I didn’t get my Atari 2600 new. Actually, I was a bit late to the Atari party, which I’ve been trying to make up for ever since. It was 1986, and my cousin Bobby was upgrading to this fancy new Nintendo thing that everyone was talking about. My uncle Frank—always the practical one in the family—suggested they pass their old Atari system to me rather than letting it collect dust in their basement. I was seven years old and had only played video games at friends’ houses, so the idea of having a console in my actual home seemed like a dream.
I remember the day it arrived at our house, packed rather unceremoniously in a beat-up JCPenney shopping bag. The woodgrain console had a few scuffs, one joystick had tooth marks on it (Bobby went through a weird chewing phase), and the whole thing smelled faintly of cigarettes thanks to my uncle’s two-pack-a-day habit. But none of that mattered. It was MINE. My very own game system! My dad, never one to show much interest in “those electronic gizmos,” surprisingly took charge of hooking it up to our living room TV. Looking back, I think he was more excited than he let on.
The Atari came with five cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pitfall, River Raid, and some bizarre racing game with a label so worn you could barely make out the title. Combat became my gateway drug into the world of gaming. Those blocky tanks and biplanes might look primitive now, but to seven-year-old me, they were perfect embodiments of tactical warfare. My older brother Dave and I would play for hours, developing elaborate strategies for the different game variations. We even created a tournament bracket on a piece of notebook paper that we kept tucked inside the game manual, tracking our wins and losses over an entire summer.
Adventure, though—that was the game that captured my imagination most completely. That little square hero (who I named “Bob” for some reason) navigating castles, battling dragons that looked more like ducks, and hunting for that chalice… it was the first time I experienced genuine immersion in a video game world. I’d dream about those catacombs, wake up with ideas for how to solve puzzles more efficiently. The day I discovered the hidden developer credit—the first Easter egg in video game history—I rode my bike four blocks to my friend Tyler’s house just to tell him about it. He didn’t have an Atari, but I needed SOMEONE to appreciate this monumental discovery.
The technical limitations of the Atari 2600 are almost comical by today’s standards. The console had a whopping 128 BYTES of RAM. Not megabytes, not kilobytes—bytes. For context, the text in this sentence uses more memory than the entire working RAM of the machine that sparked my lifelong gaming passion. Developers had to work programming miracles just to make games function, which led to some fascinating workarounds. The flickering ghosts in Pac-Man weren’t a deliberate design choice but a necessary compromise because the system could only display a limited number of moving objects simultaneously.
Those limitations bred creativity, though. River Raid’s procedurally generated levels were an ingenious solution to memory constraints. The river layout was determined by a simple algorithm rather than stored map data, creating a seemingly endless (and surprisingly varied) experience using minimal resources. Playing it now, I’m still impressed by how engaging it feels despite its simplicity. Few modern mobile games manage to create that same “just one more try” compulsion with a hundred thousand times the processing power.
My Atari collection grew slowly but steadily. Allowance money occasionally funded a new game from KB Toys at the mall, but the real treasure troves were garage sales. Every Saturday morning in summer, my mom would drive me around to sales in our neighborhood. “He’s looking for Atari games,” she’d tell the confused homeowners as I beelined for their card tables of castoffs. Sometimes I’d score big—I got Yars’ Revenge and Space Invaders for a quarter each from a lady who said her son had “outgrown them.” Other times I’d find nothing, but the thrill of the hunt was almost as fun as playing.
Speaking of joysticks—those indestructible implements of gaming frustration and joy—I went through several over the years. The original Atari CX40 joystick was simultaneously a marvel of durability and an ergonomic nightmare. After extended play sessions, that hard plastic square base would leave red marks on your palm, and the stiff action of the stick itself could give you blisters. But man, could they take a beating. I accidentally stepped on one, and while it made an ominous cracking sound, it kept working perfectly fine. Try that with your fancy modern controllers!
I eventually upgraded to the Wico joystick—the Formula One of Atari controllers. The bat-shaped handle and responsive microswitch action made games like Frogger and Demon Attack infinitely more playable. I saved up for weeks to buy it, counting out $15.99 in mostly quarters to the clearly annoyed cashier at Electronics Boutique. Best investment of my young life.
