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Comment by psyklic | Hacker News Reader

I would characterize them more as "foundational" and "genre-creating" -- modern games build on top of their gameplay. Some classics (often played on cell phones today): space invaders, asteroids, pitfall (side-scroller), and numerous procedurally-generated games which form the basis of roguelikes!

I would keep in mind that much of the fun was the controllers, which are all essentially obsolete today (paddle controllers and stiff joysticks). Most atari games feature a "high score" goal due to the limitations of the architecture, which makes you replay the same level over and over -- modern games can have more variety. And, many atari games are _solely_ designed for multiplayer (aka someone sitting next to you!).

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Adventure does not meet many of the criteria you mention, and yet is one of the best games for the 2600. It also happens to date from the 1970s!

The 2600 is undoubtedly a pivotal console in the history of video games, but you're right that it's a foundation more than anything. Few people would want to drive a Model T to work every day but skip forward a few decades and you have the type of classic car that most people would want in their garage. For a lot of us the 2600 is something to be admired from a distance, I suppose

The model-T is an amazing car even today. It had no oil/water-pump that could fail.

This is the reason you go back to simpler things, everything today is over engineered.

That said the C64 is a better device to learn for since it matches the NES in more domains and is a real computer with a keyboard!

And now it's easy to connect it to the internet for multiplayer games!

If you really need to go Atari then 7800 is the way.

The versions of Space Invaders and Asteroids people remember nostalgically are not the 2600 versions, for good reason. Neither are the 2600 versions the original.

I think Space Invaders actually is most known and played on the 2600, at least in the US. It didn't quite have the same reach in arcades outside of Japan, compared to the biggest titles like Missile Command, Galaga, [Ms.] Pac-man. It was the big system-selling killer app for the 2600 before Pac-man came out.

I wrote a more arcade-accurate Space Invaders port for the 2600 (in 1997, when homebrew games were getting started): https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=283

The tell for me is that when asked to describe the first/preferred version they played, most people will eventually mention multicolored invaders. So either they're falsely projecting today's images back (possible but I think unlikely if they don't regularly see it still today) or they're remembering an arcade version with an overlay.

This may be true, but think about Asteroids, which is the converse. Most people will also mention multicolored asteroids, which was true on the 2600 but not the arcade. They will remember whichever version is more vivid, even if it wasn't what they experienced more.

Right. For decades I thought I had played Space Invaders on the Arcade machine while I discovered later it was Space Invaders Part II (Taito). Also, with a similar color palette, Space Panic.

Space Invaders was by far the most played cart on my 2600. It was so faithful to the original arcade game and the difficulty ratcheted up just right.

I hadn't seen your version until now (wow!) but it does a great job of contrasting the trades that the designers of these games had to make when the resources they had to work with were so limited: here, a lot more invaders vs. substantially less resolution on each.

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