Atari's shining star: The Atari 2600 Video Computer System, Model # CX-2600.    The Atari 2600 was designed in Grass Valley, California.   The Atari 2600 team consisted of Jay Minor, Steve Mayer, Ron Milner and Joe Decuir.   The case design was done by Douglas Hardy and Fredrick Thompson.    Originally the whole idea around the Atari 2600 was to design a new console system that would have a longer sales life then past Atari game consoles.   Originally Atari started out selling home game consoles such as PONG, Super Pong, Stunt Cycle, Video Pinball and others.   However their sales life (how long they would sell strong before people grew bored and wanted a new product to come out) was short lived.   So the idea around the Atari 2600 was to design a new system that would have a shelf life of up to 2-3 years.   Atari had originally planned to sell a total of 10 games for the Atari 2600.   The original game boxes used to be marked 01, 02, 03 for the original intention of selling only 10 different games.

        Atari included every conceivable form of flexibility into the console.   There were seperate difficult switches for both the left and right player, the console had a selection for both Black & White and Color televisions.   The game console also came packaged with not only a set of joystick controllers, but also a set of paddle controllers giving the customer the ability to purchase nearly any game they wanted and not have to worry about whether it would work with the console or not.

        Another interesting feature about the Atari 2600 were its games.   Most games came with dozens of different variations of the game so that customers could try out all different combinations and never grow bored as quickly as simply having one game, one variation to play.

        The Atari 2600 took on a life of its own when Atari introduced the first home licensed version of Space Invaders.   People couldn't get enough.   Thats when Atari realized it could cash in on licensing exclusive rights to sell home versions of the most popular arcade games.   Games such as Space Invaders, Missle Command, Asteroids, and Defender sent sales sky-rocketing because of the close conversion down to the Atari 2600's graphics capabilities.   However it was games like Pac Man that Atari produced that were its downfall.   The Atari 2600 version of Pac Man was written by Todd Fry who, although he was talented Atari 2600 programmer did not like Pac Man and did a sloppy half-effort of porting the game to the Atari 2600.   Also he received a 1 Million dollar check for his work which he stapled a photocopy of it to his office door for all to see.   Todd also worked on the Atari Swordquest series and also was putting the finishing touches on an Atari 2600 version of Xevious (a feat of masterful programming since the game was so complex) when Atari was sold, 2600 Xevious was never finished or released.
 
 
 
 
 

        Even though consoles such as the Sony Playstation, the new Sega Dreamcast and even older discontinued systems like the Atari Jaguar 64 have power that is 100's of time greater then the Atari 2600.   The little VCS that could, even though its discontinued is still going and is still the worlds most popular Video Game System.