Storage for Atari cartridges was always a challenge. Those chunky rectangles didn’t fit in standard shelving, and their uniform gray appearance made finding specific games a treasure hunt unless you organized them obsessively. My solution was an old plastic tackle box from my dad’s fishing days. Each compartment perfectly fit two stacked cartridges, and I organized them by genre: action, adventure, sports, and “weird ones” (I’m looking at you, E.T.). I still have that tackle box, though it’s now displayed on a shelf rather than stuffed under my bed.
The neighborhood Atari hierarchy was serious business back then. Kenny from three doors down had an Intellivision, which sparked endless schoolyard debates about system superiority. He’d brag about the superior graphics and more complex gameplay of his Intellivision games, while I’d counter with the Atari’s larger game library and the sublime perfection of Pitfall. These weren’t just casual discussions—they were theological disputes about the orthodoxy of gaming. In retrospect, we were just junior versions of today’s console war combatants, minus the internet forums.
I remember when the “E.T. is the worst game ever” discourse started circulating among us kid gamers. Interestingly, I owned it and didn’t think it was THAT terrible. Frustrating? Absolutely. Those stupid pits you’d fall into over and over again were maddening. But I actually finished it once, which made me something of a neighborhood legend for about a week. Years later, when news broke about the infamous New Mexico landfill filled with unsold E.T. cartridges, I felt weirdly validated for having defended it all those years. “See? It was historically significant!” I told my wife, who responded with the look of patient boredom she reserves for my most obscure gaming reminiscences.
The magic of Atari gaming wasn’t in the graphics or the sound—it was in what our imaginations added to those primitive audiovisual experiences. Those blocky sprites were just suggestions, frameworks upon which we built elaborate mental worlds. A few squares became spaceships that we could picture in vivid detail. A simple beep conveyed the triumph of victory or the sting of defeat. Modern games spell everything out in 4K resolution with orchestral soundtracks, but the Atari required—and rewarded—creative participation from the player.
Some of my fondest memories involve our neighborhood high score competitions. Tyler finally got his own Atari for Christmas in ’87, and we’d have weekend-long tournaments involving multiple households. Asteroids was our game of choice—we’d take turns playing while everyone else watched, munching on Doritos and sipping Shasta (the budget soda my friend’s mom always bought). We kept the high scores meticulously recorded in a spiral notebook, complete with witnesses’ signatures to prevent cheating. When I finally broke 100,000 points after weeks of trying, you’d have thought I’d won an Olympic gold medal from our celebration.
I still boot up my Atari occasionally, now connected to a small CRT TV I keep specifically for retro gaming. Modern flatscreens just don’t display these games correctly—the response time is all wrong, and something about the image scaling makes the already-chunky graphics look even worse. My kids watch with a mixture of amusement and confusion as I play these ancient games, their young minds unable to comprehend how something so primitive could possibly be entertaining. “But there’s only like three colors, Dad,” my daughter once observed while watching me play Berzerk. She’s not wrong, but she’s missing the point entirely.
What’s interesting is how these games have transformed in meaning over my lifetime. As a kid, they represented the cutting edge—the most exciting technology available to me. In my teens and twenties, they became nostalgic curiosities, occasionally revisited but largely supplanted by newer, shinier experiences. Now, in middle age, they’ve become something closer to comfort food—familiar, reliable experiences that connect me to different phases of my life. Playing Pitfall today, I’m simultaneously seven years old in my parents’ living room, fifteen and showing it to a new friend, twenty-three and finding my old cartridges in a box during a move, and forty-something introducing it to my children.
The stories behind these games have become almost as meaningful as the games themselves. Learning about Howard Scott Warshaw developing E.T. in just five weeks to meet a Christmas deadline helps me appreciate what an achievement it was, despite its flaws. Understanding the Atari 2600’s technical specifications makes the creativity of these early developers even more impressive. And knowing that Adventure’s Easter egg—the simple room with programmer Warren Robinett’s name—was a rebellious act against corporate anonymity adds a layer of humanity to those primitive pixels.
Maybe that’s why I’ve become something of an Atari preservationist in my middle age. I’ve expanded my collection through eBay and retro gaming stores, carefully hunting down cartridges in good condition with intact labels. My wife tolerates this quirk with bemused acceptance, though she drew the line at displaying them in the living room. Instead, they occupy a special shelf in my home office, alongside a refurbished woodgrain 2600 and a pristine Wico joystick still in its faded packaging. It’s not just nostalgia—it’s preserving a crucial chapter in the evolution of the medium I love. Those simple games on that humble machine showed me worlds of possibility that I’m still exploring today, just with a few more pixels at my disposal.
