Atari 2600 Review

Everything that came afterward starts here. Before the 2600 a home console played the games soldered into it, and Atari's decision to put the software on a cartridge and the hardware under a television created the shape of the business that still holds today: a cheap box, an expensive library, and a third party industry that grows up around the platform whether the platform holder wants one or not.

The wood grain cabinet and the single button joystick are as recognizable as anything in consumer electronics. Space Invaders sold the machine into millions of homes, Pitfall and River Raid showed what a determined programmer could wring out of it, and Activision's founding as the first independent publisher is a direct consequence of how Atari treated its own staff.

The performance grade sits two tiers under the overall for a plain reason: the hardware has 128 bytes of memory, no frame buffer of any kind, and a programmer has to build each scanline as the beam draws it, which is why so much of the library resolves into colored blocks. Quality control eventually vanished, the market drowned in unsellable cartridges, and the crash of 1983 followed. The importance is not in dispute.