At one point, it was asked why Crackpots wasn't a paddle controlled game. As I recall, there weren't any paddle games by Activision. I seem to remember David Crane saying that they avoided the paddle since many 2600 systems didn't come with one out of the box. Don't hold me to that, but that is how I remember it.
As an old guy from the 80s who grew up playing the Atari 2600, please allow me to put something about the using the difficulty and B/W switches as game functions into perspective. Often an Atari (or Intellivision, or Coleco) was played with the unit in front of you and a stack of games next to you so you didn’t have to get up as often. The units in the market at the time were the big Vaders and wood grain models. No Juniors yet and no clone consoles, Sears notwithstanding. They had easy to flip toggle switches that were well within arms reach. For a kid who grew up on Star Wars, playing Starmaster and flipping the switches to bring up the map was a special kind of magic that made you buy into the idea that you really were piloting a spacecraft. That’s what the programmers wanted you to feel. Without these toggles and instead tiny switches located at the rear, this sensation is completely lost on clone machines and honestly, the 2600 Juniors as well. This was my favorite video so far. Thank you for letting me share some memories of my favorite console. Cheers!
Heavy Sixers made in Sunnyvale were the best ones. Totally agree about the switches on the back being garbage. Space Shuttle was the GOAT Activision cartridge.
@@SIPEROTH They did, but they're crazy expensive... like $60 for a brand new Atari game cartridge and they'll only sell the digital game as an extra if you've bought the physical cartridge. Meh.
If Activision didn't exist, Blizzard reputation wouldn't be dragged in to the mud. As they said "ether you die a hero or live long enough to become a villain"
On the contrary. Activision single-handedly invented the concept of ‘third party’ developers and publishers. Atari took them to court over it, arguing that only the manufacturer of the console should be able to make and release games for it. Activision won, and the floodgates were opened, allowing anyone and their grandma to make and sell video games, creating a massive glut of absolute trash software on the market, which turned off and infuriated consumers, who then ditched video games entirely, thus causing the crash.
Dolphin had something of a 'cheat': you could always just jump the shrimp by leaping out of the water, ignoring the holes (and 'echolocation') entirely. That allowed me to hit the max score.
I still have a cartridge. Something failed inside though; it was a very sad day. For the "endless ladder" area, there are ways to keep track if you're attentive: where the frog is, the pattern of the bats vs. which rock wall graphic is on the right end of the screen, and the river at the bottom. Sometimes you do need to go up or down a screen to re-orient yourself, but you pick up the patterns with time.
Some years ago when I was in my 30s, I had Atari Anthology for the XBox. If you are unfamiliar with it, its just a collection of Atari Games - both arcade and home versions. When the family fathered at my Grandmothers for the Holidays, I brought it with me to show my much younger cousins who at the time were still kids and never played anything earlier than XBox and PS2. When I popped in Atari Anthology, they absolutely loved it and couldn't get enough. Goes to show, that even the oldest games are still fun to play.
Oh my gawd, you have to rope the black anguses in Stampeed. They count toward you stray count (lose a life). The nuance to that game is wrangling the other cows so you're free to get the black angus when it appears.
I figured out that Pitfall route by drawing a full map of the game and beat it with the maximum possible score. Actually didn't take as long as you'd expect. Good fun.
I love these videos where you look at a large library of titles like this. It's a great way to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time and gives spotlight to games that might otherwise never get it, even if they often are for justified reasons. I've got a 2600 myself but often forget I have it, but this video might help change some of that.
The way my cousins and I figured out Pitfall was that we drew every scene on a piece of paper, taped them together to end, and rolled it up like a scroll, with one of us playing and another one navigate the scroll and call out what scene was next. So much fun.
At 35:08 “…seeing the space station…” LOL! That was probably the Skylab in the 80s since the space station was launched in ‘98! Thanks for the great video!
As a kid, my favorite Activision games were (played on my 7800): Pitfall Keystone Kapers Kaboom Commando (2600) As an adult, I’d add River Raid and H.E.R.O. As top ones
In Starmaster, you might've been dying because your shields became disabled from being attacked, as indicated by a "S" in the "D:" damage indicator line.
18:36 Ghostbusters is amazing on the C64. It even has speech! You can sing along to the song. It also allows you to save your game with a unique code and play again on anyone's computer.
There's something interesting about Pressure Cooker, if you hold the button you can bounce the ingredients back with no penalty, including the ones you want under pressure, so it makes it the more thrilling. Oh and you can simply go to the delivery room and press the button to get rid of unwanted ingredients in exchange of a penalty.
Pitfall...my personal nemesis. For a while it was my favorite game when I was a kid. I played this game over and over memorizing the path and my foot position while jumping on alligators and over logs and scorpions. I nearly finished it without dying and without hitting a single log or falling down a hole or pit. A knew a perfect game was in my grasp! And one day I got to the last screen with a bar of silver on the other side of the screen and ran out of time. That was the last time I played the game with any amount of vigor or seriousness.
Activision started out as Good Guy Publishers, but they survived to become more and more disliked by the community. Live long enough, everyone becomes a villain eventually :P Joking aside, in the 80's, Activision was a go to publisher on many 8-bit platforms.
@@autobotjazz1972 I don't remember typing this, 2 years out, but it does entertain me when I see an opinion of mine from years ago, and that opinion hasn't changed. You also picked up ENTIRELY what I was putting down. I've even used that exact reference in more recent times concerning Activision/Blizzard. Maybe they'll beat the average of what happens to companies absorbed into bigger corporations, and be able to redeem themselves, instead of JUST being a corporate cash cow for Microsoft to abuse. MS has a VERY spotty historical record, but you never know, perhaps the name may once again rise to the level of that of pride in their releases, and regain the reverence they once commanded. I won't be holding my breath for that, though.
