Atari 2600 Games That Pushed the Limit | Friday Night Arcade 

Friday Night Arcade definitely need Star Raiders

Friday Night Arcade great video

If I were you, I would put Fatal Run instead of Pole Position. They're roughly similar, but Fatal Run is more of a hardware limit pusher.

That is absolutely fascinating. Thanks do much for the info!

Indeed. I wanna do a separate video specifically about that chip and games that utilized it which is why I didn't really get into it here. Thanks for sharing!

@@FridayNightArcade I don't think anything else used it. It's described by patent 4,644,495. I've subbed and I look forward to whatever you dig up.

bryede i think Activision more or less moved away from Atari 2600 after Pitfall II. Even though it was a huge success for that platform.

The DPC (David Patrick Crane) chip is also responsible for some of the sprite fetching logic, reducing the CPU load to the point that it can afford the 7 cycles/line necessary to fetch music data. My BTP2 (Better Than Pitfall II) software-based music engine takes 46 cycles/scan line to produce four-voice music, but without a DPC2 it can't co-exist with much in the way of independently-moving objects.

River Raid was a fantastic game.

great games, Keystone Kapers blew me away too.

Moonsweeper really pushed things too.

Activision held many titles of which became the saving grace for many an Atari early consoles.

Activision pretty much saved the 2600..

Exactly!

Technically Atari released the ‘VCS (Video Computer System)’ in 1977. Atari didn’t change the name to ‘2600’ until October/November of 1982. I bought my Atari ‘VCS’ in 1978.

And FWIW... we just called it "the Atari"

It was designed for simple games like Pong and Combat. It's probably the most pushed console of all time.

I have mixed opinions about this. What you say is correct, in fact like most consoles of the day, they were meant to be quickly replaced by future improved generations. Atari actually kept the plan going, but this little toy thing kept selling so well, and i guess they couldn't stop making something that still made profits i guess? By the 1984 crash the market was flooded of the things, which were obsolete before the 80ies began. The subsequent Atari 5200 (1982) and later 7800 (1986 but meant for 84) were supposed to lay this one to rest. You gotta love the efforts done to "port" things to this primitive thing. In those days, it was all the rage to have games "like the real arcade thing". But soon came consoles which were identical or superior in capabilities to the Arcade (but then Arcades also upgraded, and that race would go on thru the 90ies. So to be in context, lets pick up the Arcade game Popeye. You see the Atari 2600 port and looks like garbage. You wouldn't think Nintendo wouldn't come out with a console able to completely recreate their title in a home console, but yes, in 1983 (you read that right) they did. Popeye is the original cartridge that came bundled with the Famicom, to show case that it was in fact, the same experience as the arcade, if not better. I know and am aware of the fantastic job done by the likes of Activision, who discovered that undocumented rainbow color thing on the Stella chip, and is also part of gaming history for being one of the first independent game company developer for consoles (made by ex Atari employees). Back to Japan, the Famicom as it name implies was in fact an 8 bit computer, i mean, they all are, but it did had its keyboard, cassette and later floppy, all which were scrapped for the american version. One thing that happened after "the crash" was parents heading straight to "computers", they would have survived that crash brilliantly, but they went to America as a console, not wanting to battle the likes of Commodore and Apple but take over the now deserted console market. BTW Mario Bros (not super, also with a crappy Atari 2600 port) was also 1983, another "Arcade or better than", experience).

There was also a game called Radar Lock for the 2600, which was based on the same game engine as Solaris. It was released in 1989, making it one of the last games made for the 2600. (Aside from modern homebrew games, the last game for the 2600 was Klax in 1990.)

I remember Solaris helped alleviate the envy I felt for my neighbor's NES. That game was amazing with all those sectors to explore and working your way around the map. I really wish they would have remade Solaris for the 7800. That system has a shocking lack of (pseudo) 3D shooters. I didn't know Radar Lock was built on the same code as Solaris, but stripped down to just the action element of the game, I really didn't think much of Radar Lock.

I loved Solaris. It was amazing back in the day! I always thought it was in a league of its own.

Solaris looks like a cross between Star Raiders and Buck Rogers.

Problem is, Solaris came along, long after the heyday of the 2600 - so many, like me, discovered it many years later - which is both sad and kind of cool at the same time!

I remember sending away for a hero patch in the mail after reaching a certain score

OMG! H.E.R.O. was my jam back in the day! I almost forgot about this one!

