Gaming Nostalgia: Atari 2600

With Spring starting, I decided to go digging through a few boxes, organizing and cleaning out my old stuff. Well, what I found between old school papers and random bags of Legos was something I hadn't thought about for quite some time. My Atari 2600.

Released in 1977, the Atari 2600 quickly became the most popular gaming console for nearly a decade and ultimately became the foundation for every single video console to come.

While the 2600 had been dated for well over a decade when we finally picked it up at a garage sale, we marveled at its simplicity and spent hours and hours playing Pitfall!, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Barnstorming, Asteroids and Space Invaders. While the Atari 2600 was a bit before my time, I grew up playing those same titles on a rival system, Mattel's Intellivision, so naturally I was stoked to find everything I needed to play the system in a few cardboard boxes marked at an outrageously low price.

Almost forgotten at the bottom of a box, I dusted off the controls and worked to attach it to my high-definition television. I crossed my fingers as I turned the thing on. A few years back I tried and failed to get this working properly, figuring that the circuits had finally fried. As I plugged in the system and changed my TV to “Channel 3,” I was elated to find that not only did the system still work, but that it still played games. I am a bit miffed that the analog system isn't exactly compatible with today's digital technology.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across some history I was completely unaware of until I began writing this article. A company named Mystique produced a number of pornographic video games for the 2600, such as Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em, Bachelor Party and Custer's Revenge.

Lots of fuzz, but enough picture clarity for me to bask in some nostalgia for a few minutes and relive a bygone era of gaming where games often didn't have any ending, no ultimate goal other than to just play. If there actually happened to actually be a finite ending, the game simply restarted without much, if any, fanfare to note.

Much to my surprise, I stumbled across some history I was completely unaware of until I began writing this article. A company named Mystique produced a number of pornographic video games for the 2600, such as Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em, Bachelor Party and Custer's Revenge. Crude, but doubly so for Custer's Revenge, which depicted both racism and rape. These are considered some of the most offensive games ever produced, and for good reason.

The 2600's market share, along with virtually every other second generation video game console, virtually ceased to exist when the North American video game crash occurred in 1983, eventually making way for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Now, is anyone interested in a road trip to New Mexico to find the mass grave of millions of unsold 2600 cartridges of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Pac-Man?