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In October 1977 the VCS was released for $249.95. Nine games were available for its launch, and initial sales were disappointing.
Bushnell had a falling out with Warner, so in 1978, he left. With it, Warner management introduced a new style to Atari: dress codes and time cards, ending the old Atari "hacker" culture. Bushnell signed a five-year agreement not to compete with Atari and bought his Pizza Time Theater (Chuck E. Cheese) franchise back from Warner.
Videogames started getting increasingly popular in 1979, but the VCS wasn't exactly breaking any sales records. That is until 1980, when Atari became the first company to port an arcade game to cartridge. The game? Space Invaders. Space Invaders for the VCS hit the streets in January, 1980 and was a huge hit. Many people bought the VCS just to play Space Invaders, as Warner had predicted. The future of Atari looked bright.
But that same year, a group of high-profile Atari programmers, disgruntled over Atari's policy of giving little or no credit to the creators, left the company. David "Pitfall" Crane, Larry "Combat" Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead (creators of many Atari sports games) left Atari to form Activision, a company which later developed some of the VCS's best games. Atari wasn't very happy about having to deal with this new competition (as Atari was the sole producer of VCS games prior to Activision's formation), and at the time they didn't realize that this was the beginning of the end. Other companies started to join the fray, and soon more and more VCS titles (of varying quality) appeared on the shelves.
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Atari Pinball, Model C-380, Released 1977. |
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Sears Tele Games Pong IV , Model [TBD], Released ?. |
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Sears Pong Sports IV , Model [TBD], Released 1977. |
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Atari VCS 2600 , Released 1977Click here to see my cartridge collection. |
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Sears Arcade II , Released 1982
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Atari VCS 5200 , Released 1983Often called "super console", the VCS5200 was basically an Atari 800 without a keyboard. |
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Atari 400 - Sensor keyboard , Released 1979. |
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Atari 400 - SideWriter keyboard, Released 1980??.External keyboard connected to the Atari 400 for better typing. |
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Atari 400 - Real keyboard, Released 1980??. |
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Atari 800, Released 1979. |
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Atari 600XL , Released 198?. |
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Atari 800XL , Released 1983. |
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Rounders
As I started writing the Vectrex version I decided to write a similar version for the Atari 5200 console.
At this time all what I can provide is the following emulator screenshots:
Intro |
Game |
Click on the picture for a larger image.
More information will become available once I have more to tell…
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I'd like to thank the Atari history site and Chris for their permission to use their pictures and content in this web site. |
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Last Revised: July 12, 2000
This page had been reviewed