Happy 35th birthday Atari 2600!

[speedingsport]

I loved Atari! Pong, Asteroids, Battlezone, Space Invaders, Star Wars and the list goes on.

Do you have a favorite Atari game?


I saw this and I found it interesting.


Stellaaaaa!
Actually, before it hit shelves, the Atari 2600 had another name: "Stella." The project's codename was named after one of the engineers' bicycles, and is currently the name of a widely downloaded Atari 2600 emulator.

It was kind of expensive.
The initial price for the system was $200. That might seem like a pittance, but in 1977 that was the equivalent of $775 today. And you thought Sony's initial PlayStation 3 pricing was insane.

It was almost a Disney product.
Warner wasn't Atari's first choice for an investor, though. Both MCA and Disney were approached first, but declined.

It wasn't cheap to build.
It might not seem like much by today's standards, but the Atari 2600 cost $100 million to develop.

It had lots of games.
Most gamers can only name a handful of 2600 games, but by the time the system was replaced, more than 400 games had been made for it. That might seem negligible by today's standards, but it blew its competition out of the water. Only about 150 games were made for Mattel's Intellivision.

It could go online.
The Sega Dreamcast might have been the first game console to popularize online play, but way back in the early 80s, a fledgling company called CVC released the GameLine for the Atari. The chunky cartridge could connect to servers over phone lines and players could download games to play on their console. It was way ahead of its time, though sadly the GameLine would fade into obscurity after the company folded in 1983.

Some of its games are worth a fortune.
The rarest game for the Atari 2600 is Air Raid. Only 13 copies are known to exist today, and they're worth as much as $31,000 each.

For the rest of the article and fun facts go here - Happy 35th, Atari 2600! | Games Blog - Yahoo! Games

I think I will go check ebay for one and set it up in the coach!