Atari 2600

Atari, Inc. was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in 1972. Its first major product was Pong, released in 1972, the first successful coin-operated video game. While Atari continued to develop new arcade games in following years, Pong gave rise to a number of competitors to the growing arcade game market. The competition along with other missteps by Atari led to financial problems in 1974 before the company recovered by the end of the year. The increasing competition increased the risk, as Atari had found with past arcade games and again with dedicated home consoles. Both platforms are built from integrating discrete electro-mechanical components into circuits instead of being programmed as on a mainframe computer. Thus, development of a console had cost at least plus time to complete, but the final product only had about a three-month shelf life before becoming outdated by competition. By 1974, Atari had acquired Cyan Engineering, a Grass Valley electronics company founded by Steve Mayer and Larry Emmons, both former colleagues of Bushnell and Dabney from Ampex, who helped to develop new ideas for Atari's arcade games. Even before the release of the home version of Pong, Cyan's engineers, led by Mayer and Ron Milner, had envisioned a home console powered by new programmable microprocessors capable of playing Atari's arcade offerings of the time. The programmable microprocessors would make a console's design significantly simpler and more powerful than any dedicated single-game unit. However, the cost of such chips was far outside the range that their market would tolerate. MOS Technology 6502/6507 In September 1975, MOS Technology debuted the 6502 microprocessor for at the Wescon trade show in San Francisco. Financial models showed that even at , the 6502 would be too expensive, and Peddle offered them a planned 6507 microprocessor, a cost-reduced version of the 6502, and MOS's RIOT chip for input/output. Cyan and MOS negotiated the 6507 and RIOT chips at a pair. MOS also introduced Cyan to Microcomputer Associates, who had separately developed debugging software and hardware for MOS, and had developed the JOLT Computer for testing the 6502, which Peddle suggested would be useful for Atari and Cyan to use while developing their system. The second prototype included a TIA, a 6507, and a ROM cartridge slot and adapter. Alongside the electronics development, Bushnell brought in Gene Landrum, a consultant who had already consulted for Fairchild Camera and Instrument for its upcoming Channel F, to determine the consumer requirements for the console. In his final report, Landrum suggested a living room aesthetic, with a wood grain finish, and for the cartridges to be "idiot proof, child proof and effective in resisting potential static [electricity] problems in a living room environment". Landrum recommended it include four to five dedicated games in addition to the cartridges, but this was dropped in the final designs. By October 1976, Warner and Atari agreed to the purchase of Atari for . By 1977, development had advanced enough to brand it the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) and start developing games. The console launched at , with two joysticks and a Combat cartridge; eight additional games were sold separately. Most of the launch games were based on arcade games developed by Atari or its subsidiary Kee Games: for example, Combat was based on Kee's Tank (1974) and Atari's Jet Fighter (1975). Bushnell pushed the Warner Board of Directors to start working on "Stella 2", as he grew concerned that rising competition and aging tech specs of the VCS would render the console obsolete. However, the board stayed committed to the VCS and ignored Bushnell's advice, leading to his departure from Atari in 1979. Atari sold about 600,000 VCS systems in 1979, bringing the installed base to a little over 1.3 million. Atari obtained a license from Taito to develop a VCS conversion of its 1978 arcade hit Space Invaders, which made it the first officially licensed arcade conversion for a home console. Atari sold 1.25 million Space Invaders cartridges and more than a million VCS systems in 1980, nearly doubling the install base to over 2 million, and then an estimated 3.1 million VCS systems in 1981. of which over copies had been sold by 1990. Pac-Man propelled worldwide Atari VCS sales to units during 1982, according to a November 1983 article in InfoWorld magazine. A subsequent InfoWorld article from August 1984 stated that more than Atari 2600 machines had been sold by 1982. A March 1983 article in IEEE Spectrum magazine estimated about 3 million VCS sales in 1981, about 5.5 million in 1982, as well as a total of over 12 million VCS systems and an estimated 120 million cartridges sold. In Europe, the Atari VCS sold 125,000 units in the United Kingdom during 1980, and 450,000 in West Germany by 1984. In France, where the VCS released in 1982, the system sold 600,000 units by 1989. The console was distributed by Epoch Co. in Japan in 1979 under the name "Cassette TV Game", but did not sell as well as Epoch's own Cassette Vision system in 1981. In English-speaking countries, the console was distributed in the United Kingdom (first from 1979 by Ingersoll Electronics Ltd., later by Railway Terrace), Australia (by Futuretronics), Canada (first from 1977 by Paragon Entertainment and from 1980 by Irwin Toys), Ireland (from 1979 by Quintin Flynn and from 1982 by Omnitek), New Zealand (by Monaco), Singapore (by Hin Seng Ltd), South Africa (by Frank & Hirsch), Hong Kong (by Wong's Kong King Ltd) and Malaysia (by Perangsang