Yeah, I vividly remember how psyched I was to get Donkey King for Christmas in whatever year that was. '82? '83? Whatever. You can imagine what a goddamn letdown it was. My parents were the kind of people who thought one cartridge should keep us entertained for the entire interval between Christmases, so I ended up beating those two crappy levels a million times anyway.
Suck.

Dan, at least it wasn't the E.T. game, right?

I could have dealt with the insanely mediocre game play of PAC-MAN

I could have dealt with the insanely mediocre game play of PAC-MAN if it wasn't for the air raid siren quality of every sound of the game. Seriously painful.

if it weren't for the air raid siren quality of every sound of the game.

Pooyan has the Defender video.

My gradfather loved to play the 2600 Pac-Man. This was even many years later. He didn't like arcade games or anything, just the 2600 Pac-Man. Since he could play forever on it, I think it was a type of meditation.

I owned an Intellivision. Always kinda felt sorry for my friend with 2600s -- mainly because of crap games like these.

I remember being irritated as a kid by the fact that Mario changed into a brown pulsing blob (wearing pink shoes) everytime he climbed a ladder. That and the fact that the kid down the street had a ColecoVision and therefore a DonkyKong that looked like DonkeyKong.

Since when has Atari been considered an 8-bit system?

I always felt ripped off with the Atari version of Asteroids. I realize that raster graphics are a lot klunkier than the vector graphics of the arcade game, but for fuck's sake, at least make the asteroids EXPLODE when you hit them instead of deflate like a Goodwill basketball.

If only you'd skipped the 2600 and gone for the 5200... Arcade quality games and a totally sweet design. I still pull it out and play it every once in a while, although my controllers are starting to dry rot.

this list shows that the technology from aracade to the console was still so infant that when it came to tranfering games like burger time to the console the results turnd out to be less then expected. and donkey kong for the 2600 hundred wonder what the reaciton was of the execs who saw the final product.

Jesus.

I'm glad we all grew up and quit playing stupid video games that are just pure shit.

Well, back to Twilight: the Video Game

@rasmodeus, at first I read that as "...I think it was a type of mediCation."

/funny either way

2600 Double Dragon anyone?

http://beeteedee.com/wp/?p=29

@Not BTD
I remember Double Dragon. I was so excited and then so disappointed. I also found it insanely hard back then.

What about the 2600 California Games? Talk about a horrible port.

Come on. Are you really complaining about the graphics on the Atari 2600? That's like complaining that a cat won't play catch with you like a dog will. The Atari 2600 has crappy graphics. That's just a fact of life. It was released in the 1970s for god's sake.

If you want to complain about the gameplay or the dissimilarity to the arcade version, fine. But leave the graphics quality alone. It's like picking on a retarded kid.

Was anyone unfortunate enough to play the 2600 version of Double Dragon? Punching was useless and kick-spamming was the only way to defeat your enemies. Plus there was a glitch were you could stand a few pixels away from the left side of the screen and the enemy would NEVER cross it. Just stand there and kick away.

You said it Brassgerbil - the Intellivision ruled.

Rasmodeus, you could not play the pac-man for any significant length of time though. I played my sister once for 5 hours straight, whereby on my last man when I was about 20 points away from her score, my pacman fell through the screen into a ghost on the bottom of the screen. Then the A/c adapter blew. I think I must have gone through 10 of those things.

I remember getting 2600 Pac Man as a kid for Christmas. I loaded that thing up, played it for the first time and... loved it, because I was a stupid kid, I didn't know any better and I was playing motherfucking Pac Man at home, far from the clutches of the drug dealers and child molesters that stalked the NJ arcades. Ah, good tims.

Glad I had my childhood in the nineties, whereby my first christmas videogame story consists of me playing super mario world for the snes all day long :)

I did miss out on Yars' Revenge though

@ Hypersapien
Not really disagreeing with your response but my cat totally plays fetch like a dog.

