*26* Mind Blowing Atari 2600 Games!!!

the Atari 2600 was originally designed to play games like pong and tank but later games would go far beyond that and would blow the minds of early 8s Gamers so let's check out some original Atari 2600 games that push the limits of what this system could do starting with Adventure now you know Adventure is not like a graphical Powerhouse but the game itself is just incredible because of the number of of rooms and the fact that you have three dragons one bat and that the dragons all have different behaviors and also that they are doing things off screen that you have no idea what that is so to me that's just mind-blowing in and of itself but the game is also so fun and yeah your character looks like a square but that's part of the game's charm there's nothing quite like escaping the dragon finding the chalice and recovering The Chalice back to the gold castle I mean it's a great feeling when you finally accomplish that goal and plus the fact that Warren Robinette was able to code this with only 4 kilobytes of memory that itself is just truly mind-blowing Battle Zone now I suppose Atari could have gone the vector style Graphics route with this game but they decided to make it look more I don't know realistic one difference is that you are looking at the tank from above instead of inside the tank which I don't know I think looks kind of cool to be able to see the tank and you can see the Treads moving and everything plus I've always thought that the colors in the game were just really well done you get mountains in the background and the ground itself even moves which is kind of neat well I mean it looks like it's moving anyway and it's even awesome when you get hit you get that like static on the screen and everything so the fact that this game looks as good as it does and was done in only 8K that that's pretty awesome that's pretty mind-blowing here we have BMX air master and this was not originally an Atari release I believe it was a TNT games did this one but what I find awesome about the game is the fact that it looks like a Nintendo NES game also the animation is so cool on your biker it's really really well done there are three stages you have your standard halfpipe where of course you have to do all the these different tricks and then you've got this stage where you have to ride as quickly as you can to the end and try to get as many points as you can and then you have the third stage which is on this dock which looks so cool I love that little island in the background it's so awesome unfortunately BMX air Master is not a game that's in my collection because it's kind of hard to come by but maybe one day I'll get it how about Commando here's a game that you never thought would have appeared on the Atari 2600 and it's a really good version too in this case the character looks like an actual Soldier instead of uh you know like an adventure where he looks like a square but check out the scrolling and the graphics of the trees and the wall plus it's got music playing in the background I remember this was a game that I used to show off to my friends who thought the Atari 2600 was you know too old school I say oh yeah you think it's old school huh let's check out this game and yeah it would blow their minds that's for sure they never would have thought a game like this would appear on the 2600 Double Dragon is the next game that I think is pretty mindblowing the game play is not really that great but to me it's just the fact that it exists and it has so many different screens of course I suck at the game I can't even really get very far into it to show you enough of the different screens it's a tough game and I'm sure somebody's beating it out there just not me here's escape from the mind master and this is a supercharger game you had to have a special cartridge that would connect to a tape drive so that you could play the game off of a tape and these games had a little bit more memory to them than the standard games back then and escape from the mind master was the game that was included with the supercharger but what I find mind-blowing about this is how the maze moves it's so smooth a lot of games back then you didn't get that nice progression of moving through the maze it was just all a step by-step kind of process but this looks so cool that the way that it moves for those of you who have never played this game the goal here is to well at least in the first stage find the different items and return them to their correct positions so that you can escape this first maze and you also have to avoid this little alien guy I feel like I could just step on him but I can't he gets me every time also like this little bit here between stages where you uh play as a ship trying to avoid I don't know I guess those are asteroids or missiles or something I don't [Music] know but yeah I find escape from the mind master to be quite mindblowing F14 tom cat is a pretty incredible game too me check this out you're actually flying off the deck of I assume that's the Enterprise and then once you do your goal is to you know destroy as many enemy aircraft as possible and I actually have the 7800 version of this game and I've played that a lot so I can tell you that the 2600 version is incredibly similar to that one the graphics aren't quite as good but the the fact that this exists and is basically a flight simulator for the 2600 again A system that was meant to play Pong is pretty mindblowing