River Raid, Enduro, Star Master, and Megamania were my favorites. I never knew about Spider Fighter until I got into collecting back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Spider Fighter was an instant hit with me; and interestingly, I immediately compared it with Megamania; essentially declaring them equals.
When I was collecting Atari 2600 actively this was the first set of games I went after. Pitfall II, Barnstorming, Frostbite, Beamrider, H.E.R.O. and Kaboom! are all classics.
Oh ... wow I never realized just how many of the games I loved playing on my mom's old 2600 as a kid were from Activision. No wonder I still feel such a small thrill of nostalgia whenever I see their logo regardless of how low they've fallen...
I missed the Atari era, but I got to play most of these games on Activision Anthology on PS2. It's a well made compilation. It has a couple previously unreleased games too.
To me, Activision is like Atari's Nintendo seal of quality. Nintendo were also great on Atari, as well as the "RealSports" and Intellivision shared titles.
i absolutely LOVE these videos. they are the only one of their kind on youtube. simply the best. i wish this kind of content was not so niche so your channel could blow the F up cause you deserve it. i have seen all the other videos in this series and will see all future entries cause it is just great. Thank the heavens for you. p.s. i dont want to ask for any specific console to review the games of, cause i would watch everything anyways.
My is fav as a child was Frostbite, Keystone and Spider fighter, (all completed levels to rotate levels again). Space shuttle is quite hard, I did complete a few times but it a bit of random luck.
Ghostbusters 2 kinda sucked, all it consists of is leading a guy on a rope down a hole. I know in the movie it was Ray going into the sewer but it's Atari so it could be anyone on the rope, but that's beside the point
Okay, I just looked into this more and found out something bizarre. In those lists that mention all 2600 games, GhostBusters II is listed as a game by "Salu". Never heard of them before. That's why they weren't in the lists I checked (AtariAge, AtariMania). So... does it actually count? I'm not sure. It says "Activision" on the box, strangely enough. I'm still going to mention it in the following video. In addition, responding to @Game Hero above, GhostBusters II was not on Activision Anthology, neither was the first one.
I actually refer to Activision from 1979 to 1991 as 'the Real Activision.' When Phillips launched their lawsuit against Activision, it was the end. Bobby Kotick gambled to buy Activision, but its not the same Activision. He bought it just for the name, nothing more.
Glad to see some Dolphin appreciation. Atari 2600 was WAY before my time, but Dolphin's still enjoyable for me and pretty creative at that, with the echolocation and whatnot.
Chopper Command! My favorite when I was a kid, and 40 years later, still my favorite! I don't remember what it was called, but my controller of choice fit entirely in the palm of my hand. It was black, had a red trackball exposed on the top, the actual stick part of the joystick was maybe 1" to 1½" tall and centered on top of the trackball. It had two "FIRE" buttons, one on either side pressed by either the thumb or index finger. The only problem, but it was easy enough to get used to, was that it was too fast; moves had to be minute, or with the tiniest motion would send the cursor, or your own object from one side of the screen to the other in a flash. The controller was completely symetrical, so left handed players could use it just as easily or difficultly as right handers; no alteration or programming or setup required.
Great review guys...for me in my 50th year now 🙀 growing up with this console it was River Raid all the way for me. I do still play River Raid on the PS2 Activision compilation. Takecare 👍
My favorite 2600 game of all time happens to be an Activision title -- and yes, consider me part of team Spider Fighter. A true "thumb burner," but damn, I absolutely LOVED playing it back in the day, and I was quite good at it, too! BTW, re: your hit detection comment -- that one ship/bug (the so-called "Master Nest"), when it is displaying with a white band across it, is in its "immunity phase," before it distributes the rest of the bugs. It makes it a bit more challenging that way.
I loved browsing the Activision catalogue. I loved that the game designers were featured. None of the games aged better than Activision. Keystone Kops, Chopper Command, Pitfall, HERO... I still play these games regularly. Although not as obsessively as I used to. Crackpots, Plaque Attack - they were always favorites of mine! I spent SO many hours playing Pitfall 2.... but on my C64. That ladder section always reminded me of a maze - frustrating, but it felt amazing when you cracked it. Don't forget.... these games were meant to be accompanied by instructions. It was part of the product. Secret Codes. Impossible to figure out controls. Even overlays for keypads. The manual is part of the experience, and if you don't have them you are missing out.
We didn't mention it anywhere in the video, but my favorite games out of the ones we played here are: Enduro Frostbite H.E.R.O. Keystone Kapers Rampage! Starmaster Before today Crystal Castles was the only 2600 game I liked, so it was nice to take a more serious look at the library and find more favorites. I'd love to hear from everybody else! What games on the 2600 do you like?
