To be someone in the 80s experiencing videogames for the first time, no matter how shitty they were. Reminds me of the first time my family got internet, it was wonderful.
I remember as a kid being entranced by PS1 graphics. Being able to control what was on-screen was amazing, compared to movies, and Crash Bandicoot was peak graphics for all I cared. It couldn't be topped. I'd love to see a person's reaction to playing the arcade game Cube Quest from 1983 for the first time, though. It must have blown people's minds whenever they were lucky enough to see it in action.
Vinny's horror at the knowledge that the YTP of his own voice acting was hand-made is way funnier than it ought to be. Dude was _not_ prepared for the sheer dedication of poopers.
How many hands John Coleco had to grease to get all the gorm out of those kongs? I mean look at DOS Kong. Now that's a record Billy doesn't want reinstated.
It goes deeper. People allege that Atarisoft made the C64 port of DK (Arcana Software did one in Europe, I'm talking about the NTSC one) slow on purpose. Looking at the fluidity of the Atari 800 port, it seems plausible, but the graphics were at least really well converted.
@The_Boctor That'd be a bit bizarre to me, when Atari handled port duties for multiple Colecovison titles (Galaxian, Berzerk, etc.) and those are all probably the best versions of those games available at the time. Same with Mattel and their M-Network ports of Intelevision titles to the 2600. But whenever it's a coleco port to Atari or Intelevision (DK, Lady Bug, DK Junior, etc.) it's ALWAYS trash. And part of the reason we know is because people were able to make homebrew versions of those games that would've run on contemporary hardware and are great. So the two options are either Coleco was just that incompetent on any hardware that wasn't their own, or it was deliberate. And the evidence points toward the latter. In the case you're referring to, know Atari's history and work ethics at the time, I'd imagine it's more the result of crunch than sabotage. That's the reason for like 90% of bad atari ports (see Pac-Man on the 2600).
Adventure is a really unique game. The number 1 at the beginning means the tutorial, you can change it to 2 which is the actual game, and 3 which is a randomizer that works surprisingly well. It was an early favorite of the Stamper brothers.
@stanbrule9357it only rearranges the item locations, but this completely changes the order you need to do things in the game, so it still results in wacky situations
"Proto-Zelda." Which is funny because Adventure was an attempt by the creator to make a graphical game inspired by the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure.
I mean, you can say that for basically every early RPG and Adventure game (Rogue and DND for example), but none of them did it in real time other than Adventure. Also, Ninty has cited Adventure as an influence.
@@TheWrathAbove bump combat comes from Dragon Slayer which is even earlier of we're getting as deep as possible... though that itself is arguably descendant from Rogue. Point being every thing is built off something else I guess, lol.
@@warbossgegguz679 When it comes to videogames, obviously they needed to build off of things that did well. Hydlide is terrible but it's obvious that A LOT of games use systems that work just like it, and Zelda looks like they took that style and did a great job at it. If not for mediocre or underbaked games, we would have never gotten any of the modern classics. And all thanks to fucking Pong and that other vector game that basically set the entire gaming industry off.
43:38 Congo Bongo was developed by Ikegami, the same company who did the original DK and Zaxxon. The original AC version had an isometric playfield and featured 4 stages, unlike the A2600 and SG-1000 versions.
6:40 never played that game, but im pretty sure that it didn't glitch, it was on 2 player mode, because the "lives" where still 3 after he died and were on the other side of the screen
Since Vin didn't grow up with them, maybe he just couldn't figure out that Atari games sometimes default to 2P modes... and some like Indiana Jones just... need 2 sticks for wathever reason.
I mean, everyone blame E.T. as the single culprit for the videogame clash but Atari brought its own demise when they went overboard with the publicity instead of investing in a good game
Also, the entire "videogame crash" only really affected the US directly... Asia and Europe were still going strong and in particular, the UK released tons of games that are extremely influential and important pillars of PC gaming and early consoles.
@@annarenfold438 it didn't affect Europe because they had no industry to crash, just a bunch of small-time home computer game publishers, USA had those too and they weren't affected by the crash either but it didn't matter because that was peanuts compared to the console market, the only unaffected place was Japan which is why they went on to dominate the industry for decades and Europe didn't.
@@holdingpattern245 And the rest it history, as they say. Japan truly became the leader when it came to videogames in the early days, with big names like Nintendo and SEGA just absolutely on top of the game.
@@annarenfold438Didn't happen until the Famicom, or more particularly a year or two after Famicom launched, since early Famicom games largely didn't outpace extant hardware from other makers. The Famicom was _almost_ as ahead of its time as the Atari VCS was, so it took a while for devs to start realizing its potential. There was simply nothing like the Atari craze in other territories, including Asia, so there was nothing to crash. I think the point is often missed that until the VCS came along, and particularly until the world's first killer app (Space Invaders on VCS in 1980) came along, there was no console market to speak of.
I think ET was the tipping point of the 1983 videogame crash. But it wasn't the sole reason why it crashed. ET apparently was one of the best selling games on the console. But retail outlets were overwhelmed with returns and refunds. Which caused retailers to dump videoigame systems altogether. Pac-Man 2600 was also a big culprit too.
Hey Vinny, it's been a while! I just want to let you know I was responsible for the Super Mario (Princess Rescue) and Zippy the Porcupine homebrews. I did those back in the early to mid 10's, just before I started watching you. I'm sorry. ;)
@@REM_sheepHehe. Thanks. I wanted to keep the honored tradition of naming games based off of existing properties in a way that was fitting. Princess Rescue, because Atari back in the day named their games based off what the game was rather about or what you did. What do you do in Super Mario Bros.? The goal is to rescue the Princess. Princess Rescue. Sonic? Well, what would his lesser known ancestor cousin might be? A porcupine named Zippy? Sure. :) I did finally create my own original Atari Homebrew though and it came out in 2023 called Robot Zed. Inspiration from games like Mega Man and Kirby. A platformer/mission rescue type game with power ups that you get from your enemies and some slight Rogue like elements (as much as I could do with limited hardware), where different sections of a level would be randomly selected for you to play on making it a little different every time. Plus you got to choose the order of which levels you wanted to play in the style of Mega Man after you passed the initial intro level to get you familiar with the game before really settling in.
I just want you to know I keep Princess Rescue on my Harmony cart (don't have the Encore edition so unfortunately Zippy is too big) and boot it up from time to time. What you managed to do on this geriatric """"'hardware""""" is incredible and I commend your work. Just about the only thing I've been able to do with it is make a rainbow-color screen and laugh at the funny patterns from deliberately fucking up the TIA timing routines (I really hope this doesn't damage my CRT lol)
6:00 Pong itself was actually a ripoff of a Magnavox Odyssey game called Table Tennis, Magnavox ended up taking Atari to court over it Atari settled for $1.5m.
What a surreal period where the concept of table tennis could be patented and "owned" purely because it was digital. Also a bit ironic when Magnavox would steal the concept of Simon (Touch Me by Atari) from Atari not that much later.