@Hypersapien: Why not hold the 2600 to the higher expectations it met in other games? Sure, the graphic ability was awfully limited, but there were a lot of games--many of them by Activision--that were able to make good-looking games. Hell, if the relatively impressive-looking Ms. Pac-Man was able to be produced without an increase in the technology of the unit itself, it seems like a fair criticism to say that the graphics of the original sucked complete ass.

Funny, I rather enjoyed some of the games on this list....Amidar was addictive as crack. Of course we expected a lot less from our video games back then.

Yep, that's about every crappy port I would have said.

Gee...let's judge games on a console from 1982 based on the technology of 2009! There was nothing wrong with most of htese considering the extreme limitations of the system.

If you don't see the huge difference between console versus arcade in 2009 versus console versus arcade in 1982, you have no business writing about video games. Not even for a silly blog.

I had the Odyyssey II and remember that system's Pac-Man rip-off, K.C. Munchkin. They had to stop making it because of the blatant copyright infringement. I have my original copy somewhere......

...wonders if Lakawak read the article at all before commenting...

The Pac Man was so disapointing, not round and he would weirdly flicker on and off or disappear.

Here's my theory: these games (especially the super-popular Donkey Kong and Pac-Man) were crappy ON PURPOSE.
Why? So the home video game market didn't compete with the arcade game market. Think about it: if you had a picture-perfect replica of Pac-Man at home, why go to the arcade?
You can't honestly tell me that the programmers of the 2600 didn't know all kinds of tricks and "hacks" around the limitations of the system. Sure, the graphics might be hard to duplicate (or maybe not), but the game-play of games like Pac-Man shouldn't be that hard to duplicate. So, my theory is that the game companies and programmers deliberately made crappy versions of arcade games to prop up the arcades.

This is kind of the argument now, about DVD's and home theater systems: why go to the theater when you can watch a picture-perfect movie with your 72" projection system.

And as a follow-up: I wonder if we were all a little less demanding of home video games back then. Pong was only a few years old, Intellivision was new, so did we really expect a picture-perfect recreation of our favorite arcade games?

Nowadays, if a soldier in the background of "Halo 4" doesn't fall to the ground with exacting physics and gravity, people write complaint blogs about it!

i was shocked the first time i scoped out the internet for atari games and lists and i saw how much everyone hated pac-man. i played that game a lot when i was three and i loved it. it was better, to me, than that game i played where the tanks fought. then hit the button to switch modes and it's still tanks. hit it about four more times, now there's one tank?

I think we're being a little too critical here. This was the late 70's / early 80's. If you were LUCKY you had cable TV. I was 9 and had a freakin' gaming system in my house with big name arcade games. It's hard to complain considering this was the starting point of what would become a culture. Compared to the features of the first home PCs and cell phones, I think we had it pretty good.

That was like what, twenty years ago? Talk about a more recent console for Christ's sake.

When I was a kid I loved my 2600 more than both Jesus and Satan, but I can affirm without hesitation that some games were WAY better than others. The ones on this list do indeed show a distinct lack of either a.) effort, or b.) skill on the part of the programmers. Back then there were some geniuses who could get the absolute most out of 4 kilobytes. And there were some who were just grinding code for pizza money.

Always remember, "Yar's Revenge" and "Pac Man" run on the exact same hardware.

I'll say what I said at FARK:

Just an interesting fact here, to put things in perspective.

The total size of EVERY Atari 2600 game *combined* (including the naughty ones) is 3.11 megabytes.

Considering that most of these ports managed to fit their content within 4 KB, they're pretty good ports.

Bear that in mind when tearing down the 2600 games; The biggest 2600 VCS game was 32 KB (Fatal Run), but most were 4 KB. A few were as in the 8 KB or 12 KB zone, and there were a rare few that managed 16 KB. A fair number of them were only 2 KB.

Let's see any developer make a halfway entertaining game on 4 KB today.

Burgertime and Donkey Kong looked and played GREAT on my Colecovision
Good times.

