The Atari 2600 didn’t just bring games into American living rooms — it created the modern home console business model, survived a catastrophic industry crash it helped cause, and somehow stayed in production for fifteen years despite all of it.
Launch and Early Success
Released in 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) — it wasn’t renamed the 2600 until 1982 — the console launched at $199, a genuinely significant sum at the time, equivalent to roughly $1,000 or more in today’s dollars. Its interchangeable cartridge format was itself a meaningful innovation: previous home systems were typically limited to a small, fixed set of built-in games, while the 2600’s cartridge slot promised an expanding library rather than a static product.
Activision and the Third-Party Publishing Model
In 1979, a group of Atari programmers — frustrated that the company gave game designers no public credit and no royalties despite driving cartridge sales — left to found Activision, the first true third-party game publisher. Atari sued to block them, but the case ultimately established that outside companies could legally publish games for a console they didn’t manufacture, creating the third-party publishing model that the entire games industry still runs on today.
E.T. and the Crash
Atari’s 1982 cartridge adaptation of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has become the most famous cautionary tale in gaming history. Rushed into production in roughly five to six weeks to hit the holiday season, the game shipped in enormous quantities relative to actual demand and was widely panned by players and critics alike. Persistent rumors that Atari buried a huge quantity of unsold cartridges in a New Mexico landfill were treated as urban legend for decades, until a 2014 excavation near Alamogordo — documented in the film “Atari: Game Over” — confirmed the burial was real, unearthing thousands of cartridges including E.T. copies. E.T. wasn’t the sole cause of the broader 1983 video game crash, but it became the enduring symbol of an industry that had oversaturated its own market with rushed, low-quality titles.
Remarkable Longevity
Despite the crash, Atari kept the 2600 in production all the way through 1992 — a fifteen-year run that’s genuinely unusual for any piece of consumer electronics from that era. Over its lifetime, the console sold more than 30 million units worldwide, cementing it as one of the best-selling game consoles of the pre-NES era and the foundation the entire home console industry built on.
The Single-Button Joystick
The 2600’s simple joystick-and-single-button controller became instantly iconic — simple enough to be intuitive for anyone, distinctive enough to be recognized on sight decades later, and durable enough that working original controllers remain reasonably easy to find today.
Collecting Notes
- 2600 consoles and common cartridges remain widely available and inexpensive, making it one of the most accessible entry points into console collecting.
- Rarer titles — smaller print runs, unlicensed third-party games, or prototype cartridges that never saw full retail release — can command real premiums among dedicated collectors.
- The console’s simple hardware makes it a relatively forgiving system to service and maintain compared to more complex later consoles.
Nearly fifty years later, the 2600 remains the clearest single artifact of both how the home console industry got started and how close it came to ending before it had really begun.