""The fun is here, oh yessiree!""

I remember the commercial jingle as if I heard it just yesterday. This was my first ever video game system. It was amazing how they could cram so much fun into cartridges that were only 2k - 16k big. This console has such lasting appeal that it can even be enjoyed by the younger gamers of today.

Graphics Capabilities: 8
Compared to it's rival the Intellivision, the 2600 didn't have good animation quality. Game scenes were also not as well detailed. Still, most games had 60 fps sprite/screen scrolling, which was very cool looking back then. As ROM sizes increased, decent amounts of detail were able to be added to games.

Audio Capabilities: 7
Although not as good as Intellivision, noone can forget the classic sounds that games made on this system. What stands out most in my mind is the sound of your ship going into warp in Solaris. :)

Controller Design: 7
Joysticks with one button were sufficient enough back then, but left very little room for added gameplay depth. This is why some people opted for Intellivision instead. Having to buy special controls for certain games was also a pain. Atari should have, for instance, build an analog dial right onto the joystick controller so people didn't have to keep switching from the joystick to the paddle to play different games (like Breakout, for example).

Game Library: 9
Kickass stuff for everyone! There were great action games (Keystone Capers, Jungle Hunt), Racing games (Dodge 'Em), and even the signs of the first adventure and RPG games (Adventure). There were very nice arcade ports also (Gyruss is one of the best; noone thought the Atari could generate such an enjoyable port of an arcade game so much more powerful than it). There were quite a few shining stars in the 2600's lineup, like the above mentioned Solaris, which had very good graphics for a system of its time (your ship actually scales when it flies away). Sports games were noticeably better on the Intellivision, but there were still some good sports games on the Atari (I personally enjoyed Video Olympics very much). There were also some very unique games that really didn't fit under a genre (Yar's Revenge). The only genre this system didn't touch on well was strategy, but it's safe to say that noone was disappointed with Atari's game selection.

Bottom Line?
This system survived for a good amount of time even when both Nintendo and Sega released their respective 8 bit systems. Today the Atari 2600 lives on in emulators and in the minds of all oldschool gamers who remember that some of the most fun games come in the smallest packages. This system was and still is enjoyable and this fact will never cease to be true, which is why I give it a 9.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 07/10/01, Updated 07/10/01