back Old Atari Games

The good old Atari games of the seventies and eighties are worlds apart from today's modern video games. A single joystick button and control stick meant you were somewhat limited but this also made the games easier for beginners to pick up and play. The Atari was very usable compared to a personal computer and games often lasted minutes instead of hours or days. Many of today's games are highly complex by comparison. This manifests itself in the fact that you often have to spend time in training sessions or tutorials just to learn how to play. The old Atari games were generally quick to get up and running and complete (win or loose).

Are modern games better? The game controllers have become more comfortable. The graphic detail and sound capabilities of modern gaming hardware allows for a more complex gaming environment in which people from all over the world can participate in. However, old Atari games quite often contain a fundamental, ageless presence of entertainment sadly missing in many modern games.

With less than half a dozen hardware screen objects (known as player missile graphics, or sprites) and a playfield resolution typically no more than 40 pixels in width, old Atari games certainly were constrained in their ability to express. Two channels of sound and a CPU with a clock frequency thousands of times less than today's computers forced players to fill in the gaps with their imaginations. Atari helped this along with large quantities of artistic renderings of the games that far outshone the game's in-play imagery. Despite all of this, don't underestimate all of the old Atari games. There are many which remain as fun today as they were back in the day.