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@michaelbullen3104

4 ай бұрын

J A H N N Y you better tell Vin to play more Artery 2600 this segment rules

Vinny immediately speed-running a soft lock on Adventure literally had me screaming at my screen.

@corazonfeathers8116

5 ай бұрын

That's our Vinny

@TheRedCap

5 ай бұрын

It wasn't even a softlock, that key was to get the sword, which is optional. He needed the black key just south of the starting area.

@Klonkus

3 ай бұрын

I doubt it really

To be someone in the 80s experiencing videogames for the first time, no matter how shitty they were. Reminds me of the first time my family got internet, it was wonderful.

@blobbem

5 ай бұрын

I remember as a kid being entranced by PS1 graphics. Being able to control what was on-screen was amazing, compared to movies, and Crash Bandicoot was peak graphics for all I cared. It couldn't be topped. I'd love to see a person's reaction to playing the arcade game Cube Quest from 1983 for the first time, though. It must have blown people's minds whenever they were lucky enough to see it in action.

@Mr.SpicyIce

5 ай бұрын

​@@blobbemVR is this for me. So much trash. Although the trash is to show what can be done.

@nickfarace9339

5 ай бұрын

I played the crap out of adventure as like a 4-5 year old. The dragon scared the CRAP out of me. Enough that I had to take breaks from the game.

@french.toastman

5 ай бұрын

It was wild.

@dooffff

5 ай бұрын

Yeah just summarize the video for the sake of top comment lol

Vinny's horror at the knowledge that the YTP of his own voice acting was hand-made is way funnier than it ought to be. Dude was _not_ prepared for the sheer dedication of poopers.

@TheSizzleDash

5 ай бұрын

yes i am very dedicated at pooping lmao the terms

I swear the sound effects from the Donkey Kong port are like THE stock video game sound effects. I've heard these exact sounds in shows before.

@stevethepocket

5 ай бұрын

Yep, the Atari 2600 version of _Pac-Man_ gets that treatment a lot too.

IIRC The DK port at 8:46 was intentionally made that way as a way to get people to play the Colecovision port

@Mordecrox

5 ай бұрын

How many hands John Coleco had to grease to get all the gorm out of those kongs? I mean look at DOS Kong. Now that's a record Billy doesn't want reinstated.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

Correct. And Coleco even got taken to court by Mattel and Atari over them doing this with a TON of games.

@The_Boctor

5 ай бұрын

It goes deeper. People allege that Atarisoft made the C64 port of DK (Arcana Software did one in Europe, I'm talking about the NTSC one) slow on purpose. Looking at the fluidity of the Atari 800 port, it seems plausible, but the graphics were at least really well converted.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

@The_Boctor That'd be a bit bizarre to me, when Atari handled port duties for multiple Colecovison titles (Galaxian, Berzerk, etc.) and those are all probably the best versions of those games available at the time. Same with Mattel and their M-Network ports of Intelevision titles to the 2600. But whenever it's a coleco port to Atari or Intelevision (DK, Lady Bug, DK Junior, etc.) it's ALWAYS trash. And part of the reason we know is because people were able to make homebrew versions of those games that would've run on contemporary hardware and are great. So the two options are either Coleco was just that incompetent on any hardware that wasn't their own, or it was deliberate. And the evidence points toward the latter. In the case you're referring to, know Atari's history and work ethics at the time, I'd imagine it's more the result of crunch than sabotage. That's the reason for like 90% of bad atari ports (see Pac-Man on the 2600).

8:35 I love how most of the sprites are okay looking and then you have Donkey Kong who is just a gingerbread man

@FinleyZero

5 ай бұрын

He's even throwing chocolate chip cookies at Jumpman. Very appropriate.

35:43 - I like how the pilot's scarf visibly flutters. That's a neat graphical touch.

"Proto-Zelda." Which is funny because Adventure was an attempt by the creator to make a graphical game inspired by the text-based Colossal Cave Adventure.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

I mean, you can say that for basically every early RPG and Adventure game (Rogue and DND for example), but none of them did it in real time other than Adventure. Also, Ninty has cited Adventure as an influence.

@TheWrathAbove

5 ай бұрын

​@@warbossgegguz679 I mean, Hydlide while bad absolutely did that over a year before Zelda 1 released

@Zanpaa

5 ай бұрын

How is that funny? "This guy is my dad." "This is funny because he also has a father."