next we have Frogger for the supercharger and as you can see this game looks incredibly similar to the arcade it also has great music too of course the downside is you would have to wait for this to load off of a tape but to be honest I I think it would have been worth it back then I mean imagine if your buddy had the Parker Brothers version and you had this one and you showed him this version he'd probably punch you right in the nose yeah I'm just blown away how amazing this version is with the graphics and the music and the gameplay it's all just so close to the arcade and I was just thinking how this game really feels like a Homebrew game that was created back then I mean today Homebrew programmers have a lot more tools than they did back then but to create a game like this for the 2600 it just feels I don't know it just feels good it feels [Music] right Ghostbusters is the next game and yes this game is not great none of the Ghostbusters games are great but the fact that this was created for the 2600 and it plays pretty much like the original Commodore game I think that's a pretty strong Testament to how good the programming is in this version of the game again the stage where you're trying to catch the ghost is probably the most fun and is even more graphically impressive than the NES version in fact I think the music is even better than the NES version all right here we have hero and in the game your goal is to save trapped miners at the bottom of the mine graph ially it's on par with many other Activision games of the time but I think what makes this game so mind-blowing to me is how fun it is also the character is very recognizable he looks like a man instead of a square and has a really great story as well something that you don't get with very many Atari 2600 games the other thing that's really cool is the fact that your character has like a helicopter pack and he can fly and there's a certain amount of gravity that is also pulling you down over time so you know the mathematics involved in getting that to work I can't even imagine and lastly I think what makes this game so mind-blowing is the fact that the stages are just so huge there's actually 20 different stages that you have to get through in order to complete the game next is icari Warriors and this is another one along the lines of Commando in fact I wouldn't be surprised if they use the same engine for Commando and iari warriors again the game is a scrolling action shooter game where you play as an iari Warrior whatever that is shooting enemies and hopping in tanks but what blows my mind about this game other than the fact that it exists is how far upwards you can scroll it just seems to go on and on and on and the map itself is pretty varied with different buildings and walls and bridges and helicopters and things like that in the game there's just a lot in this game that really makes it impressive it always surprises me when games that are far above the 20 600 in technology or ported to that system sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't in this case I think it works pretty well Jungle Hunt is the next game and what blows my mind about this one is very clearly right here on this first stage check out that parallx scrolling along the top of the screen so you'd have to manually program each instance of those vines or whatever up there and then program the the foliage in front of it how the heck was this done the swimming stage does not have this kind of Parallax scrolling but the rock jumping stage does and it runs a little bit slower so you can kind of get an idea of what it looks like I mean look at that it's just crazy oh yeah it's also here in the cannibal stage as well but not quite as noticeable because there isn't any scrolling really plus I can't even get past that stupid cannibal here we have Kung Fu Master and again we have a very recognizable character here in this game in fact many recognizable characters they all look pretty much like people the colors in the game are really really good and in fact what's kind of mind-blowing to me is that if you look at the enemy characters and your character at the same time both of the character Graphics are pretty much the same but as you can see my character is all wearing white and the enemy character is wearing purple and blue now normally on a Target 2600 games you can't have different colors on the same scan line but I guess uh the programmer who is Dan kitchen is using Sprites here instead of just regular background Graphics also what's cool about this game is that you know arguably it looks as good or better than the Nintendo Entertainment System version and I think that's pretty impressive for a system that was released in 1977 millipede is our next game and this one is mindblowing to me because of the number of Sprites that are just all over the screen here the game is Fast Fun and it's also very Relentless the mushrooms Graphics are a little weak but other than that this game is awesome so much going on now there is a quote from Dave stoas stus I think that's how you pronounce his name who's the programmer of millipede and he said something to the effect of how he had to program the code in between the jitteriness of the game or something like that I don't know I just find it pretty interesting the amount of Hoops that uh 2600 programmers had to go through in order to get games to work I feel like this is a really impressive effort here we have Mont Zuma's