http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/04/conan-takes-show-to-tbs-but-he-couldve-gone-to-xbox-live/
Interesting read, think I'll have to get a hold of this book. Especially cool to remember the old days of Activision 1.0 when they were headstrong rebels focussed on making the best games they could...

Nice reading, indeed. I prefer Mattel's Intellivision anyway :-P

Ah... I had a 2600.
Second hand, worked pretty well. I was shite at most of the games though, cept Frogger.
I remember a crazy Superman game that I couldn't figure out at all. Good times.

It's a good book. I won myself a copy last year when Guru Meditation was ported to the iPhone.
Interesting you should mention. An Intellivision emulator was just released for iPhone and iPad.

Damnit, edited the wrong post and buggered the link

Aaaah .... the Atari 2600.
Anyone remember the big Video Game Crash of 1983? For those who don't, here's a story
I only got an Atari 2600 years later, in 1989, 6 years after the Atari 2600 caused the crash. I wanted a NES but an Atari 2600 was 50 euros, a NES was 250 euros so my father decided it would be better to get an Atari 2600 to surprise us. Took us ages to get it working, as well. When we finally did get it working, we discovered the free game included: Defender. Ironically, it was probably the best Atari 2600 game I played except for Midnight Magic, a very underrated pinball game. Still, we had 5-6 fun games although they were all extremely repetitive (more on that later).
Years later, back in 2000 with Internet breaking through, I found a single file which contained thousands of Atari 2600 games and I was like "wow I got to try this". 30 games later I was stunned by how crap they all were. At first I thought it was just pink glasses (since I enjoyed a lot of the Atari 2600 games I had back in the days) but then I discovered about the big Video Game Crash: the Atari 2600 had SO many crap games that the value of them plummeted and no-one wanted to buy them anymore, because there was no quality control. So of the 1500 or so games I had as roms, at least 80-90% were total garbage - not just today but back then as well. Many were almost impossible to figure out or were so abstract compared what was on the box (try E.T. to see what I mean). To this day, the Atari 2600 roms I own are by far the biggest pile of trash out of all my roms (and I got tens of thousands).
Yet there were still a few games that stole my heart:
Defender: tough but fun.
Ghostbusters: some parts of the game were never properly implemented and the end part where you get to fight Zuul is pretty crap but overal, it was one of the more imaginative Atari 2600 games.
Riverraid I (the second one less so) was great fun despite being rather simple and repetitive. Back then, me and my brother kept trying to get the highest score which is really the main reason why we were playing so much.
Midnight Magic: great pinball game with different "colour zones" which is what made is play again and again. I remember beating my brother's high score to his dismay :p
The Smurfs: the game itself is rather crap but for some reason, the graphics appealed to me despite being basic. Very colourful, great music (for an Atari 2600 game) and 6 (wow) different screens!

Gaming on the "iPhone"? Oh please... I'd prefer to hit my balls with a giant brick, I'd say....

Atari causing the crash is a bit of a myth. In fact Atari knew it was going to happen and tried to prevent it. What happened was Atari were the only ones that were allowed to manufacture the cartridges so they had a tight control on the market. Several other companies wanted in on the action and lobbied that it was un-competitive and they won. After that point anyone was allowed to make their own games for any system and you had the most bizzare people like fast food corporations and soft drinks makers suddenly making games. All too often they simply ripped off another game and did a sprite swap. The market became flooded with companies who knew nothing about making games, just that they wanted a slice of the gaming pie. This snowballed until the whole industry simply collapsed.
Queue whole bins full of cartridges all selling for 50 cent each (If that!) and the actual gaming companies collapsed unable to make money and the other companies simply retreated back to their home markets.

Suit yourself, but this is a gaming forum. You are more likely to find what you are after here.

Awesomely disgusting :-P

I'm afraid I must back KingofGnG :P the iPhone is crap for games that need actual buttons to be pressed. Great for adventure games (but only just due to its size) but crap for arcade games.

What?
Just joking.

Today i learned that there is people out there that searches for "testicle torture".
Today has been an interesting, if somewhat scary day.

*fainting*