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

@@TheWrathAbove bump combat comes from Dragon Slayer which is even earlier of we're getting as deep as possible... though that itself is arguably descendant from Rogue. Point being every thing is built off something else I guess, lol.

@annarenfold438

5 ай бұрын

@@warbossgegguz679 When it comes to videogames, obviously they needed to build off of things that did well. Hydlide is terrible but it's obvious that A LOT of games use systems that work just like it, and Zelda looks like they took that style and did a great job at it. If not for mediocre or underbaked games, we would have never gotten any of the modern classics. And all thanks to fucking Pong and that other vector game that basically set the entire gaming industry off.

I’m 45. Born when Space Invaders was released. My father had an Atari he let us play on. Then he got the Commodore 64 and Amiga and eventually, I got my own Sega Genesis for Christmas. Growing up along side video games was an amazing experience. Still love gaming to this day. I’ve shared it with all my kids who are all adults now (and gamers). Bout to put my Vinesauce shirt on (under my suit) and head to work. Helldivers 2 when I get home. Long Live Gaming.

@joelockard7174

5 ай бұрын

It's great being older and living with those memories of games before they started to sour. The only real modern games I play now are from indie otherwise they're monetized into the dirt usually. Can't tell you how many times I'll pop on the NES or Sega and play randomly whatever I have. Now at this point I have entire libraries on SD cards and play them on stuff like Ever Drives. That's something I'll always enjoy even when the modern industry just disappoints again and again.

@corazonfeathers8116

5 ай бұрын

Aw, I hope you had a good work day.

@JoseBronxRican

5 ай бұрын

Another one of the old-heads here. Vinny obviously missed my other comments on videos that I made whenever the community got too ignorant about stuff from way back in the day. Yes, there are older viewers (Vinny's funny... enough), and yes, by watching I'm exposing myself to remarks and commentary that shits all over everything I ever knew and loved, but I can live with it. 😀

I mean, everyone blame E.T. as the single culprit for the videogame clash but Atari brought its own demise when they went overboard with the publicity instead of investing in a good game

@annarenfold438

5 ай бұрын

Also, the entire "videogame crash" only really affected the US directly... Asia and Europe were still going strong and in particular, the UK released tons of games that are extremely influential and important pillars of PC gaming and early consoles.

@holdingpattern245

5 ай бұрын

@@annarenfold438 it didn't affect Europe because they had no industry to crash, just a bunch of small-time home computer game publishers, USA had those too and they weren't affected by the crash either but it didn't matter because that was peanuts compared to the console market, the only unaffected place was Japan which is why they went on to dominate the industry for decades and Europe didn't.

@annarenfold438

5 ай бұрын

@@holdingpattern245 And the rest it history, as they say. Japan truly became the leader when it came to videogames in the early days, with big names like Nintendo and SEGA just absolutely on top of the game.

@Asterra2

5 ай бұрын

@@annarenfold438Didn't happen until the Famicom, or more particularly a year or two after Famicom launched, since early Famicom games largely didn't outpace extant hardware from other makers. The Famicom was _almost_ as ahead of its time as the Atari VCS was, so it took a while for devs to start realizing its potential. There was simply nothing like the Atari craze in other territories, including Asia, so there was nothing to crash. I think the point is often missed that until the VCS came along, and particularly until the world's first killer app (Space Invaders on VCS in 1980) came along, there was no console market to speak of.

@schtive81

5 ай бұрын

I think ET was the tipping point of the 1983 videogame crash. But it wasn't the sole reason why it crashed. ET apparently was one of the best selling games on the console. But retail outlets were overwhelmed with returns and refunds. Which caused retailers to dump videoigame systems altogether. Pac-Man 2600 was also a big culprit too.

E.T. gets the credit for crashing the game industry but in reality it was actually the Atari Pac-Man port because so many people *KNEW* what the arcade game was supposed to look and sound like, people legitimately felt ripped off with Pac-Man

Hey Vinny, it's been a while! I just want to let you know I was responsible for the Super Mario (Princess Rescue) and Zippy the Porcupine homebrews. I did those back in the early to mid 10's, just before I started watching you. I'm sorry. ;)

@Sporkyyyy

5 ай бұрын

Honestly super impressive! The legally distinct names are wonderful lol

@sprybug

5 ай бұрын

@@SporkyyyyHehe. Thanks. I wanted to keep the honored tradition of naming games based off of existing properties in a way that was fitting. Princess Rescue, because Atari back in the day named their games based off what the game was rather about or what you did. What do you do in Super Mario Bros.? The goal is to rescue the Princess. Princess Rescue. Sonic? Well, what would his lesser known ancestor cousin might be? A porcupine named Zippy? Sure. :) I did finally create my own original Atari Homebrew though and it came out in 2023 called Robot Zed. Inspiration from games like Mega Man and Kirby. A platformer/mission rescue type game with power ups that you get from your enemies and some slight Rogue like elements (as much as I could do with limited hardware), where different sections of a level would be randomly selected for you to play on making it a little different every time. Plus you got to choose the order of which levels you wanted to play in the style of Mega Man after you passed the initial intro level to get you familiar with the game before really settling in.

