Tech Nostalgia: VCS (Premium)

Any discussion about personal technology nostalgia has to begin with the Atari VCS, which is more commonly known as the Atari 2600. The VCS wasn’t the first home video game machine, and it wasn’t even the first to support multiple games via external cartridges. What it was, instead, was a worldwide phenomenon that shipped with one key issue that eventually proved so problematic that it triggered an industry-wide crash that took down Atari and all of its competitors. Folks, that’s what influence looks like.

But long before hubris and mismanagement tanked the company, Atari was a unique and primary player in a new market that blended personal technology and entertainment. And it provided a three-prong attack over time that included arcade game machines, home computers, and home videogame machines, the most important of which was the VCS, or Video Computer System.

Having previously produced more limited home videogame machines like Pong, Atari’s original goals for the VCS were clear enough: create a home videogame machine for the living room that could play any number of games, each available via its own standalone ROM cartridge, many of which would be conversions of its hit arcade games. And like so many technology companies of the mid-to-late 1970s, it also sought to do so as inexpensively as possible. The company didn’t have a lot of cash on hand, and it wasn’t clear what kind of investment this effort would require.

Fortunately, the timing was right: in 1975, Chuck Peddle and MOS Technologies released the 8-bit 6502 microprocessor, their response to the Motorola 6800. (Indeed, Peddle and his 6502 design team had previously worked at Motorola on the 6800.) The 6502 had three key advantages over the 6800: it was faster, simpler, and far less expensive. As such, it would go on to be the most popular 8-bit microprocessor, with variants of it powering everything from all of Atari’s videogame systems and home computers (and Lynx), all of Commodore’s home computers, the Apple I, II, IIe, III, and IIc, the BBC Micro, and even the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) over the ensuing decade.

MOS Technologies offered to sell Atari the 6502 for just $25, a far cry from the $300 price tag that the Motorola 6800 commanded. But even that was too expensive for small, struggling company, and so Peddle offered them a cost-reduced variant called the 6507 along with a separate I/O chipset for just $12. And with that, the VCS was born … as codename “Stella,” named not after a woman but rather after a bicycle used by Joe Decuir, the engineer who created the first prototype. Decuir then recruited Jay Miner to create a second prototype that combined the 6507 microprocessor, Miner’s TIA (Television Interface Adapter) chipset, and a ROM cartridge interface into something resembling the VCS that Atari soon brought to market. (Miner would later go on to design the multi-chip system architectures of Atari’s 8-bit product line and the first Amiga computers.)

Atari’s penny-pinching would dog the VCS—and its game developers and customers—for the long life of the product. The system had to draw graphics on screen at precise intervals timed to the cathode ray design of the TVs of the day—a limitation its early game developers called “racing the beam”—and had very few system resources, with a resolution of 160 x 192 (on NTSC systems), support for 128 colors (but only 4 per line), just 128 bytes (yes, bytes, not kilobytes) of RAM, and 2 KB or 4 KB of ROM initially. But it did have the basics needed to create compelling games, including player, ball, and missile sprites that could be drawn independently from the background playfield, and mono audio output. And game developers—first at Atari, but later joined by outside developers at Activision, Imagic, and other companies—were able to make astonishingly playable games, which grew more impressive with each passing year.

Because of Atari’s financial woes, the VCS almost didn’t happen. But in 1976, Warner Communications agreed to acquire Atari for $28 million, and with millions of dollars more of investment in Stella, Atari was able to launch it as the Video Computer System (VCS) at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in June 1977, just as Star Wars was coming to theaters.

It was a unique device. In a bid to make it acceptable in the living room, the VCS was given an iconic ribbed black design with orange highlights and a faux wood trim, similar to stereo equipment and TVs of the day. It was rugged, able to handle the onslaught of children, and explicitly designed to be “idiot-proof,” though the multiple switches on its front seem anachronistic and busy today. The VCS went on sale in September 1977 for $199 with a TV adapter, two joysticks, and a bundled game cartridge, Combat. It also launched alongside 8 other game cartridges, Air-Sea Battle, Basic Math, Blackjack, Indy 500, Star Ship, Street Racer, Surround, and Video Olympics, none of which are particularly remarkable.

The VCS was only moderately successful at first, though it far outsold other videogame systems of the day. Atari sold about 375,000 units in 1977, and then 550,000 the following year, far fewer than the 800,000 units it had produced. And then it finally sold 1 million units in 1979. But a string of successful arcade game conversions like Asteroids, Breakout, Missile Command, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, as well as some unique console titles like Adventure, finally catapulted the VCS into the stratosphere: Atari sold 2 million VCS units in 1980 and then 4 million in 1981. By 1982, over 10 million units had been sold in the U.S. alone, and some of the more popular game titles had sold several million units each.