International Sdn Bhd). In 1982, Atari launched its second programmable console, the Atari 5200. To standardize naming, the VCS was renamed the Atari 2600 Video Computer System, or Atari 2600, with the number derived from the manufacture part number CX2600. By 1982, the 2600 cost Atari about to manufacture, and was sold for an average of . The company spent .50 to to manufacture each cartridge, plus to for advertising, wholesaling for . In 1980, Atari attempted to block the sale of the Activision cartridges, accusing the four of intellectual property infringement. The two companies settled out of court, with Activision agreeing to pay Atari a licensing fee for their games. This made Activision the first third-party video game developer, and established the licensing model that continues to be used by console manufacturers for game development. Activision's success led to the establishment of other third-party VCS game developers following its model in the early 1980s, including U.S. Games, Telesys, Games by Apollo, Data Age, Zimag, Mystique, and CommaVid. The founding of Imagic included ex-Atari programmers. Mattel and Coleco, each already producing its own more advanced console, created simplified versions of their existing games for the 2600. Mattel used the M Network brand name for its cartridges. Third-party games accounted for half of VCS game sales by 1982. Decline and redesign In addition to third-party game development, Atari also received the first major threat to its hardware dominance from the ColecoVision. Coleco had a license from Nintendo to develop a home version of Nintendo's 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong, which was bundled with every ColecoVision console. Coleco gained about 17% of the hardware market in 1982 compared to Atari's 58%. With third parties competing for market share, Atari worked to maintain dominance in the market by acquiring licenses for popular arcade games and other properties to make games from. The 2600 conversion of Pac-Man had numerous technical and aesthetic flaws, but still sold upwards of 7 million copies. Heading into the 1982 holiday shopping season, Atari had placed high sales expectations on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game based on the film of the same name that was programmed in about six weeks. Atari produced an estimated four million cartridges of E.T., but the game was poorly reviewed, and only about 1.5 million copies were sold. In December 1982, Warner Communications issued revised earnings guidance to its shareholders, having expected a 50% year-to-year growth but now only expecting 10–15% due to declining sales at Atari. Coupled with the oversaturated home game market, Atari's weakened position led investors to start pulling funds out of video games, beginning a cascade of disastrous effects that would come to be known as the video game crash of 1983. In September 1983, Atari sent 14 truckloads of unsold Atari 2600 cartridges and other equipment to a landfill in the New Mexico desert. The event was long considered an urban legend that claimed the burial contained millions of unsold cartridges. However, when the site was excavated in 2014, only 700,000 cartridges were revealed to have been buried, confirming reports from former Atari executives. Atari reported a loss for 1983 as a whole, and continued to lose money into 1984, with a loss reported in the second quarter. Warner, wary of supporting its failing Atari division, started looking for buyers. In July 1984, it sold most of the assets of Atari's consumer electronics and home computer divisions to Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, in a deal valued at ; Warner would retain Atari's arcade business, which would be rechristened as Atari Games. Tramiel, a proponent of personal computers, halted all game development for the 2600 soon after the sale. The North American video game market did not recover until about 1986, after Nintendo's 1985 launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. In 1986, Atari Corporation released a redesigned version of the 2600, supported by an ad campaign touting a price of "under 50 bucks". With a large library of cartridges and a low price point, the 2600 continued to sell into the late 1980s. Atari released the last batch of games in 1989–90, including Secret Quest and Fatal Run. By 1986, over Atari VCS units had been sold worldwide. The final Atari-licensed release was the PAL-only version of the arcade game Klax in 1990. After more than 14 years on the market, production on the 2600, along with the Atari 7800 and Atari 8-bit computers, ended in 1992. Despite this, sales of the 2600 continued in Europe for years to come. It cost less than £39.99 and was mainly distributed through mail order chains. In 1991, 200,000 units were sold on the continent, and it was a bestseller at Littlewoods stores in the UK. After the fall of communism, Atari attempted to legally introduce the Atari 2600 and 7800 to former Eastern Bloc countries, with the small price being main advantage of the system. However, Atari was defeated by even cheaper and easily available clones called "Rambo TV Game 2600" (advertised with the 1982 movie character Rambo), which contained up to several hundred built-in games. In Western Europe, the last stocks of the 2600 and 7800 were sold until the summer/fall of 1995. ==Hardware==