@BigOlSmellyFlashlight

5 ай бұрын

i remember playing those homebrews when they had just come out and dabbling in batari basic for my own

@sprybug

5 ай бұрын

@@BigOlSmellyFlashlightAwesome! How did it go?

@TheRedCap

5 ай бұрын

I just want you to know I keep Princess Rescue on my Harmony cart (don't have the Encore edition so unfortunately Zippy is too big) and boot it up from time to time. What you managed to do on this geriatric """"'hardware""""" is incredible and I commend your work. Just about the only thing I've been able to do with it is make a rainbow-color screen and laugh at the funny patterns from deliberately fucking up the TIA timing routines (I really hope this doesn't damage my CRT lol)

I forget if this name was already suggested, but Atari Archive might be a good name for this segment.

@marafolse8347

5 ай бұрын

That's already a show, really cool, goes through each game chronologically and in exhaustive detail.

@MediaMunkee

5 ай бұрын

_Atarocities._

@_plg

5 ай бұрын

Atarcities isn't taken, is it?

Adventure is a really unique game. The number 1 at the beginning means the tutorial, you can change it to 2 which is the actual game, and 3 which is a randomizer that works surprisingly well. It was an early favorite of the Stamper brothers.

@holdingpattern245

4 ай бұрын

@stanbrule9357it only rearranges the item locations, but this completely changes the order you need to do things in the game, so it still results in wacky situations

I thought Johnny was going to make the Loss comic with atari games in the thumbnail

@EthVortexShield

5 ай бұрын

lmao

@8bitpixelbreakin

5 ай бұрын

You made me double check the thumbnail to make sure it wasn't Loss.

43:38 Congo Bongo was developed by Ikegami, the same company who did the original DK and Zaxxon. The original AC version had an isometric playfield and featured 4 stages, unlike the A2600 and SG-1000 versions.

Howard Scott Warshaw programmed E.T. in five weeks. I will always defend it for that reason and because it's one of the first games I ever had, I played hours of it over and over successfully. While no one would describe it this way at the time it's an open world map where collectables appear in randomized locations. I supposed it's a walking simulator as well as a proto-horror game because you're constantly running from the authorities like you would a monster in Amnesia. I have two distinct E.T. memories: one was the time the game glitched causing infinite "reeces pieces" (the single pixel you see in the middle of some screens) to scroll left to right allowing me to max out what I could pick up, the other was the first lucid dream I ever had where recognizing I was dreaming playing E.T. I walked into my kitchen and dumped a bucket of water over my head to wake myself up.

@Zanpaa

5 ай бұрын

"It's bad but they didn't put in a lot of work so it's good actually" is a wild argument

@fuzzspanden

5 ай бұрын

@@Zanpaa ET isnt honestly THAT bad for its era and platform. It was just very meh and overhyped, so was a crazy financial failure.

@spacebassist

5 ай бұрын

@@Zanpaa i think another (probably better) example would be DOOM on the Saturn, that was another instance of insane crunch by one programmer. it's still a piece of crap yeah, but it's more about what was achieved with such a suffocating deadline

@espurrthestupididiot2405

5 ай бұрын

Proof that nostalgia can happen even when you're fed garbage.

@eldrichnemo9312

5 ай бұрын

@@Zanpaa Warshaw put in a TON of work, but his bosses? Yeah not so much! Just like video games today

6:00 Pong itself was actually a ripoff of a Magnavox Odyssey game called Table Tennis, Magnavox ended up taking Atari to court over it Atari settled for $1.5m.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

What a surreal period where the concept of table tennis could be patented and "owned" purely because it was digital. Also a bit ironic when Magnavox would steal the concept of Simon (Touch Me by Atari) from Atari not that much later.