And that brings us to the VCS’s key flaw. It was not locked down, and so when Atari management refused to acknowledge its rockstar developers in their games or on game packaging, or pay bonuses based on the success of their games, several simply left the company in 1979 and started their own firm, Activision, specifically to create games for the VCS from outside Atari. (Activision cofounder David Crane had been inspired to leave when he discovered that his games had earned Atari $20 million while he had made only $20,000 a year.) Though the notion of third-party developers is common today, Activision was the first, and it was unclear what the legal ramifications were.

Indeed, Atari sued in 1980, alleging that Activision’s games infringed on its intellectual property. But the two firms settled out of court in late 1981 after Atari lost a few minor court battles over specific issues. The impact was two-fold. First, it was legal for third-party game makers to release titles for the Atari VCS. And second, because this market was so lucrative, it attracted a long list of vendors of varying business acumen and quality, so Atari could no longer ensure that the games that were released for its own console were any good. And many were not: in time, a glut of poorly-made games would lead to the videogame crash of 1983, triggering an exodus by all the major players. Coleco and Mattel dropped their videogame platforms entirely and Warner Bros. sold Atari’s consumer business to former Commodore boss Jack Tramiel, with no cash trading hands. In the end, Atari, which had been the fastest-growing company in U.S. history, was also the fastest to fail. (This set of experiences would lead Nintendo to ensure that it controlled the release of third-party games for its Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, which reinvigorated the videogame market when it was released in the United States in late 1985.)

But before the crash, the VCS was the first massively successful videogame machine, and Atari was unsure of how, when, or even if it should follow it up with a more technically sophisticated successor. Thanks to the success of the Commodore PET, Tandy TRS-80, and Apple II computers, Atari firs repurposed its original VCS follow-up as two home computers of its own, the Atari 400 (with 4 KB of RAM) and 800 (with 8 KB), each of which was powered by multiple processors created by Jay Miner. Atari’s 8-bit computer lineup was technically superior to the competition, but because Atari was so heavily associated with games, they never saw much success in the marketplace. And so Atari finally used its 8-bit architecture for a new videogame system that could replace the VCS.

Atari marketed that new videogame system as the Atari 5200 SuperSystem and, in doing so, it retroactively renamed the VCS to the Atari 2600 Video Computer System, with most simply calling it the Atari 2600. These number-based brands are derived from Atari’s internal parts numbering system, where the original VCS was part number CX2600 and subsequent hardware products followed the same scheme. For example, the first Atari VCS game cartridge, Combat, is part number CX2601.

A later follow-up, first canceled by and then resuscitated by the Tramiel-owned Atari, was named the Atari 7800.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Atari VCS. And my memories of this device are very clear. While I never owned the console personally, several of my friends did, and we would arrange big sleepovers in Jr. High School and early in High School during which several of us would gather with all of our different videogame machines and cartridges and try to stay awake until dawn. (We always failed.)

And there were so many terrific VCS games, including Atari-published titles like Asteroids, Pac-Man (despite its issues), Missile Command, Kaboom!, Yars’ Revenge, Dig Dug, Jungle Hunt, Defender, Super Breakout, Pole Position, Ms. Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Joust, Berzerk, Galaxian, and Battlezone, and an innumerable number of third-party entries like River Raid, Pitfall, Atlantis, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Q*bert, Megamania, Chopper Command, and Demon Attack.

And you can still play them all today.

Looking past the many physical emulators, the easiest and fastest way to reexperience the past is to check out one of the web-based Atari VCS emulators, like Atari Online. But many will want an offline solution, and there’s only one notable Atari VCS emulator for modern platforms like Windows, called Stella (and named after the original Atari VCS codename). You will also need game cartridge ROMs, of course, but they aren’t hard to find with Google Search.

Those interested in the history of Atari and the VCS can read such titles as Atari Inc. Business is Fun by Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel, Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming by Jamie Lendino, Zap!: The Rise and Fall of Atari First Edition by Scott Cohen (paper only), and Once upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry by Howard Scott Warshaw, all of which I own (I bought the last on Audible but suspect the Kindle/book version would probably be better). There are also some interesting documentaries, like Once Upon Atari ($5.99 on GOG) and Atari Game Over (free, YouTube).

If you would like to learn more about the technical aspects of the Atari VCS and some of its top games, I highly recommend Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. (I bought this book back in 2009.)

And if you are interested in learning how to create games for the Atari VCS, Atari Age has a great list of resources. But you should also look at Andrew Davie’s Atari 2600 Programming for Newbies (PDF) and Steven Wright’s Stella Programmer’s Guide (paper), which is also available in its original form from 1979 (PDF). And batari BASIC may be of even more interest, as it lets you target the VCS using a far more accessible language using an editor in Windows, Mac, or Linux. (To be clear, I have only skimmed this material at best.)