@warbossgegguz679 No, it's not just that the concept of digital table tennis was owned by Magnavox, it's that Pong is an iterative copy of Magnavox's Table Tennis. Even in those far simpler times, it was still certainly possible to create multiple, wholly unique versions of the simplest of concepts. There were already a number of electronic tennis games prior to even Magnavox's Table Tennis, all of which play and look very different from each other, further highlighting the similarities between Pong and Magnavox's Table Tennis.
@04I've seen the odyssey's games, and you have totally free movement with no scoring mechanism... so that already is a massive difference. Ralph Baer kind of has a history of being extremely petty and arrogant, so I think that plays a role.
I’m 45. Born when Space Invaders was released. My father had an Atari he let us play on. Then he got the Commodore 64 and Amiga and eventually, I got my own Sega Genesis for Christmas. Growing up along side video games was an amazing experience. Still love gaming to this day. I’ve shared it with all my kids who are all adults now (and gamers). Bout to put my Vinesauce shirt on (under my suit) and head to work. Helldivers 2 when I get home. Long Live Gaming.
It's great being older and living with those memories of games before they started to sour. The only real modern games I play now are from indie otherwise they're monetized into the dirt usually. Can't tell you how many times I'll pop on the NES or Sega and play randomly whatever I have. Now at this point I have entire libraries on SD cards and play them on stuff like Ever Drives. That's something I'll always enjoy even when the modern industry just disappoints again and again.
Another one of the old-heads here. Vinny obviously missed my other comments on videos that I made whenever the community got too ignorant about stuff from way back in the day. Yes, there are older viewers (Vinny's funny... enough), and yes, by watching I'm exposing myself to remarks and commentary that shits all over everything I ever knew and loved, but I can live with it. 😀
E.T. gets the credit for crashing the game industry but in reality it was actually the Atari Pac-Man port because so many people *KNEW* what the arcade game was supposed to look and sound like, people legitimately felt ripped off with Pac-Man
Atari is very easy to point and laugh at nowadays. Adventure has absolutely nothing on Tears of the Kingdom, obviously. However, despite not growing up in the 70s or even the 80s, I have a deep fascination with Atari and games of its time. These games look simple, but there was a lot of thought and artistry that went into making them. You have such limited hardware and you gotta use it to create a game that people will wanna keep coming back to. It’s not easy, and when Howard Scott Warshaw tried to get a bit unorthodox under a strict deadline, his game found itself in a New Mexico landfill. I highly recommend looking into Atari’s history. It was a crazy time.
Howard Scott Warshaw programmed E.T. in five weeks. I will always defend it for that reason and because it's one of the first games I ever had, I played hours of it over and over successfully. While no one would describe it this way at the time it's an open world map where collectables appear in randomized locations. I supposed it's a walking simulator as well as a proto-horror game because you're constantly running from the authorities like you would a monster in Amnesia. I have two distinct E.T. memories: one was the time the game glitched causing infinite "reeces pieces" (the single pixel you see in the middle of some screens) to scroll left to right allowing me to max out what I could pick up, the other was the first lucid dream I ever had where recognizing I was dreaming playing E.T. I walked into my kitchen and dumped a bucket of water over my head to wake myself up.
@@Zanpaa i think another (probably better) example would be DOOM on the Saturn, that was another instance of insane crunch by one programmer. it's still a piece of crap yeah, but it's more about what was achieved with such a suffocating deadline
That Superman game is so crazy complex it makes it almost incomprehensible. The game 'map' is essentially 20 or so screens layered on top of each other in a grid. If you Google it, it looks almost like the stage map from Outrun. Even by 80s Atari standards, the game was too alien for most people to figure out, but I've always had a weird appreciation for it. And I'm not even a Superman fan.
Princess Rescue really is something special. Not only did they make a full instruction booklet and cart for it, but if you played it on a system using a Genesis controller, they allowed you to use the extra button for fireballs. (It's up on the joystick if you're playing on a normal Atari 2600 controller.) Serious kudos to the people that put the time and effort into the extra details and added bits.
3:37 Fun fact: ET constantly lands in this hole because the collision detection for holes is pixel perfect. And it includes your head. Someone actually wrote a ROM hack that fixes that and it makes the game significantly less frustrating. 8:44 Yes this is official. But it's *also* a bootleg. Nintendo licensed Donkey Kong's rights out to different companies. Coleco got the console rights and Atari got the home computer rights. So the Atari 2600 version officially licensed from Nintendo, but *not* Atari, because it was developed by Coleco. Coleco would then release a home computer (the Coleco Adam) and demoed it running Donkey Kong, which pissed off Atari so much they dropped their plans to license and release the Famicom in the USA. Yes, the NES almost wound up being an Atari product!
0:50 I know some people are really married to this idea that we're on the brink of a new "crash" when financially video games are turning higher profits than ever and the industry is growing rather than shrinking. The only thing that's happening is some major players are dipping and/or going under, but even then the headlines don't really convey how much money companies like Squenix, WB, EA, and Activision are making on their "failures". Reviewers and influencers complaining =/= the game lost money. And for every major bomb they have a ton of wins. And even then all you're going to see is new giants start to form out of small companies. That's literally how both Activision and EA started. This kind of stuff is cyclical. I get that there's the perpetual "anti-corporate" "modern gaming sucks" crowd, but the entire market tanking isn't something to wish for.
If I had to guess, the "wishing" is everything going so bad that devs are forced to make good games again, which, _could_ happen, but still probably wouldn't be that good of an idea anyway. I'm no economics expert, but I have to assume a crash now would be _way_ more impactful than the 1983 one.
@@firstnamlastnam2141The problem I have is the "again" part. Like, EA, Activision, and Ubisoft sure, but have ALL AAA GAMES in the past decade or so really been terrible? Because nobody told me. Guess I should now hate DMC5, GoW, Doom & Doom Eternal, every Nintendo game, RE 2, 3, 4, and 8, Tekken 8, SF 6, KoF15, Dragon Quest 11 and Monsters, FFXV, XVI, and VII Remake... I hope you see my confusion. You basically have to be buying exclusively games from those 3 publishers to genuinely think the entire gaming landscape is worthy of going scorched earth on atm.
@@warbossgegguz679 Yeah, I get where you're coming from. It's just people coming to that conclusion after being burned one too many times, I suppose. I'm sure they'll get what's coming to them eventually, and hopefully not at the cost of complete annihilation.
Market crashes are a good thing because they clear out the slop. I don't know if we'll get a full-scale crash, but I'm definitely rooting for large studios to go under.
Fun fact, the Atari 2600 had a variant of the same processor as the NES and many, many other 8-bit machines of the 70s and 80s. Its primary limitation is the weird video/audio chip and the fact it only has 128 Bytes of RAM. Yes, BYTES. As in, 0.128 kilobytes.