Conceptually HERO is genius, much like Pitfall and Enduro. Brilliant use of a limited canvas.....

That game was great

I had H.E.R.O on ColecoVision. Awesome game. That game had so much replay to it... Never seemed to get old no matter how many times I played through the levels. I remember there was a port of HERO on the Sega SG-1000. Didn't like that one. They added music to it and while it kinda seemed cool at first, it got old fast. In that port the guy uses a jetpack instead of a mini backpack helicopter. And the collision detection was awful. Trying to go down holes, you had to be DEAD CENTER. Bleh

Agree!

People hugely exaggerate when it comes to how bad E.T. actually is. I've played it. It's actually a very decent game if you ask me. I had no issues with it. There are so many games out there that are *far* worse.

@@JMFSpike yeah, it certainly kept me occupied as a kid... Space shuttle as well. Solaris had pretty complex game play for the day. By the time Solaris came out 2600 games were often a few dollars in the store so those of us with limited allowances got some extra longevity out of the console.

E.T was hardly the shitbox everyone made it out to be. It was just incredibly short. There were much much worse games on the Atari.

@@REPVILE The thing about ET, is if a pixel of ET touched a hole, you'ld fall in it, so if the top of his head touched a hole, you'ld fall in a hole, even though his feet were miles away from the hole. Which I guess confused a lot of people.

@@lmcgregoruk Those people were just bad at the game. You can exit the homes easily if you know where to exit it from. Id say 99% of the people that criticize ET never played and were not even born yet when it was released. Most shovelware Switch games are worse

Truth. Sometimes I "warm up" before playing a modern game by firing up Chopper Command or Space Invaders for 5 minutes... just to get the thumbs warm.

Too bad they never did Berserk's sequel, Frenzy.

I liked Jungle Hunt at the arcade but it was hard to move the guy on the 2600. On the one hand, by licensing arcade games they got attention and excitement for their title, but it didn't deliver for the price. There's a difference in games to get you to put in another quarter and when you can play at home as long as you want to. I once saw a distributor's room that had really bad arcade games (probably that no one wanted) that I was allowed to play for free for an hour.

I wanted to include Space Shuttle in this video because it's a fantastic simulation given the hardware limitations of the time, but after I messed with it some more, I decided it's worthy of its own video. With the overlays and complex controls and everything, there's just a lot to it. So expect a Space Shuttle standalone video at some point in the future! Star Raiders was cool too. I talked about Star Master awhile back which was basically a Star Raiders clone (but a really good one).

I couldn't get the space shuttle even moving without it blowing up. I would have made a shit astronaut

I can't tell you how many times I quit the game because of its complexity. I finally decided to read the manual and actually completed the mission including landing. I never picked it up again.

Solaris was really Neubauer's spiritual sequel to Star Raiders (only more tailored to the 2600's strengths and weaknesses).

@@n136h To be fair, the real shuttle is probably simpler to control than the 2600 version.

I missed it, and might not have gotten it anyway in 1984. I got Pitfall! in 1982 or '83 but only won it a couple times including once a few years ago. I had moved on to a home computer that wasn't very good, but I learned to program somewhat.

That's a good speed run technique.

My fav atari game as well.

Your first console will forever be my favorite console of all time. Xenophobe, Tower Toppler, Ninja Golf, Hat Trick, Robotron 2084, Double Dragon . . . Yep. Nostalgia is both bitter & sweet . . .

So many other consoles were better, especially for sports games. But they didn't have as extensive a library as Atari. Activision did make some games for Intellivision, but that was an aside. Colecovision looked the best and had an add-on to play Atari cartridges. Of course home computers were becoming the thing. The kid in _Stranger Things_ should have asked for a Commodore 64; Atari was pretty much done the year the show takes place.

Glad somebody else remembers the Supercharger. I broke a really nice joystick playing Dragonstomper because of the repetitive menu choices.

Commie Mutants from Space and Escape from the Mind Master were two of my favorites. Crazy how dam great it was. What was the Spaceship game for it?

@@samfrito Phaser Patrol was the Star Raider ripoff, it was the packin with the supercharger, great game

I think I saw something like that in an electronics store but it was too expensive. I also had moved on to the Commodore VIC-20, which used its own cassette recorder.

It was painful to see him get shot. But still, I couldn't get far in the game, maybe due to the difficulty of the UFOs that come right at you and have to be shot?

