The first real console system...Space Invaders. Yep...heh...I remember being STUNNED at how awful Pacman was when it first came out on the Atari. I mean Atari games were never as good as the arcade, but this ugly Pacman wasn't even round and he had an eye! And the whole "tarn-tarn-tarn" sound effects were just fucking awful...but I loved some of those old classics...well, E.T. was a pretty awful game too...LOL...but still! Everyone had an Atari, and no one had a PC, and we thought we were cool.

Atari had it all. They were just about to release this kick-ass new console system (The Atari 7800) which was practically arcade quality at the time, and I wanted one really bad. Then this family known as the Tramiels bought Atari and they weren't into video games so they put it on the shelf for 3 years while Nintendo helped themselves to the abandoned market. Fuckin' stupid...

I used to love:

Space Invaders
KABOOM!!
Pitfall

and most of all... MagaMania! it's gonna drive you insane!

Ahh, memories...

CalhounSq said:

Oh man...I got to moving my fingers pretty fast on KABOOM!! In the upper levels it was moving so fast it was totally hopeless!

SexLovely said:

I honestly think your best gaming experience today is on a Windows PC. But I haven't bought a console in years so maybe I'm biased.

teller said:

Yeah maybe.

teller said:[quote]

CalhounSq said:

SexLovely said:

Oh, it was the one where there was this convict in a black-and-white striped prison suit (if you can call it that, this is Atari we're talking about after all) moving back and forth across the top of the screen dropping bombs. You were basically this bucket of water at the bottom (if you can call it that, this is Atari we're talking about after all) that would catch the bombs. If you missed one, they would all explode (if you can call it an explosion, this is Atari we're talking about after all).

After Atari died down, I got one of those Commodore 64's. It took 50 million years any game to load from it's 360k floppy disks, but the games were great! Summer Games and M.U.L.E. were my favorites...

This was before they cracked down on pirating. The game makers would go to outrageous lengths to make their disks "un-copyable," but then the hackers would release copying software which could defeat the odd formatting schemes. Games were traded like...well...Trading Cards!

I had colecovision and my neighbor had atari. I got an adapter/attachment to play atari games on my colecovision. I had Ms.Pac Man (which was pretty cool, very colorful), E.T., and The Smurfs game. I know, lame.

On colecovision I had Mousetrap, which was like pac man, only with a mouse eating cheese bits and cats were chasing him. (Man this sounds rediculous) When you ate a bone, it was like the power pill in pac man and the mouse became a dog and ate the cats!!! Wow. Memories.

I did have Donkey Kong.

BTW CalhounSq, I do remember Magamania. I thought it was called Megamania or Megalomania though. Maybe I'm thinking of a different game? My neighbor had it and I used to love to play it. It was crazy!

Oh yeah and Missle Command and Frogger were pretty cool too.

ATARI still makin some killer games.
when my partner and i went to the grand canyon
our hotel had a game room with and atari game.
neither of us can remember the name of it,
but we plan a trip back there, just to see
if they still have it.

Asteroids...nothing better.

I didn't have Atari but I did have Intellivision. And it ruled! Some of my favorite games were-

Astrosmash
Burger Time
Pitfall
Mouse Trap

TRON said:

Thank God I'm not the only one who remembers mousetrap!!!

VinaBlue said:

I remember seeing Mousetrap in the arcades. There were quite a lot of Pac-man clones at the time...unfortunately, I was grounded from video games for like 3 years because of Pac-man...by the time I laid eyes on it again, everyone had moved on.

TRON said:

Astrosmash was the best!

TRON said:

Intellivision was a refreshing step forward over Atari...but man, those controllers! What were they thinking?!

2 words baby...

YAR'S REVENGE

still have a Colecovision around here somewhere, and a C64, too...don't know where my old Bally Astrocade went, though.

I play atari on my PC.Do a search for Stella and you will know what i mean My kids get a big laugh at how simple the grafics are.I tell em back in my day those games were the best thing going.They were much better than pong

feltbluish said:

Oh man! I forgot about that one! I ROLLED Yar's Revenge!

4LOVE said:

True, true...you can emulate Atari now! I've done it myself, while the games are really crappy by today's standards, it's a walk down memory lane! There's also a Commodore 64 emulator out there.

