When we talk about the most popular consoles of all time, Playstation 2 is the first name that comes to mind. Not in vain, it still celebrates its record as the best-selling console in history, with around 160 million units sold since it was first released.
But there’s an older console that can be considered even more popular for other reasons. Launched in 1977, the Atari 2600 quickly became everyone’s favorite machine and had an impressive 15-year lifecycle. To compare with PS2 again, the popular console lasted for 13 years and continued to have a presence even with Playstation 3 in the market. But Atari’s case is more extreme, leading many to skip an entire generation altogether.
Feeding nostalgia
The emotional connection that players had with their 2600 was very powerful. Before this machine, playing video games necessarily meant leaving home and spending money in arcades. Although the industry had made attempts with Magnavox Odyssey, the console that truly managed to bring the arcade experience home was Atari’s.
In a shorter cycle than usual for a console, it was five years after the release of the 2600 that the company launched the Atari 5200 to the market. The philosophy was similar to current Pro consoles, the 5200 was not a generational change per se, but it was a technologically more advanced machine than its predecessor that offered a similar gaming experience.
The problem: the lack of backward compatibility with the 2600 catalog. Unable to play their old cartridges on the new machine, with an unappealing exclusive catalog and controllers famous for being defective, people didn’t have much incentive to switch machines and in 1984, just two years after its release, production ceased.
This happened even a second time, in 1986, after a successful market test two years earlier and already in the third generation of consoles, the company released its Atari 7800, a powerful console whose main value proposition was, besides its improved graphics and controllers, that this time it could play 2600 cartridges.
The problem here is that Atari was the company of the nostalgics, while new entries like Nintendo had come to renew the market with more advanced games and innovative proposals, the Americans remained stuck in retro experiences and arcades that, despite looking better on the new console, did not represent a very qualitative improvement over what the 2600 already offered. It is said that about 4 million consoles were sold, fairly poor sales that continued to feed the success of the 2600, which continued to be sold until 1992.
Almost single-handedly lifting the home video game market and even surviving the video game crash of the eighties. The classic console could only sustain the company’s popularity to a certain point and the importance of Atari decreased over the years. In the nineties and unable to adapt to the market, Atari Jaguar was its last console.
Despite the numerous machines that have come from the American company, even to this day when someone mentions Atari, the mental image that comes to mind is the 2600. And it’s a nostalgia that is still being capitalized on today. If we wanted, we could continue extending the life of the console, because last year Atari 2600+ was released, which despite its many quality of life improvements, still allows players to play old cartridges.
In 3DJuegos | Silent Hill wanted to be an adaptation of Stephen King. The story of that failure is the origin of much of what makes the saga special
In 3DJuegos | The NES had its anti-UFO 50: a disastrous and expensive compilation that managed to avoid Nintendo’s quality seal