The Atari 2600's CPU is the MOS Technology 6507, a version of the 6502, running at 1.19 MHz in the 2600. Though their internal silicon was identical, the 6507 was cheaper than the 6502 because its package included fewer memory-address pins—13 instead of 16. The designers of the Atari 2600 selected an inexpensive cartridge interface that has one fewer address pins than the 13 allowed by the 6507, further reducing the already limited addressable memory from 8 KB (213 = 8,192) to 4 KB (212 = 4,096). This was believed to be sufficient as Combat was only 2 KB. Later games circumvented this limitation with bank switching. The console has 128 bytes of RAM for scratch space, the call stack, and the state of the game environment. The top bezel of the console originally had six switches: power, TV type selection (color or black-and-white), game selection, left and right player difficulty, and game reset. The difficulty switches were moved to the back of the bezel in later versions of the console. The back bezel also included the controller ports. Graphics '' (1982) has more advanced graphics than the games the VCS launched with. The black bar on the left provides extra time for the program to prepare graphics between each scanline. The system was designed without a frame buffer to avoid the cost of the associated RAM. The background and sprites apply to a single scan line, and as the display is output to the television, the program can change colors, sprite positions, and background settings. The careful timing required to sync the code to the screen on the part of the programmer was labeled "racing the beam"; the actual game logic runs when the television beam is outside of the visible area of the screen. Regional releases of the Atari 2600 use modified TIA chips for each region's television formats, which require games to be developed and published separately for each region. All modes are 160 pixels wide. NTSC mode provides 192 visible lines per screen, drawn at 60 Hz, with 16 colors, each at 8 levels of brightness. PAL mode provides more vertical scanlines, with 228 visible lines per screen, but drawn at 50 Hz and only 13 colors. SECAM mode, also a 50 Hz format, is limited to 8 colors, each with only a single brightness level. Controllers The first VCS bundle has two types of controllers: a joystick (part number CX10) and pair of rotary paddle controllers (CX30). Driving controllers, which are similar to paddle controllers but can be continuously rotated, shipped with the Indy 500 launch game. After less than a year, the CX10 joystick was replaced with the CX40 model Because the Atari joystick port and CX40 joystick became industry standards, 2600 joysticks and some other peripherals work with later systems, including the MSX, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari 8-bit computers, and Atari ST. The CX40 joystick can be used with the Master System and Sega Genesis, but does not provide all the buttons of a native controller. Third-party controllers include Wico's Command Control joystick. Later, the CX42 Remote Control Joysticks, similar in appearance but using wireless technology, were released, together with a receiver whose wires could be inserted in the controller jacks. Atari introduced the CX50 Keyboard Controller in June 1978 along with two games that require it: Codebreaker and Hunt & Score. The CX22 Trak-Ball controller was announced in January 1983 and is compatible with the Atari 8-bit computers. There were two attempts to turn the Atari 2600 into a keyboard-equipped home computer: Atari's never-released CX3000 "Graduate" keyboard, and the CompuMate keyboard by Spectravideo which was released in 1983. ==Console models==

Minor revisions The initial production of the VCS was made in Sunnyvale during 1977, using thick polystyrene plastic for the casing as to give the impression of weight from what was mostly an empty shell inside. Sears released several models of the VCS as the Sears Video Arcade series starting in 1977. The final Sears-specific model was the Video Arcade II, released during the fall of 1982. Sears released versions of Atari's games with Tele-Games branding, usually with different titles. Atari 2800 The Atari 2800 is the Japanese version of the 2600 released in October 1983. It is the first Japan-specific release of a 2600, though companies like Epoch had distributed the 2600 in Japan previously. The 2800 was released a short time after Nintendo's Family Computer (which became the dominant console in Japan), and it did not gain a significant share of the market. Sears previously released the 2800 in the US during late 1982 as the Sears Video Arcade II, which came packaged with two controllers and Space Invaders. Around 35 games were released for the 2800. Designed by engineer Joe Tilly, the 2800 has four controller ports instead of the two of the 2600. The controllers are an all-in one design using a combination of an 8-direction digital joystick and a 270-degree paddle, designed by John Amber. The 2800's case design departed from the 2600, using a wedge shape with non-protruding switches. The case style is the basis for the Atari 7800, which was redesigned for the 7800 by Barney Huang. Released after the video game crash of 1983, and after the North American launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the 2600 was supported with new games and television commercials promoting "The fun is back!". Atari released several minor stylistic variations: the "large rainbow" (shown), "short rainbow", and an all-black version sold only in Ireland. Later European versions include a joypad. Unreleased prototypes The Atari 2700 was a version of the 2600 with wireless controllers. The CX2000, with integrated joystick controllers, was a redesign based on human factor analysis by Henry Dreyfuss Associates. The circa-1982 Atari 3200 was a backwards compatible 2600 successor