I know it's funny to mock, but it's amazing how some of these games, especially the homebrew, look this good when you consider the specs of the system. All it has are 2 small 8x1 pixel sprites, 2 1 pixel "ball" sprites, and a couple of baackground block registers that can mirror or repeat. Everything else is done with carefully timed code updating the screen as it's being drawn (it has no video RAM, and only 128 bytes of RAM + the ROM on the cartridge for the game itself). "Racing the beam" is the phrase used, and it takes a lot of skill as a programmer to get this all working.
I grew up in the SNES era, however my brother and I did have a plug-and-play thing with a bunch of Activision Atari 2600 games on it (i.e. Pitfall, River Raid, Atlantis, etc.). We understood that these (even back then) were old games, but we still had lots of fun playing them!
Yes. People born in the 70s watch your streams. Adventure and Breakout were my jams. We played on our tube TV in the basement with red shag carpet and a bar with glitter Formica.
I grew up in this era the whole way. Atari was da bomb for Space Invaders & Asteroids. What killed it was the fact that 3rd party software was the Wild West of video games. It started with Activision (formed by ex-Atari employees not getting royalties for their top selling games). After that it snowballed with countless software publishers and a lot of shovelware was being released which caused the collapse…
I love 2600 games for what they are. I've probably found out about them through AVGN, and I believe the setting he'd put up to play those games made me enjoy them way more than just watching a gameplay video
I was born in the 90s but my grandma had an Atari, so I played a lot of games on it before having more modern systems. Dark Dungeons for the 7800 was my favorite.
“Could you imagine all the kids who had their Atari console up at max volume?” One thing that I love about the Activision Anthology Atari collection was that you could put the game on mute and jam out to some 80’s tunes from the in game boombox. I feel like that was what a lot of kids did. Just turn the dial to 0 and listen to the radio while you play Atari.
One of the most horrifying moments of my life was when I bothered to learn how to play ET.... and found out it's one of the best 2600 games. Up there with Enduro and Montezuma's revenge. Almost solely due to its random nature, it's a kind of fun scavenger hunt game. Due to the limitations of the console, randomized content really helped stretch out the lifespan of a game. General tips for those who don't want to read the manual: Those symbols at the top of the screen are your jedi powers. They're tied to specific spots of the screen, to use them just go back to those spots. Crucial ones are the Force Sonar power, which is the ? mark. It tells you if there's a phone part in a hole, so you don't have to blindly jump into holes like an idiot. Another is mind control, the palace symbol, which will cause the molesters to go home and leave you alone for a while. After you collect the phone, you phone home using the space invader symbol hidden somewhere on the map (try to keep an eye out for it while putting together the phone), and run back to the landing pad tile back on the first screen. Then you win a round~ Also don't let yourself hit the ground when falling into a pit, use force levitate. Impacting the ground uses more of your midichlorians and if you run out of midichlorians you die.
Vinny forgetting the Atari lore. Atari games were in fact in demand post 80's because older gamers didn't want to spend more money, and thought their consoles worked just fine, so a lot of customers in video stores would complain about no new Atari games, resulting in all of those late releases.
Goes without saying, but having able to PLAY a video game at home in the late 70s and early 80s, utilizing only one button and the joystick, no need to worry about updates you just put in the game and play...was a luxury...
@@totororaptors That's a stupid, revisionist-history, kinda thing to say. That would be like whining about the first movies not having sound and thinking that people must have been appalled at the lack of color and high definition back then. They weren't, and there's a reason why the Atari 2600 was the longest-selling console. There was no quality control with 3rd party games after a court ruled that Atari had to allow everyone to make cartridges for their system. There are a few games that people still collect and play NOW, almost half a century after the console debuted. You can't judge everything by modern standards.
@@shawnpatrick1877I'll gladly judge everything by modern standards. The first movies looked terrible. The founding fathers were racists. Aristotle was a dumbass. I could do this all day.
Vinny, I would vote to call this "Atari Anomalies". Because some are good, some are bad, but all are unusual. Either way, I told my friends I was going to an 'AA meeting'.
The idea that E.T. is a terrible game is a myth. It's an alright game for its time, the worst sin it commits is just being frustrating to play for the first time (which can leave a bad impression on someone, leading them to believe it's a bad game). The game isn't confusing if you actually read the manual, and reading the manual was the norm for the 8-bit era, but people nowadays tend to forget that, they try to play it without reading the manual and they leave with a misconception that the game is too confusing. I think most people nowadays think it's a terrible game solely from hearsay without actually giving the game a fair shot. The developer managed to make a decent game despite being given an absurdly short amount of time to work on it, which is an accomplishment.
People defending ET will never stop being hilarious. You even admit it was bad but hey, it was made in a short amount of time, so somehow that makes it good.
@@Zanpaahe said it was just "decent" not good. E.T. isn't really spectacularly bad compared to countless other Atari games, it was shovelware but not unplayable. It mainly gets it's bad reputation from how much of a let down and financial failure it was, but if you were to play it in a vacuum (with the instructions like intended) it would be like, a solid 4/10 compared to other games on the console at the time. Not good, but not "worst game ever made" levels of bad.
@@Zanpaa People criticizing it will not stop being hilarious because everyone alive at the time knows that you're just full of crap and pretending that you know something based on things you've read online. If you even so much as played a significant number of Atari games, you would know it was mediocre with some good qualities and nowhere near bad by the standards of the time. Even people who had issues with it back then seem to be those who were too young or too dumb to read the manual. Every kid I knew at the time liked the game. That's real life, not a James Rolfe skit, and even James has said as much.
@@WasabiKitCat It was also one of the best-selling games on the console. It lost money because Atari constantly made horrible business decisions and decided to make more cartridges than the number of consoles that existed at the time. They thought it would sell systems due to the movie's popularity, but even if it did, their estimation was ridiculous. Atari was notorious for bad decisions like turning down Nintendo's offer to distribute their console under the Atari brand name in North America.
28:50 It's completely deserved in my opinion. Do you ever see a video game commercial on TV and feel awkward? I feel bad for everyone else who has to watch it and isn't a gamer. The Playstation "To Michael" ads spring to mind. If you take a step back and look from an outsider's perspective, it is weird and sad how into it people are. I believe it's because I remember a time when playing them, or especially talking about video games in public meant you were a NERD. I like video games but I hate the modern culture of them, especially how it leaks into real life & mainstream media. When people talk about them in public I catch myself spacing out from the conversation and I look at them as nerds, even though I myself am one.
I know people in chat had to know the one plane game was called "Barnstorming" but once you hear the name, seeing you can fly through them becomes a lot more obvious.
Growing up with grandparents who kept the same Atari 2600 they bought in the 80s, they also had a copy of ET. I would spend hours trying to beat the game while my grandpa would watch in the background. He never told me it was impossible, I just thought I sucked. Because I guess there's nothing funnier than a 3 year old screaming at a TV over a few pixels.
It wasn't impossible, you really just sucked. I beat it at the age of 5. There were even difficulty levels you could choose to make it almost impossible not to beat the game.
