If you didn't see your favorite Atari 2600 game mentioned here, there's a chance I covered it in one of the many other Atari episodes I've done -- thank you for watching --> ru-vid.com/group/PLdGtTWqCEvuJCOriBVUUtmrYY8mht1Ll5
I'd like to see a video of those games before Space Invaders made Atari a must-have thing in January 1981. Starting with Combat, it seemed most games were two players back then, and not an arcade-port or single-shooter. Some people say they loved playing Combat and others with their friends and/or family. Also several games were removed from the catalog and production, but not other primitive-looking ones from the first 9 games, and I wondered, why and why not?
Fun fact: the barrier in Yars Revenge is actually the game code itself, apparently lightly obfuscated to appease legal. HSW did a great post-mortem about the game, that you can find on the GDC RU-vid channel.
Oh there were so many...Enduro, Keystone Kapers , Crackpots, River Raid, Megamania, Pitfall, Planet Patrol (and Moon Patrol), Pooyan, Frostbite,Demon Attack and Pac Man (only later on in my life I played the Arcade version). recently I discovered Tunnel Runner and Dark Cavern amazing games.
That's hilarious. I also had no idea that those were supposed to be fireballs in the 2nd stage of donkey Kong. The Atari 2600 version was the first version of donkey Kong I played as a kid.
Just came here to say that I have not seen that artwork for Yars in YEARS!!! I was so young and didn't even realize what I was looking at but I was so pulled into the artwork I will never forget it. Good times!
I discovered your channel a couple of days ago and I really like your 2600 videos. The 2600 was also our first console (I think it still exists somewhere at my parents home) and as a kid my favourite games were Demon Attack, Asteroids, River Raid, Pitfall, Circus Atari (with paddles), H.E.R.O (that we didn't own but rented sometimes), Missile Command, Mega Mania (bought that in a bargain for I thought 10 guilders, that was 4 or 5 US dollars at that time) and Q-Bert and of course Space Invaders. We also had Yars' Revenge (one of the favourites of my dad) and a whole bunch of other games like Night Driver, Video Pinball, Air Sea Battle, Combat (I think this one came with the system), Star Voyager, Breakout, Super Breakout, 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Othello, Sky Skipper and probably a few I forgot. In Demon Attack I was pretty good back then, I remember one time I was really on the loose and I didn't die at all. A classmate came over to play along with the Atari but he never got a chance to play because I didn't die. Nowadays I still play Atari 2600 games on my Playstation Classic with Bleemsync or on a Raspberry Pi. I also made a full size arcade cabinet in 2006 that also included an Atari 2600 emulator. I added a spinner using a mouse hack, that way I could play Circus Atari as if I was playing it with paddles. But I haven't switch on the cabinet for over a year now. I'm thinking of building a bartop cabinet and get rid of the full size one.
I was addicted to some that were by any objective measure pretty bad. I think I may be the only person who obsessively played the Miniature Golf cartridge--an early and obscure title in which you're trying to knock a rectangle into a rectangle using a rectangle while trying to avoid a rectangle, on chunky playfields that my mother memorably described as resembling uvulas. (Though I think Homestar Runner's "Secret Collect" game was partly a parody of it.)
I don't think he's done a video about Atari games leading up to Space Invaders which made Atari the thing to get. I'd like to see that. Of course if he was 4 in 1982, then he might not have nostalgia for 1977-1980 games.
I loved Yars Revenge. The auto parts store we'd visit (Pep Boys?) had an Atari 2600 kiosk with it playing and that's how I found out about it. That'd be like going into an Auto Zone today and them having a Nintendo Switch kiosk with console/games you could purchase.
They had something like that at J.C. Penney so you could play game variation number 1 to try it out. Not sure it convinced me as it was just games made by Atari.
As far as Atari 2600 games go, Towering Inferno legitimately gave me at least one nightmare as a kid. Granted, I couldn't have been older than 4 or 5 at the time.... maybe even younger.... and I wasn't even the one playing it!
My favorite games were Ms. Pac-man, Demon Attack, Venture, Stargate, Pitfall and Spider Fighter. I got high score patches from Activision for Pitfall and Spider Fighter. Bam!