I still have my Atari 2600 and about 20 games and I still fire it up and play it often

Jess
www.privacy-stuff.be.tc

I can remember having Pac-Man on the 2600 for about a week. After that time a friend at school had a hand drawn copy of the screen with a pattern that you could do and clear the board every time without dying. I quickly memorized it and then made "the circuit" to all my other friends houses amazing them at my Pac Man "skill". I also remember having my mom and dad drive me 20 miles to a friends house to borrow his Donkey Kong that had just came out that week. Just the fact that he loaned it to me made him the best friend ever. I can still remember that drive home to this day, one of the most exciting moments of my early childhood..

The 2600 Rules!

Bump for coleco... the graphics were great. Even 'Turbo' looked arcade.
Instead of pitfall we had Cabage patch kids. And Smurf's "big boss" style setup involving Gargamel was great practice... for Megaman later on NES.

I always thought the barrels in Donkey Kong look like Honeycomb's cereal. "Honeycomb's big...yeah yeah yeah! It's not small...no no no! Honeycomb's got...a big big bite! Big big (taste/crunch) in a big big bite!"

Man, put those things in milk and they got really squishy really fast.

Not all atari 2600 games are bad. But there are some really bad games like the ones on the list. They actually make me cry.

I always felt sorry for kids with a 2600.
Glad my Dad got me the ColecoVision, it had the best home graphics of the early 80s. It even had a 2600 add-on if you wanted to play 2600 games.

I made my mom stand in line at the toy store for 2 hours so she could get her hands on Pac Man for Atari. Masking my disappointment at how badly the game sucked was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do.

In a way, Atari can't be blamed - in fact, I'd argue that it's because of Warner's stupid buttoned-up corporate attitude that real progress in gaming happened on the 2600. The progress started with Activision, a company formed by ex-Atari employees. After seeing many of their games sell in the hundreds of thousands (or even millions!), the programmers asked for a raise. Ray Kasser was rumored to have said that they were worth no more to him than the people packing the cartridges in boxes!

The result was a company formed to push the 2600 to it's utmost limits. Battle Tank, Enduro, Frostbite, Pitfall I&II and a slew of other games EMBARRASSED Atari into having to produce quality again. In doing so, Atari got to sell their machine WAY past it's prime. Think of any other game console whose lifespan stretched across three decades!

Atari did return with some pretty incredible games - once they had competition: Ms.PacMan was simply amazing. One wonders why it took so long. The truth is, no one really knew the 2600 had it in it until someone was motivated enough to try.

I grew up with the Atari 2600, and to me, the 2600 version of the Pac-Man sound effects are not only the canonical Pac-Man sound effects, but they are the canonical sound effects of the Atari 2600 itself. Sure, we had other games--but those ones stood out.

And I liked them...I was like three years old though... But they still bring back happy memories...

I actually liked the 2600 version of Pac Man, and those sound effects bring back so many memories...

Circus Atari is still one of my favorite games...

I can't believe Superman didn't make your list. I remember being so confused by that game as a kid.

Superman wasn't a port, was it?

But that's okay--most of the posters on Fark and Digg didn't get that distinction either...

lol i remember going to my friends house to pllay some of those at that time it was the most awsom thing around and was completely oblivious the fact that it was a crappier version of the arcade, heck it was Video Games AT HOME!!

then of course nintendo came out and well atari just didn't cut it anymore. but i had my nintendo while my friend was stuck with atari. and wow that was almost 30 years (not 20 btw) ago. btw who can forget Smash Brothers. (mario bros. before it was mario bros.)

Ms. Pac Man was better than Pac-Man because the cartridge itself had more memory in it, making it cost a lot more to manufacture.

Keep that in mind when assuming all the games ran on the same 2600 hardware. The cartridge hardware varied, and making things more expensively meant they wouldn't sell.

Pacman is definitely #1 on this list by a million. That game was just horrible and broke the hearts of millions of gamers world wide.

2600 Double Dragon anyone??

@MartinVan - I loved my coleco vision! :D Good times for sure!!

I don't know--2600 Congo Bongo looked pretty impressive to me. It beats the hell out of 2600 Donkey Kong!

But Pac-Man definitely is No. 1.

And who the hell let Defender get released when the goddamn ship disappeared when you fired?!?!?