Frankenstein, Save Mary, and Turmoil, are immediate stand-outs in terms of hidden gems. And Communist Mutants from Space is a lot better than the simple graphics and attention grabbing B movie title would suggest. (The Earth Dies Screaming is an even better title, but nowhere near as good.) Yar's Revenge, Adventure, Solaris, and Demon Attack are all games generally regarded as too obvious to recommend, but that's not going to stop me. Just make sure you have a good display for Demon Attack, as half the appeal is what they're doing with the 2600's color palette. Also, Winter Games is better than the NES version, if you're into that kind of gameplay. Meanwhile, there are so many outstanding homebrew that I'm not even going to attempt to name them all. Please do your own research at Atari Age, as you're really missing out otherwise. Here's a list of the games I play the most often, to get you started. Juno First, Halo, Ladybug, Pac-Man 8k, and Frantic - the earlier versions of Frantic, before they added voice clips at the cost of 16-bit quality animation. And yes, that's an officially licensed Halo game, in 4k, without even a hint of bankswitching to make things easy on the game's creator. You may be surprised at what's been crammed into that tiny space, without any extra hardware assistance. Especially if you've read "Racing the Beam" first, like the developer did. Because nothing more complicated than Pong or Combat should exist on that console. And what it takes to break those limits is as close to an Olympic sport as coding can offer.
Yes. Interesting their history. That's why they had great games. Seaquest! Barnstorming! Grand Prix. River Raid! Pitfall! Chopper Command! Almost half our library back when was Activision.
Activision made the best games for the Stella. Like straight up bangers. They also gave kudos to each game's developer which was unheard of for commercial console games.
YEAH I read through most of the manuals for these and I couldn't believe that they had little paragraphs at the end written by the person that wrote the game, giving the player tips and the like.
A game like Decathlon should be played with the track and field controller. You might break your Atari joystick if you use it for games like this. The Genesis arcade stick might also be a better choice. Or a D-pad.
Never knew River Raid had sequels! I did some digging, and it looks like the source code for the SNES game was found back in 2001, but never compiled into a playable rom. Also, there was a SNES Kaboom game in the works, but that didn't get very far. Seems they were part of some Activision retro-revival initiative along with Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, and both games got delayed, "pending the success of Pitfall." Considering PTMA sold pretty well, I'm guessing they either had unreasonably high expectations for it, or realized that they couldn't do the same numbers with Kaboom: RTX On.
Pitfall had a new title on the NES, but it’s considered to be one off the worst adventure and platform games and worst games in general on the system and many people think that is why the series died and remakes off other Activision titles stopped.
I doubt it would work. There were such bad games on that system that most developers didnt last longer than 1 year before folding. There really were only 4 companies that made decent games for the 2600. They are: Atari Activision Imagic Starpath (ok! You needed their hardware for their games to run, but still)
We had about a third of those, though we played them on the 7800. Most of them came in compilations - four or five games bundled together on one or two cartridges. I guess our parents found that good value for money. Super Hit Pak - River Raid, Grand Prix, Sky Jinks, Fishing Derby, and Checkers Smash Hit Pak - Frogger, Stampede, Seaquest, Boxing, and Skiing Rad Action Pak - Kung-Fu Master, Chopper Command, Frostbite, and Freeway Apart from that we had Commando, Rampage, and River Raid II. It probably makes sense that we'd get River Raid II since we already had the first game. With Rampage I think we wanted to get the 7800 version but the 2600 version was what the store had.
Never had or played Atari growing up so this was a cool insight on a console I know very little about. I have to say some of these games look very impressive compared to other games I've seen/what comes to mind with the 2600! Also cool to have two different perspectives on each game here, PSPMan definitely gets a sub :)
Activisions sports games were the best. Spent hours trying to knock a split second off Skiing, and Tennis and Boxing were grt fun. Wasn't unhappy when the Atari 400 turned up though.
4:30 If you can get one, I strongly recommend the Quickshot 2 Turbo, which is pushing 30 years now and is actually meant to be used on a C64, but is by far the best Atari 9-pin joystick out there. I've never been able to get on board with the "base button" system employed by the 2600 joystick or the Competition Pro.
I actually do have one of those somewhere, my dad had one from back in the day and like everything else that was passed onto me. I haven't actually used it in like 20 years.
When I was a kid I didn't understand why people even bothered playing the Magnavox Odyssey but when the Atari 2600 man it felt revolutionary ,it was what little boys dreams were made of , I know Combat may not look like much but as a kid it was so insanely impressive to see someone being able to play it in their home anytime they felt like it. As a kid any arcade you went to in 1970 just had electro-mechanical games with a few light gun games thrown in, I can still vividly remember when Wal-Mart took out the pinball machines in the lobby and put in arcades as business owners weren't happy about all the maintenance that had to be done to the pinball machines to keep them functional.
Oink! is actually one of my all time favorite games. :) I also remember when my parents came home from Sears (or maybe Montgomery Ward) back in 1985 or 86 and handed me Chopper Command and Seaquest for my birthday. I still play those whenever I bust out the Retron! I may have to look into Ghostbusters, since it looks a LOT like the Commodore 64 version, which I absolutely loved.
When I was a kid, some guy in a neighbouring village took his redundancy from the Pit and sunk the entire thing into being a mobile 2600 rental shop. I have no idea what happened to him or if he even made a profit but I rented just about every Activision game off him at some point. He also had just about every other 2600 game, his van looked like the inside of a spiv's coat. Most of the Imagic games were pretty good too and I remember the numb thumb club. My parents never really paid much attention to the games but would sometimes play, I rememeber getting up one morning and they had mapped out Pitfall II on a huge sheet of paper so I guess they got into that.
Had Kaboom! in the 1980s and an interesting note to mention. The manual contained a hint about letting the final bomb drop just before earning an extra life if you were still at 3 barrels, which I believe is one of the earliest hacks in video games and truly unique as it was printed by the designer, not something we would need to figure out for ourselves.