It’s probably been mentioned here already, but the 2600 port of Frogger is easier than the arcade version, as it allows you to wrap around the sides of the screen when you’re riding something in the river. In the arcade version, hitting the side of the screen while you ride the river results in instant death.
Truth -- although if you use the game select switch on the console one of the later variants brings back the arcade version where the screen edge causes death.
I just discovered your channel today, and I really love these Atari videos! My brother and I used to play a lot of these as kids... One of my favorite memories is playing my dad at Super Challenge Football. He would absolutely stomp me and would not tell me how to pass because he wanted me to figure it out myself. I remember getting so mad! I eventually did figure it out, though. Some other favorites were those Swordquest games (though really hard for a kid to figure out what was going on with those), Winter/Summer Games, Zaxxon, and Tutankham (just read that the name was cut short to save space). Thanks for these!
Yar's Revenge was the first game I owned when I got the system in 86. It was real mysterious back then and didnt really understand what to do, but loved it. Ive played it since and its definately a classic game. Still no other game that is really like it. Frogger I got with no label for 1 dollar from someone in the neighborhood selling off games. That was another one of my favorites on the system. Taz is one I discovered recently on emulation and was great. Enduro was another recent one that was great. Some of my favorites that I owned back then were, Kangaroo, Dig Dug, Millipede, Mario Bros., Frogger, Yars Revenge, Keystone Kapers and Kaboom. Pitfall was great too. Qbert and Mouse Trap were up there too.
Wow what a line up for round 2 Aaron. I loved all of these games. It was definitely the Golden age of gaming. What I love the most is the fact that you are introducing younger generations to the games we grew up playing. It probably confuses the hell out of them and makes them question how we ever enjoyed video games as kids......well kids it's like what Aaron said, we used our imagination! Great work my friend. Your channel definitely shows off some golden age gaming goodness!
just subscribe to your Channel. it reminded me how much I loved the Atari 2600. It made me reflect upon my childhood and how much has happened in the world and in my life in the last 40 years.... some of my favorite Atari games were, ET... I was shocked to see it getting bad rap as time went on. it was a very Dynamic game. Others were the m Network sports games. Baseball being my favorite... activisions boxing (and listening to my mother say oh and they kick too...lol)... Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great game and the sounds of breakout and super Breakout put me into a blissful trance(especially when you broke through the wall and the ball went crazy. these were just some of my favorites... Thank you
The white Coleco Donkey Kong cart was the first video game I ever owned. (I think I got it packaged with the Coleco Gemini for Christmas in the early 80s.)
My favorite 2600 games are asteroids, berserk and frogger those are about the only ones I still play. Although I never understood how a frog can’t go in the water.
Stampede was one of my favorites. ...once you figured out that the cows on each row were replaced by faster cows each time, coordinated by color (light color slow to dark color fast) and the stationary Black cow or skull reset the sequence, it was pretty easy
Got my Atari VCS at Christmas 1980 when I was 10 My Favorite games were Space Invaders, Yars Revenge, Berserk, Mega Mania, River Raid, Frogger, and Gopher enjoyed your video
My List: Activision Fishing, Raiders of the Lost Ark (once I figured out how to play the game), Adventure, Star Raiders, Pitfall, and Warlords (my dad used to have his friends over and theyd play this, letting me join in. Lots of good memories), and finally, Defender.
I see you played the easy mode of Yars' Revenge. In the correct mode, you have to eat material from the shield, then fly back across the screen to power up the Zorlon Cannon. Only then can you fire it, and if it hits the shield, it bounces back. You can also touch the Quotile to get a fresh charge (in case you run out of shields to eat), but you still have to fly back to your home planet to activate the Cannon. And of course, the most difficult thing to do in the game was to hit the Sworl with your Cannon shot in mid-flight via a reflected shot off of the shield.
Party Pooper (kiddin). I tried to improve my score by doing the "hit the flying swirl" thing, but I think the last two times I did it my cursor ended up in the secret position to stop the game and show initials. Also the enemy dash gets really fast.
My very first system was the SEGA Master System when I was 6 years old, and I play the hell out of it, it is still my favorite console until this day... probably because the wonderful nostalgic music, graphics and good memories. :) I must mention that I'm subscribed for a while now and I enjoy your content, keep up the good job!
