Sad day for those who grew up with their consoles. I remember wasting away Saturday mornings watching Transformers, GI Joe, then firing up the 2600 and playing games till 3pm. But to be quite honest, Atari has been a shell of the company it once was for a long time now. Their last major hit game, as I recall, was The Witcher, mentioned in the article above.
This is only going to be about the 9000th time that the Atari IP has been sold off or reorganized or gone bankrupt.
I grew up with Atari. Remember the Old Days of the 2600. When Atari, and its main competitiors, Intellivision and Colecovision, were the Big 3 Consoles. Those were the days. Extremely PRIMITIVE by today's standards & tech, but what a fun time it was 30 years ago.
My first console was an Atari 5200. It was pretty decent at the time, but the controllers were total lemons. If I am not mistaken, it was the first game system to have a "pause" feature.
The first game system in my house was the original pong. That was seriously primitive and seriously fun.
No, there was an upgrade for the Atari 2600 called, I think, The Atari 2800. Instead of the usual four sliding switches (on/off, reset, etc...) it had six sliding switches one of which was a pause button. Other than that they were the same as the 2600 as far as I know.
^ Not sure if you mean the Atari 7800. It was the first backwards compatible console, if I recall correctly, being able to play 2600 games on it. My mom bought me a game for the 7800 when I was a wee lad, and I remember being heartbroken when it wouldn't play on my 2600. We went back to K-Mart and they wouldn't let us return it because it had been opened. This was a recent new rule. After getting the manager, my mom must've used her cute Asian girl charms on him because he let us return it.
Hmm, I had to do some googling since it has been so many years. This is the Atari 2600 I remember my family buying back in 1981-1982: We bought some promotional package which came with the circular paddles used to play Pong and a few other games plus Pong came with the unit as did Space Invaders but we had to buy Pac-Man (which was a very popular game at the time). Notice how it had four slider buttons on the console. I remember one of our neighbors had this version of the Atari 2600, for some reason I want to say it was called the Atari 2800 but I can't seem to find anything by searching for that name, it was basically the same as the 2600 but it had six sliding switches including a pause button/switch. The time frame on these was from the very late 1970's to the very early 1980's after which they were replaced by an ungraded version of the same basic system but with a new black and silver plastic finish with a more sleek design using actual buttons instead of the old toggle switches.
The other cool thing is the Atari joystick was completely compatible with my Commodore 64 home computer so after I got older and no longer was interested in the Atari 2600 I was still able to use the joy sticks with the C64.
Turns out I was right and wrong at the same time. The first console with ANY type of "Pause" feature was the Fairchild Channel F (originally called the Fairchild Video Entertainment System), released in 1976. It had a "Hold" button on the console. The Atari 2800 was the Japanese version of the Atari 2600. It was released in 1983. The Atari 5200 was released the previous year, in 1982. The "Six switch" version of the Atari 2600 was just called the Atari 2600. None of the six switches was a "Pause" or "Hold" button. The six switches were, "On/Off", "Color/Black and White", "Game Select", "Game Reset", "Left Difficulty", "Right Difficulty". The Atari 5200 was the first video game system to have a "Pause" button on the controller.
I remember a friend of mine in 8th or 9th grade buying an Atari Jaguar game console but I wasn't impressed by its graphics, there were very few titles (and no exclusive titles which were any good), and the thing cost more than any other console at the time except the NEO-GEO which had far better graphics and sound. Not to mention the Jaguar's controllers sucked and didn't even fit in your hands.