Back in the day, I had a knock-off pong game, a 'real' pong game, an Atari 2600, a Coleco ADAM computer (what a piece of crap...but it played Colecovision games), a Commodore 64 computer, a Sega Master System (with the right promotion/third party support, it woulda kicked Nintendo's butt-it had way better graphics and sound), a Nintendo NES, a Sega Genesis/32X and a Sony Playstation. Right now I have a PS2, a Sega Dreamcast, and a *dead* HP Pavilion PC. I want to get either an XBox or a Game Cube.

yeah my dad had one and we used to play that bowling game all the time...I would get so mad when he would beat me I think he still has it sitting around their house somewhere... next time I go back to Indiana I may have to check the status on that and see if it still works.

Anyone remember the patches the Activision used to give away for reaching a certain score on their games? I got patches for Pitfall, Megamania, Stampede, LaserBlast, and one other that I can't remember now

I'm a huge fan of Atari... my first videogame that I ever played was Centipede on the Atari 2600 / VCS. I first taught myself to program on an old Atari 400 and later an 800XL. I later moved to the Atari ST, then STE which ran my home studio for years and years... and later moved to the Jaguar which I still play regularly (Tempest 2000 is brilliant, full of Minter Yak magic).

It is upsetting however the way the brand is being bastardised nowadays by Infogrames (the current owner of Atari) who insist on sticking the Atari logo on some very average games. Very sad indeed.

For anyone in Scotland: Check out the Game On exhibition in Edinburgh - it charts the history of videogaming and some groovy old cabinets of stuff like Pong, Tempest etc. It's good fun and worth your fiver.

For anyone interested in those old-school games... check out Llamasoft - Jeff Minter has relaunched Llamasoft and has done some great new stuff... download the demo of GR++ and enjoy!

I'm working on some stuff in my spare time that I'll post soon and let you enjoy...

ian

Atari will forever hold a place in my heart. I broke three vertabrae in my back when I was younger and I had to lay on a piece of plywood for 6 months... Atari saved me from boredom. Asteroids and Space Invaders got played a lot!

ian said:

Atari as a brand seems completely wasted. It's all history now, but at the time, man...it was like "what the f*** happened?"

Interesting fact, though...after playing a few games on the Commodore 64, I later saw them on the Atari 1200XL, and was impressed at how much better they were. I must have been out of it, but the Atari seemed like a better PC than a Commodore in some ways...at least in retrospect. Oddly, the 1200XL wasn't graphically compatiable with Atari 800, which must have upset quite a few consumers. It's kinda funny to look back at Atari and Commodore, who kept "upgrading" their product line but didn't have much of a clue about compatibility...the cruddy PC has at least always been compatible with older versions of itself (well, mostly...I can't seem to play Rise of the Triad anymore).

I'm going to break some hearts here, but I gotta let you guys know this:

Space Invaders wasn't an Atari game.

Space Invaders was developed by TAITO. You may have played a version of it on Atari hardware at some point, but the game is not an Atari-developed game.

Pacman wasn't an Atari game either.

Pac Man was developed by NAMCO. You may have played a (probably really stinking) version of it on your Atari VCS, but it wasn't the original beauty that was real Pac Man.

SexLovely said:

Happy to advise SexLovely! It depends on what sort of games you like, but of all the 3 current generation consoles the only "must buy" is the Sony Playstation 2. The Xbox and GameCube haven't been around long enough to get a decent catalogue of exclusive, quality titles. The PS2 on the other hand has Gran Turismo 3, Ico, Rez, Metal Gear Solid 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, Jak & Daxter, Fatal Frame, GTA Vice City, Frequency and lots of other good stuff.

The Xbox has Halo. And it has online play with Xbox live which is nice. It's coming down in price AGAIN in the UK very soon so wait a while if you are gonna buy one. Right now though, it isn't a very compelling purchase because there are so few titles. When new games like Splinter Cell and Blinx arrive it may help matters.

The GameCube is a lovely piece of hardware, but there isn't a single great game that would make you wanna buy one. Luigi's Mansion, Super Mario Sunshine, Pikmin... they have some great things in them but some bad flaws too. If you are a Nintendo fan you might be disappointed. It's worth waiting for the new Zelda release in the new year, and also for the UK PAL release of Animal Crossing which is bloody great.

It's a PS2 then! And the price is nice and sensible now.