Review: The Atari 2600+ is a stubbornly faithful recreation of a ’70s legend

videogameschronicle.com:

The Atari 2600’s importance in the history of video games can’t be understated.

These days, internet historians will enthusiastically explain how the 2600 (or the Atari VCS, as it was originally called) was responsible for the video game crash of 1983 and almost brought the entire hobby to its knees until Nintendo stepped in to save the day.

Putting aside the fact that this take is extremely America-centric – Japan didn’t have a crash and Europe was doing just fine with the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, thanks very much – it also overshadows the fact that the Atari 2600 played a huge part in making video games popular in the first place.

It’s now been 46 years since the console was first released, and it stands as the video game equivalent of the Lumière brothers’ early movies. Just as audience members in 1896 shrieked in terror at the sight of a giant train pulling up in front of them, so too did players in 1977 whoop with joy at Combat, its bundled two-player tank game.

Place either work in front of today’s generation and they’ll wonder what all the fuss was. The Atari 2600 may well be the shoulders atop which countless other consoles have stood pyramid-style over the decades, but in the 2020s they look less like shoulders and more like big squares.

Put a game like Adventure, Haunted House or Yars’ Revenge in front of many of today’s players, and they’d not only likely mock how basic they look (like the pesky whippersnappers they are), but even if they decided to give them a go they’d struggle to get into them.

And yet, there remains an ever-ageing generation of players who still fondly remember the formative years of the medium, and are happy to overlook the primitive nature of these games because they still remember how