Probably one of the few if only games for 4-players they put out since Street Racer and Video Olympics which were part of the first 9 games released concurrent to the console.
Frogger! I would play that game over and over and over again. Until my parents made me quit. Or my cousins took back the Atari so that they could play something.
Others I played all the time: Missile Command, Asteroids, Breakout for a while, though I never got that good at it. Space Invaders, certainly. Early on I spent a lot of time playing the blackjack game in the Casino cartridge. Oh, and Video Pinball. Which in no way resembles pinball (or Atari's arcade Video Pinball game), but it was diverting enough. We had the Donkey Kong cartridge, and it actually played OK considering how fugly it was, but that was toward the end of my Atari 2600 interest; before too long I got hold of the Atari 400/800 version and played that instead.
_Yars' Revenge_ is indeed a pretty awesome game. It's one of the most unique shooters ever made and holds up really well today despite its simplicity. I love it.
Great memories! Having never played the Donkey Kong arcade as a kid I thought your gravy boats looked more like ducks..DK looked like the gingerbread man. Lol.
Whether you've seen the arcade version or not matters, as does the age you played Atari. For teens, they should have pushed the 5200 and said give the 2600 to your little brother.
About 10 years ago I was showing my young kids games on the Atari 2600. When I started Donkey Kong, my daughter who was seven tried to explain what she thought was going on in the game to her 5 year old brother. "You see there is this gingerbread man, and he's holding a mouse hostage, he rolls cookies at you and have have to jump the cookies and rescue the mouse."
The interlacing on the footage that's making certain graphics disappear is killing me! Other than that, your channel is SUPER underrated and deserves WAY more subscribers.
I only recently got my first VCS, in a goodwill auction on eBay. It came with half a dozen games and since then I acquired a bunch more as well as a Harmony Cartridge. And I must say the new Homebrew games blow me away. My favorite is Mappy, but Donkey Kong VCS is also great. It is leaps and bounds above the CBS / Coleco version, which we still play sometimes, because it is... different!
Frogger is the only one I recall playing as a kid. I wasn't into the 2600 Donkey Kong because they for whatever reason neglected to increase the difficulty as you progressed. It's so easy that it's boring in no time. Gremlins is great.
I used to think that Donkey Kong for the Atari was Mario in another world, where a sentient gingerbread man tossed cookies at Mario, then said cookies would die and their cute-ish but vengeful spirits would come up and try to kill the ginger bread man (and Mario) My neigbour friend had the Colleco vision version, but we considered the Atari version to have "A superior and more edgy storyline" so we ironically enough only played that one
Its what we had, so it’s what we played... I can remember not being too excited about most Atari games, but I made the best of them. Usually my friends and I invented an outrageous storyline for each game. This would result in an hour-long laughing-til-you-cried fest. We were 12 in ‘82, so you can only imagine where our minds went(No nothing dirty - just crazy)! Btw, I agree, Frogger was excellent. In fact, all Parker Bros. Atari games were very well executed. Imo Activision barely edged-out Parker’s quality!
While Adventure will probably always be my number one favorite, I can agree with just about everything else so far. This takes me back....so glad I found your channel. Good Stuff!
Adventure could have used its own video, what with Ready Player One featuring its Easter Egg. I played that a lot, and it's been fun this week playing it again. I like winning! But sometimes the gold key is locked in the gold castle and you don't know unless you check every possible room. I did see you had Adventure in the video, "Games with Real Endings."
Another fun video, but I must say you made some Yars' mistakes. 1) You don't play as Yar, you play as one of many Yars. 2) The Qotile doesn't follow you around, it is considered a guided missile that the Qotile sends out. 3) You don't recharge your Zorlon Cannon by reaching the opposite side of the screen, you do so by touching the Qotile. You can also recharge it by nibbling on the red shield surrounding the Qotile. Finally one omission (not exactly a mistake) -- no mention of hunting the Swirl?? that's how you earn extra lives and a whopping 7,000 bonus points.
I played Frogger,it was fun. Sometimes when I'm playing Grand Theft Auto 5 , I take the character and then I run across a busy highway just to see if they will make it across without getting hit just like in frogger.
