RetroGaming

I'm sorry the Channel F didn't do better, with its ridiculous framebuffer. They still weren't sure that video games should be single-player. They had no idea what was possible with that kind of display tech. (Of course, neither did the framebuffered Astrocade, several years later.)

But as a programmer - it's hard not to love the 2600. It had nothing. The 6502 processor has special access to the first 256 bytes of RAM, and the 2600 included a whopping 128. There's only two and a half bytes of background. Two and a half! Sprites are similarly ridiculous, with two "players" and two "missiles," i.e., two actual sprites and a pair of dots. The sprites could be repeated three times, and if you wanted a six-digit score, you had to repeatedly change the graphics mid-scanline. Really - every game "raced the beam." I'm not sure it's possible to have a recognizable video game without modifying the screen as it's being drawn. Gimmicks that would become fancy extra effects on NES and so forth are strictly necessary on 2600.