Video Gaming Blog

Submitted by Gaming Briefs and Nostalgia Bits

It may be the first game system to end up there:

In 1977, Atari converted a television set, for good or bad, into a toy. While it wasn’t the first home video game system, it popularized the fledging electronic games genre with its bright colors, catchy music and pop-in cartridge versions of arcade favorites such as Pac-Man, Frogger and Space Invaders.

“It may look primitive compared to the advanced video game systems available today, but it helped make these possible,” said the museum’s curator, Patricia Hogan.

Indeed. And while it may not be the first of it’s sort, it’s certainly one of the very first home console machines ever invented and the first really successful one during its time. It deserves a place in some kind of fame hall! And now, it’s got it.

Hat tip: Hot Air Headlines.

I guess I might as well tell a little bit now about my own personal experiences with the Atari 2600, the first ever game console I’d played with in my childhood. It was while spending time at the house of a babysitter in Pennsylvania who immigrated from Romania, and whose son owned a console. The games I really liked on it were ones like Breakout, Tank, Centipede, Pac-Man, Missile Command, and especially Space Invaders, which was probably the most successfully translated arcade game, closest you could get to a faithful port at the time. And this was all years before SNK wowed me for many years with their Neo-Geo console, which was by far the most faithful porting of anything arcade based to a home console! I also like the early Activision products like River Raid and Pitfall, which was by far the most popular of their first creations.

Of course, there were also some really big disasters like the adaptation of E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial, one of the biggest flops produced during the video game market crash of 1983. I saw it in play once and it was one of the most BORING games I’d ever seen! (This, of course, was years before Steven Spielberg in turn alienated me altogether with some of his worst movie efforts since the turn of the century.) I can certainly see now why Atari had all the cartriges left gathering dust on their shelves buried in a landfill dump soon afterwards.

Thank goodness Atari was able to recover from that dreadful mishap and return to making better games soon afterwards. Their best efforts included their puzzle games, IMO.

We sure have come a long way since then, haven’t we?

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