As someone far too young for this stuff... I actually enjoy Adventure, but you need to play it awhile (or read the manual) to really understand In fact for most of the games you'd need some guide in order to appreciate them. Some of them are really hard to figure for yourself, and even the manual was not enough - but keep in mind kids probably played them for weeks on end, especially the Adventure-styled ones, and figuring them out was part of the fun. E.T. wasn't so bad, but it came well.. very late in the system lifetime, and the falling into the pits and getting out of them was slow and pointless (it was there to convey that you lose so much energy/stamina flying up... but it could have simply drained faster proportional to the speed-up). Still it has quite a few of different mechanics, like the field being divided into invisible zones (you can see the indicator on the top) to activate various contextual actions, like the dashing, and having to manage the energy, as well as different collectibles, and the screens are connected in a non-Euclidean fashion (just like Adventure) so you also have to figure out the "hyperspace". Before E.T, its author made Raiders of the Lost Ark , which was a way more cryptic Adventure-inspired game, and it was generally well received (as well as Yars' Revenge before it, that was considered among the best Atari 2600 titles.. because it basically played like an arcade game, but it wasn't a (compromised) port of one).
It would be interesting to see if there are actually 40 to 50 somethings that actually watch your content! Also, when you said that Zippy is not real, did you mean it was a homebrew game, a fan game in the style of Atari 2600, or the gameplay is pre-recorded footage, so it actually doesn't exist?
Everyone keep calling ET THE worst game ever and being one of the main causes of the video game crash of 1983 It is... in a technical way Not only was that game rushed but Atari had the guts to make more copies than there were consoles, around the time where there so many shovelwares, clones, too many consoles, no real difference between versions and no quality control And despite being rushed and made in only 6 weeks, ET is pretty well made and fairly unique in gameplay for its time
Even though the Ataris were no more by the time I was playing vidya as a bab, there's something so incredibly nostalgic and classic about the graphics, music and SFX that come out of the 2600.
I was surprised to not see Quadrun here specifically because it allegedly had the first ever voice lines on a home game console, even if it was creepy as hell. Though to be fair I have no idea if this game ever had an emulation for it due to how few of the cartridges exist
1:29 dude I could literally make a whole movie out of this with all of our favorite characters from our favorite games going all the way back the the Atari but it’s like set in the future and everything sucks and everyone has a vr headset thing and…
Atari was a big part of my childhood, despite hatching the same year NES came out My top favorite was Hall of the Mountain King, hope Vinny does that one one day since it had pretty good music for 6 bit midi Pitfall 2 was my second and I think it fueled my interest in Metroidvania
Be me who bought a 2600 in 2021 and its one of those ones where if you love the history of Video Games as a whole, its neat to have but the games are just simple and makes you appreciate how far the genre has become. Obviously there were those games that didnt have the time and effort put into them but the ones like PONG, Adventure, Pitfall, and Missile Command laid the foundation for Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft and even SEGA for a short time to run wild with it.
The Atari port of Donkey Kong has all those sound effects that corporate executives who either don't know, or don't care about video games, making something that has the most basic and generic sound effects. Its so plain and basic that its fucking disgusting.
Some of these Atari games are pretty good. I mean even with the simplistic and primitive looking pixels, they look playable. These old school retro games rely on good gameplay and not graphics unlike nowadays gaming industry.
I played a lot of Atari at my grandparents for a few years that and Mario 64 were the only games I had there. I played a lot of Adventure, Food Fight, and this defender game with 4 corners and each person had a corner.
ChatReplay ► chatreplay.stream/watch?v=NtxfSMvJ2nU
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J A H N N Y you better tell Vin to play more Artery 2600 this segment rules
To be someone in the 80s experiencing videogames for the first time, no matter how shitty they were. Reminds me of the first time my family got internet, it was wonderful.
I remember as a kid being entranced by PS1 graphics. Being able to control what was on-screen was amazing, compared to movies, and Crash Bandicoot was peak graphics for all I cared. It couldn't be topped.
I'd love to see a person's reaction to playing the arcade game Cube Quest from 1983 for the first time, though. It must have blown people's minds whenever they were lucky enough to see it in action.
@@blobbemVR is this for me. So much trash. Although the trash is to show what can be done.
I played the crap out of adventure as like a 4-5 year old. The dragon scared the CRAP out of me. Enough that I had to take breaks from the game.
It was wild.
Yeah just summarize the video for the sake of top comment lol
Vinny immediately speed-running a soft lock on Adventure literally had me screaming at my screen.
That's our Vinny
It wasn't even a softlock, that key was to get the sword, which is optional. He needed the black key just south of the starting area.
I doubt it really
Vinny's horror at the knowledge that the YTP of his own voice acting was hand-made is way funnier than it ought to be. Dude was _not_ prepared for the sheer dedication of poopers.
yes i am very dedicated at pooping lmao the terms
IIRC The DK port at 8:46 was intentionally made that way as a way to get people to play the Colecovision port
How many hands John Coleco had to grease to get all the gorm out of those kongs? I mean look at DOS Kong. Now that's a record Billy doesn't want reinstated.
Correct. And Coleco even got taken to court by Mattel and Atari over them doing this with a TON of games.
It goes deeper. People allege that Atarisoft made the C64 port of DK (Arcana Software did one in Europe, I'm talking about the NTSC one) slow on purpose. Looking at the fluidity of the Atari 800 port, it seems plausible, but the graphics were at least really well converted.
@The_Boctor That'd be a bit bizarre to me, when Atari handled port duties for multiple Colecovison titles (Galaxian, Berzerk, etc.) and those are all probably the best versions of those games available at the time. Same with Mattel and their M-Network ports of Intelevision titles to the 2600. But whenever it's a coleco port to Atari or Intelevision (DK, Lady Bug, DK Junior, etc.) it's ALWAYS trash.
And part of the reason we know is because people were able to make homebrew versions of those games that would've run on contemporary hardware and are great. So the two options are either Coleco was just that incompetent on any hardware that wasn't their own, or it was deliberate. And the evidence points toward the latter.
In the case you're referring to, know Atari's history and work ethics at the time, I'd imagine it's more the result of crunch than sabotage. That's the reason for like 90% of bad atari ports (see Pac-Man on the 2600).
35:43 - I like how the pilot's scarf visibly flutters. That's a neat graphical touch.
I swear the sound effects from the Donkey Kong port are like THE stock video game sound effects. I've heard these exact sounds in shows before.
Yep, the Atari 2600 version of _Pac-Man_ gets that treatment a lot too.
8:35 I love how most of the sprites are okay looking and then you have Donkey Kong who is just a gingerbread man
He's even throwing chocolate chip cookies at Jumpman. Very appropriate.
Adventure is a really unique game. The number 1 at the beginning means the tutorial, you can change it to 2 which is the actual game, and 3 which is a randomizer that works surprisingly well. It was an early favorite of the Stamper brothers.
@stanbrule9357it only rearranges the item locations, but this completely changes the order you need to do things in the game, so it still results in wacky situations
"Proto-Zelda." Which is funny because Adventure was an attempt by the creator to make a graphical game inspired by the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure.