@alfo2804

5 ай бұрын

​@warbossgegguz679 No, it's not just that the concept of digital table tennis was owned by Magnavox, it's that Pong is an iterative copy of Magnavox's Table Tennis. Even in those far simpler times, it was still certainly possible to create multiple, wholly unique versions of the simplest of concepts. There were already a number of electronic tennis games prior to even Magnavox's Table Tennis, all of which play and look very different from each other, further highlighting the similarities between Pong and Magnavox's Table Tennis.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

@04I've seen the odyssey's games, and you have totally free movement with no scoring mechanism... so that already is a massive difference. Ralph Baer kind of has a history of being extremely petty and arrogant, so I think that plays a role.

Atari is very easy to point and laugh at nowadays. Adventure has absolutely nothing on Tears of the Kingdom, obviously. However, despite not growing up in the 70s or even the 80s, I have a deep fascination with Atari and games of its time. These games look simple, but there was a lot of thought and artistry that went into making them. You have such limited hardware and you gotta use it to create a game that people will wanna keep coming back to. It’s not easy, and when Howard Scott Warshaw tried to get a bit unorthodox under a strict deadline, his game found itself in a New Mexico landfill. I highly recommend looking into Atari’s history. It was a crazy time.

BACK IN MY DAY WHEN THE GAME WAS THE GAME

I was born in 79 and have been watching Vin for YEARS

I was born 1975 and I’ve watched you since you started streaming Vinny.

That Superman game is so crazy complex it makes it almost incomprehensible. The game 'map' is essentially 20 or so screens layered on top of each other in a grid. If you Google it, it looks almost like the stage map from Outrun. Even by 80s Atari standards, the game was too alien for most people to figure out, but I've always had a weird appreciation for it. And I'm not even a Superman fan.

I liked "Atari Archaeology"

6:40 never played that game, but im pretty sure that it didn't glitch, it was on 2 player mode, because the "lives" where still 3 after he died and were on the other side of the screen

@annarenfold438

5 ай бұрын

Since Vin didn't grow up with them, maybe he just couldn't figure out that Atari games sometimes default to 2P modes... and some like Indiana Jones just... need 2 sticks for wathever reason.

@125scratch2

5 ай бұрын

@@annarenfold438also probably accidentally set 2p mode

@annarenfold438

5 ай бұрын

@@125scratch2 Yeah, he did say "what is this" when a couple games seemingly let him pick between modes and levels in a very Atari way.

@125scratch2

5 ай бұрын

@@annarenfold438 A lot is lost with the lack of manuals I feel

@annarenfold438

5 ай бұрын

@@125scratch2 From lore to instructions or even context, yeah, no manuals hurts these old games way more than primitive graphics or audio.

Empire Strikes Back was my favorite Atari game back then. It was basically Defender but on Hoth.

Is this how E.T. got sick outside, he kept falling into pits looking for items?

The Space Runaway Ideon artwork at 10:36 legitimately caught me off guard

@Squiddy0912

5 ай бұрын

Vinny didn't realize how right he was when he called it a "Gundam".

27:24 for lobotomy

(31:28) For a moment it kinda sounded like Vinny was just making shit up, but then the hard cut to that title screen had me literally cackling

This is what TV show directors think how video games look now

"Adventure is a pretty good game." (Vinny softlocks himself only a minute in) Never change, Binyot ♡

Atari games go underappreciated. It was an extremely important era of vidya.

Fun fact, the Atari 2600 had a variant of the same processor as the NES and many, many other 8-bit machines of the 70s and 80s. Its primary limitation is the weird video/audio chip and the fact it only has 128 Bytes of RAM. Yes, BYTES. As in, 0.128 kilobytes.

I was born in the 90s but my grandma had an Atari, so I played a lot of games on it before having more modern systems. Dark Dungeons for the 7800 was my favorite.

So did the producers of Pac Kong just steal a piece of Space Runaway Ideon promotional art and slap it on the box?

3:37 Fun fact: ET constantly lands in this hole because the collision detection for holes is pixel perfect. And it includes your head. Someone actually wrote a ROM hack that fixes that and it makes the game significantly less frustrating. 8:44 Yes this is official. But it's *also* a bootleg. Nintendo licensed Donkey Kong's rights out to different companies. Coleco got the console rights and Atari got the home computer rights. So the Atari 2600 version officially licensed from Nintendo, but *not* Atari, because it was developed by Coleco. Coleco would then release a home computer (the Coleco Adam) and demoed it running Donkey Kong, which pissed off Atari so much they dropped their plans to license and release the Famicom in the USA. Yes, the NES almost wound up being an Atari product!