RAM chips were still expensive during the heyday of Atari, and just getting 3K for my Vic-20 was too expensive, let alone 16K. I guess they really came down in price by the end of the 1980s. Of course if Atari had gone with a better, more expensive chip in 1977, games would have been better. But I guess they thought they'd come out with a new system in 1980-1, but due to Space Invaders' success, they stretched it through 1983.

Vanguard was a fun one. I bought it because I loved the arcade version so much at the time.

Atari kept sporadically reviving that idea of a keypad controller for the 2600. There was a really early one that was used with the Basic Programming cartridge and a few brainteaser-type games, and a "kid's controller" that was just a big keypad used with some Sesame Street games. I recently learned that they were all functionally identical--you could play all these cartridges with the Star Raiders keypad, though the overlays wouldn't have fit.

Star Voyager from Imagic was better and didn't require a keypad.

Do you think you might need medical attention?

The Atari 2600 wasn't designed to play Pong. There were already a lot of dedicated Pong home systems.

@@reh3884 I had one of those that could play 3 pong games. Video Olympics was the Atari version.

Wanted to leave enough on the table to justify a Part 2.

@@FridayNightArcade , it's cool man. :-) I play loads of retro games, and I HAVE to admit that for some reason, I never played Solaris. It is so so deep!

Asterra2 I loved Smurf. Sounded good. Looked good. Moved good. Played good (although very easy with little replay value) Funny fact is that the screenshots on the back of the box the game looks totally different and much worse. I don’t know why if they just forget to update the box art or if there was an earlier canned version?

I loved those as well as Mega Mania.

Don't forget Spider Fighter, Pressure Cooker, Star Master, and Moon Sweeper (IMAGIC). =) But yeah, Keystone Kapers and Moon Sweeper are tied for my fave 2600 games ever.

Starmaster was cool as well.

Keystone Kapers is awesome. Spent hours upon hours playing that.

KABOOM!

I played that game all the time as a preteen

@Beatrice Karau Given the limitations of the Atari 2600, I can see why you'd think that.

Pole Position> enduro . Did enduro get it's own TV show? :)

Looks nice, but not much replayability. Would have preferred to put quarters in PP1 and 2 at the arcade to make to the end.

There was another glitch where you could finish it in less than 10 seconds involving the bridge. It was the earliest video game where my sisters and I did speed runs.

Excellent.....

Hey thank you for the kind words!

That's very kind of you to say - as always, thank you for continuing to support the show all this time.

Thanks for sharing Steve, I love hearing stories like this. That's quite the find - I've been trying to track down a Starpath to possibly do a video on. That's awesome that you were able to get one for such a good price during its initial run. I'll keep those titles you mentioned in mind.

Thanks for checking out the show!

Hey thanks for checking out the show, Jake!

I thought Solaris was a rip off of Moon Sweeper... which looked so much better...

I couldn't get very far with Star Raiders. Maybe it was the controls to shoot the ship?

Awesome - thank you for sharing. Yes, Ms. Pac Man was quite good and River Raid is one of my all time favorites (despite being meh at it). The procedural generated level trick is nifty though. You might also like Starmaster where it's surprisingly more simulation than first meets the eye. There's a survival mechanic built in where you have to refill your ship's energy ever so often. Thankyou for checking out the show.

Ms. Pac-Man was what Pac-Man should have looked like in 1982. If Pac-Man was only available to the 5200, then people with Pac-Man Fever would have bought that console and cart, and maybe the Crash of 1983 wouldn't have happened.

Rodrigo Neves da Silva, I still have that game ( no working Atari though). I never found the Ark. I knew how to locate it in the map room, but I couldn’t figure out how to get to it.

Matt, it's been a long time since I last played it, but I remember you get to the Ark through the location that is marked on the map. Once you find it, you are returned to the intro screen, where Indy is lifted on that sort of scissor lift to finally reach the Ark, while Indy's theme song plays in the background. Very cool, but I'd have to play it again nowadays to find out if I'm stiil able to finish it!

Back in the day I got to the ark room, but didn't know where I was supposed to dig. An adventure puzzle game, but not an action game. They needed an action game with the truck chase, like that game where you ride a horse in a western and follow the train, (Wild Western). It's said this is a failure selling under 1 million and one of the bad games Atari put out in 1982 (along with Earthworld, E.T. and Pac-Man, though Pac-Man was a best-seller).

Alot of the imagic titles rocked.