I mean, you can say that for basically every early RPG and Adventure game (Rogue and DND for example), but none of them did it in real time other than Adventure. Also, Ninty has cited Adventure as an influence.
@@warbossgegguz679 I mean, Hydlide while bad absolutely did that over a year before Zelda 1 released
How is that funny?
"This guy is my dad." "This is funny because he also has a father."
@@TheWrathAbove bump combat comes from Dragon Slayer which is even earlier of we're getting as deep as possible... though that itself is arguably descendant from Rogue.
Point being every thing is built off something else I guess, lol.
@@warbossgegguz679 When it comes to videogames, obviously they needed to build off of things that did well. Hydlide is terrible but it's obvious that A LOT of games use systems that work just like it, and Zelda looks like they took that style and did a great job at it. If not for mediocre or underbaked games, we would have never gotten any of the modern classics. And all thanks to fucking Pong and that other vector game that basically set the entire gaming industry off.
43:38 Congo Bongo was developed by Ikegami, the same company who did the original DK and Zaxxon. The original AC version had an isometric playfield and featured 4 stages, unlike the A2600 and SG-1000 versions.
6:40 never played that game, but im pretty sure that it didn't glitch, it was on 2 player mode, because the "lives" where still 3 after he died and were on the other side of the screen
Since Vin didn't grow up with them, maybe he just couldn't figure out that Atari games sometimes default to 2P modes... and some like Indiana Jones just... need 2 sticks for wathever reason.
@@annarenfold438also probably accidentally set 2p mode
@@125scratch2 Yeah, he did say "what is this" when a couple games seemingly let him pick between modes and levels in a very Atari way.
@@annarenfold438 A lot is lost with the lack of manuals I feel
@@125scratch2 From lore to instructions or even context, yeah, no manuals hurts these old games way more than primitive graphics or audio.
I mean, everyone blame E.T. as the single culprit for the videogame clash but Atari brought its own demise when they went overboard with the publicity instead of investing in a good game
Also, the entire "videogame crash" only really affected the US directly... Asia and Europe were still going strong and in particular, the UK released tons of games that are extremely influential and important pillars of PC gaming and early consoles.
@@annarenfold438 it didn't affect Europe because they had no industry to crash, just a bunch of small-time home computer game publishers, USA had those too and they weren't affected by the crash either but it didn't matter because that was peanuts compared to the console market, the only unaffected place was Japan which is why they went on to dominate the industry for decades and Europe didn't.
@@holdingpattern245 And the rest it history, as they say. Japan truly became the leader when it came to videogames in the early days, with big names like Nintendo and SEGA just absolutely on top of the game.
@@annarenfold438Didn't happen until the Famicom, or more particularly a year or two after Famicom launched, since early Famicom games largely didn't outpace extant hardware from other makers. The Famicom was _almost_ as ahead of its time as the Atari VCS was, so it took a while for devs to start realizing its potential. There was simply nothing like the Atari craze in other territories, including Asia, so there was nothing to crash. I think the point is often missed that until the VCS came along, and particularly until the world's first killer app (Space Invaders on VCS in 1980) came along, there was no console market to speak of.
I think ET was the tipping point of the 1983 videogame crash. But it wasn't the sole reason why it crashed. ET apparently was one of the best selling games on the console.
But retail outlets were overwhelmed with returns and refunds. Which caused retailers to dump videoigame systems altogether. Pac-Man 2600 was also a big culprit too.
I forget if this name was already suggested, but Atari Archive might be a good name for this segment.
That's already a show, really cool, goes through each game chronologically and in exhaustive detail.
_Atarocities._
Atarcities isn't taken, is it?
Hey Vinny, it's been a while! I just want to let you know I was responsible for the Super Mario (Princess Rescue) and Zippy the Porcupine homebrews. I did those back in the early to mid 10's, just before I started watching you. I'm sorry. ;)
Honestly super impressive! The legally distinct names are wonderful lol
@@REM_sheepHehe. Thanks. I wanted to keep the honored tradition of naming games based off of existing properties in a way that was fitting. Princess Rescue, because Atari back in the day named their games based off what the game was rather about or what you did. What do you do in Super Mario Bros.? The goal is to rescue the Princess. Princess Rescue. Sonic? Well, what would his lesser known ancestor cousin might be? A porcupine named Zippy? Sure. :)
I did finally create my own original Atari Homebrew though and it came out in 2023 called Robot Zed. Inspiration from games like Mega Man and Kirby. A platformer/mission rescue type game with power ups that you get from your enemies and some slight Rogue like elements (as much as I could do with limited hardware), where different sections of a level would be randomly selected for you to play on making it a little different every time. Plus you got to choose the order of which levels you wanted to play in the style of Mega Man after you passed the initial intro level to get you familiar with the game before really settling in.
i remember playing those homebrews when they had just come out and dabbling in batari basic for my own
@@BigOlSmellyFlashlightAwesome! How did it go?
I just want you to know I keep Princess Rescue on my Harmony cart (don't have the Encore edition so unfortunately Zippy is too big) and boot it up from time to time. What you managed to do on this geriatric """"'hardware""""" is incredible and I commend your work. Just about the only thing I've been able to do with it is make a rainbow-color screen and laugh at the funny patterns from deliberately fucking up the TIA timing routines (I really hope this doesn't damage my CRT lol)
6:00 Pong itself was actually a ripoff of a Magnavox Odyssey game called Table Tennis, Magnavox ended up taking Atari to court over it Atari settled for $1.5m.
What a surreal period where the concept of table tennis could be patented and "owned" purely because it was digital.
Also a bit ironic when Magnavox would steal the concept of Simon (Touch Me by Atari) from Atari not that much later.
@warbossgegguz679 No, it's not just that the concept of digital table tennis was owned by Magnavox, it's that Pong is an iterative copy of Magnavox's Table Tennis. Even in those far simpler times, it was still certainly possible to create multiple, wholly unique versions of the simplest of concepts.
There were already a number of electronic tennis games prior to even Magnavox's Table Tennis, all of which play and look very different from each other, further highlighting the similarities between Pong and Magnavox's Table Tennis.
@04I've seen the odyssey's games, and you have totally free movement with no scoring mechanism... so that already is a massive difference.
Ralph Baer kind of has a history of being extremely petty and arrogant, so I think that plays a role.
I’m 45. Born when Space Invaders was released. My father had an Atari he let us play on. Then he got the Commodore 64 and Amiga and eventually, I got my own Sega Genesis for Christmas. Growing up along side video games was an amazing experience. Still love gaming to this day. I’ve shared it with all my kids who are all adults now (and gamers). Bout to put my Vinesauce shirt on (under my suit) and head to work. Helldivers 2 when I get home. Long Live Gaming.
It's great being older and living with those memories of games before they started to sour. The only real modern games I play now are from indie otherwise they're monetized into the dirt usually. Can't tell you how many times I'll pop on the NES or Sega and play randomly whatever I have. Now at this point I have entire libraries on SD cards and play them on stuff like Ever Drives. That's something I'll always enjoy even when the modern industry just disappoints again and again.