I was sure in Adventure, you could use the bridge to grab the key if it gets stuck in anything.

kinda disappointed they didn't include DKVCS in the pack. Such an impressive homebrew.

Pac Kong is a game where you play as a man who has to save ÷ signs from a phoenix while dodging autumn leaves.

Even though the Ataris were no more by the time I was playing vidya as a bab, there's something so incredibly nostalgic and classic about the graphics, music and SFX that come out of the 2600.

The colour of the key has to match the colour of the gate.

I find Jr Pac-Man for Atari to be pretty good even if really fucking hard

Who destroys the Gond? LUTHER DESTROYS THE GOND!

I grew up in the SNES era, however my brother and I did have a plug-and-play thing with a bunch of Activision Atari 2600 games on it (i.e. Pitfall, River Raid, Atlantis, etc.). We understood that these (even back then) were old games, but we still had lots of fun playing them!

With games like these it's small wonder the market crashed. Remember, these used to cost over $100-120 in modern money.

I love 2600 games for what they are. I've probably found out about them through AVGN, and I believe the setting he'd put up to play those games made me enjoy them way more than just watching a gameplay video

Yes. People born in the 70s watch your streams. Adventure and Breakout were my jams. We played on our tube TV in the basement with red shag carpet and a bar with glitter Formica.

I grew up in this era the whole way. Atari was da bomb for Space Invaders & Asteroids. What killed it was the fact that 3rd party software was the Wild West of video games. It started with Activision (formed by ex-Atari employees not getting royalties for their top selling games). After that it snowballed with countless software publishers and a lot of shovelware was being released which caused the collapse…

Goes without saying, but having able to PLAY a video game at home in the late 70s and early 80s, utilizing only one button and the joystick, no need to worry about updates you just put in the game and play...was a luxury...

@totororaptors

5 ай бұрын

Yeah but also all of the games looked like vomit and there was no quality control Actually maybe that hasn't changed

@pareidolist

5 ай бұрын

When the game... WAS the game

@shawnpatrick1877

5 ай бұрын

@@totororaptors That's a stupid, revisionist-history, kinda thing to say. That would be like whining about the first movies not having sound and thinking that people must have been appalled at the lack of color and high definition back then. They weren't, and there's a reason why the Atari 2600 was the longest-selling console. There was no quality control with 3rd party games after a court ruled that Atari had to allow everyone to make cartridges for their system. There are a few games that people still collect and play NOW, almost half a century after the console debuted. You can't judge everything by modern standards.

@totororaptors

5 ай бұрын

@@shawnpatrick1877 sorry

@pareidolist

5 ай бұрын

​@@shawnpatrick1877I'll gladly judge everything by modern standards. The first movies looked terrible. The founding fathers were racists. Aristotle was a dumbass. I could do this all day.

One of the most horrifying moments of my life was when I bothered to learn how to play ET.... and found out it's one of the best 2600 games. Up there with Enduro and Montezuma's revenge. Almost solely due to its random nature, it's a kind of fun scavenger hunt game. Due to the limitations of the console, randomized content really helped stretch out the lifespan of a game. General tips for those who don't want to read the manual: Those symbols at the top of the screen are your jedi powers. They're tied to specific spots of the screen, to use them just go back to those spots. Crucial ones are the Force Sonar power, which is the ? mark. It tells you if there's a phone part in a hole, so you don't have to blindly jump into holes like an idiot. Another is mind control, the palace symbol, which will cause the molesters to go home and leave you alone for a while. After you collect the phone, you phone home using the space invader symbol hidden somewhere on the map (try to keep an eye out for it while putting together the phone), and run back to the landing pad tile back on the first screen. Then you win a round~ Also don't let yourself hit the ground when falling into a pit, use force levitate. Impacting the ground uses more of your midichlorians and if you run out of midichlorians you die.

10:26 Ideon, what the heck it's doing here?!

When E.T. was all you had, you played E.T. no manual, going at it RAW.

"...however, this doesn't exist and you're just dreaming."

Princess Rescue really is something special. Not only did they make a full instruction booklet and cart for it, but if you played it on a system using a Genesis controller, they allowed you to use the extra button for fireballs. (It's up on the joystick if you're playing on a normal Atari 2600 controller.) Serious kudos to the people that put the time and effort into the extra details and added bits.