Gotta add Circus Convoy to this list! Check it out, Gary Kitchen and David Crane made it, so its more Activision than modern Activision. It really looks like the love child of Pitfall! and Keystone Kapers - 2 of the best 2600 games.
Even though Activision co-founder David Crane made this game with Garry Kitchen, it was not from Activision. Audacity Games is the official company behind Circus Convoy, but I can see where you're coming from since even I once thought this was an Activision game.
Gamers today will call us stupid and gay. Did we really play video games like these? Yes we did. You had to have to been there at the time. It was something radically new. It was damn good fun. An Atari console could accommodate four players at once back in those days. Can anyone say multiplayer? Atari Warlords was my favorite. It was a four-player game in 1981.
6:11 I think any atari game should have this warning lol some of those games where intense, especially when they had to flicker the screen to get all the game elements on there
I remember playing Space Shuttle at my friend's house years ago. The idea is to dock with the space station and return to earth, iirc. I remember my friend called his dad to tell him we beat it and his dad asked if we played on the easiest setting...whoops! As for Stampede, IIRC, you are supposed to lasso the cows facing you as they are worth the most points. I think they were the black angus cow.
Gonna start getting into collecting for the ColecoVision, would love to see you do a video on the game library since it's not too big! The ColecoVision was a way more powerful console than the 2600 and generally had great arcade ports and even a few superior ports of third party games. Would've been interesting to see if it could've battled the NES with a sequel console but they folded as a company before then.
As a 2600 enthusiast, seeing as Classic Game Room is gone and Lazy Game Reviews has moved to greener pastures, Atari content in 2023 is more important than ever. Thanks for keeping the flame and I hope to see more in the future!
At one point, it was asked why Crackpots wasn't a paddle controlled game. As I recall, there weren't any paddle games by Activision. I seem to remember David Crane saying that they avoided the paddle since many 2600 systems didn't come with one out of the box. Don't hold me to that, but that is how I remember it.
I mean, Kaboom! uses it. But by that point, the paddle controller was kind of...forgotten.
@@unj Obviously, they didn't completely exclude the paddle.
😊😊😊
As an old guy from the 80s who grew up playing the Atari 2600, please allow me to put something about the using the difficulty and B/W switches as game functions into perspective. Often an Atari (or Intellivision, or Coleco) was played with the unit in front of you and a stack of games next to you so you didn’t have to get up as often. The units in the market at the time were the big Vaders and wood grain models. No Juniors yet and no clone consoles, Sears notwithstanding. They had easy to flip toggle switches that were well within arms reach. For a kid who grew up on Star Wars, playing Starmaster and flipping the switches to bring up the map was a special kind of magic that made you buy into the idea that you really were piloting a spacecraft. That’s what the programmers wanted you to feel. Without these toggles and instead tiny switches located at the rear, this sensation is completely lost on clone machines and honestly, the 2600 Juniors as well.
This was my favorite video so far. Thank you for letting me share some memories of my favorite console. Cheers!
Wow Sears...I havent heard of that in years. Is it even still around?
@@rgm4646 a distant memory
Awe... sears...
Also.. that's a wonderful memory! I cant only imagine how cool that must have been!
Ahhhh the good old days of Sears "Telegames" brand of games that were just relabeled Atari games...lol
Heavy Sixers made in Sunnyvale were the best ones. Totally agree about the switches on the back being garbage.
Space Shuttle was the GOAT Activision cartridge.
Oh my God he really said at 14:30 “personally my favorite part of dragster is when you base your entire career on a lie you told 35 years ago” SAVAGE!
I can't believe I understood that reference
Take that Rogers lol 😂
lol, I was so pissed he didn't mention that and then that line came and I lost it! :-D
Todd Togers
🤣🤣🤣 scorched
Ironic that Activision was sick of all the corporate big wigs
EA under Trip Hawkins was cool as hell too and 3DO’s licensing model would have been soo great shame :/
Electronic Arts started the exact same way and more or less suffered the exact same fate.
@@droopy935 Yup, at that time, I actually bought games just because they had the EA label on it, without knowing anything about them.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain
@@kayeplaguedoc9054 Don't forget about Ubisoft.
Its the same story with them.
“You’ve probably noticed the wall of shrimp by now.”
My official new favorite out-of-context sentence.
Really cool to see how impressive some of these titles are, seems Activision definitely knew how to handle the 2600 hardware.
Them and iMagic knew what they were doing.
And they’re still making them. David Crane and colleagues released the new Atari 2600 game, Circus Convoy around a week ago! 😮
@@amuzulo Interesting 🤔. Did they released it in actual physical form for the original Atari?
@@SIPEROTH They did, but they're crazy expensive... like $60 for a brand new Atari game cartridge and they'll only sell the digital game as an extra if you've bought the physical cartridge. Meh.
@@amuzulo saluuuton
If Activision didn't exist, the video game crash would've happened way earlier
& we would have never gotten the Tony Hawk games!
@@joeyparkhill8751
As much as Teen Digital Diva (PC CD-ROM), Wreck-It Ralph (Nintendo Wii), Battleship (XBOX 360) and Tarzan (Nintendo 64)
If Activision didn't exist, Blizzard reputation wouldn't be dragged in to the mud.
As they said "ether you die a hero or live long enough to become a villain"
On the contrary. Activision single-handedly invented the concept of ‘third party’ developers and publishers. Atari took them to court over it, arguing that only the manufacturer of the console should be able to make and release games for it. Activision won, and the floodgates were opened, allowing anyone and their grandma to make and sell video games, creating a massive glut of absolute trash software on the market, which turned off and infuriated consumers, who then ditched video games entirely, thus causing the crash.