Revenge and this goes Way Beyond what Parker Brothers was doing back in the day most of their games were arcade conversions or licensed properties of some sort but this one really goes beyond all those now I haven't really gotten too far into the game but what I love about it is that there's just so many different screens to travel through and each one of these screens is pretty much a puzzle in and of itself so I'm checking out the map for Mont Zuma's Revenge and I never knew that it was designed to look like a pyramid that's pretty cool this is a game that really breaks the mold for typical Atari games that were just one screen I mean sure Adventure did it Superman did it but this one really goes above and beyond I can only imagine what it was like to play this game back then I never owned it so so I've only played it since then but it's always blown my mind at how awesome it is that's for sure Pete Rose Baseball is the next game I want to talk about and imagine you just got an Atari 2600 in 1978 and you have the game home run and somebody went back in time with a copy of Pete Rose Baseball and showed it to you wouldn't your mind be blown the players actually look like players and in the batting screen they're very large which which is very cool you have multiple views of the field which can make Fielding a little challenging but this reminds me very much like a Nintendo game where home run is just a boring mess of a game Pete Rose Baseball is actually a fun game to play next is Phoenix and I really love this game game it is an arcade conversion but it's so incredibly well done you start out by blasting these smaller bird enemies and later they are replaced by these much larger bird enemies where you have to shoot them pretty much in the middle in order to destroy them cuz if you just shoot the Wings off that doesn't do any good you have a shield which will protect you from the bullets and dive bomb attacks but for me what's most impressive about the game other than the fact that it's just a lot of fun is of course the mothership stage now we think of Boss Battles as pretty common these days but back then it was pretty much unheard of there weren't a lot of boss battles in Atari games that's for sure I would have been totally shocked if I'd have been playing this game just thinking it was a standard alien attack Bird shooting game and then suddenly This Mother Ship appears and I have to destroy it too whoa so having this Mothership in the game just totally elevates it in my opinion here we have pitfall to and this one is mind-blowing for a number of reasons first of all there are a lot of screens to go through and the screens with water are just so cool because of the animation in the water something that I never would have expected by playing pong on the [Music] 2600 this game is massive I want to say there's like 60 different screens in the game which no doubt was a challenge for David crane to program while they all kind of look similar they're also very different another thing that makes Pitfall 2 Stand Out is the scrolling up and down you don't really see a lot of 2600 games that scroll up and down like this but probably the biggest thing that will blow your mind about this game is the music I'm not sure how many voices it is but listen to it it's got percussion and Melody and it changes based on what happens during the game it's really something that you don't see in any Atari games before or after Pitfall outside of homebrews of course [Music] so while there are a lot of mind-blowing games for the 2600 to me Pitfall 2 is really the first one that just I mean I who never would have thought that a game like this would appear on that [Music] system here's a game called quadron and the game itself is I don't know I don't find it to be all that impressive well maybe the colors are kind of cool showing off the amount that the 2600 can display at one time but the real mind-blowing thing about the game is that yeah you know it has voice in it quad quad quad and it is the first 2600 game to have built in voice I just wonder what it would have been like to pop this game in for the first time back then and hear the 2600 talk I think my eyes would have bugged out if that would have happened quad quad quad here's River Raid 2 and this game is not really mentioned all that often in fact I think it's been pretty much forgotten and it still has the basic River raid formula where you're traveling down the River of No Return on a mission to destroy the bridges and such you also have to avoid while what look like aircraft carriers and jets and helicopters and things like that along the way one huge advancement over the original is your altitude you can actually fly over a lot of these enemies and bridges and stuff like that also what's cool is that there's a little map on the screen a far more complicated game than the original riverid but the amount of action and complexity of the game just makes it way more mind-blowing than the original here we have Solaris which I feel is one of the greatest Atari 2600 games ever created obviously it's a spaceship shooter game kind of along the vein of star Raiders or Star Trek but this one definitely takes star Raiders above and Beyond well at least the 2600 version of the game and to a lesser extent the Atari 8bit version as well I mean this one is so much more colorful so much more frantic and pretty amazing with all the uh graphical effects with the the planets going by and