with "more memory, higher resolution graphics and improved sound". Related hardware and recreations The Atari 7800, announced in 1984 and released in 1986, is the official successor to the Atari 2600 and is backward compatible with 2600 cartridges. Multiple retro-style consoles and microconsoles have been released since the lifespan of the original Atari 2600: • The TV Boy includes 127 games in an enlarged joypad. • The Atari Classics 10-in-1 TV Game, manufactured by Jakks Pacific, emulates the 2600 with ten games inside an Atari-style joystick with composite-video output. • The Atari Flashback 2 (2005) contains 40 games, with four additional programs unlocked by a cheat code. It uses a recreated chip based on original 2600 hardware, and is compatible with original 2600 controllers. It can be modified to play original 2600 cartridges. • In 2017, Hyperkin announced the RetroN 77, a clone of the Atari 2600 that plays original cartridges instead of preinstalled games. • The Atari VCS (2021 console) can download and emulate 2600 games via an online store. • The Atari Flashback 12 Gold (2023) contains 130 games built-in. • The Atari 2600+ (2023) is a replica of the 2600 and is 20% smaller. The 2600+ includes support for original Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges. • The Atari 7800+ (2024) is a smaller replica of the Atari 7800. It has similar features to the Atari 2600+, but its exterior encasing design pays homage to the Atari 7800. ==Games==

In 1977, nine games were released on cartridge to accompany the launch of the console: Air-Sea Battle, Basic Math, Blackjack, Combat, Indy 500, Star Ship, Street Racer, Surround, and Video Olympics. Indy 500 shipped with special "driving controllers", which are like paddles but rotate freely. Street Racer and Video Olympics use the standard paddle controllers. Atari, Inc. was the only developer for the first few years, releasing dozens of games. Atari determined that box art featuring only descriptions of the game and screenshots would not be sufficient to sell games in retail stores, since most games were based on abstract principles and screenshots give little information. Atari outsourced box art to Cliff Spohn, who created visually interesting artwork with implications of dynamic movement intended to engage the player's imagination while staying true to the gameplay. Spohn's style became a standard for Atari when bringing in assistant artists, including Susan Jaekel, Rick Guidice, John Enright, and Steve Hendricks. These artists generally conferred with the programmer to learn about the game before drawing the art. An Atari VCS port of the Breakout arcade game appeared in 1978. The original is in black and white with a colored overlay, and the home version is in color. In 1980, Atari released Adventure, the first action-adventure game, and the first home game with a hidden Easter egg. Rick Maurer's port of Taito's Space Invaders, released in 1980, was the first VCS game to sell a million copies—eventually doubling that within a year and totaling more than cartridges by 1983. The VCS port of Asteroids (1981) was the first game for the system to use 8K via a bank switching technique between two 4K segments. Some games, including Atari's ports of Dig Dug and Crystal Castles, are 16K cartridges. Many early VCS titles were able to display in both monochrome (black and white) and full color through the use of the "TV type" switch on the console. This allowed the VCS games to function on both monochrome and color televisions. However, beginning around the rebranding from "VCS" to "2600", support for black and white display modes diminished greatly, with most releases during this period only displaying in color and the TV type switch serving no function. Late releases such as Secret Quest, began using the TV type switch for gameplay functions, such as pausing. Two Atari-published games, both from the system's peak in 1982, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial were rushed to market and are cited as factors in the video game crash of 1983. A company named American Multiple Industries produced a number of pornographic games for the 2600 under the Mystique Presents Swedish Erotica label. The most notorious, ''Custer's Revenge'', was protested by women's and Native American groups because it depicted General George Armstrong Custer raping a bound Native American woman. Atari sued American Multiple Industries in court over the release of the game. ==Legacy==

" (2012) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Pitfall!, and Combat The 2600 was so successful in the late 1970s and early 1980s that "Atari" was a synonym for the console in mainstream media and for video games in general. Jay Miner directed the creation of the successors to the 2600's TIA chip—CTIA and ANTIC—which are central to the Atari 8-bit computers released in 1979 and later the Atari 5200 console. The Atari 2600 was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong in Rochester, New York, in 2007. In 2009, the Atari 2600 was named the number two console of all time by IGN, which cited its remarkable role behind both the first video game boom and the video game crash of 1983, and called it "the console that our entire industry is built upon". In November 2021, the current incarnation of Atari announced three 2600 games to be published under "Atari XP" label: ''Yars' Return, Aquaventure, and Saboteur''. These were previously included in Atari Flashback consoles. A model of the Atari 2600 was released by Lego in 2022.{{cite web|first=Chris|last=Reed|title=Atari 2600 LEGO Set Is Now Available ==Notes==