Nice channel :) I thought it would be impossible to offer something new and fresh among all those retro gaming channels on YT. But here it is :) Good work. Keepu upu ;)
I know it was the over saturation of 3rd party games that helped caused the cradh of the video game market. But you can't deny that is part of what made the 2600 so special. I think there was a game based off of King Kong and was similar to Donkey Kong. It was odd games like this that friends would have that you didn't that made playing games on the Atari so neat. After the Atari era for me. My Commodore 63 was my next game machine (although it was a computer) I never owned any Nintendo systems until this year when I bought my kids the Switch with some of my tax return for them. Other than that. I prefer photography and video editing now.
This is partly true about 3rd-party games. But some Atari 2600 games were return-to-the-store bad! I'm thinking E.T., Pac-Man, Star Raiders and the Swordquest series. Some of the arcade ports weren't good either. So if they HAD a quality seal like Nintendo did later, their judgement was really bad and they'd have just given it to anyone who paid for it. There were a lot of good Activision games after their talent left, and Q*Bert and Frogger were good 3rd party arcade ports. There were so many things that caused Atari to fall or fail, that stopping one thing wouldn't have done it.
I had a system for playing Yars Revenge. I could literally go on forever with a single game. Maxed out the lives and it was an aberration for me to actually die. The game would usually end due to boredom, dinner or sleep.
I played it recently, trying to max my score by hitting the enemy in mid-air. When I got to 100,000 I lost my neutral zone, but I don't see it mentioned in the manual or web sites. I thought it was an original game, but saw a video this month saying it was based on an arcade game where the enemy was in the center with circular force shields.
Hmmm, I don't think I ever played that Gremlins game, although I've played all the others. I do remember an ALIEN game, though. Oh, and at the time, I thought Donkey Kong was throwing rolling pizzas at you, rather than barrels, and that those fireballs were pizzas that were still hot, right out of the oven!
Yar's Revenge may be my favorite out of the ones you highlighted, although Frogger was up there for me as well. For my picks, they are mostly Activision titles. I used to play... *Seaquest *Keystone Kapers *Frostbite *Enduro *Jungle Hunt *Cosmic Ark I liked other as well, but those are my main favorites. I think Seaquest is probably my absolute favorite, however Frostbite is close too.
Anybody remember Space Shuttle? That was a game that you had to have the manual in front of you to play because there were so many things you had to DO to really get anywhere in the game.
I'm 43 years old and I just now found out that the frog in Frogger wraps around to the left side of the screen if you let him float off of the right. Do you have any idea how fucking hard it was to get a frog into the first space without this knowledge?! AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!
You appear to do what I used to do on 2600 Donkey Kong. That was jump over the last bridge and end up in the air. For some reason it felt weird not do that. :)
How 'bout that cover art on Yar's Revenge, amirite? I wanted to be an artist for them so bad when i was a kid. The art on the boxes and instruction manuals really helped set the tone for the imagination you had to use once you started playing the games.
If he does a 2-player episode, Warlords, Indy 500 and the M-Network Armor Ambush and its sports games should be the best. Some people said Maze Craze was great, but I didn't have it or get to play it.
Many visually simple arcade conversions were not only due to the castrated 6502 cpu in each machine, but the miniscule amount of ram in most cartridges.
Seeing the later games made me wonder, and the answer was chip prices came down and they could put better ones in. Atari Pac-Man however was used with a smaller chip to save money, and everyone saw how it could have been with Ms. Pac-Man in 1983. CRASH!
Got a gameboy advance game that has yars revenge on it. Never did have this one on Atari. Not bad at all now I know what I'm actually doing. It also has donkey Kong and pong. Donkey Kong is absolutely timeless.
Let’s see... Adventure, Circus Atari, Empire Strikes Back, Warlords, Haunted House, Missile Command, Berzerk, Keystone Kapers and Adventures of Tron, were some of my favorites. I also enjoyed most of the ones you mentioned in the video. Juno First and Draconian are a couple of new favorites of mine from Atari Age.