The idea that E.T. is a terrible game is a myth. It's an alright game for its time, the worst sin it commits is just being frustrating to play for the first time (which can leave a bad impression on someone, leading them to believe it's a bad game). The game isn't confusing if you actually read the manual, and reading the manual was the norm for the 8-bit era, but people nowadays tend to forget that, they try to play it without reading the manual and they leave with a misconception that the game is too confusing. I think most people nowadays think it's a terrible game solely from hearsay without actually giving the game a fair shot. The developer managed to make a decent game despite being given an absurdly short amount of time to work on it, which is an accomplishment.

@Zanpaa

5 ай бұрын

People defending ET will never stop being hilarious. You even admit it was bad but hey, it was made in a short amount of time, so somehow that makes it good.

@Myriadis

5 ай бұрын

@@ZanpaaWay to twist everything he wrote there, congratulations

@WasabiKitCat

5 ай бұрын

​@@Zanpaahe said it was just "decent" not good. E.T. isn't really spectacularly bad compared to countless other Atari games, it was shovelware but not unplayable. It mainly gets it's bad reputation from how much of a let down and financial failure it was, but if you were to play it in a vacuum (with the instructions like intended) it would be like, a solid 4/10 compared to other games on the console at the time. Not good, but not "worst game ever made" levels of bad.

@shawnpatrick1877

5 ай бұрын

@@Zanpaa People criticizing it will not stop being hilarious because everyone alive at the time knows that you're just full of crap and pretending that you know something based on things you've read online. If you even so much as played a significant number of Atari games, you would know it was mediocre with some good qualities and nowhere near bad by the standards of the time. Even people who had issues with it back then seem to be those who were too young or too dumb to read the manual. Every kid I knew at the time liked the game. That's real life, not a James Rolfe skit, and even James has said as much.

@shawnpatrick1877

5 ай бұрын

@@WasabiKitCat It was also one of the best-selling games on the console. It lost money because Atari constantly made horrible business decisions and decided to make more cartridges than the number of consoles that existed at the time. They thought it would sell systems due to the movie's popularity, but even if it did, their estimation was ridiculous. Atari was notorious for bad decisions like turning down Nintendo's offer to distribute their console under the Atari brand name in North America.

Atari nostalgia

Zaxxon is normally flying in an angle and you move between spaces and shoot things in the air and on the ground. 3rd person 3D is ambitious though!

“Could you imagine all the kids who had their Atari console up at max volume?” One thing that I love about the Activision Anthology Atari collection was that you could put the game on mute and jam out to some 80’s tunes from the in game boombox. I feel like that was what a lot of kids did. Just turn the dial to 0 and listen to the radio while you play Atari.

It was Atari, everyone was ripping off each other. lol

@diskpoppy

5 ай бұрын

fun fact: Atari ripped off Magnavox Odyssey for Pong

Personally, I'd suggest Atari Antiquities for the segment name, it keeps the retro feeling alive, clearly showcases what sort of content will be in the video, and doesn't have connotations that trend either positive or negatively. but what do I know, I'm on the oregano

I know it's funny to mock, but it's amazing how some of these games, especially the homebrew, look this good when you consider the specs of the system. All it has are 2 small 8x1 pixel sprites, 2 1 pixel "ball" sprites, and a couple of baackground block registers that can mirror or repeat. Everything else is done with carefully timed code updating the screen as it's being drawn (it has no video RAM, and only 128 bytes of RAM + the ROM on the cartridge for the game itself). "Racing the beam" is the phrase used, and it takes a lot of skill as a programmer to get this all working.

My older brothers and sisters had an Atari. It's in the attic now covered around fiberglass. Wonder if it's worth it to dig it out of there.

We avoided a video game crash during the great recession of 2008.

The reason why the Atari has such poor audio was because it had no sound chip. The CPU had to do the sound and since it was already running the game and drawing the graphics you didn’t have many clock cycles to work with. Later games like Pitfall 2 solved this by putting a sound chip into the cartridge, similar to how some SNES games would feature a graphics co-processor in the cartridge. EDIT chat member just mentioned it. Oh well.

@mzxrules

5 ай бұрын

no the reason the Atari has such poor audio is that the TIA chip (which generates the audio signal) is more noise maker than musical instrument. The output frequencies you can set with the audio tone and audio frequency registers aren't designed to line up with the frequencies of normal musical notes, so most if not all sound will be off key. You can definitely still make music by setting the tone/frequency registers and have it sound good enough for 2600 standards (check my youtube channel), but it generally wasn't done then. What Pitfall 2 does to overcome this is something pretty bonkers. The game sets the tone and frequency registers to 0, then adjusts the volume register on every scanline, which in effect creates a custom output waveform. The soundchip within the game cart computes what volume to set to create the proper sound

@jb-br8bf

5 ай бұрын

@@mzxrulesI stand corrected then. Fair enough!

mEa.T.