I think it was the proliferation of third-party developers that brought it on. They weren't all as good as Activision.
Dolphin had something of a 'cheat': you could always just jump the shrimp by leaping out of the water, ignoring the holes (and 'echolocation') entirely. That allowed me to hit the max score.
Activision, holy crap. They really make the simple little Atari look beautiful.
Yeah, Pitfall II is absolutely incredible. Glad to see someone talk about it.
That game was on another lever, the pinnacle of the system. The Atari 8 bit had an entire new level after you completed it.
I still have a cartridge. Something failed inside though; it was a very sad day. For the "endless ladder" area, there are ways to keep track if you're attentive: where the frog is, the pattern of the bats vs. which rock wall graphic is on the right end of the screen, and the river at the bottom. Sometimes you do need to go up or down a screen to re-orient yourself, but you pick up the patterns with time.
Hours on Enduro back in the day
Enduro was THE Pole Position/Turbo for the 2600
Kaboom was my #1, played with a paddle, it was so addictive and endless.
Some years ago when I was in my 30s, I had Atari Anthology for the XBox. If you are unfamiliar with it, its just a collection of Atari Games - both arcade and home versions. When the family fathered at my Grandmothers for the Holidays, I brought it with me to show my much younger cousins who at the time were still kids and never played anything earlier than XBox and PS2. When I popped in Atari Anthology, they absolutely loved it and couldn't get enough. Goes to show, that even the oldest games are still fun to play.
If only kids these days thought that way. I don’t know any retro gamers irl
Oh my gawd, you have to rope the black anguses in Stampeed. They count toward you stray count (lose a life). The nuance to that game is wrangling the other cows so you're free to get the black angus when it appears.
I figured out that Pitfall route by drawing a full map of the game and beat it with the maximum possible score. Actually didn't take as long as you'd expect. Good fun.
I love these videos where you look at a large library of titles like this. It's a great way to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time and gives spotlight to games that might otherwise never get it, even if they often are for justified reasons. I've got a 2600 myself but often forget I have it, but this video might help change some of that.
Wanna sell it?
I loved Keystone Capers growing up.
The way my cousins and I figured out Pitfall was that we drew every scene on a piece of paper, taped them together to end, and rolled it up like a scroll, with one of us playing and another one navigate the scroll and call out what scene was next. So much fun.
degens.
Nice 😎
At 35:08 “…seeing the space station…” LOL! That was probably the Skylab in the 80s since the space station was launched in ‘98! Thanks for the great video!
Good video man. I grew up with Enduro,Pitfall,and a couple of the Imagic games. River Raid was a great game,I was terrible at it though.
Aye, sounds familiar, Keystone Capers & H.E.R.O. were my fav's.
As a kid, my favorite Activision games were (played on my 7800):
Pitfall
Keystone Kapers
Kaboom
Commando (2600)
As an adult, I’d add River Raid and H.E.R.O. As top ones
I was playing Laserblast when I was told to put on the TV. Reagan had been shot.
In Starmaster, you might've been dying because your shields became disabled from being attacked, as indicated by a "S" in the "D:" damage indicator line.
18:36 Ghostbusters is amazing on the C64. It even has speech! You can sing along to the song. It also allows you to save your game with a unique code and play again on anyone's computer.
GHESTBESTRES!
There's something interesting about Pressure Cooker, if you hold the button you can bounce the ingredients back with no penalty, including the ones you want under pressure, so it makes it the more thrilling. Oh and you can simply go to the delivery room and press the button to get rid of unwanted ingredients in exchange of a penalty.
Pitfall...my personal nemesis. For a while it was my favorite game when I was a kid. I played this game over and over memorizing the path and my foot position while jumping on alligators and over logs and scorpions. I nearly finished it without dying and without hitting a single log or falling down a hole or pit. A knew a perfect game was in my grasp! And one day I got to the last screen with a bar of silver on the other side of the screen and ran out of time. That was the last time I played the game with any amount of vigor or seriousness.
Pitfall was a monster hit, everyone with a 2600 loved it.
Activision started out as Good Guy Publishers, but they survived to become more and more disliked by the community. Live long enough, everyone becomes a villain eventually :P Joking aside, in the 80's, Activision was a go to publisher on many 8-bit platforms.
brings to mind a saying : "‘You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain’." Harvey Dent
@@autobotjazz1972 I don't remember typing this, 2 years out, but it does entertain me when I see an opinion of mine from years ago, and that opinion hasn't changed. You also picked up ENTIRELY what I was putting down. I've even used that exact reference in more recent times concerning Activision/Blizzard. Maybe they'll beat the average of what happens to companies absorbed into bigger corporations, and be able to redeem themselves, instead of JUST being a corporate cash cow for Microsoft to abuse. MS has a VERY spotty historical record, but you never know, perhaps the name may once again rise to the level of that of pride in their releases, and regain the reverence they once commanded. I won't be holding my breath for that, though.
River Raid and Enduro look absolutely amazing
River Raid, Enduro, Star Master, and Megamania were my favorites. I never knew about Spider Fighter until I got into collecting back in the late 90s and early 2000s. Spider Fighter was an instant hit with me; and interestingly, I immediately compared it with Megamania; essentially declaring them equals.
Did you know you can ko someone in Boxing? Just score 99 points before the round ends to automatically win!
