technically it is an extremely modest piece of software. The 2600 had 128 bytes of memory and built its picture in real time, which made anything based on remembering a sequence an almost ideal fit, since it demanded no complex graphics whatsoever. Control relied on the keyboard controllers Atari sold as an accessory, which in emulation today means dealing with key mapping before the game behaves as intended. Its interest now is historical rather than recreational: it documents how manufacturers at the end of the seventies imagined a console being used outside pure entertainment. You can launch it in the browser on OldGame.cz, so trying that period thinking for yourself requires no hunting for original hardware. Early Atari cartridges are poorly served by later standards, since many of them existed to demonstrate what the machine could do rather than to offer depth.