Everyone keep calling ET THE worst game ever and being one of the main causes of the video game crash of 1983 It is... in a technical way Not only was that game rushed but Atari had the guts to make more copies than there were consoles, around the time where there so many shovelwares, clones, too many consoles, no real difference between versions and no quality control And despite being rushed and made in only 6 weeks, ET is pretty well made and fairly unique in gameplay for its time

Vinny, I would vote to call this "Atari Anomalies". Because some are good, some are bad, but all are unusual. Either way, I told my friends I was going to an 'AA meeting'.

born in 1982 and grew up playing on a 128k+ zx spectrum until i got my master system 2 and then on to every system since then but mostly a pc gamer

the robot at 10:28 looks suspiciously a lot like space runaway ideon it was almost a jumpscare

Growing up with grandparents who kept the same Atari 2600 they bought in the 80s, they also had a copy of ET. I would spend hours trying to beat the game while my grandpa would watch in the background. He never told me it was impossible, I just thought I sucked. Because I guess there's nothing funnier than a 3 year old screaming at a TV over a few pixels.

@shawnpatrick1877

5 ай бұрын

It wasn't impossible, you really just sucked. I beat it at the age of 5. There were even difficulty levels you could choose to make it almost impossible not to beat the game.

@medjedradio

4 ай бұрын

@@shawnpatrick1877 claro que sí.

Some of these games actually look pretty great considering the Atari was made to run things like pong and space invaders

I know people in chat had to know the one plane game was called "Barnstorming" but once you hear the name, seeing you can fly through them becomes a lot more obvious.

Man, this takes me back to when I wanted a 7800 for Christmas until I played the NES at my cousin's home. After than I was NES all the way. Seeing these 2600 games is a reminder of how big a jump the NES was for the time. That said, the 2600 was a big jump from the pong system my Dad bought before the 2600 appeared. Time sure does fly.

My dad has E.T on the Atari from when he was younger and it sure is a video game

26:07 I struggled to find what game title Vinny was trying to pronounce, but it was "Entombed", and it's not a homebrew, it's from 1982

Be me who bought a 2600 in 2021 and its one of those ones where if you love the history of Video Games as a whole, its neat to have but the games are just simple and makes you appreciate how far the genre has become. Obviously there were those games that didnt have the time and effort put into them but the ones like PONG, Adventure, Pitfall, and Missile Command laid the foundation for Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft and even SEGA for a short time to run wild with it.

28:50 It's completely deserved in my opinion. Do you ever see a video game commercial on TV and feel awkward? I feel bad for everyone else who has to watch it and isn't a gamer. The Playstation "To Michael" ads spring to mind. If you take a step back and look from an outsider's perspective, it is weird and sad how into it people are. I believe it's because I remember a time when playing them, or especially talking about video games in public meant you were a NERD. I like video games but I hate the modern culture of them, especially how it leaks into real life & mainstream media. When people talk about them in public I catch myself spacing out from the conversation and I look at them as nerds, even though I myself am one.

The video game crash is overblown. It only happened in the US.

I mean, that rotating gonzo head on the muppets game is indeed impressive for the atari

I’m surprised the Halo Atari 2600 game wasn’t shown off here. That game is fascinating

it's astonishing that any games ever got made for this system, given what a nightmare it was to code for

Fun video! Carrot Kingdom would have made the good addition, you ever see that one?

Vinny forgetting the Atari lore. Atari games were in fact in demand post 80's because older gamers didn't want to spend more money, and thought their consoles worked just fine, so a lot of customers in video stores would complain about no new Atari games, resulting in all of those late releases.

*"We have Sonic at home."*

I played a lot of Atari at my grandparents for a few years that and Mario 64 were the only games I had there. I played a lot of Adventure, Food Fight, and this defender game with 4 corners and each person had a corner.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

Warlord is the name. Used to have some old Atari plug & plays that I played a lot, Warlord included. Is good.

