Collection essentials #25: Video Olympics (2600)

 

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of a super old game called Pong, which was made by Atari and released in 1972. Pong wasn’t the first ever video game, and it wasn’t even the first arcade game, but it was the industry’s first commercial success. And it’s not hard to see why. It’s a very simple game that’s super easy to describe. One player controls a thin rectangle on one side of the screen, the second player controls one on the other side, and they hit a little dot back and forth hoping to squeak it past the other player to score points. It was super simple, easy to understand and play immediately, social due to being two players, and it was addictive.

By the time the Atari 2600 came out five years later, in 1977, Pong wasn’t so fresh and new anymore, and it was probably a bit too simple even to even be an Atari 2600 game ported directly. But Atari brilliantly took Pong and its concept and expanded it greatly as one of the launch titles for the 2600, resulting in Video Olympics. You can play straight-up regular Pong as one of the game modes, but there is SO much more here! There are various Olympic sports that get their own interpretation of the Pong concept, such as volleyball, basketball, soccer and hockey. There are literally SEVERAL DOZEN game modes, and it’s true that each one may not last you a real long time, but with so many, you and your friends can be at it for a while.

Another thing impressive about this game is that it supports FOUR PLAYERS. This is because the paddle controller, which this game uses, comes with two knobs built in, so with two paddle controllers, you’ve got four knobs for the four players to use. This is really impressive to me because four-player simultaneous action was not common at all to begin with and didn’t become the norm until the Nintendo 64 came out in 1996 with four controller ports! And this is literally one of the oldest of the old games in my whole collection!