Aw, I hope you had a good work day.
Another one of the old-heads here. Vinny obviously missed my other comments on videos that I made whenever the community got too ignorant about stuff from way back in the day. Yes, there are older viewers (Vinny's funny... enough), and yes, by watching I'm exposing myself to remarks and commentary that shits all over everything I ever knew and loved, but I can live with it. 😀
E.T. gets the credit for crashing the game industry but in reality it was actually the Atari Pac-Man port because so many people *KNEW* what the arcade game was supposed to look and sound like, people legitimately felt ripped off with Pac-Man
Atari is very easy to point and laugh at nowadays. Adventure has absolutely nothing on Tears of the Kingdom, obviously. However, despite not growing up in the 70s or even the 80s, I have a deep fascination with Atari and games of its time. These games look simple, but there was a lot of thought and artistry that went into making them. You have such limited hardware and you gotta use it to create a game that people will wanna keep coming back to. It’s not easy, and when Howard Scott Warshaw tried to get a bit unorthodox under a strict deadline, his game found itself in a New Mexico landfill. I highly recommend looking into Atari’s history. It was a crazy time.
Howard Scott Warshaw programmed E.T. in five weeks. I will always defend it for that reason and because it's one of the first games I ever had, I played hours of it over and over successfully. While no one would describe it this way at the time it's an open world map where collectables appear in randomized locations. I supposed it's a walking simulator as well as a proto-horror game because you're constantly running from the authorities like you would a monster in Amnesia.
I have two distinct E.T. memories: one was the time the game glitched causing infinite "reeces pieces" (the single pixel you see in the middle of some screens) to scroll left to right allowing me to max out what I could pick up, the other was the first lucid dream I ever had where recognizing I was dreaming playing E.T. I walked into my kitchen and dumped a bucket of water over my head to wake myself up.
"It's bad but they didn't put in a lot of work so it's good actually" is a wild argument
@@Zanpaa ET isnt honestly THAT bad for its era and platform. It was just very meh and overhyped, so was a crazy financial failure.
@@Zanpaa i think another (probably better) example would be DOOM on the Saturn, that was another instance of insane crunch by one programmer. it's still a piece of crap yeah, but it's more about what was achieved with such a suffocating deadline
Proof that nostalgia can happen even when you're fed garbage.
@@Zanpaa Warshaw put in a TON of work, but his bosses? Yeah not so much! Just like video games today
I thought Johnny was going to make the Loss comic with atari games in the thumbnail
lmao
You made me double check the thumbnail to make sure it wasn't Loss.
BACK IN MY DAY WHEN THE GAME WAS THE GAME
Is this how E.T. got sick outside, he kept falling into pits looking for items?
That Superman game is so crazy complex it makes it almost incomprehensible. The game 'map' is essentially 20 or so screens layered on top of each other in a grid. If you Google it, it looks almost like the stage map from Outrun.
Even by 80s Atari standards, the game was too alien for most people to figure out, but I've always had a weird appreciation for it. And I'm not even a Superman fan.
Empire Strikes Back was my favorite Atari game back then. It was basically Defender but on Hoth.
The Space Runaway Ideon artwork at 10:36 legitimately caught me off guard
Vinny didn't realize how right he was when he called it a "Gundam".
Princess Rescue really is something special. Not only did they make a full instruction booklet and cart for it, but if you played it on a system using a Genesis controller, they allowed you to use the extra button for fireballs. (It's up on the joystick if you're playing on a normal Atari 2600 controller.) Serious kudos to the people that put the time and effort into the extra details and added bits.
27:24 for lobotomy
3:37 Fun fact: ET constantly lands in this hole because the collision detection for holes is pixel perfect. And it includes your head. Someone actually wrote a ROM hack that fixes that and it makes the game significantly less frustrating.
8:44 Yes this is official. But it's *also* a bootleg.
Nintendo licensed Donkey Kong's rights out to different companies. Coleco got the console rights and Atari got the home computer rights. So the Atari 2600 version officially licensed from Nintendo, but *not* Atari, because it was developed by Coleco.
Coleco would then release a home computer (the Coleco Adam) and demoed it running Donkey Kong, which pissed off Atari so much they dropped their plans to license and release the Famicom in the USA. Yes, the NES almost wound up being an Atari product!
I liked "Atari Archaeology"
it's astonishing that any games ever got made for this system, given what a nightmare it was to code for
"Adventure is a pretty good game."
(Vinny softlocks himself only a minute in)
Never change, Binyot ♡
This is what TV show directors think how video games look now
I was sure in Adventure, you could use the bridge to grab the key if it gets stuck in anything.
0:50 I know some people are really married to this idea that we're on the brink of a new "crash" when financially video games are turning higher profits than ever and the industry is growing rather than shrinking. The only thing that's happening is some major players are dipping and/or going under, but even then the headlines don't really convey how much money companies like Squenix, WB, EA, and Activision are making on their "failures". Reviewers and influencers complaining =/= the game lost money. And for every major bomb they have a ton of wins.
And even then all you're going to see is new giants start to form out of small companies. That's literally how both Activision and EA started. This kind of stuff is cyclical.
I get that there's the perpetual "anti-corporate" "modern gaming sucks" crowd, but the entire market tanking isn't something to wish for.
If I had to guess, the "wishing" is everything going so bad that devs are forced to make good games again, which, _could_ happen, but still probably wouldn't be that good of an idea anyway. I'm no economics expert, but I have to assume a crash now would be _way_ more impactful than the 1983 one.
@@firstnamlastnam2141The problem I have is the "again" part. Like, EA, Activision, and Ubisoft sure, but have ALL AAA GAMES in the past decade or so really been terrible? Because nobody told me.
Guess I should now hate DMC5, GoW, Doom & Doom Eternal, every Nintendo game, RE 2, 3, 4, and 8, Tekken 8, SF 6, KoF15, Dragon Quest 11 and Monsters, FFXV, XVI, and VII Remake...
I hope you see my confusion.
You basically have to be buying exclusively games from those 3 publishers to genuinely think the entire gaming landscape is worthy of going scorched earth on atm.
@@warbossgegguz679 Yeah, I get where you're coming from. It's just people coming to that conclusion after being burned one too many times, I suppose. I'm sure they'll get what's coming to them eventually, and hopefully not at the cost of complete annihilation.
Market crashes are a good thing because they clear out the slop. I don't know if we'll get a full-scale crash, but I'm definitely rooting for large studios to go under.
Nobody thinks there will be a crash. They think the large players doing garbage like Skull and Bones will have to change their ways, and they will.
Pac Kong is a game where you play as a man who has to save ÷ signs from a phoenix while dodging autumn leaves.
Fun fact, the Atari 2600 had a variant of the same processor as the NES and many, many other 8-bit machines of the 70s and 80s. Its primary limitation is the weird video/audio chip and the fact it only has 128 Bytes of RAM. Yes, BYTES. As in, 0.128 kilobytes.
The colour of the key has to match the colour of the gate.