The ET game is actually so unnerving and creepy oh my god 😭

Atari Curiosities will be fine thanks vin

As someone far too young for this stuff... I actually enjoy Adventure, but you need to play it awhile (or read the manual) to really understand In fact for most of the games you'd need some guide in order to appreciate them. Some of them are really hard to figure for yourself, and even the manual was not enough - but keep in mind kids probably played them for weeks on end, especially the Adventure-styled ones, and figuring them out was part of the fun. E.T. wasn't so bad, but it came well.. very late in the system lifetime, and the falling into the pits and getting out of them was slow and pointless (it was there to convey that you lose so much energy/stamina flying up... but it could have simply drained faster proportional to the speed-up). Still it has quite a few of different mechanics, like the field being divided into invisible zones (you can see the indicator on the top) to activate various contextual actions, like the dashing, and having to manage the energy, as well as different collectibles, and the screens are connected in a non-Euclidean fashion (just like Adventure) so you also have to figure out the "hyperspace". Before E.T, its author made Raiders of the Lost Ark , which was a way more cryptic Adventure-inspired game, and it was generally well received (as well as Yars' Revenge before it, that was considered among the best Atari 2600 titles.. because it basically played like an arcade game, but it wasn't a (compromised) port of one).

0:50 I know some people are really married to this idea that we're on the brink of a new "crash" when financially video games are turning higher profits than ever and the industry is growing rather than shrinking. The only thing that's happening is some major players are dipping and/or going under, but even then the headlines don't really convey how much money companies like Squenix, WB, EA, and Activision are making on their "failures". Reviewers and influencers complaining =/= the game lost money. And for every major bomb they have a ton of wins. And even then all you're going to see is new giants start to form out of small companies. That's literally how both Activision and EA started. This kind of stuff is cyclical. I get that there's the perpetual "anti-corporate" "modern gaming sucks" crowd, but the entire market tanking isn't something to wish for.

@firstnamlastnam2141

5 ай бұрын

If I had to guess, the "wishing" is everything going so bad that devs are forced to make good games again, which, _could_ happen, but still probably wouldn't be that good of an idea anyway. I'm no economics expert, but I have to assume a crash now would be _way_ more impactful than the 1983 one.

@warbossgegguz679

5 ай бұрын

@@firstnamlastnam2141The problem I have is the "again" part. Like, EA, Activision, and Ubisoft sure, but have ALL AAA GAMES in the past decade or so really been terrible? Because nobody told me. Guess I should now hate DMC5, GoW, Doom & Doom Eternal, every Nintendo game, RE 2, 3, 4, and 8, Tekken 8, SF 6, KoF15, Dragon Quest 11 and Monsters, FFXV, XVI, and VII Remake... I hope you see my confusion. You basically have to be buying exclusively games from those 3 publishers to genuinely think the entire gaming landscape is worthy of going scorched earth on atm.

@firstnamlastnam2141

5 ай бұрын

@@warbossgegguz679 Yeah, I get where you're coming from. It's just people coming to that conclusion after being burned one too many times, I suppose. I'm sure they'll get what's coming to them eventually, and hopefully not at the cost of complete annihilation.

@Zorro9129

5 ай бұрын

Market crashes are a good thing because they clear out the slop. I don't know if we'll get a full-scale crash, but I'm definitely rooting for large studios to go under.

@Zanpaa

5 ай бұрын

Nobody thinks there will be a crash. They think the large players doing garbage like Skull and Bones will have to change their ways, and they will.

I love donkey Kong on the Atari 2600, it’s actually one of my favorite ways to play the game

I was born in 94 so i grew up playing my parent's consoles, Mainly Snes and nes but sometimes i would hook up the old atari

these are the blueprints of gaming

I had the strangest childhood. The first thing I ever got to play vidya on was my own HP Desktop in the third grade. After that, the second thing I got was my brother’s PS2. Third, an ancient Atari 2600 that somehow still worked. Pitfall and Slot Racers mofo

Back in the day I would play games that were usually classic Atari exclusives on my Genesis and NES can I say what a couple years of tech development and a few years of tech development on the Sega's part I really enjoy vintage gaming like if we didn't have block games that made us use our imagination most modern gaming would not exist

Atari 2600 was the first console I ever had, had ET, Moon Patrol and Pacman and I would play them constantly! 😊

I was surprised to not see Quadrun here specifically because it allegedly had the first ever voice lines on a home game console, even if it was creepy as hell. Though to be fair I have no idea if this game ever had an emulation for it due to how few of the cartridges exist

1:29 dude I could literally make a whole movie out of this with all of our favorite characters from our favorite games going all the way back the the Atari but it’s like set in the future and everything sucks and everyone has a vr headset thing and…

I would love to see Vin do something with a similar format to RLM but for retro games.