This 2600 Mystery Has Puzzled Atari Collectors For Decades

Knowing how Atari worked they probably got very stoned or did some LSD and forgot about it.

I always thought Atari's numbering of systems to be strange but never really realised their games were numbered in such a bizarre way too. Interesting investigation!

Pong was long in the tooth by 1977 but Video Olympics was nonetheless half of the formula when Atari were engineering the VCS's features. They wanted a system that could competently run the aforementioned Tank, as well as a sort of "Pong to end all Pong clones" with more variations than even the most ambitious Pong clone on the market. That's why the system supports two player sprites, two bullets (for Tank), a ball (for Super Pong), and the ability to double- or triple-up the player sprites individually (for special paddle modes in Super Pong, although the feature was kind of mindlessly taken advantage of in Combat as well). The platform was already vastly superior to everything else on the market just from this laundry list, but there were two things that pushed it beyond into "ahead of its time" territory. The first was multi-channel audio—something which only exists because of an abandoned idea about having stereo speakers built into the console itself so both players could hear sound from "their side" of the unit. And of course the item which ensured the VCS would forever be the most ahead-of-its-time console ever released was the decision to forego VRAM and force devs to build graphics one scanline at a time. The fallout of which was that 1) almost every single 2600 game is 60fps, and 2) the harsh sprite limitation could be more or less ignored, and in fact even the second game in the catalog, Air Sea Battle, does just this. Matter of fact, there's an abandoned homebrew Space Invaders in the wild which demonstrates, in effect, more simultaneous non-flickering sprites on screen than 1983's Famicom (also decently ahead of its time) is capable of. It is suggested that because of the genre allotment of only ten titles that Atari perhaps didn't expect them to get filled. This is true. The assumption at the time of development was that the console would have a shelf life of perhaps three years. The designers didn't understand the full potential of the platform they'd created, imagining that it would get by on games of roughly the quality of Combat and nothing much better than that, and nobody understood the potential impact of a "killer app", which came in 1980 with Space Invaders—the world's first killer app. They had been planning to develop a successor to the VCS at around that time, but Space Invaders, and the VCS's subsequent boom in popularity, changed those plans. You could make a solid case for Space Invaders dooming Atari's future.

I think the thing I’m most surprised about is how long the 2600 lasted - you’re telling me they were still making the things up to two years after the Mega Drive came out?!

They never thought they would make more than 100 games! :face-green-smiling:

Actually Hunt & Score as well as Basic Math Fun WIth Numbers were the Sears Tele-Games versions. Both versions of those games were released in the US, just that Sears & Atari agreed to make a Sears-exclusive version of the 2600.

Love it, great overview! I think I never owned an Atari, but I do remember playing on a unit in front of the tv with switches like on on the 2600, but I believe these were for a few pre-selected games on-board. Mainly pong. Didn't remember what the machine was though.

10 games in six or however many genres would have seemed like a lot in those days. I don't believe any other console to that point had come close to that - the Fairchild Channel F, for example, had just 26 games. I don't think anyone had an idea yet of how long a console could really last; most were on the market for a couple years and then either petered out or were quickly replaced by something new. So I think it fits in with what was assumed at the time that 60 game slots actually would allow for plenty of space in the lineup. I also think the idea at that time was that most owners of a console would buy most or all of the games that actually came out for it. Even today, you don't see a lot of people with 60-game libraries for the PS5 or Xbox Series X. So I think Atari assumed every game would have a pretty high attach rate and everybody would end up with about 30 games in their library, so putting out 60 of them probably seemed like overkill.

Atari 2600 games have the best and most beautiful box art ever. Get the book "The Art of Atari", its a gorgeous tribute to these wonderful pieces of art.

Great video and very interesting part about the CX numbers. Also, love the rainbow color-code of the games ✨

I purchased an Atari 2600 6 year's ago. It is in new condition including the controllers and works well. I started playing it a couple of days ago. It is a nostalgic blast! Makes me feel like a kid again 😎

Nice use of a heavy sixer as the set model for this video :) I never realised the numbers were consecutive so now I'm going to have to dig out all my games to see what I'm missing.

Just saying, Video Olympics pretty much contains enough Pong variants to last you a lifetime. lol

I've worked in the software biz for years, and in one of the places we actually dealt with part numbers. There was a list or spreadsheet that someone maintained and when a new piece of software came out, a new slot in the list was taken up. Which one depended on whoever was maintaining the list. I will say that the most important thing about these part numbers was that each one had an associated "Bill of Materials" which helped the manufacturing branch of the company to build the product. Thus a part number called out the box to be used in the product, the cartridge, the documentation, warranty cards, and the like. So, someone probably did start out with the idea that this range was for this sort of game, and the next range was for another sort of game, but eventually the inclination to just assign them sequentially probably became strong, and they just gave into the pressure. I'm sure manufacturing didn't care about what type of game it was. They probably preferred that there were no gaps in the numbers.

This was very very interesting. But now I have a problem. I suddenly want boxed copies not just loose carts. Thanks Rees. Thanks! 😂

Take into account that Atari had changed hands three times in the 2600's lifetime. Nolan Bushnell's Atari was sold to Warner Brothers, then sold to Jack Tramiel after the market crash. There were a lot of people coming and going, and I'm sure whoever was in charge of their odd numbering system in 1977 wasn't there just a few years later, let alone until the final 2600 game release. And besides, Bushnell was ready to replace the 2600 with a newer console in the late '70s (which Warner Brothers opposed, hence his leaving the company), so they didn't expect to have the 2600 out on the market for so long that they'd need more than 100 number codes for games.

This was an awesome video! I feel like I should have figured this out on my own, but this is cool!

I remember the old catalogues, would show the games in categories. I've also read that they were so high back then, they apparently made a bong out of the shell!! Don't know if that was true but the early days were, 'Come as you are' It's a surprise anything got done.

5:46 Poor Pac-Man and Surround get no respect. The throwing of the box, and the smack of the other falling, was quite unexpected and funny.

This was a fantastic watch for us product number goobs. Thanks!