When I was collecting Atari 2600 actively this was the first set of games I went after. Pitfall II, Barnstorming, Frostbite, Beamrider, H.E.R.O. and Kaboom! are all classics.
H.e.r.o is still way overpriced
@@marccaselle8108 Thankfully in the early 2000’s it wasn’t. 👍
@@MrMegaManFan true and hero is a good game too. It's one of my favorites
@@marccaselle8108
Did you ever finish it?
@@Ytnzy250 i never finished h.e.r.o but I still love the game.
Oh ... wow I never realized just how many of the games I loved playing on my mom's old 2600 as a kid were from Activision. No wonder I still feel such a small thrill of nostalgia whenever I see their logo regardless of how low they've fallen...
I had Space Shuttle as a kid - at the time it seemed really amazing!
Decathlon, Enduro, Hero, Keystone Capers. Pitfall, River Raid and Space Shuttle Gave me many hours of fun.Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.
@14:33 haha, todd rogers reference. love it
There are some real gems in the 2600 library. I can't wait to see this series going forward.
I missed the Atari era, but I got to play most of these games on Activision Anthology on PS2. It's a well made compilation. It has a couple previously unreleased games too.
"Base your entire career on a lie you told 35 years ago," - fantastic Dragster quote
To me, Activision is like Atari's Nintendo seal of quality. Nintendo were also great on Atari, as well as the "RealSports" and Intellivision shared titles.
I do enjoy Robot Tank more than Battlezone on the 2600. It was not only more colorful, but it had weather conditions as well.
i absolutely LOVE these videos. they are the only one of their kind on youtube. simply the best. i wish this kind of content was not so niche so your channel could blow the F up cause you deserve it. i have seen all the other videos in this series and will see all future entries cause it is just great. Thank the heavens for you.
p.s.
i dont want to ask for any specific console to review the games of, cause i would watch everything anyways.
Watching Airwolf whilst playing chopper command!
My is fav as a child was Frostbite, Keystone and Spider fighter, (all completed levels to rotate levels again).
Space shuttle is quite hard, I did complete a few times but it a bit of random luck.
Did Activision have any involvement with the 2600 port of Ghostbusters II?
considering how it was in Activision Anthology, I'd say it can't be denied
I'll have to include it in the Imagic/Absolute followup then.
Larry the knowledge man.
Ghostbusters 2 kinda sucked, all it consists of is leading a guy on a rope down a hole. I know in the movie it was Ray going into the sewer but it's Atari so it could be anyone on the rope, but that's beside the point
Okay, I just looked into this more and found out something bizarre. In those lists that mention all 2600 games, GhostBusters II is listed as a game by "Salu". Never heard of them before. That's why they weren't in the lists I checked (AtariAge, AtariMania). So... does it actually count? I'm not sure. It says "Activision" on the box, strangely enough. I'm still going to mention it in the following video.
In addition, responding to @Game Hero above, GhostBusters II was not on Activision Anthology, neither was the first one.
14:30 oh snap. Shots fired.
Todd Togers is all like “don’t kick a guy when he’s down”
Actovision carts were looking rough already back in the 80s and only getting tougher with age
Back when Activision was still a respectable company
I actually refer to Activision from 1979 to 1991 as 'the Real Activision.' When Phillips launched their lawsuit against Activision, it was the end.
Bobby Kotick gambled to buy Activision, but its not the same Activision. He bought it just for the name, nothing more.
Glad to see some Dolphin appreciation. Atari 2600 was WAY before my time, but Dolphin's still enjoyable for me and pretty creative at that, with the echolocation and whatnot.
I like laser blast, you can just zone out and get into a rhythm efficiently clearly each screen… until you finally mess up a long time later.
Chopper Command! My favorite when I was a kid, and 40 years later, still my favorite!
I don't remember what it was called, but my controller of choice fit entirely in the palm of my hand. It was black, had a red trackball exposed on the top, the actual stick part of the joystick was maybe 1" to 1½" tall and centered on top of the trackball. It had two "FIRE" buttons, one on either side pressed by either the thumb or index finger. The only problem, but it was easy enough to get used to, was that it was too fast; moves had to be minute, or with the tiniest motion would send the cursor, or your own object from one side of the screen to the other in a flash. The controller was completely symetrical, so left handed players could use it just as easily or difficultly as right handers; no alteration or programming or setup required.
Demon attack was my all time favorite Atari 2600 game
My dad owned a 2600 back in the day, and his favorite game on there was Chopper Command, even to this day. Plus, I find it good to play myself.
Great review guys...for me in my 50th year now 🙀 growing up with this console it was River Raid all the way for me. I do still play River Raid on the PS2 Activision compilation. Takecare 👍
My favorite 2600 game of all time happens to be an Activision title -- and yes, consider me part of team Spider Fighter. A true "thumb burner," but damn, I absolutely LOVED playing it back in the day, and I was quite good at it, too! BTW, re: your hit detection comment -- that one ship/bug (the so-called "Master Nest"), when it is displaying with a white band across it, is in its "immunity phase," before it distributes the rest of the bugs. It makes it a bit more challenging that way.
Spider Fighter the original rage game. Haha.Good times.
I loved browsing the Activision catalogue. I loved that the game designers were featured. None of the games aged better than Activision. Keystone Kops, Chopper Command, Pitfall, HERO... I still play these games regularly. Although not as obsessively as I used to. Crackpots, Plaque Attack - they were always favorites of mine! I spent SO many hours playing Pitfall 2.... but on my C64. That ladder section always reminded me of a maze - frustrating, but it felt amazing when you cracked it.
