> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://averagetechnerds.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Atari 2600 (1977)
- URL: https://averagetechnerds.com/atari-2600/
- Published: 2026-10-21T18:28:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T21:07:49.000Z
- Description: The console that made cartridges normal, from Combat in the box in 1977 to 128 bytes of RAM, racing the beam, the E.T. landfill and a 2600+ that still plays your old carts.
- Author: Victor
- Tags: Where We Came From, Retro Gaming

Victor’s note

The Atari predates me by about a decade. It came out in 1977, and by the time I started playing game consoles as a little kid, it was already old. Probably old enough to be considered retro, not that we had a sense of retro gaming back then, with gaming being new and all. But we knew it was old.

Growing up lower class with a single parent, expensive electronics weren’t exactly a luxury we had. So I had a secondhand Atari that had been passed down through the family, and it was my first real experience with video gaming, and the first one I remember. Spider-Man, Frogger, Pac-Man, the infamous E.T., Asteroids, the one with the little ship in the middle blasting the squiggly lines coming at you. There were others I can’t remember right now, but that was my exposure to gaming.

So there I was, playing a 15-year-old console in the early 90s, amazed by the concept of it all, and effectively begging for a more updated console. Which is how I ended up with the Nintendo. Also old by then, but still newer than the Atari.

## So, the Atari

It wasn’t called the 2600 at first. It was the Atari Video Computer System, part number CX2600, and it only picked up the “2600” name in 1982, when Atari needed to tell it apart from the new 5200\. Warner Communications had bought Atari the year before it launched, in 1976, for $28 million.

It went on sale in the summer of 1977\. You’ll see “September 11, 1977” online, and nobody has found a source for that date. What the record shows is newspaper ads selling it from August 1, 1977, at $169.88 to $189.99 depending on the store, so call it under $200\. By mid-October, Atari said it had shipped 90,000 of them. In the box: the console, two joysticks, two paddle controllers, and Combat, a cartridge with 27 game variations on it.

![Woodgrain four-switch Atari 2600 with a joystick](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-wood-4sw-set.jpg)

The four-switch woodgrain model with its joystick. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

The wood panel on the front was on purpose. Atari’s consultant reportedly wanted something that looked like furniture, so it could sit in the living room next to the TV without looking like a toy. And the engineering codename was “Stella”, reportedly after a bicycle one of the engineers rode. Atari’s own programming manual still carried the name in 1979.

## It didn’t take off right away

The first couple of years were quiet. What changed that was Space Invaders in 1980, the first arcade game officially licensed for a home console. Exactly how much it helped is disputed, but one of Atari’s own programmers at the time said sales “exploded”, and the console went from a few hundred thousand a year to over a million.

Then came the games people still name. Adventure, where Warren Robinett hid his own name in a secret room you reached with a single grey dot, because Atari didn’t credit its programmers. It’s the most famous early Easter egg in a video game, though an earlier one has since been found in a 1978 Channel F game, so it wasn’t the first. Pitfall! in 1982, reported at about 4 million copies. Pac-Man the same year, about 7 million sold, and still a letdown next to the arcade. Asteroids, the one in my note, was reportedly one of the first cartridges to use a trick called bank switching to fit more game than the slot was designed for.

## Four programmers walked out

In 1979, four of Atari’s programmers found out, from an internal memo, that their games had made about 60% of Atari’s $100 million in cartridge sales the year before. David Crane was earning about $20,000 a year, with no credit on the box. Atari’s CEO reportedly called them “towel designers”. So Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan left and started Activision with a businessman named Jim Levy.

Activision put the programmer’s name on every game and gave each one a page in the manual. Atari sued, and the two settled in 1982 with Activision paying royalties. As far as anyone has found, Activision was the first independent company to make games for a console it didn’t build.

![Atari CX40 joystick with its red fire button](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-joystick.jpg)

The joystick: one stick, one button. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## E.T., in five weeks

Atari got the E.T. rights at the end of July 1982 and wanted the game on shelves for Christmas. Howard Scott Warshaw, who had just made Yars’ Revenge, built it in about five weeks. Atari made about 4 to 5 million cartridges, and sales estimates run from about 1.5 to 2.6 million. The exact numbers are disputed, so that’s as precise as the record gets.

Then the legend. In September 1983, Atari trucked cartridges from its El Paso plant to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and poured concrete over them. The story grew into “millions of E.T. cartridges buried in the desert”. The manager who ran it told the AP in 2014 it was about 728,000 cartridges of many different games, most of them broken or returned stock. When the dig happened in April 2014, about 1,300 came out of the ground, and most of them weren’t E.T.: Pac-Man, Centipede, Asteroids, Defender. The city sold 881 of them to collectors for $107,930\. So the legend was real. Just smaller.

And no, E.T. didn’t cause the 1983 crash on its own. The reporting at the time, and Warshaw himself, point at the bigger picture: a market flooded with games and consoles, Atari making far more cartridges than it could sell, and a returns policy that sent them all back. Atari lost about $536 million in 1983, and Warner sold the consumer business in 1984.

