ATARI 2600 THE KING OF RETRO GAMING

For most of us in the gaming world, this was our first home gaming console. Yes, I know for a fact that a few far less successful home gaming devices existed before the old Atari 2600, but this is the machine that would change everything! When the 2600 came out, my friends and I couldn't believe what we were playing. Our parents couldn't believe what their children were doing with their television with the furry speakers and many times they wanted to join in. The Atari actually brought families together. When you went to the arcade, you didn't want your mom or dad to go with you, you just wanted them for the car ride over there. But with the Atari 2600, you actually wanted to see if you could beat your dad at Basketball or if mom could keep up with your Tron Deadly Discs skills. The Atari was so huge that it crossed over into our comic books and our Saturday morning cartoons. Of course the corporations couldn't be left out of this and that's when the market started getting a bit goofy with games like Kool Aid Man and Chase The Chuck Wagon, a game that was based on a dog food mascot. Eventually this and other unoriginal, uninspired games killed the once glorious market, but the Atari would have many sequels long before the 17th version of Playstation was thought of. Close to 1000 games were made for the original Atari 2600 and we haven't seen a creative phenomena like this ever since. This all happened during a time when making games was much more difficult and game developers actually had to figure out ways to turn square pixels into balls or boulders. In turn, most of the games were quite difficult. Many of them were never ending, you were just going for a high score, but some of the adventure or puzzle games that had a conclusion took ages to finish. Many of these games would be forerunners of all the RPG video games we know and love. The Atari 2600 wasn't just some machine...for us who grew up with it, it was magic. We could play our favorite arcade games without even leaving our living room. We could not only see comic book heroes and Star Wars plot lines coming to life on our small screen, but we could actually be Superman or Luke Skywalker! Overall, I’m a gamer and I have enjoyed most home gaming systems at least up to the original Playstation, but no other console has such a special place in my heart as the Atari 2600 and here are some of my favorite games that I loved in 1983 and actually am still enjoying to this very day...

Honorable Mentions That Almost Made The List:
Wizard Of Wor
Adventure
No Escape
Mountain King
Venture

5. Swordquest Earthworld

Up to the point of the release of Swordquest I had never played a game as complex and challenging as this. Well, actually I take that back, I had, but it was Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and it was done with scraps of notebook paper and 20 sided dice. Granted this game wasn't exactly full of Red Dragons or Owlbears, but I could tell it was in that same vein. Swordquest had an accompanying comic book and this comic held the final clues to solve the mystery that was Swordquest Earthworld. To bring home my point on how difficult retro gaming could be, hundreds of thousands of people bought this game, but only 8 people managed to complete the puzzle. Overall, the entire Swordquest series is a blast and I really wish we had seen it come to it's conclusion with the never finished Airworld.

4. Spider-Man

Oh man, the fun my friends and I had seeing who could get Spider-Man to fall the farthest. Seeing Spidey go 'splat' was strange at first, but soon became hilarious! The plot was simple enough, you just have to stop the Green Goblin and defuse all his bombs and super bombs. The difficulty on this simplistic theme got really hard, really fast. If you were lucky enough to sneak past Green Goblin's thugs in the building windows, all the bombs and the goblin himself 3 times, it probably wasn't going to happen a fourth time. Nonetheless we played for hours on end seeing who could capture the most bad guys, who could get the most points or the aforementioned who could make our hero hit the concrete the hardest.

3. Pitfall

4 million of us gamers bought this game making it the second best selling game in Atari history! Seems strange for a game that technically only lasts 20 minutes, but it was a step in development above many games. Activision gave us scroller games which would become the basis for 90% of games for the first Nintendo system. This was unlike most other Atari or Intellivision games whereas each screen you went into was different. You weren't stuck in one area, you could endlessly go back and forth and explore 256 different screens...heck you could even go backwards right from the very beginning of the game. Can you believe all these screens along with crocodiles, scorpions, tar pits and Pitfall Harry himself had to be created using only 50 bites of code? Game developers had to be very creative to get the most bang for their byte and the success of this game even gave Harry a cartoon just like Pac-Man had.

2. Tunnel Runner

When I saw this 3D game for the Atari I lost my mind! How in the world was this done although today I'm more likely to ask how was this done with only 256 bytes of RAM? This is really the only 3D adventure game I remember playing for Atari, but perhaps that's because I played it so damn much! This game was so cool to me that 75% of the games I would play on my next console, the Commodore 64 would look like this. Think Bard's Tale II or Curse Of The Azure Bonds. Gameplay itself was terrific because it was like being in a horror movie. You were trapped in a maze and you had to find the key and get out. Killer creatures called Zots were hunting you down and just like a Jaws or Creature From The Black Lagoon films, the music would get more intense as the Zot grew closer to having you as a meal...video game making at it's finest!!!

1. Real Sports Volleyball

These days I absolutely loathe sports, but back in my younger days I loved baseball, football, soccer and volleyball. Volleyball was actually a sport that I was so good at that I often wondered if I could have a career playing with the likes of Sinjin Smith or Karch Kiraly. Perhaps what started me on my volleyball interest though was this game. The Real Sports games weren't like the previous sports games for the Atari. Home Run and Football couldn't hold a candle to Real Sports Baseball or Real Sports Football! This volleyball game was no different. Sure your beach volleyball team mates were stuck together, but that didn't stop you from doing a bump, set, spike routine correctly as long as you had a feather touch on the joystick. You had tournaments with your friends and against the computer and wrote down your results on paper and you thought it was the greatest thing in the world! The Real Sports people put so much effort into developing games that you can even see the sun go down over the horizon and if you wait long enough a shark passes rather close to your game...now that's fun gaming!!!