Atari 2600

The Atari 2600 is a home video game console made by Atari, Inc. It went on sale in North America in September 1977 as the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), and in 1982 it took the name of its model number, CX2600.^[1] Games were sold on cartridges. The console came with two joysticks, a pair of paddle controllers and a cartridge of Combat.^[2] Sales over its lifetime are usually put at about 30 million consoles, and Atari ended the line in 1992.^[3]

The processor is a MOS Technology 6507 that runs at about 1.19 MHz. The console has 128 bytes of RAM, which hold a game's variables and the processor's stack, and no memory for a picture. Its video chip, the Television Interface Adaptor, draws one scan line at a time. A scan line lasts about 64 microseconds, which is 76 processor cycles, and a television frame has roughly 262 of them, so a program has to change the chip's registers while the line is being drawn. Programmers called this "racing the beam", the phrase that gave the 2009 history of the console its title.^[1] A cartridge's program sat in a 4 KB window of the processor's address space; larger games switched between banks of memory on the cartridge.

The first units have six switches on the front panel: power, television type, game select, game reset, and a difficulty setting for each player. Collectors call the 1977 production run, built in Sunnyvale, California, the "heavy sixer". From 1980 the difficulty switches moved to the back, leaving four on the front. The front panel carries a simulated woodgrain veneer. A black version without it appeared in 1982.^[2]

Both controller ports are DE-9 connectors, the nine-pin D-subminiature type that is often called DB9. The standard joystick is digital: it closes one switch for each of four directions and one for its single button, so it tells a game which way to move but not how far. The paddle controller is a rotary dial that a game reads as a varying amount, for games such as Breakout. Commodore adopted the same connector and wiring on the VIC-20 (1980) and the Commodore 64 (1982), so an Atari joystick worked on them, and the arrangement is still called the Atari joystick port.^[1] See Joystick for science.

The console launched with nine cartridges.^[2] Combat was packed in with most units until 1982. Sears sold the console under its Tele-Games label, with a different pack-in game, and sold several Atari titles under names of its own, among them Gunslinger for Atari's Outlaw.

In 1979 a group of former Atari programmers founded Activision, the first company to publish games for the console without Atari's involvement. The 2600 version of Taito's Space Invaders (1980) was the first licensed conversion of an arcade game for a home console and sold more than 6 million cartridges.^[3] Atari's own conversion of Pac-Man (1982) was criticized for its flickering ghosts and sold between 7 and 8 million copies, depending on the count. In 1983 the North American video game market contracted sharply, and historians list Atari's rushed releases of Pac-Man and E.T. among the causes.^[3] Later titles included Activision's Megamania (1982) and conversions of Defender and Star Raiders (both 1982).

The 2022 memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest, by Molecular Reality Corporation, names the 2600 as the source of three of its inspirations. Combat (1977), the cartridge packed with the console, and Gunslinger (1978) are the two inspirations listed for Genomic Ranger. Megamania (1982) is one of four named for SARS Invaders.^[4] Combat is also the oldest game the memo names.

The 2600's controller port and joystick are the other half of the company's use of the machine. In its 2022 overview, which the founder posted publicly in 2026, the company described the demonpore 64, a nanopore reader it built in 2020 and 2021, as having "the general appearance and footprint of a classic 1980s gaming console", with "a Db9 plug for a custom joystick".^[5] The joystick is black with one stick and a red button, in the style of consoles of the late 1970s, and it carries a badge of the company's cartoon demon, Maxine. It controlled the console's syringe pump through the company's game Maxine's Quest.^[6]

A company chatbot later said that the demonpore 64 had been "housed in a repurposed Atari 2600 case".^{[6][better source needed]} The company has described the machine only as resembling a console of the period.

• Joystick for science
• Experigaming