Atari 2600

A box that took new games

The Atari 2600 was not the first home console and not the first to use cartridges. The Fairchild Channel F had reached the market a year earlier with the same idea. What Atari had was an arcade catalogue, a brand children recognised, and the reach to sell it. Atari showed the system at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show on 4 June 1977 and had it in shops that September at US$199.

The box contained two joysticks, a pair of paddle controllers and the Combat cartridge. Eight more games were sold separately, all built by Atari and most derived from its own arcade titles. The case carried a woodgrain veneer and six chrome switches across the front. Collectors call that first run the Heavy Sixer.

Stella, and a chip bought for twelve dollars

The project began inside Cyan Engineering, the Grass Valley consultancy Atari had acquired, under the codename Stella. The first plan used Motorola's 6800, until cheap MOS microprocessors appeared in late 1975. Atari's engineers negotiated the 6507, a cost-reduced 6502 in a 28-pin package, and MOS's RIOT input and timer chip, at US$12 for the pair. Jay Miner designed the Television Interface Adaptor that produced the picture, and a second prototype worked by March 1976.

Atari could not fund the launch alone. In 1976 Nolan Bushnell sold the company to Warner Communications for US$28 million, and the new owner funded the push into production. The console has 128 bytes of RAM. Its processor runs at 1.19 MHz and can address 4 KB of cartridge memory, a limit set by the 13 address pins on the 6507 and then cut further by a cartridge slot with one pin fewer. It was thought sufficient because Combat was 2 KB.

Five objects and a racing beam

The TIA has no framebuffer. Instead of storing a picture, the console generates the image in step with the electron beam of a cathode ray tube, and the program has to update the display registers between scanlines. Programmers learned to "race the beam", doing other work in the horizontal blanking interval while the gun crossed the screen.

The chip can draw a background playfield, two player sprites eight pixels wide, two one-pixel missiles and a ball that stretches from one to eight pixels, and every Atari 2600 game is assembled from those elements. An NTSC machine produces 160 pixels across and 192 visible lines at 60 Hz, with 16 colours at eight levels of brightness. The PAL version shows 228 lines at 50 Hz but only 13 colours.

Space Invaders changes the arithmetic

Early sales were slow. Atari moved between 350,000 and 400,000 consoles in 1977, sold only 550,000 of the 800,000 built in 1978, and reached an installed base of a little over 1.3 million by the end of 1979. The market did not understand a machine with no game of its own until the licensed conversion of Taito's Space Invaders arrived in 1980, the first officially licensed arcade conversion for a home console. It sold 1.25 million cartridges, console sales passed a million that year, and the install base doubled.

The same year brought Adventure, one of the first action-adventure games and the home of the first widely recognised Easter egg, the programmer Warren Robinett's hidden credit. Cartridge sizes grew as programmers worked around the address limit: 2 KB at launch, 4 KB as standard with Space Invaders, and 8 KB with the 1981 port of Asteroids, which switched between two 4 KB banks. By the end of the run Atari's Fatal Run used 32 KB.

Activision and the licensing model

At first every cartridge came from Atari. In 1979 three of its programmers, David Crane, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, left to found Activision and publish their own games. Atari sued in 1980; the case settled out of court with Activision paying a licence fee. That settlement made Activision the first third-party developer and established the arrangement every console maker has used since: outside studios pay the platform holder for the right to sell software. Pitfall!, released in 1982, sold four million copies.

Pac-Man, E.T. and the collapse

By 1982 the 2600 was the dominant console in North America and the word Atari had become a synonym for video games. Pac-Man, the conversion everybody wanted, became its best-selling cartridge at more than eight million copies, criticised for barely resembling the arcade game. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was written in about six weeks for the holiday season, four million cartridges were produced, and roughly 1.5 million were sold.

In December 1982 Warner told shareholders that growth would be far below its forecast, and the resulting loss of confidence helped start the North American crash of 1983. Atari sent 14 truckloads of unsold cartridges to a landfill in New Mexico that September and reported a US$536 million loss for the year. A 2014 excavation of the site found 700,000 cartridges.

The long tail

Warner sold the consumer electronics business to Jack Tramiel in 1984. Atari Corporation then released a smaller, cheaper 2600 in 1986, advertised as costing under fifty dollars, and the large cartridge library kept the machine selling into the Nintendo era. The last Atari releases came in 1989 and 1990, and production ended in 1992 after more than 14 years. Around 30 million consoles were sold in total.

The 2600 was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2007, and IGN ranked it the number two console of all time in 2009, calling it the console the industry is built on. It proved that a home machine could be a platform, that games could be a separate publishing business, and that hardware could be stretched by software long past its creators' expectations.