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A History of Atari — the Golden Years
simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, Steve Fulton has published a massive 23,000-word history of Atari from 1978 to 1981, encompassing '... some of the most exciting developments the company ever saw in its history: the rise of the 2600, the development of some of the company's most enduringly popular games (Centipede, Asteroids) and the development and release of its first home computing platforms.' Best quote in there for Slashdot readers, perhaps: 'Atari had contracted with a young programmer named Bill Gates to modify a BASIC compiler that he had for another system to be used on the 800. After that project stalled for over a year Al was called upon to replace him with another developer. So ... Al is the only person I know ever to have fired Bill Gates.'"
Star Raiders.
To be fair, the company now known as Atari has virtually no relation to the company known as Atari in the late '70s and early '80s.
Star Raiders
30 years later they still have people making brand new original games for the Atari 2600 like this one or that one!
You just got troll'd!
I played Atari from when I was 3 until I was 8(1984-C64+ 1985-NES). I can't see anyone having played more hours of it than I did. I don't know. For some reason, I wanted to be the best video game player in the world. A video game allows children an outlet to their problem solving and reflex desires. I saw Atari 2600 as something new to my generation, so I played it as hard as possible. I figured that I may not be able to compete at games that have been around longer than I have because people had the age advantage on me. But video games were fresh so I put all my effort in them to get better. I was #1 in Starcraft for a while, and #1 in Warcraft 3 for a while too.
But as cool as it sounds to be the best in video games in the world... It really is hard to rate a video game player. You have all different genre of games.
No one probably cares, but I have memories. One of the memories was 1983 when I thought Atari 2600 should just keep making games. I never thought to myself that the video games could get better though with more powerful computing. Just breathing in today's world is living the dream for a video game player. And once you played out all the video games, you have the potential to make games too.
God spoke to me.
in case you don't feel like clicking through 20 pages of ads, you can view the article as one page here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3766/atari_the_golden_years__a_.php?print=1
The original Atari has been dead and buried for a long time now.
The current "Atari" is actually a company that used to be known as Infogrames and mostly changed their name to get out from under their rep of being purveyors of crap.
As others have noted, the classic space combat game is Star Raiders. But Star Raiders was excellent on the Atari 800 and 400 computers; the official Atari version for 2600 was, IMHO, very poor.
Happily, the Activision folks made an excellent knockoff of Star Raiders called Starmaster. The most important parts of the Star Raider experience are there: you can raise and lower shields, you have a galactic map, you have multiple star bases, the enemy will surround and destroy the star bases, you can get damaged, and you can dock with a star base to repair damage and refuel.
If you love 2600 gaming, get a copy of Starmaster and play it in your old 2600 or 7800. Once you have a legal copy, get a ROM image from somewhere and you can also play it in Stella. Starmaster and Millipede are my two favorite games to play in Stella.
If you fondly remember having an extra, weird keyboard thing for the game, you are remembering the official Atari 2600 Star Raiders. If you don't remember that, perhaps you are remembering Starmaster. (In Starmaster, the screen does turn blue when you have the shields up.)
For completeness, I'll add that Imagic sold a game called Star Voyager. It is a very simplified Star Raiders sort of game: you fight enemies, then fly through a warp gate to go to a new level and fight more enemies. There are no star bases; you cannot be damaged, but you can run out of energy. When you are out of energy, any enemy hit kills you. Warp gates refuel your energy. While it has no strategy at all, it is fun as a light shoot-em-up game.
P.S. Not every Activision game is gold. They had a game called Robot Tank, that was essentially Starmaster all over again, except that this time there was no way to repair damage. As a kid, I hated Robot Tank as much as I loved Starmaster.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Umm, the Lynx was a color handheld, released over 9 years before the GameBoy got color. (According to wikipedia, Atari Lynx was introduced September 1989, and the GameBoy Color was introduced October 21, 1998 in Japan.)
(No, I'm not a huge Atari Lynx fanboy -- I bought one used, a long time after they stopped selling them, on the net for like $50.. I only ever got one or two games for it.)
Right. The current Atari was Infogrames
Microsoft already existed when Atari started developing the 800/400. Microsoft was supplying BASIC interpreters to a wide range of machines, most of them short lived. For a while Microsoft Basic was the Java of its day because you could reliably make an MS BASIC program run on a zillion different systems if you avoided using proprietary features. Often, BASIC code listings in magazines would have one list to enter for all systems that covered 90% of code, then separate lists for the remaining 10% to cover distinct system features.
MS BASIC for the Atari 800/400 did come out eventually. It was a 16K cart while the standard Atari BASIC was just 8K. Atari BASIC had had interesting tricks you could do with large strings but the string handling in MS BASIC was far more capable and there were numerous other features, like Player/Missile handling commands, to do things that required a much deeper understanding of the hardware under the 8K BASIC.
A the time the 800/400 was launched, a 16K cartridge was considered prohibitively expensive and the first MS BASIC for the Atari was on floppy. This meant it needed a lot of memory, 32K, for the era, and that hindered adoption. The cartridge (plus utiliy floppy) version cme later after Atari BASIC was far too well established to make a non-compatible version attractive. The people who created Atari BASIC formed a company called OSS and produce some really nice improvements/replacements to Atari BASIC.
1. Gates of Zendocon: I really like this shooter, it's both relatively mindless and pretty creative.
2. Chip's Challenge: I think this is probably the best puzzle game for the Lynx.
3. Zarlor Mercenary: Well, if you like Shoot 'Em Ups, this one is a good one.
4. Ninja Gaiden III: It's a duplicated of the NES version, if you liked the NES Ninja Gaiden games you'll like this one.
5. Xenophobe: There are a few different choices I could put here, but I choose Xenomorph, just because I like it.
Honorable Mention: Ninja Gaiden (arcade beat 'em up, not like the NES games), Slimeworld (Alien world exploration, fun game, it was tough for me to choose between this an Xenomorph), Dracula (For fans of point and click adventures), Batman Returns(Okay beat 'Em up, high difficulty), Electrocop (Awkward controls, but it has Asteroids and Breakout minigames)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."