One Man’s Atari 2600 Odyssey

When I was 14, way before the advent of PlayStation or Xbox, there was the Atari 2600. At the time this was bleeding edge technology and represented the pinnacle of the home games industry.

My best friend received a little box, which more resembled a Hi-Fi component than a gaming system, for his birthday and invited all us kids around to play. He plugged it into the back of his 14” CRT TV and pushed a square games cartridge home, and my imagination came alive.

It is no exaggeration to say this visit to my friend’s house was one of my abiding memories of a wonderful childhood and one that fired my life-long love of games consoles.

The first game up was Centipede. A simple but strangely addictive game. A long line of little connected spheres, the aforementioned centipede, slowly at first, made its way down the screen around various obstacles. Your mission was to shoot off each sphere before the centipede reached your position at the bottom of the screen.

This simple premise became hellishly more difficult because when shot, the centipede split in two, with both parts moving inexorably towards you. As the game progressed the centipede began to move quicker and quicker until it was almost impossible to hit. Eventually, when it beat you and reached your position at the bottom of the screen, the famous ‘Game Over’ legend would appear.

Anyone who remembers the game Snake, a staple and quite addictive game on early Nokia mobile phones, can appreciate that two decades earlier, in full colour and on a big screen, in those days at least, Centipede had the power to entrap a generation of our impressionable minds.

We all took turns with, I have to say, the least ergonomic and most frustrating controller I ever had the displeasure of using. By the end of a long hard day gaming, my little hands would be aching. The console and the games were, however, nothing short of stunning.

The rest of that summer I barely ventured outdoors, spending most of my time in my friends’ living room playing the Atari 2600. I ended the summer pasty white but as happy as I’ve ever been. On the run-up to Christmas of that year, there was only one thing on my wish list, an Atari 2600 of my own.

When I awoke on Christmas morning I remember being overjoyed by the sight of my very own console which fully introduced me to the wonderful world of gaming. I received the Centipede games cartridge with my console and in a wrapped present I was happy to find three additional games cartridges, the iconic arcade hits, Galaxian, Space Invaders, and Asteroids, which quickly became three of my favourite games to this day.

The console that came into my life in the mid-1980s had actually been released in 1977, a mind-boggling 44 years ago, and it went on to sell over 30 million units (source: AtariAge). This then was truly a console giant of the first age, comparable to the sales figure of the giants of today, the PlayStation and Xbox. The impact the Atari 2600 had on me and my life is immeasurable and can in some way be seen by the fact that all these years later I still get a thrill out of getting my hands on the latest games consoles and games.

Over the years I gifted or sold all of my older consoles to help fund the next newer, brighter, shinier one. All except that original Atari 2600. As an adult, many years away from that impressionable child whose first console was this square wood affect plastic box, it says a great deal that I still have my little console. It has travelled down the years, and through several house moves with me and is still in a cupboard on a shelf all its own.

The Atari 2600 was and still is, a truly great little console.

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