Don't forget.... these games were meant to be accompanied by instructions. It was part of the product. Secret Codes. Impossible to figure out controls. Even overlays for keypads. The manual is part of the experience, and if you don't have them you are missing out.
We didn't mention it anywhere in the video, but my favorite games out of the ones we played here are:
Enduro
Frostbite
H.E.R.O.
Keystone Kapers
Rampage!
Starmaster
Before today Crystal Castles was the only 2600 game I liked, so it was nice to take a more serious look at the library and find more favorites. I'd love to hear from everybody else! What games on the 2600 do you like?
Frankenstein, Save Mary, and Turmoil, are immediate stand-outs in terms of hidden gems. And Communist Mutants from Space is a lot better than the simple graphics and attention grabbing B movie title would suggest. (The Earth Dies Screaming is an even better title, but nowhere near as good.)
Yar's Revenge, Adventure, Solaris, and Demon Attack are all games generally regarded as too obvious to recommend, but that's not going to stop me. Just make sure you have a good display for Demon Attack, as half the appeal is what they're doing with the 2600's color palette.
Also, Winter Games is better than the NES version, if you're into that kind of gameplay.
Meanwhile, there are so many outstanding homebrew that I'm not even going to attempt to name them all. Please do your own research at Atari Age, as you're really missing out otherwise. Here's a list of the games I play the most often, to get you started. Juno First, Halo, Ladybug, Pac-Man 8k, and Frantic - the earlier versions of Frantic, before they added voice clips at the cost of 16-bit quality animation.
And yes, that's an officially licensed Halo game, in 4k, without even a hint of bankswitching to make things easy on the game's creator.
You may be surprised at what's been crammed into that tiny space, without any extra hardware assistance. Especially if you've read "Racing the Beam" first, like the developer did.
Because nothing more complicated than Pong or Combat should exist on that console. And what it takes to break those limits is as close to an Olympic sport as coding can offer.
Demon attack
Pressure Cooker, Cosmic Commuter and Pitfall 2 for the world! Beside those you already mentionned.
River raid!
@@plaztik767 great game!i have it on my old xbox classic with the 2600 emulator
Yes. Interesting their history.
That's why they had great games.
Seaquest!
Barnstorming!
Grand Prix.
River Raid!
Pitfall!
Chopper Command!
Almost half our library back when was Activision.
What a criminally underrated channel. You shot up top my top 5 channels focused on gaming, electronics, etc.
Activision made the best games for the Stella. Like straight up bangers. They also gave kudos to each game's developer which was unheard of for commercial console games.
YEAH I read through most of the manuals for these and I couldn't believe that they had little paragraphs at the end written by the person that wrote the game, giving the player tips and the like.
14:29
I get it now.
Todd freaking Rogers.
The biggest fraud aside Billy Mitchell.
A game like Decathlon should be played with the track and field controller. You might break your Atari joystick if you use it for games like this. The Genesis arcade stick might also be a better choice. Or a D-pad.
Never knew River Raid had sequels! I did some digging, and it looks like the source code for the SNES game was found back in 2001, but never compiled into a playable rom. Also, there was a SNES Kaboom game in the works, but that didn't get very far. Seems they were part of some Activision retro-revival initiative along with Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, and both games got delayed, "pending the success of Pitfall." Considering PTMA sold pretty well, I'm guessing they either had unreasonably high expectations for it, or realized that they couldn't do the same numbers with Kaboom: RTX On.
That's really weird how nobody has compiled it yet.
Pitfall had a new title on the NES, but it’s considered to be one off the worst adventure and platform games and worst games in general on the system and many people think that is why the series died and remakes off other Activision titles stopped.
Real quick comment:
STARMASTER on the Atari 800 is amazing. Having the keyboard makes this game so much better.
I missed out on atari, I grew up on NES but that was like...my life as a kid
I would love to see you reviewing the other Atari 2600 devs as well... your Atari videos are my favorite. Thanks for making my day better
I doubt it would work. There were such bad games on that system that most developers didnt last longer than 1 year before folding.
There really were only 4 companies that made decent games for the 2600. They are:
Atari
Activision
Imagic
Starpath (ok! You needed their hardware for their games to run, but still)
Private Eye is pretty funny when the game looks like it drops you into Pitfall on some of the screens!
Great vid! Keep up the great work!!
We had about a third of those, though we played them on the 7800. Most of them came in compilations - four or five games bundled together on one or two cartridges. I guess our parents found that good value for money.
Super Hit Pak - River Raid, Grand Prix, Sky Jinks, Fishing Derby, and Checkers
Smash Hit Pak - Frogger, Stampede, Seaquest, Boxing, and Skiing
Rad Action Pak - Kung-Fu Master, Chopper Command, Frostbite, and Freeway
Apart from that we had Commando, Rampage, and River Raid II.
It probably makes sense that we'd get River Raid II since we already had the first game. With Rampage I think we wanted to get the 7800 version but the 2600 version was what the store had.
Never had or played Atari growing up so this was a cool insight on a console I know very little about. I have to say some of these games look very impressive compared to other games I've seen/what comes to mind with the 2600!
Also cool to have two different perspectives on each game here, PSPMan definitely gets a sub :)
thanks. I actually suggested dual ratings because I thought it would be a good idea
Activisions sports games were the best. Spent hours trying to knock a split second off Skiing, and Tennis and Boxing were grt fun. Wasn't unhappy when the Atari 400 turned up though.
when I was making my video I had to get one of the achievements for skiing and honestly that was a lot of fun trying to shave seconds off of my time
I first played HERO on one of those PSX disks and I've sworn by it ever since.
