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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Hmmm... going by this video, the Fairchild games (and controllers) were impressively innovative for the day, considering that Pong-like games ruled at the time. Unfortunately, it appears that with the Atari 2600 being released less than a year later, Channel F's thunder was essentially stolen, and rightly so because of the A2600's superior complexity and innovaton. So close, and yet so far!
Now there's a phrase that I didn't expect to see. :-)
I do think that the console's controllers look kind of interesting. I've never seen them before, sort of an alternate fork in console controller design that we didn't go down. A handle with a six-degrees-of-freedom thumbstick on top.
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (1984) is pretty wild for being on a console from 1977 with 128 bytes of RAM. Clearly some fun programming tricks were learned in those seven years.
Fun fact: altho the early (and average) A2600 carts were 4k, they could actually be much larger, such as 16k, or even 64k, as with the later "Megaboy" by Dynacom. The key factor of course was the cost of memory at the time, and with more memory, that's how you get more sprawling games like Pitfall 2.
So yeah, Pitfall 1 was 4k, while Pitfall 2 lazily only used 11k of it's physical 16k or ROM size.
I feel there's a lot to talk about in that area. Not only were the A2600 games clearly superior to the Fairchild's right off the bat, but the programmers kept pushing the envelope year after year with all kinds of little tricks & techniques.
Also, it's kind of mind-blowing to me how Mattel began work on the Intellivision as early as 1975, eventually got it out the door with significantly superior hardware specs in 1979, yet kind of fumbled the ball when it came to the controllers, and specifically failed when it came to their library of games and the 'fun-factor.'
Legendary games like Adventure could have been topped so easily on the Intellivision, yet they somehow missed the opportunity. Or a simple yet brilliant game like "Warlords" was somehow more fun than anything ever produced on the INTV, far as I know. How could that happen?
Then again, Atari sort of failed in similar fashion in preparing to win the next round of the console wars, being utterly blown out of the water by the Nintendo NES a whole 8yrs after the A2600 first came out. That pretty much killed off their whole console line, with the "Lynx" being their last gasp IIRC.
Haha, sorry for the ramble. Just chatty at the moment...
Jaguar and Lynx. The Lynx was Epyx's last gasp as well. The Epyx guys who created it were former Amiga designers, and it's a bit hilarious that Atari had to buy Amigas from their nemesis Commodore to be able to develop games for Lynx.
Oops, late reply. But yeah, that rings a bell!
Indeed, I recall reading a fascinating article about their rise & fall, along with Sierra Online I think it was. Maybe over at The Dot-Eaters or such. [link]
I don't know what it is, but these histories, what with their twists, turns, ironies, and terribly-made decisions, are downright fascinating to me.