everything this is another game that is just absolutely huge There are 16 sectors in the game with the possibility of 54 stages in each sector for a m numbingly amount of stages I I can't even calculate that high I love how there's just so much Variety in the game you can be flying in space you can be flying on a planet you can be flying through like a corridor kind of thing and I haven't even really gotten all that far into the game there's could be even more stuff Way Beyond that one of my favorite special effects though is when you're on the planet and you can see like the crater scrolling by that's just so cool and sometimes when you're on the surface of the planet you have to rescue these astronauts before the planet explodes which again keeps the variety up in the game instead of just you know basically shooting aliens all the time so a lot of variety in the game a lot of special effects a lot of fast action Solaris may be the most mind-blowing game of all atori games here's Space Invaders and you know you might not think that Space Invaders is all that mind-blowing of a game but think about it for a minute this game is way better than the original arcade it has color Graphics it has 112 different variations in the game including invisible Invaders bases that move multiplayer enemy missiles that move back and forth I mean this one's got a lot of variety and it's a lot of fun but aside from all that what makes it mind-blowing is the fact that you've got so many aliens on the screen at once sure it doesn't have as many aliens on screen at once as the original arcade game but 36 aliens for the system to keep track of and also not to flicker that is so awesome I'm not a programmer I just know that it's pretty impressive to have that many aliens on screen at once and none of them are flickering pretty dang impressive if you ask me now our next game Space Shuttle is a game that I had to have just based on the fact that it is so mindblowing I remember reading about this game and how Steve kitchen actually went to NASA to learn about the space shuttle and how it all operates and everything and he was able to condense all of that down into a very small 8 kilobyte Atari 2600 game I mean you actually go through the entire process of launching the shuttle capturing the satellite and then Landing the shuttle again and that was all done in 8 kiloby I mean this game is so complex that it had to have an overlay in order to play it I've long since lost my overlay but I do remember playing this game over and over again and I was pretty good at it crazy to think that a game this complicated would appear on a system that was meant to play Pong I mean it's so awesome how well done this game is here we have Tapper the classic arcade game from Midway and this is one of the better arcade to home conversions on the 2600 gameplay is very close to the original even though the graphics aren't quite there they are pretty impressive there are multiple stages and I really like the shadow under the table in the sports arena just makes it look so much more realistic you know I guess as much as an Atari 2600 game can look [Music] realistic but not only does it have the multiple stages where you serve beverages from the left side or the right side or a mix between the two you also have that bonus stage with a very accurate Mountain Dew graphic in the background I always thought that was really cool oh yeah and your character looks very much like the character from the game too he's very highly detailed this one's always been a fun game to me I've always enjoyed it and I find it to be very impressive graphically and gameplay-wise [Music] our next game is called Tunnel runner and this is another game where you're wandering a maze and trying to escape essentially but it is in a 3D perspective it does have some nice and colorful Graphics one thing I find really impressive about this game is that the maze itself is randomly generated and that the firstperson perspective will also reflect that randomly generated maze it's pretty awesome [Music] actually definitely a fun and graphically impressive game for sure xenophobe is our next game and I've always found it to be very impressive how they were able to shrink down the arcade game onto the 2600 it's got a lot of different stages and backgrounds which is pretty cool but it also has a very fun gameplay element to it in fact I think it's more fun than the original arcade game unfortunately it's not a two-player simultaneous game but even without it this game is very impressive with the gameplay elements and animation that it has I mean you've got different weapons that you have to collect there's different aliens to battle and the fact that they attempted this on the 2600 is just impressive in and of itself all right well that's going to do it for some really impressively mindblowing games for the Atari 2600 what was the first game that blew your mind on the 2600 let me know down in the comments until then I want to thank you for watching take care and we'll see you next time bye-bye

Channel: Greg's Game Room

Views: 34,122

Keywords: Gregs Game Room, classic video games, retro gaming, video games, Atari 2600, Mind blowing Atari games, games that push the limits of the atari 2600, Best atari games, hidden gems atari 2600, what are the best atari games, what games push the atari 2600, Activision games, Atari Games, Atari VCS

Id: X1axqFU8bZg

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024