Atari 2600 35 Years Later

it launched in the U.S. in October 1977 -- and 35 years is a long, long time.And while Atari supported the 2600 into the '90s, for most consumers the system's life effectively crashed to an anticlimactic end in 1983 when Warner (who owned Atari at the time) reported that its games division had overextended itself and lost billions of dollars. The U.S. video game industry reeled from those losses and didn't recover until Nintendo performed triage a few years later with the NES -- the system that a large percentage of 1UP readers regard as their entry into the medium.

The simple fact is that 35 years is a long time in video game terms, and while the average age of gamers continues to rise, today's "core" gamer tends to have gotten into gaming well after the 2600's heyday. Many contemporary game fanatics, weaned on post-PlayStation 3D visuals, can barely stomach the comparatively primitive visuals of NES and Genesis games; for them, Atari 2600's minimalist blocks and bleeps are so far removed from their expectations for video games that they may as well be cave paintings.

And yet, regressive as the 2600 may appear to the modern eye, video games would exist as they do today without the influence of that console. The 2600 didn't really do anything first, but it did it better, and it created an industry in the process. The 2600 helped transform games from a novel amusement into a creative medium: A financial juggernaut. And while the system had its failings, both technical and corporate, it taught its successors both what to do and what not to do. And for millions of kids -- now grown adults who perhaps no longer respond to Internet solicitations for their memories of video games -- it opened a world of imagination, entertainment, and even addiction.

Maybe most gamers don't see Atari 2600 as the baseline of video games the way they did back in the NES and even PlayStation days, but the system's impact has in no way diminished over time. The 2600 remains as important today as it was in the days when it ruled the living room and school kids replaced "a partridge in a pear tree" with "a cartridge for Atari" when they sang "The 12 Days of Christmas."by 1up