Atari Roundup

We're gonna break from the release order format just slightly here, because in the interest of getting the proper Pong experience with its intended input, I bought a Plug n Play Atari system with the knob-based “paddle” controllers, and rather than repeatedly digging it out to play stuff as I come to it in the backlog, I've elected to just spend some time with every game included on the thing.

Pong (1972)

Obviously you know Pong, it's one of the ones that EVERYONE knows. I'm pretty sure many people mistakenly believe it to be the first video game ever made; it wasn't, but it was the first game Atari found success with. Nolan Bushnell's previous attempt to make bank putting Spacewar! in bars as a coin-op machine under the name Computer Space, was a miserable failure because dealing with complex relative movement mechanics involving inertia and thrust vectors and whatnot was Simply Too Much for drunk straight people in 1971. I would also contend that Computer Space was a dull, poorly-considered take on the original game, but I don't think that had much to do with its failure. Drunk straight people in 1971 would probably have hated Spacewar! just as much.

Bushnell, not to be deterred by a single easily-diagnosable failure, quickly set about making plans for another attempt at a coin-op arcade cabinet. Initially he was considering a driving game (presumably something similar to the electromechanical driving games that existed at the time?) but that was quickly tossed out due to concerns that it would be too complex for their newly-hired design engineer, Al Alcorn. He landed on the answer after seeing a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, which included a number of rudimentary video games for users to play on their home television, including a simple 2D interpretation of tennis. Bushnell had Alcorn recreate this tennis game as a prototype, and was so pleased with the results that he wasted no time in turning it into an arcade cabinet, and boy howdy was it successful this time. Many Pong cabinets were reporting income in excess of 400 dollars per day, and a lot of the earliest reports of malfunctioning machines turned out to be due to an overflowing coin reservoir shorting the coin slot circuit. This was also when Bushnell and co discovered that there was already a company called Syzygy, and received to Atari, a reference to a particular game state in Go.

All of which is to say, not only was Atari’s first arcade cabinet a cynical recreation of an existing game in a pay-per-play format, deployed to areas populated by drunk people with loose wallets, so was their first successful one. Once again this project becomes an exercise in disabusing myself of any sentimentality I may have held about the early video game industry. There's no way around it, this shit is scummy. In 2025 we've got a good couple decades of discourse around video games which argues or simply assumes that they are a form of art, and Bushnell, as the head of Atari, the first really successful American video game company, is seen as more or less synonymous with the early days of the industry. As a result, we tend to forget that he was first and foremost a businessman, and specifically a businessman with a background in electromechanical games, which first of all were not viewed within their own industry as artistic endeavors, and secondly have always been closely tied to the development of electronic gambling, most notably slot machines.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that early arcade games are basically the same as slot machines; I think in terms of play experience and how they were viewed by the industry creating them, they were closer to pinball tables. (Notably, Atari partnered with Bally, a pinball manufacturer, to produce their early arcade machines.) However, there's a perception nowadays that there's sort of a hard line between gaming and gambling, one which is being aberrantly transgressed by recent developments such as gacha, and that's simply an ahistoric perspective. Gaming and gambling aren't the same thing, but they share origins, and continue to have more in common than many would like to admit.

But, I hear you ask, what about the game? I'm 4 paragraphs into this screed of 70s video game industry culture criticism, and I haven't even spoken about how the game actually plays.

Well, it's fine. It's certainly simpler than Computer Space, but I think in that simplicity it actually lands on a slightly increased level of difficulty. We're trading depth for precision here, you can only move in two directions but you need to be very exact with it. This would suck ass if you had to do it with digital input, but instead you've got a very responsive analog knob, so it's a decent time. I can't say I loved playing it, but I probably would in 1972, assuming Computer Space hadn't put me off the concept of arcade cabinets entirely. I don't think I'd call it a masterpiece, but it's easy to see why it was such a success and became such an iconic element of gaming history. Unfortunately I just don't have much to say beyond that, the reason this section is so front-loaded with cultural context is because that's really the interesting part here. Divorced from all that, Pong is just a pretty decent game, no more, no less.

Steeplechase (1975)

This one sucks ass honestly. Specifically I played the Atari 2600 port, I understand there was also an arcade version, maybe that's better, but what I played was trash.

The premise is simple enough. Steeplechase depicts a Kentucky Derby-style horse race, each of four players controls a horse who is in their own lane racing for the finish. As long as the horse is on the ground, it gains speed, and then loses it while jumping, which you can do by pressing the button on the controller. You can adjust the height of your jump with the knob, and will have to time a jump over a series of hurdles of random sizes. The longer you're in the air during your jump, the more speed you lose, but you'll lose even more by hitting the hurdle, and the faster you go the closer you'll get to the right side of the screen, thus affording you less time to react to oncoming hurdles.

All that sounds fine on paper; in practice, a very small section of the height range is viable (the rest being so low as to not be able to clear hurdles consistently or so high as to lose too much speed) and it's comically easy to just dial in the ideal jump height and simply focus on timing your leaps. It's just boring, there's simply not enough challenge to give it any real intrigue. My girlfriend and I played several games against two computer racers, and I left everyone in the dust easily every single time. I literally solved the game entirely on the first play, which, needless to say, is not a good look for a competitive arcade game.

Breakout (1976)

I feel like I should be kind to this one. It’s the first iteration on a concept that’ll go on to really be something, and it’s easy to see why. The starting premise for this project was “let’s make a single-player variant of Pong,” and as an interpretation on that idea I think what we have here is actually pretty strong conceptually. Instead of hitting a ball back and forth between two players, one player hits a ball at the opposite wall repeatedly; to give this a sense of progression and keep it from feeling too static, the wall gradually breaks, brick by brick, each time the ball hits it, and the ball speeds up when you hit certain milestones (number of hits, reaching certain layers in the wall of bricks). It shows some real game design ingenuity, and is, at a basic level, fairly fun.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to ignore the ways that it fumbles its conceit, especially looking back with nearly fifty years of hindsight in which it’s been iterated and refined countless times. I don’t want to suggest that this game should be derided for simply not living up to the standard of later games in its genre, but the perspective does make it hard to overlook some of the oddities of this first attempt. Most notably, there are deficiencies with the way collision is handled which can not only be unsatisfying, they at times feel like outright errors of game logic.

