Unreal History of the Atari 2600

Such_a_geek writes "Atari fans, do you remember playing Gunther Gebel Williams' Cage Cleaner, Typing Tutor, and Peabo Bryson's Cow Tipper on your 2600? How about playing the interactive Foghat 8-track while playing with your Pong action figures? Yeah, me neither. But thanks to this totally fake but quite convincing screenshots in this alternate history of 2600 games, I almost find myself remembering these things."

Comments

To heck with those games

[fobbman]

I was sitting here scratching my head thinking "They had Unreal for the Atari 2600?"

How about "Basic Programming"?

[Otter]

I have this memory of reading an Atari tips/review book that raved about the "Basic Programming" cartridge and how you could use it to write all sorts of sophisticated programs. And begging my mother to spring for it along with the expensive input device it required. And sitting down to try out my 1337 Apple ][ basic skills and finding that the Atari system had a maximum memory of 48 commands and variables, making it unusable for anything beyond:

10 PRINT "BITE ME, ATARI!"
20 GOTO 10

Was that a nightmare or did that actually happen?

Mirror

[DigiBoi]

Here is a Mirror.

Great book for video game history buffs

[Reedo]

I picked up the book, The Ultimate History of Video Games, last year and found it to be incredibly interesting. It's packed with information covering everything from the very first game ever made (Spacewar, student Steve Russell while at MIT) onward. It goes through the rise and fall of the video game industry (which crashed hard in the early 80s), the coin shortage caused by Space Invaders, the beginnings of Atari (and their fall), Nintendo and Sega. The author interviewed countless people from that era - it has tons of first-hand information/quotes from the folks that started the industry (Nolan Bushnell, Ralph Baer, etc) scattered all throughout the book where appropriate. And you'll find out that Atari wasn't all too squeaky clean when they started - their warehouse always reeking of recently smoked pot. ;) Oh, and that Steve Jobs actually got his start there.

This may sound like an ad, but the author deserves it. If you're interested in learning about how things began and what it was like at Atari/etc in the early days, then you'll love this book.