![All-black Atari 2600 four-switch model, nicknamed the Vader](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-vader-fl.jpg)

The all-black model fans call the “Vader”. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## It kept going anyway

In 1986 Atari brought it back as the 2600 Jr., a smaller version that sold for under $50\. The last licensed game, Klax, came out in 1990, and production ended in 1992\. That’s 15 years for one console. Total sales are usually given as about 30 million, but that number traces to a 2012 press release from a company licensing the Atari name, so treat it as an estimate. Nobody has found an Atari ledger with the real figure.

![Atari 2600 Jr with a rainbow stripe](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-jr-fl.jpg)

The 2600 Jr, the late, smaller redesign. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

## How it was made

Skip this part if chips aren’t your thing. If they are, this is the best part of the Atari story, because every game you played on it was built on almost nothing.

![Atari 2600 four-switch motherboard](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-four-switch-motherboard-flat.jpg)

The four-switch motherboard. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

**The brain.** The processor is a MOS 6507 at about 1.19 MHz. It’s a cut-down version of the 6502, the chip in the Apple II (the NES used a modified version of it), put in a smaller package with fewer pins to make it cheaper. Fewer pins meant it could only reach 8 KB of memory, and the cartridge slot cut that to 4 KB per game. Combat was 2 KB. Later cartridges got around it with bank switching, swapping chunks of the game in and out.

![MOS Technology processor chip from an Atari 2600](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-cpu-mos-c010745.jpg)

The MOS processor at the heart of it. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

**128 bytes.** That’s the console’s entire RAM. Bytes, with a B. It lives inside a second chip that also reads the joysticks and the console switches, and a game’s variables and its stack share that space. Atari’s own programming guide says the two grow toward each other, “hoping the two never meet”. A whole childhood of games ran in less memory than this paragraph.

**Racing the beam.** This is the part that amazes people once it clicks. The 2600 has no video memory. It can’t hold a picture. The graphics chip, the TIA, only knows about the single line of the screen it’s drawing right now. So the game’s code has to tell it what to draw, line by line, in step with the electron beam sweeping across the TV, 262 lines, 60 times a second. The code gets 76 processor cycles per line to do it, and all the actual game logic has to happen in the gaps at the top and bottom of the screen. Programmers called the drawing loop the “kernel”, and most games updated every second line just to buy time. When you see what Pitfall! or River Raid got out of that, it’s hard not to respect it.

**What it could draw.** The TIA knows about a background, two player sprites, two missiles and a ball, and it detects collisions between them in hardware. The picture is 160 pixels across, with 128 colours to pick from on a US TV. Sound was two channels, through the TV speaker. The switches on the front were power, colour or black-and-white for older TVs, game select, game reset, and two difficulty switches that Atari’s guide labels A for pro and B for amateur.

**The controllers.** The CX40 joystick, the black one with the single red button, was designed by an Atari engineer named James Asher. Its plug became a standard that Commodore, Amiga and others picked up for years afterward. The paddles came in the box, too, and games like Warlords used all four for four players.

![Atari 2600 paddle controller](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b3/23/b323103c-90c0-46a8-9230-7d317a5ebaf3/content/images/2026/10/console-hall-atari-2600-paddle-controller-fr.jpg)

A paddle controller. Photo: Evan Amos (public domain).

**The models.** Collectors call the 1977 original the Heavy Sixer: six switches on the front and thick shielding inside, made in Sunnyvale for about a year. Then the lighter Light Sixer in 1978, the four-switch model in 1980 with the difficulty switches moved to the back, the all-black 1982 model collectors call the Vader, which was the first one to say “2600” on it, and the little 2600 Jr. in 1986.

**Two side stories.** In 1976, before any of this, Atari hired a young Steve Jobs, and the arcade game Breakout got built by his friend Steve Wozniak. Woz says he was paid $350 and found out later that Jobs had been paid more. He also says the idea for colour on the Apple II came to him one night working on Breakout. And in 1977, the same year the console came out, Atari’s founder Nolan Bushnell opened the first Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose.

## It never really died

In 2023, Atari released the 2600+, a smaller recreation of the four-switch model with HDMI out that plays original 2600 and 7800 cartridges, for $129.99\. It runs them through emulation, by Atari’s own account, but the point is that the box of carts in the closet has somewhere to go. A 7800+ followed in 2024\. People still write new games for the original hardware, and AtariAge publishes them on new cartridges. Ed Fries, who used to run Microsoft’s games publishing, made a version of Halo that fits in 4 KB. And in 2025, one person ran the 1979 Video Chess cartridge against ChatGPT, informally, and reported that the Atari won at beginner level. It’s one test by one person, but it’s a good one to tell.

What was the first game you remember playing on an Atari, and whose house was it at?

Based on Atari’s Stella Programmer’s Guide (1979), US Patents 4,112,422 and 4,349,708, 1977 trade and newspaper coverage from the Atari Archive, Business Week (1976), interviews with Howard Scott Warshaw (NPR, AP), Warren Robinett’s own site, David Crane and Game Informer on Activision, Steve Wozniak’s own letter, AP, CNN, Polygon and Archaeology Magazine on the 1983 burial and 2014 dig, AtariAge, Atari’s and PLAION’s 2600+ announcements, and The Register, as of October 21, 2026\. Where the sources disagree, the page says so.