So did the producers of Pac Kong just steal a piece of Space Runaway Ideon promotional art and slap it on the box?
I know it's funny to mock, but it's amazing how some of these games, especially the homebrew, look this good when you consider the specs of the system. All it has are 2 small 8x1 pixel sprites, 2 1 pixel "ball" sprites, and a couple of baackground block registers that can mirror or repeat. Everything else is done with carefully timed code updating the screen as it's being drawn (it has no video RAM, and only 128 bytes of RAM + the ROM on the cartridge for the game itself). "Racing the beam" is the phrase used, and it takes a lot of skill as a programmer to get this all working.
I grew up in the SNES era, however my brother and I did have a plug-and-play thing with a bunch of Activision Atari 2600 games on it (i.e. Pitfall, River Raid, Atlantis, etc.). We understood that these (even back then) were old games, but we still had lots of fun playing them!
Yes. People born in the 70s watch your streams. Adventure and Breakout were my jams. We played on our tube TV in the basement with red shag carpet and a bar with glitter Formica.
I grew up in this era the whole way. Atari was da bomb for Space Invaders & Asteroids. What killed it was the fact that 3rd party software was the Wild West of video games. It started with Activision (formed by ex-Atari employees not getting royalties for their top selling games). After that it snowballed with countless software publishers and a lot of shovelware was being released which caused the collapse…
"...however, this doesn't exist and you're just dreaming."
Zaxxon is normally flying in an angle and you move between spaces and shoot things in the air and on the ground. 3rd person 3D is ambitious though!
I love 2600 games for what they are. I've probably found out about them through AVGN, and I believe the setting he'd put up to play those games made me enjoy them way more than just watching a gameplay video
I was born in the 90s but my grandma had an Atari, so I played a lot of games on it before having more modern systems. Dark Dungeons for the 7800 was my favorite.
“Could you imagine all the kids who had their Atari console up at max volume?”
One thing that I love about the Activision Anthology Atari collection was that you could put the game on mute and jam out to some 80’s tunes from the in game boombox. I feel like that was what a lot of kids did. Just turn the dial to 0 and listen to the radio while you play Atari.
10:26 Ideon, what the heck it's doing here?!
26:07 I struggled to find what game title Vinny was trying to pronounce, but it was "Entombed", and it's not a homebrew, it's from 1982
I was born 1975 and I’ve watched you since you started streaming Vinny.
I was born in 79 and have been watching Vin for YEARS
I find Jr Pac-Man for Atari to be pretty good even if really fucking hard
One of the most horrifying moments of my life was when I bothered to learn how to play ET.... and found out it's one of the best 2600 games. Up there with Enduro and Montezuma's revenge. Almost solely due to its random nature, it's a kind of fun scavenger hunt game.
Due to the limitations of the console, randomized content really helped stretch out the lifespan of a game.
General tips for those who don't want to read the manual:
Those symbols at the top of the screen are your jedi powers. They're tied to specific spots of the screen, to use them just go back to those spots. Crucial ones are the Force Sonar power, which is the ? mark. It tells you if there's a phone part in a hole, so you don't have to blindly jump into holes like an idiot. Another is mind control, the palace symbol, which will cause the molesters to go home and leave you alone for a while.
After you collect the phone, you phone home using the space invader symbol hidden somewhere on the map (try to keep an eye out for it while putting together the phone), and run back to the landing pad tile back on the first screen. Then you win a round~
Also don't let yourself hit the ground when falling into a pit, use force levitate. Impacting the ground uses more of your midichlorians and if you run out of midichlorians you die.
Vinny forgetting the Atari lore. Atari games were in fact in demand post 80's because older gamers didn't want to spend more money, and thought their consoles worked just fine, so a lot of customers in video stores would complain about no new Atari games, resulting in all of those late releases.
Goes without saying, but having able to PLAY a video game at home in the late 70s and early 80s, utilizing only one button and the joystick, no need to worry about updates you just put in the game and play...was a luxury...
Yeah but also all of the games looked like vomit and there was no quality control
Actually maybe that hasn't changed
When the game... WAS the game
@@totororaptors That's a stupid, revisionist-history, kinda thing to say. That would be like whining about the first movies not having sound and thinking that people must have been appalled at the lack of color and high definition back then. They weren't, and there's a reason why the Atari 2600 was the longest-selling console. There was no quality control with 3rd party games after a court ruled that Atari had to allow everyone to make cartridges for their system. There are a few games that people still collect and play NOW, almost half a century after the console debuted. You can't judge everything by modern standards.
@@shawnpatrick1877 sorry
@@shawnpatrick1877I'll gladly judge everything by modern standards. The first movies looked terrible. The founding fathers were racists. Aristotle was a dumbass. I could do this all day.
Vinny, I would vote to call this "Atari Anomalies". Because some are good, some are bad, but all are unusual.
Either way, I told my friends I was going to an 'AA meeting'.
Who destroys the Gond? LUTHER DESTROYS THE GOND!
kinda disappointed they didn't include DKVCS in the pack. Such an impressive homebrew.
We avoided a video game crash during the great recession of 2008.
The idea that E.T. is a terrible game is a myth. It's an alright game for its time, the worst sin it commits is just being frustrating to play for the first time (which can leave a bad impression on someone, leading them to believe it's a bad game). The game isn't confusing if you actually read the manual, and reading the manual was the norm for the 8-bit era, but people nowadays tend to forget that, they try to play it without reading the manual and they leave with a misconception that the game is too confusing. I think most people nowadays think it's a terrible game solely from hearsay without actually giving the game a fair shot. The developer managed to make a decent game despite being given an absurdly short amount of time to work on it, which is an accomplishment.
People defending ET will never stop being hilarious. You even admit it was bad but hey, it was made in a short amount of time, so somehow that makes it good.
@@ZanpaaWay to twist everything he wrote there, congratulations
@@Zanpaahe said it was just "decent" not good. E.T. isn't really spectacularly bad compared to countless other Atari games, it was shovelware but not unplayable. It mainly gets it's bad reputation from how much of a let down and financial failure it was, but if you were to play it in a vacuum (with the instructions like intended) it would be like, a solid 4/10 compared to other games on the console at the time. Not good, but not "worst game ever made" levels of bad.
@@Zanpaa People criticizing it will not stop being hilarious because everyone alive at the time knows that you're just full of crap and pretending that you know something based on things you've read online. If you even so much as played a significant number of Atari games, you would know it was mediocre with some good qualities and nowhere near bad by the standards of the time. Even people who had issues with it back then seem to be those who were too young or too dumb to read the manual. Every kid I knew at the time liked the game. That's real life, not a James Rolfe skit, and even James has said as much.
@@WasabiKitCat It was also one of the best-selling games on the console. It lost money because Atari constantly made horrible business decisions and decided to make more cartridges than the number of consoles that existed at the time. They thought it would sell systems due to the movie's popularity, but even if it did, their estimation was ridiculous. Atari was notorious for bad decisions like turning down Nintendo's offer to distribute their console under the Atari brand name in North America.
