If someone who’s flirting with midlife starts talking about old-school video games at home, it doesn’t take long for the Atari name to come up, right? In the early 80’s it was part of almost everyone’s life. Even the pretty girls who were cheerleaders played that horrible version of Pac-Man for 2600 on those glorious game days.

I honestly believe that the Atari 2600 had two different lives during its operation in the late 70’s and early 80’s. When it debuted in 1977 and for the first 3 Christmases it existed, it was a rich kid’s toy. It was a luxury to have one in your house. If you were lucky enough to have a friend who had one, it was a blast to play. Sure the first games released were mostly simple and often boring, but it was new and cool.

In 1980, Atari captured the rights to the crushing arcade Space Invaders and that blew the lid off the home game market. Atari that followed that up by bringing home its crushing arcade Asteroids in 1981. These two titles justified parents giving in to their children’s demands. Many consumers bought an Atari just to play these two games.

Atari had some competition with Mattel’s Intellivision, which featured better graphics and sound, but didn’t have access to the big-name titles Atari had locked up. The Intellivision was also more expensive than the Atari 2600. These were the golden years of the 2600.

1982 would also be a good year for the 2600 system. Activision made some classic games for Atari, and Pitfall was one of those games my mom put on stock for me at the local Gaylord’s department store that summer. By fall, a new home gaming system called Colecovision was coming out and it looked amazing!

Atari had responded by introducing its new advanced Atari 5200 system to the market. This is where I get confused about this whole topic. You see, once the home gaming market took off, all the devices that could write lame code started creating games for the 2600 system.

The problem was, the vast majority of the games sucked and were terrible. But Atari is as much to blame as these shady companies. Do you remember how bad Pac-Man was? Sure, we live in denial and we played that crap because it was the only home version out there when it was released.

The Colecovison was a huge success despite the fact that Coleco was caught off guard and was unable to produce the systems fast enough to meet demands during the 1982 Christmas season. Meanwhile, Atari had 5200 equally powerful there, but decided to keep building their own. 2600 older. This time the old horse was panting a lot!

You’d think Atari would have had the common sense to phase out the 2600 and start supporting their far superior 5200 system. However, that was not the case. Two things happened in the fall of ’82 that ultimately spelled doom for Atari and the video game industry as a whole.

For the holiday season, Atari rolled the dice in two major projects for the 2600. The Swordquest series and ET The Video Game. The Swordquest series featured four adventure games in a series and included a solid gold prize contest for players who could solve the puzzle.

The problem was that the Swordquest games were terrible with gameplay that didn’t make any sense. It was heavily promoted by Atari and it was a total failure. ET was a pure example of Atari run by a bunch of corporate jerks who knew nothing about programming and didn’t really care about delivering a quality product.

ET was reunited in a mad rush just so the game could be shipped for the 1982 Christmas blitz. So someone at Atari thought it would be a good idea to mass-produce more copies of ET than the 2600 systems that existed in American homes in that moment. weather.

As expected, the game was a complete failure! Atari found themselves stuck with millions of copies of ET that they couldn’t give away. Eventually, Atari was forced to bury the unwanted games in a landfill in New Mexico. That was truly the beginning of the end for Atari and for the home gaming market as a whole.