RetroGaming

I loved the 2600 because that was all we could afford when I was a kid. I liked the ColecoVision and Intellivision graphics better though. Luckily, some of my friends had both.

I like ColecoVision best, but it had an unfair advantage, coming out a full 5 years after the 2600 and 3 years after the Inty. It's really generation 2.5, competing with the 5200. But man, those arcade ports were so impressive, and the expansion module to play 2600 games made it the best of both worlds.

I had an intellivision that my dad bought used off a coworker. My first console, I've got a soft spot for that one.

Colecovision was the bomb. Couldn't afford it, but it was great!

Atari 2600 because it's the one I got to play the most and having video games outside of the arcade was mind blowing.

I never had a Vetrex but I would see them and always wanted one. Still do lol.

Not a "console" per se... but in that time frame... Commodore vic 20 or 64 would probably have been my most played games.

I only ever had an Atari, so I'll go with that.

I had a 2600 but was always jealous of my friend’s intellivision the baseball game looked better and played better.

definitely torn between the ColecoVision and 2600. i love all of the CV's arcade conversions but i also love the 2600's paddle games dearly. if only more CV games used the spinner!

If those are 2nd gen, what was first gen?

I don’t even remember ever seeing a colecovision

I had a 2600; my best friend had an intellivision.

Magnavox Odyssey 2 - quest for the rings was the most amazing game of that generation

For me it's the Intellivision with its controllers that were attached with phone cords and those plastic inserts that would customise the controller for each game.

I think we only had one game, Triple Action (although only the tanks and biplanes were worth playing).

My parents' house still has more vintage tech than most computer museums.

Intellivision but that's mostly nostalgia from the set my dad has. Pitfall was always my favorite, and I remember Microsurgery being a confusing clusterfuck. I have a few Atari 2600s and I just feel like the game play on those is boring and repetitive.

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.