Yars and Frogger were great games. Strange graphical issues though on your presentation of Frogger! I don't think the logs and turtles ever went totally invisible like that... or did they? (I know the turtles sink of course)
Eh depends on the framerate I capture at and the framerate you view it in... sometimes that makes wonky things happen with the sprites and what you see in the video versus what was actually happening on screen.
Oh, man! Donkey Kong for the 2600 was the WORST! Frogger was an absolute classic though, as was The Empire Strikes Back (also by Parker Brothers). My all-time favorite was probably Star Raiders, but Asteroids, Cosmic Ark, Atlantis, River Raid, Pitfall, and Missile Command also spent a lot of time in my Atari. The last videogame I played as a single man, the morning of my wedding, was Demon Attack. No symbolism there- it was just what was handy! Happy to report that I'm still happily married and still happily playing retrogames!
I guess Demon Attack's better than playing one of those Atari carts that were sold at the X-rated video store. I played Donkey Kong for Atari at a friend's house. I like games that have different stages, but this was so-so. Later I learned the ColecoVision shipped with Donkey Kong, so maybe they had an incentive to make it so-so.
One thing I never understood about Frogger was that going into the water kills you. Frogs are excellent swimmers. Maybe this one had a phobia that developed when he was a tadpole?
Atari 2600 games I loved: . Well, that's it. Siren on the ps2, I loved that game. Just try crouching around like those characters did, irl. Ouch and ouch.
Thought I'd mention a big part of my subbing to this channel is your excellent Atari reviews, so rich with diverse commentary. I'm so tired of 100% mockery videos on Atari because they don't really have anything to say beyond mocking it "The graphics are primitive. Well duh!". ^_^ 2:37 Exactly, how could DK 2600 be any better being that small and with Coleco in charge of it? It's no wonder why many have tried to produce a better versions through homebrew. No complaints from me on Frogger, the 2600 is adept at rendering stacked graphics so it came out great. I love Stampede, played it a lot bitd, only real problem was I never did get any better at playing it without a strategy guide, the lure of the black cattle lol. You lucky guy getting a VHS so early, damn they were pricey before Previously Viewed sales, like $80 or more iirc. Never had Gremlins on 2600 but it looks interesting enough that I'd like to get a cart. Do have the 5200 version and that does a pretty good job of reflecting the source material in video game form too.
I'm fuzzy on the years but it had to have been after Paramount started selling Top Gun on VHS for $26.95 and you started being able to buy VHS tapes everywhere at reasonable prices. I remember even spending allowance money on Star Wars on VHS at one point.
@@FridayNightArcade Oh right I forgot about that, recall some promos now talking about certain popular titles for sale. I picked up different issues of Star Wars on VHS last year, got 80s CBS Fox originals that were probably pricey bitd and that reissue in the 90s before the Special Editions happened that was cheaper. Someday I'll try BETA or Laserdisc versions. ;)
Yeah, if Coleco wanted to sell their system they shouldn't have released games like Donkey Kong for 2600. But they wanted to make money and one report said Atari 2600 had 80% market share in one year before the collapse of '83. A friend had Donkey Kong 2600, so I got Donkey Kong Jr. when it came out, but couldn't get past level 5.
I recently revisited _Donkey Kong_ on the 2600 after a good amount of experience with its NES port, and I can honestly say that both are good ports of the arcade classic in their own right. Whereas the NES port is fairly true to the original game albeit lacking most of its cutscenes and the cement stage in order to fit onto early Famicom cartridges, the 2600 port is somewhat of an adaptation since some of its mechanics differ from those of the arcade experience. Those deviations make the 2600 port play noticeably differently from the arcade game, but they also add unique challenges particularly in the rivet stage since you can't lure the fireballs to where you can more easily smash or evade them like in the arcade. In short, while the NES port of the game brings a near arcade perfect _Donkey Kong_ experience home, the 2600 port takes liberties given the system's limitations to be a good game first and a _Donkey Kong_ port second, and it's because of those liberties that the 2600 port is still worth revisiting on its own merits.
I am not going to lie... Yars Revenge was a very scary game when I was a kid and would give me nightmares. I could never play it more than five minutes and when my friends insisted on playing the game I would have to turn volume all the way down. To this day I do not like this game for the same reason nor do I like to hear it.
