VGC Top Ten: Atari 2600 Games
by Stephen Kelley, posted on 19 July 2010 / 7,292 Views
Background:
Last year VGChartz ran a series of articles that ranked the top ten games for a number of modern systems including the 360, Wii, and PS3. The voting was handled by the staff and a small “reader’s choice” section was added with the reader’s opinions. A year has come and gone, and tastes change. Not only will the list be compiled entirely by you, the fans, but we will go through a large number of game systems all the way back to the 1970’s with the Atari 2600 to modern day. We hope to do this a few a weeks, so stay tuned for your favorite systems! Since our readers are a diverse group be prepared for some surprises!
Method:
Our voting was carried out on the forums, where we asked patrons to list their top 5 Atari 2600 games in order, and numerical values were placed on the rankings. After compiling all the totals, this is the list that we came up with.
For the purpose of this series of VGC Top Ten lists, we ended up skipping the first generation of consoles entirely to focus on what most readers are familiar with. Not only would a list of ten versions of Pong and its clones be boring, but I doubt too many folks on here owned those systems. The Atari 2600 (Or VCS, or Sears Tele-games) was the first truly popular video game system as it brought gaming from the dingy underbelly of arcades to the homes. While seen as a novelty or toy to most people, the 2600 helped keep gaming alive and made it prosper as media outlets were trying to demonize gaming. Arcades were increasingly getting blamed for a number of problems and even banned in some cities during this time. Sadly for all the good things that we saw during the Atari 2600 era, there were some bad, as the 2600 also helped stagnate the game market and cause the 1980’s video game crash due to developers flooding the market with what we would now call “shovelware”.
10. Pacman
It’s pretty rare for a game to get so popular that folks start making up fake illnesses to cover for an increasingly large addiction to playing it. Of course I’m talking about “Pac-Man Fever” and more specifically the game that brought it on, Pac-Man. As the popularity of the arcade game rose, it was a matter of time before a real licensed version of the game hit home consoles, instead of the army of clones that were slowly popping up. When Atari listed the game as an upcoming release the world was whipped into a new state of Pac-Man fever, with folks predicting sales of over ten million, and tons of profit. The game did very well initially, but was plagued by unfair comparison to the far superior arcade game that the 2600 simply could not replicate. For those that gave it a chance, it was a fun game, and I believe that’s why it did so well on the list.
9. Ice Hockey
If you go to a store that sells video games today, one would assume that they would see a number of sports games. With multiple companies churning them out each year, some places are even flooded with them. That wasn’t the case way back in 1981 as there were only a tiny handful of such games, many with exciting names such as Basketball, Bowling, or even (GASP) Football. One of the many surprises on this list was that the Atari 2600 game Ice Hockey seemed to be pretty popular for a lot of folks. Maybe I just got the majority of our Canadian readership on board, but that doesn’t hide the games quality. Rather than exist as a parody of sorts of the game, much like most older sports games, Ice Hockey stood out with a variety of features. You could check opponents, steal the puck, or even switch between players.
8. Combat
As one of the first games created for the Atari 2600, it was a sure bet that Combat would make the list seeing as this game is pretty common. Whether it be tanks, jets, or biplanes, the main goal in this game is to try to destroy your opponent. The tank aspect of the game has been fairly popular over the years as to have been resurrected for other titles such as Wii Play.
7. Kangaroo
Another big surprise on this list was the game Kangaroo. I wasn’t sure it would even make the list, much less be as high as it was. Kangaroo was one of those games that seemed almost like a knock off of Donkey Kong, but not quite. It shared a lot of aspects with the game Popeye as well. The game is centered around a Kangaroo trying to rescue her son from a horde of evil monkeys. The monkeys jump around, hurl what I assume to be coconuts at you, and all manner of other bad things while you try to make it to the top. The game was popular for being one of those games you could either play to get points (by collecting fruit) or by simply finishing the levels. The game even got popular enough to have its own cartoon on CBS as part of a show called Saturday Supercade alongside Donkey Kong and Frogger amongst others.
6. Missile Command
As one of the most popular games of the golden age of gaming, and a long lasting favorite of arcades everywhere, Missile Command was also bound to be on the list. While the Atari 2600 game made a few changes, most notably storyline-wise, the game remained fairly true to its arcade roots. The original game played up Cold War era fears of ballistic missile attacks from other countries, while the Atari version invented a fake war between two planets: Zardon (the defending player) and Krytol. This change is only noted in the instruction book, so no huge changes there.
5. Plaque Attack
Plaque Attack is one of those games that simply could not exist in today’s game market, aside from being a minigame in a Wario Ware title or some such. You control a tube of toothpaste with a noble mission - protecting a person’s teeth from harm. The baddies come in the form of various foods such as candy canes, hamburgers, or even ice cream cones. You basically have to squirt toothpaste onto these villains to “kill them” and save your smile. Funnily enough Plaque Attack is not the only game where you have to brush your teeth, there was another called Tooth Protectors.
4. Super Breakout
Both Breakout games got a few votes, but far more folks gave the second game some love – placing it comfortably in the top four. We all know how Breakout plays, it’s kind of like Pong except you are breaking colored blocks rather than playing tennis. New modes included a multi-ball mode, a mode where one could have two bats, and a mode reminiscent of Space Invaders where the blocks move toward the player.
3. Pitfall!
It’s time for everyone’s favorite jungle adventurer to attempt to collect 32 treasures in as fast a time as possible. For as popular as Pitfall is, it had very humble beginning as David Crane laid out in an interview with Edge Magazine:
“I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and drew a stick figure in the center. I said, “Okay, I have a little running man and let's put him on a path [two more lines drawn on the paper]. Where is the path? Let's put it in a jungle [draw some trees]. Why is he running [draw treasures to collect, enemies to avoid, etc.]?” And Pitfall! was born. This entire process took about ten minutes. About 1,000 hours of programming later, the game was complete.”
Pitfall, Like Kangaroo, was also one of those games that got its own cartoon on CBS’s Saturday Supercade. And without Pitfall we wouldn’t have the beginning of a certain Jack Black’s acting career (clip is from the Tonight Show):
2. Asteroids
Before Bruce Willis was rocking it out against an asteroid with the soundscape of Aerosmith in the background, we had to stay content with a very popular Atari 2600 game for our projectile Rock needs. Asteroids was one of those games so popular that many arcade owners had to invest in larger boxes in order to handle an increased amount of coin capacity. The game was simple to learn but hard to master, as you had to pilot a ship charged with blowing up tons of asteroids and the occasional UFO. The 2600 port was so important to Atari, that they even developed a new high capacity cartridge to handle the new technology found within. Good thing this was done, as Asteroids was the most popular Atari 2600 game of all time.
1. Space Invaders
And now we have it, the granddaddy of all Atari 2600 games as voted by our readers, Space Invaders! Not only was Space Invaders the first ever licensed port of a coin-op arcade game, but it was the first game seen as a “killer-ap” in most game magazines and newspapers. Space Invaders proved so popular that it even caused a temporary shortage of 100 yen coins in Japan. For the port on the 2600, many folks bought the system simply for the game, almost quadrupling the sales compared to everything that came before. The game’s legacy lives on as many popular shows still make references to it, take for example the following scene from Futurama:
Join us later this week for another VGC Top Ten list, this time focusing on NES games!
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