Notably, the game logic seems to be designed to allow one brick to be broken per rally; when the ball hits a brick, from any angle, its direction reverses and it stops colliding with any other bricks. If you’ve hollowed out a narrow tunnel into the wall and knock the ball into it, it’ll pass straight through several bricks on its way out, and this just never feels natural. On top of that, it makes for an ultimately flat play experience. You’ll never hit multiple bricks in one rally, and you’ll especially never manage to get the ball on top of the wall of bricks to let it bounce around up there for massive points. It limits the play experience in a way that ultimately robs it of longevity. Ultimately, Breakout is just fine, nothing more.

Night Driver (1976)

This one’s really cool! It’s like, as simplistic an implementation of a forward-facing driving game as is possible, which of course was pretty necessary due to the limited hardware of the time. Most of the screen is black, and the “road” is constructed from a series of white pixels forming the two edge lines. It plays out more or less exactly how you expect based on the premise; gas to go, turn the wheel (knob in the case of the 2600 version) to steer, try not to go off the road. It’s pretty smooth, and the longer you go the faster it gets. Steering is certainly a bit loose, but once you get the feel for it it’s actually pretty fun. The 2600 version notably also adds oncoming cars on the left side of the street to avoid, which if anything makes the whole thing feel more ambitious. I had a good time with it, and it’s easy to see how this developed into later driving games like Outrun and Hang-On.

Video Olympics (1977)

What is there to say about this one? It’s Pong, and also half a dozen dogshit variations on Pong. There’s Soccer, pong with smaller goals and each player controls two paddles that are connected on a single line; Foosball, Soccer but with even MORE paddles; Hockey, Pong but the smaller goals are set slightly forward from the back walls; Handball, Pong but both players are on the same side of the screen and bounce the ball off the opposite wall; Volleyball, Pong but the ball travels in an arc over a net and the paddles move along the ground; and worst of all, Basketball, Pong the paddles are on the ground, the ball travels in an arc, and the goal is to land it one top of a horizontal line on the opponent’s side of the screen while you’re confined to your own side.

They all suck! Not a single one of the variants is even as good as Pong, let alone better! It’s trash!

Street Racer (1977)

It’s kind of like Night Driver, but the perspective is top-down, the road is a straight line, other cars appear and move at random, and there’s a second player you’re competing with. It’s… not as good. The whole thing feels less ambitious, less nuanced, and less interesting.

Canyon Bomber (1977)

Man, 1977 was not a good year for Atari 2600 games. This one might be the worst of the lot, you and an opponent each “control” a random selection of planes (you’ll always have the same one as your opponent, it cycles both randomly) which fly across the screen at a random speed, and you can press the button to drop a bomb into the canyon, trying to knock out as many bricks as possible. That’s it. Press button to drop bomb, no more, no less. It sucks ass, to a comical degree.

Super Breakout (1978)

It’s a pretty appreciable improvement on the original. This is where we first get multiball mechanics, the introduction of more than one layout (even if it is just two and they’re real similar), you can even get the ball on top of a row of bricks to have it bounce around up there, at least in the arcade version. This is actually a pretty vital maneuver in the “Progressive” mode, where there are multiple walls that gradually move down the play field toward you. It’s still not quite operating at a level that later brick breakers would, but it’s showing more signs of what’s to come.

Casino (1978)

This is great if you just really want some not very good recreations of casino card games, not much else to say about it.

Circus Atari (1979)

The presentation of the see-saw here is great and gives a real feeling of physicality to the game, but I can’t say it’s really all that great to play. Getting your guy up to the top of the screen and seeing him bounce around racking up points feels great but it’s such a double edged sword because he could unexpectedly slingshot back toward the ground at ANY second and at ANY angle. Nice to look at but a little poorly thought out.

Warlords (1980)

This one’s great! It takes the fundamental conceit of Pong or Breakout and turns it into a really fun 4-player elimination game, as your paddle now moves around a fortress in the corner of the screen which will break piece by piece whenever it’s hit with the ball, exposing your weak point at its core. It feels like a real increase in depth and intrigue from the earlier games, and the fact that you’re only breaking one brick at a time feels way better when it’s a competitive game than it does in single-player, and the game still manages to feel frantic despite this by putting more balls in play the longer it goes on. The presentation of the arcade version goes crazy too, the fireball looks absolutely gorgeous and seeing a dragon in the center of the screen shoot it at the start of each game is a ton of fun. The 2600 port, while certainly not bad by any means, kind of unavoidably suffers from not being able to match this presentation.

Demons to Diamonds (1982)

This one’s pretty neat! It’s pretty simple, you and an opponent each control a little turret guy who can move back and forth across the bottom or top of the screen, and fire a thick laser beam at moving targets in the center. Some of these targets will turn into their own turrets that shoot back at you after death, and you’ve gotta dodge them while maximizing how many kills you can get. The laser feels pretty good to use, and as long as you’ve got the enemy projectile speed on slow, dodging feels challenging but doable. It’s certainly not on the level of even shmups that would’ve been out already at this time like Space Invaders and Galaga, but it’s a fun time in its own right and using the knob to control your guy is quick and responsive. The one word of advice I have is don’t turn on the option that lets players shoot each other, or the game gets a LOT slower and a LOT less interesting.