I remember playing my uncle's 2600 as a kid. The game I played a ton of was Secret Quest
0:18 Apparently FrameRater has never played Indiana Jones on the 2600
4:30 If you can get one, I strongly recommend the Quickshot 2 Turbo, which is pushing 30 years now and is actually meant to be used on a C64, but is by far the best Atari 9-pin joystick out there. I've never been able to get on board with the "base button" system employed by the 2600 joystick or the Competition Pro.
I actually do have one of those somewhere, my dad had one from back in the day and like everything else that was passed onto me. I haven't actually used it in like 20 years.
When I was a kid I didn't understand why people even bothered playing the Magnavox Odyssey but when the Atari 2600 man it felt revolutionary ,it was what little boys dreams were made of , I know Combat may not look like much but as a kid it was so insanely impressive to see someone being able to play it in their home anytime they felt like it.
As a kid any arcade you went to in 1970 just had electro-mechanical games with a few light gun games thrown in, I can still vividly remember when Wal-Mart took out the pinball machines in the lobby and put in arcades as business owners weren't happy about all the maintenance that had to be done to the pinball machines to keep them functional.
Oink! is actually one of my all time favorite games. :) I also remember when my parents came home from Sears (or maybe Montgomery Ward) back in 1985 or 86 and handed me Chopper Command and Seaquest for my birthday. I still play those whenever I bust out the Retron! I may have to look into Ghostbusters, since it looks a LOT like the Commodore 64 version, which I absolutely loved.
Space Shuttle was great for kids with imaginations. I made a ship out of boxes and my TV screen was the canopy of the ship.
I want you to do a video trying out every game released on PC.
ALL OF THEM.
I'd rather have the complete C64 library. But more important: in ONE video. :-D
Physical disks only
Haha great video! You reminded me that I played Enduro when I was a kid and I had to hold the cartridge in so it would play lol :)
There was an unofficial port of Enduro on Android a few years back and it was... incredible.
There was also some kinda River Raid port, I wonder if that still exists.
I didn't know "Hero", looks amazing!
In the Kaboom! game you are using buckets of water to catch and extinguish the bombs, not a "basket"
When I was a kid, some guy in a neighbouring village took his redundancy from the Pit and sunk the entire thing into being a mobile 2600 rental shop. I have no idea what happened to him or if he even made a profit but I rented just about every Activision game off him at some point. He also had just about every other 2600 game, his van looked like the inside of a spiv's coat. Most of the Imagic games were pretty good too and I remember the numb thumb club. My parents never really paid much attention to the games but would sometimes play, I rememeber getting up one morning and they had mapped out Pitfall II on a huge sheet of paper so I guess they got into that.
Sweet. Thanks for posting this.
Had Kaboom! in the 1980s and an interesting note to mention. The manual contained a hint about letting the final bomb drop just before earning an extra life if you were still at 3 barrels, which I believe is one of the earliest hacks in video games and truly unique as it was printed by the designer, not something we would need to figure out for ourselves.
Gotta add Circus Convoy to this list! Check it out, Gary Kitchen and David Crane made it, so its more Activision than modern Activision. It really looks like the love child of Pitfall! and Keystone Kapers - 2 of the best 2600 games.
Even though Activision co-founder David Crane made this game with Garry Kitchen, it was not from Activision. Audacity Games is the official company behind Circus Convoy, but I can see where you're coming from since even I once thought this was an Activision game.
A huge part of my childhood in 40 minutes and 35 seconds.
I wanna see a colecovision episode
Gamers today will call us stupid and gay. Did we really play video games like these? Yes we did. You had to have to been there at the time. It was something radically new. It was damn good fun. An Atari console could accommodate four players at once back in those days. Can anyone say multiplayer? Atari Warlords was my favorite. It was a four-player game in 1981.
6:11 I think any atari game should have this warning lol some of those games where intense, especially when they had to flicker the screen to get all the game elements on there
Great vid 👍
I remember playing Space Shuttle at my friend's house years ago. The idea is to dock with the space station and return to earth, iirc. I remember my friend called his dad to tell him we beat it and his dad asked if we played on the easiest setting...whoops! As for Stampede, IIRC, you are supposed to lasso the cows facing you as they are worth the most points. I think they were the black angus cow.
Some interesting takes regarding these games. For a lot of these I don't agree with but nice you covered all the games. 👍
I got a megamaniac badge for getting 81k+ on megamania.😁
Gonna start getting into collecting for the ColecoVision, would love to see you do a video on the game library since it's not too big! The ColecoVision was a way more powerful console than the 2600 and generally had great arcade ports and even a few superior ports of third party games. Would've been interesting to see if it could've battled the NES with a sequel console but they folded as a company before then.
great video!!
As a 2600 enthusiast, seeing as Classic Game Room is gone and Lazy Game Reviews has moved to greener pastures, Atari content in 2023 is more important than ever. Thanks for keeping the flame and I hope to see more in the future!
I still to this day play Demon Attack on my emulator...one of the most solid games on the 2600.
Getting 2 ratings especially when they are different is very helpful thanks for all the info.
Totally disagree about Chopper Command. It's one of my favorite activision games. It's much better than 2600 defender.
Agree!
Yeah,me too.I played the hell out of Chopper Command.Shooting was a fine thing to do
Great video! Beyond just being the first third party video game developer/publisher Activision was also one of the best.