If you were born sometime between 1960 and 1990, you probably played the original Atari 2600. Atari was one of the bona fide hits of the 1980s, starting as an arcade company and going on to simply dominate home video gaming. It was originally called the Atari Video Computer System, later commonly referred to as the Atari 2600. The console was expensive and so were the games.
Those numbers may look low, but that equates out to about $600 now, with games regularly costing about $120 in today’s dollars. But it didn’t matter, as networks of young people conspired together so that one cartridge could be passed around a neighborhood. Atari dominated that time, until the “great video game crash of 1983” decimated its fortunes. In 1983, a horde of poor quality games saturated the market, and along with the rise of true home computers, spelled the end for the Atari game system. It went on to later iterations, but none of them achieved the same success.
The name continued on but…
The original Atari corporation was dead by 1984, broken up and sold to different holding companies. By the early 1990s the brand barely existed at all. It remained so until the early 2000s when a French company bought Hasbro, which had picked up the Atari name on the cheap some time earlier.
This new company, rebranding itself as Atari, set out to capture the nostalgia of the Atari name. They managed to stay afloat by marketing retro-looking products and licensing the Atari logo, which maintained a certain cool even after all these years. It was enough to keep things going until the mid-10s when the company ran aground again.
Emerging from bankruptcy, the new company created a new version of the Atari VCS based on PC hardware. They also started aggressively marketing the old games once again.
Back with a twist
All this brings us to today. Atari has announced yet another way for you to relive your childhood, this time with the soon-to-be-released game “Atari Mania.” In it, you work your way through over 150 mashed up versions of Atari originals, with graphics that are upgraded but still look retro. Take a look at the trailer:
If you want to know more, check out Atari’s site; we don’t sell software at Solid Signal.
Will it ever end?
The Atari generation is between 45 and 60 now, and being in that group I have to lay it out for you folks. The original Atari games were fun, but they’re really awful by today’s standards. They’re typically boring and really take a lot of imagination to pretend they aren’t just colored blocks doing predictable things. Today’s kids would never accept something so simple.
What that means is that when the folks who grew up playing Atari are tired of playing it, the company and its games will fade into history as intended. Until then though, keep on trying to get that ball to the top of the Breakout screen. I know I’ll be right there with you.
