At the beginning of the month I posed the question “Have you played Atari today?”, which was an Atari advertising slogan in the early 80’s. While the question was initially meant as rhetorical, I can absolutely confirm that almost every day this month I have played an Atari cartridge or two. With a collection that has swollen to 89 games, my Atari 2600 library is now my second largest having surpassed my Sega Genesis collection in size (NES still wins by wide margin). I tried every single game in my collection, all 3 of my consoles, all of my joysticks & paddles and even kept track of my high scores. Spending a month playing Atari games confirmed what I always suspected, I love arcade style gameplay! As a kid, inserting a quarter into the machine meant trying to get my initials on the arcade machines for achieving high scores. The closest I could get to replicating that at home would be to keep track of my high scores on paper and each subsequent gameplay would now have a goal….beat that score! Such a simple way to make these games even more competitive and pleasing for an arcade gamer like myself.
As far as new additions are concerned, I really focused on adding games that are widely considered fun and/or iconic. I corrected an egregious error by adding Pitfall and River Raid, two of the best and most iconic games for the system, to my collection. There are so many games for the 2600 and many of them are mediocre to bad so it makes no sense for me to add games to my collection that either aren’t fun or don’t have some sort of pop culture relevance. I also made a decision, very late in the month, that I wanted to own a copy of all of the Activision games for the 2600. Activision is widely considered, along with Imagic, as the best 3rd party game developer for the VCS/2600. The company consisted of many former Atari employees that were looking for greater recognition for their work and the early Activision game manuals would always feature a photo of the developer along with tips direct from him or her. I also set out to buy as many manuals for my existing cartridges as I could as the manuals are an important aspect of enjoying these games in my opinion. Since most games have multiple variations and sometimes the gameplay mechanics and goal of the games aren’t always intuitive, I’ve found that owning the manuals provides a level of enjoyment to games that I never had before.
I wasn’t able to add my most coveted game to my collection this month, Halloween by Wizard Video Games. Halloween is one of my favorite movies of all time so naturally I would want the video game based on the film. Unfortunately, I never pulled the trigger to get a copy back when I first started collecting for the 2600 in the early 2000’s due to it’s price, which I believe was around $75-90. Now I don’t think I could find a loose copy for less than $120 which I guess isn’t that much of a difference from 2001 vs 2017 prices but the problem is its rarity and how infrequently a copy comes up for sale on eBay. Someday I will own a copy but it just didn’t happen during my Atari VCS month.
The pros and cons of the Atari VCS/2600 console and it’s games are pretty clear. The pros are that it allows gamers to play a wide variety of arcade classics at home and cartridges generally sell for very reasonable prices. This is partly due to the fact that the Atari 2600 sold millions of consoles and games during its heyday so there’s a lot of inventory out there 30-40 years later which drives down prices. The other factor that can be considered is that the Atari 2600 has lost some luster in the retro collecting community in the past 10 years or so as the community’s focus seems to be all things Nintendo (NES, SNES, N64) and 90’s based fringe consoles (TG-16, Neo Geo, Jaguar, even the Sega Saturn and Sega CD to a certain extent). Additionally, the consoles themselves are very durable and reliable which helps the community and keeps cost of consoles down. The biggest con in my mind is that in some cases, better versions of these arcade ports exist for consoles that were released while the 2600 was still popular. Atari’s own 5200 and the Colecovision are the two most obvious options to play better versions of the same games. With that said, many players prefer the Atari 2600 joysticks and paddles over the 5200 and Colecovision controllers which are generally derided for their ergonomic properties and/or durability. Another con, which really has no bearing from a collector’s perspective, is the sheer volume of games with questionable quality. While this was troublesome in 1983 when the internet didn’t exist, now it’s easy to figure out which games are considered turds and what games to steer clear of unless one is going for a complete set. Based on these opinions and my personal experiences with the console and the games for the 2600 I could keep my Atari 2600 permanently hooked up to my CRT TV and never get bored.
Overall Grade: B+
I won’t call out all of the manuals I bought to add to my collection this month but my game additions were:
Combat – picture label version along with box and manual
Space Invaders – picture label version along with box and manual
Pitfall – game, manual, box
River Raid – game, manual, box
Dragonfire – game, manual, box
Moon Patrol – game only
Dolphin – game, manual
Starmaster – game, manual
Space Attack – game, manul
Porky’s – game only
Spider Fighter – game, manual, box
Keystone Kapers – game, manual
Oink! – game only
Jr. Pac Man – game only
Atlantis – game, manual
Chopper Command – game, manual
Skiing – game, manual
Grand Prix – game, manual
Dragster – game, manual
Driving controller and second set of paddle controllers
Here were my high scores for the month as well:
| Game | Score | Variation |
| Asteroids | 79,260 | A |
| Asteroids | 36,140 | B |
| Atlantis | 11,300 | |
| Battlezone | 45,000 | |
| Berzerk | 3,970 | |
| Centipede | 38,311 | |
| Cosmic Ark | 13,510 | |
| Crystal Castles | 18,096 | |
| Custer’s Revenge | 69 | |
| Defender | 24,550 | |
| Demon Attack | 5,170 | |
| Demons to Diamonds | 962 | |
| Dig Dug | 78,700 | |
| Donkey Kong | 29,100 | |
| Dragonfire | 1,190 | |
| Fast Food | 1,476 | |
| Freeway | 31 | 1 |
| Freeway | 18 | 2 |
| Freeway | 20 | 3 |
| Freeway | 23 | 4 |
| Freeway | 25 | 5 |
| Freeway | 16 | 6 |
| Freeway | 14 | 7 |
| Freeway | 26 | 8 |
| Frogger | 1,414 | |
| Galaxian | 13,440 | |
| Gangster Alley | 4,090 | |
| Gravitar | 2,450 | |
| Haunted House | 9 | 1 |
| Haunted House | 15 | 2 |
| Journey Escape | 98,500 | |
| Joust | 42,100 | |
| Jr Pac Man | 13,750 | |
| Jungle Hunt | 6,250 | |
| Kaboom | 1,605 | |
| Kangaroo | 3,100 | |
| King Kong | 1,490 | |
| Laser Blast | 18,810 | |
| Lock n’ Chase | 10,730 | |
| Missile Command | 39,465 | |
| Ms Pac Man | 40,990 | |
| Night Driver | 47 | 2 |
| Pac Man | 3,365 | |
| Phoenix | 11,880 | |
| Pole Position | 30,570 | |
| Popeye | 14,750 | |
| Qbert | 33,550 | |
| River Raid | 8,070 | |
| Space Invaders | 3,520 | |
| Star Voyager | 1 chevron | |
| Star Wars Arcade | 1,238 | |
| Super Breakout | 606 | 1 |
| Super Breakout | 1,186 | 3 |
| Super Breakout | 996 | 5 |
| Tapper | 54,025 | |
| Venture | 3,600 | |
| Video Pinball | 27,636 | |
| Wizard of Wor | 8,300 | |
| Yar’s Revenge | 50,173 |
Cartridge Corner 