Super Demon Attack for the TI994/a was really good also. Imagic titles were mind blowing on that system especially Microsurgeon.

Channing King yes That is what I missed them mentioned. I think this chip facilitated not just better music but some of the features of the game that a vanilla cart could not achieve.

@@litjellyfish He said in a comment that he's going to do an in-depth video on the expansion chips, which is why he didn't go into more detail about them here

Yesticles yeah i saw it later. Personally if time I prefer some short nudges to info and also that they can be found in the comments. Make less risk of duplicate questions and conversations (like ours now) but it’s no biggie, just something I reacted on when he talked about the extension for maze runner :)

Kids wanted home computers around the time of the Crash to play and program games. Atari should have seen that and figured out a way to allow kids to reprogram Atari cartridges, so they could do stuff like the double-shot.

Mr. Crane himself described the process on Atariage forums (comment #11 on "Pitfall 2: How does the sound travel from the cart?" topic) for anyone interested.

Nice! I hadn't seen that particular bit of explanation before.

Indeed. I wanna do a separate video specifically on that chip which is why I didn't get into it here. Thank you for sharing!

Oh, awesome. After falling down the rabbit hole a bit concerning what the 2600 could and couldn't do, Pitfall II just boggles the mind. That water! That music! Contextually dynamic years and years before LucasArts' eMUSE engine, and in harmony!

Yeah, homebrew is really getting into some neat stuff in recent years. I haven't decided how much homebrew I wanna get into in this forum, but if there is enough interest I might do some homebrew specific videos. Any other suggestions?

@@FridayNightArcade Space Rocks is a personal favorite of mine. If you love asteroids check that one out. I did a review of it a few years back myself :)

@@FridayNightArcade I programmed Strat-O-Gems Deluxe, Toyshop Trouble, and the menu system for Stella's Stocking. I started Strat-O-Gems in 1994, but shelved it for a decade because I didn't understand enough about how to use the RIOT timer to avoid having to count every single scan line while trying to process game logic. Toyshop Trouble features way too many objects with per-line color to possibly be an Atari 2600 game, but it's simply an 8K cart. The Stella's Stocking menu features my BTP2 ("Better Than Pitfall II") music driver that plays four-voice music over a full 61-note five-octave range as well as a really large high-res "ATARIAGE" logo that looks more like it belongs on the 7800 than the 2600.

Mappy was so advanced in it's day it didn't get ported much. Famicom had a port in the early days. By far one of my favorite arcade games of all time.

Gorf is like 4 games or stages in one: space invaders, galaxians, something new, and the mother ship. I liked Tron in the arcade which was essentially a multi-stage game with 3 or 4 games in one, including breakout and surround. But they didn't release it like that for the 2600.

I bought Tunnel Runner after the crash for peanuts. Discovered most of the CBS games at that point and was surprised that I had never heard of them before. Some really good games came out under that company: Solar Fox, Omega Race and especially Mountain King!

Not to mention it's TV Commercial! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fMFEiJFrafs.html

Chris I had no idea that existed... that is both terrifying and wonderful lol.

Yeah, that is pretty damn creepy.

Friday Night Arcade Chunky graphics and hard sound, love it!😎

to me Miner 2049 on the Coleco was pure joy. I remember playing it with my friend for countless hours. I still love the game to this day.

Glad I could help with that 😎

I'm prohibited from liking this comment multiple times.

Weather effects in a 2600 game though :3

My daughter starts laughing whenever the "Spaceship explosion sound" plays in about 90 percent of the games for the Atari 2600, you know the "FooooshfoooooooshfooooooshFOOOOOSHFOOOOOOSHFOOOOOOOOSH!" whenever the screen starts flashing extremely because you lost or a big bad guy, yeah no she still wonders why I play these and not "A real game" like Angry Birds

...what?

@@yesticles lol exactly. and it was favorited by the publisher.

lol

Sold less than 1 million some say, others said it sold a million, but pretty much no one could solve it without getting instructions from the company (or later, the internet). It should have been an action game with Indy on horseback chasing the truck, like _Wild Western_ had you on horseback pursuing a train and train-robbers.

Came with its own keypad.

Beat me to it. That game was complex.

Atari home computer version was better!

It was very well done - much better than regular Pac Man.

It plays very different. But yes it’s equally fun in it’s own flavor.

Thanks for sticking around for long! Yeah, this one kinda blew up didn't it?!