28:50 It's completely deserved in my opinion. Do you ever see a video game commercial on TV and feel awkward? I feel bad for everyone else who has to watch it and isn't a gamer. The Playstation "To Michael" ads spring to mind. If you take a step back and look from an outsider's perspective, it is weird and sad how into it people are. I believe it's because I remember a time when playing them, or especially talking about video games in public meant you were a NERD. I like video games but I hate the modern culture of them, especially how it leaks into real life & mainstream media. When people talk about them in public I catch myself spacing out from the conversation and I look at them as nerds, even though I myself am one.
It was Atari, everyone was ripping off each other. lol
fun fact: Atari ripped off Magnavox Odyssey for Pong
I know people in chat had to know the one plane game was called "Barnstorming" but once you hear the name, seeing you can fly through them becomes a lot more obvious.
My older brothers and sisters had an Atari. It's in the attic now covered around fiberglass. Wonder if it's worth it to dig it out of there.
With games like these it's small wonder the market crashed. Remember, these used to cost over $100-120 in modern money.
Does anyone know what emulator Vinny was using? There's some pretty weird visual glitches here that shouldn't be happening.
Some of these games actually look pretty great considering the Atari was made to run things like pong and space invaders
40:30 Well there was an Atari version of Blackjack, so I guess that’s close enough
Growing up with grandparents who kept the same Atari 2600 they bought in the 80s, they also had a copy of ET. I would spend hours trying to beat the game while my grandpa would watch in the background. He never told me it was impossible, I just thought I sucked. Because I guess there's nothing funnier than a 3 year old screaming at a TV over a few pixels.
It wasn't impossible, you really just sucked. I beat it at the age of 5. There were even difficulty levels you could choose to make it almost impossible not to beat the game.
@@shawnpatrick1877 claro que sí.
Atari games go underappreciated. It was an extremely important era of vidya.
Atari nostalgia
*"We have Sonic at home."*
My dad has E.T on the Atari from when he was younger and it sure is a video game
As someone far too young for this stuff... I actually enjoy Adventure, but you need to play it awhile (or read the manual) to really understand
In fact for most of the games you'd need some guide in order to appreciate them. Some of them are really hard to figure for yourself, and even the manual was not enough - but keep in mind kids probably played them for weeks on end, especially the Adventure-styled ones, and figuring them out was part of the fun. E.T. wasn't so bad, but it came well.. very late in the system lifetime, and the falling into the pits and getting out of them was slow and pointless (it was there to convey that you lose so much energy/stamina flying up... but it could have simply drained faster proportional to the speed-up). Still it has quite a few of different mechanics, like the field being divided into invisible zones (you can see the indicator on the top) to activate various contextual actions, like the dashing, and having to manage the energy, as well as different collectibles, and the screens are connected in a non-Euclidean fashion (just like Adventure) so you also have to figure out the "hyperspace". Before E.T, its author made Raiders of the Lost Ark , which was a way more cryptic Adventure-inspired game, and it was generally well received (as well as Yars' Revenge before it, that was considered among the best Atari 2600 titles.. because it basically played like an arcade game, but it wasn't a (compromised) port of one).
It would be interesting to see if there are actually 40 to 50 somethings that actually watch your content!
Also, when you said that Zippy is not real, did you mean it was a homebrew game, a fan game in the style of Atari 2600, or the gameplay is pre-recorded footage, so it actually doesn't exist?
I mean, that rotating gonzo head on the muppets game is indeed impressive for the atari
(31:28) For a moment it kinda sounded like Vinny was just making shit up, but then the hard cut to that title screen had me literally cackling
Everyone keep calling ET THE worst game ever and being one of the main causes of the video game crash of 1983
It is... in a technical way
Not only was that game rushed but Atari had the guts to make more copies than there were consoles, around the time where there so many shovelwares, clones, too many consoles, no real difference between versions and no quality control
And despite being rushed and made in only 6 weeks, ET is pretty well made and fairly unique in gameplay for its time
I’m just noticing now that ET doesn’t look weird in the game. Apparently the head is the top part and not the top of his mouth!
46:12 NIgel thornberry throws it back for his overlord
Even though the Ataris were no more by the time I was playing vidya as a bab, there's something so incredibly nostalgic and classic about the graphics, music and SFX that come out of the 2600.
The video game crash is overblown. It only happened in the US.
born in 1982 and grew up playing on a 128k+ zx spectrum until i got my master system 2 and then on to every system since then but mostly a pc gamer
10:26
The glory days when bootleggers just stole cover art from Space Runaway Ideon, refused to elaborate and left.
I was surprised to not see Quadrun here specifically because it allegedly had the first ever voice lines on a home game console, even if it was creepy as hell. Though to be fair I have no idea if this game ever had an emulation for it due to how few of the cartridges exist
1:29 dude I could literally make a whole movie out of this with all of our favorite characters from our favorite games going all the way back the the Atari but it’s like set in the future and everything sucks and everyone has a vr headset thing and…
24:46 "You can do things?" RAVES reviewer.
I’m surprised the Halo Atari 2600 game wasn’t shown off here. That game is fascinating
Atari was a big part of my childhood, despite hatching the same year NES came out
My top favorite was Hall of the Mountain King, hope Vinny does that one one day since it had pretty good music for 6 bit midi
Pitfall 2 was my second and I think it fueled my interest in Metroidvania
Mario actually was more blue than red in the arcade mario bros
Be me who bought a 2600 in 2021 and its one of those ones where if you love the history of Video Games as a whole, its neat to have but the games are just simple and makes you appreciate how far the genre has become.
Obviously there were those games that didnt have the time and effort put into them but the ones like PONG, Adventure, Pitfall, and Missile Command laid the foundation for Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft and even SEGA for a short time to run wild with it.
The Atari port of Donkey Kong has all those sound effects that corporate executives who either don't know, or don't care about video games, making something that has the most basic and generic sound effects. Its so plain and basic that its fucking disgusting.
Some of these Atari games are pretty good. I mean even with the simplistic and primitive looking pixels, they look playable. These old school retro games rely on good gameplay and not graphics unlike nowadays gaming industry.
I love donkey Kong on the Atari 2600, it’s actually one of my favorite ways to play the game
So from the Atari bootlegs we got Mpreg Jumpmad, proto-Chad, Bruigi and 3 types of freddy Kongbear
I’m pretty sure the ET game was only given 6 weeks (or months, I could be wrong) of development, which was probably why the game was so shitty.
5 weeks. All before Christmas
Now compare that amount of development time to the one of Pac-Man 2600, which got 4 months and still was shit
8:56 johnny test uses this sfx from the atari 2600 donkey kong
Yup! And it's used by countless other cartoons as well. I've even heard a radio game show use that sound effect.
these are the blueprints of gaming
I played a lot of Atari at my grandparents for a few years that and Mario 64 were the only games I had there. I played a lot of Adventure, Food Fight, and this defender game with 4 corners and each person had a corner.
Warlord is the name.
Used to have some old Atari plug & plays that I played a lot, Warlord included. Is good.