If the Atari 2600 or 7800 from the 80s were released again this year

Celtic12c

Do you think they would sell well?
Who else here remembers playing games on those consoles?

SeantheMan

They are doing it already...same thing as Nintendo Classic did

And No. Games were pants

https://www.ataribox.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WNsmCpdhhY

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ataribox-specs-release-date-pictures/

CiDeRmAn

To be honest, I don't think people would be ready to forgive the pretty rudimentary visuals on the games.
The best of them, say like Defender, look pretty good and plays great, but I don't think there's enough people out there who would even play something as complex as the arcade version of Defender these days, certainly not enough time to invest in it to get good at it.

The Atari XE system is far more capable and even then I don't think most could see past the graphics, even though my copy of Boulder Dash on my Atari 65 XE is pretty much perfect.

Plus, there's countless ways to play this stuff, with compilations available for every console since the PS2, meaning why bother with an overpriced plug'n play if you really really must play Pitfall.

I do have an Atari Pong console, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar and an Atari Lynx, as well as the aforementioned Atari 65 XE in my collection.

Shiminay

They'd tank. Hard. Atari was the one that set the bar in the early days, but the NES and Master System blew it out of the water and then the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis put the nails in the coffin. If anything, Atari made the switch to computers with the ST too soon, but it was the trend of the time with the various Commodore, Amstrad etc offerings.

Sieghardt

I think people who complain about ubisoft downgrades and bad P ports would lose their minds at some of the awful versions of games 2600 has

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

Mr.Saturn

Whoever owns the Atari name these days (I lost track after the 12th "Atari finally goes outta business"/owner change) has been putting out these things for yonks.



Apparently they've doing well enough to do 8 different editions.

Also, Halo 2600 is the best 2600 game going. The guy that coded it, Ed Fries, spoke about how programming the thing to actually run on a 2600 pushed what the system could do its very brink. Kinda saddened the browser version seems to have vanished off legit outlets. You can play a creator-endorsed browser version here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/edfries/halo-2600

NIMAN

They might be selling well, bought as gifts for children of the 80s, but I bet most have been used once and are now collecting dust somewhere around the house.