As promised some months ago, I bought myself another of Jamie Lendino's books. Adventure focuses on the Atari VCS/2600 and the halcyon early days of the home console story. And whilst that story invariably contains the details of the US-centric Great Videogames Crash, Lendino writes, as he did with Faster Than Light and Breakout, from his personal point of view as an owner of the hardware and many of the games.
An aside for UK readers: If you're a person of a certain vintage (i.e. my age), the Atari VCS/2600 was a machine that you knew people had but you never really wanted one yourself. And before you light the torches and sharpen the pitchforks, let me explain. By the mid to late 1980's, the UK videogames market was pretty much sown up by the 8-bit home micros. Consoles were a thing, but that was because they were the cheapest options in your Mam's Freeman's catalogue. Sure, you could get an Amstrad CPC 464 or a ZX Spectrum but they were triple figure sums (albeit available for a low weekly payment), but something like a 2600 seemed to hover around the £40-50 mark and that meant it had the twin negatives of being cheap and the games looked worse than the most basic of Spectrum fayre. This did you no favours when the subject came up with your school friends.
The thing is, this was a disservice to the 2600. The base hardware was closing in to being a decade old and, for a lot of cash strapped families at the time, even the low weekly payments from a catalogue couldn't disguise the fact that the "low cost" micros were out of many people's reach. But if you had a 2600, the lack of playground boasting aside, you still got to play some cracking games, even if you were using a machine that dare not speak its name. With that, back to the review.
Structurally, the book is divided in to nine chronological sections: Beginnings, Open Worlds, Invasion, ICBM's, Pitfall, Empire, Assault, Gravity and Endgame. For each section, you get an overview of what was happening with Atari and the games market in general, then a curated selection of games from that time where Mr Lendino focuses on the most noteworthy titles. And by that, I mean good and bad, though he does refrain from having too many stinkers, a good call considering the shovelware that hit the 2600 in its middle years.
Each game is given space to breathe and even if the 2600 was not your favourite system (or if you've never owned one at all), you will find Lendino's passion and enthusiasm contagious. Once I had finished the book, I fired up the Evercade to get a better idea on some of the titles mentioned in this book. And yes, whilst time has in no way been kind to them, either graphically or sonically, the gameplay shone through in titles such as the titular Adventure, Asteroids and Missile Command. I was left with a sense of wonder as to how developers managed to get such nuanced control schemes out of what was effectively a one button joystick, and a wry smile was raised when the author related the lottery of getting a good or bad title from the bargain bins in the years after the Crash, something that chimes in very well with buying budget titles for the CPC or Spectrum, and a point very nicely noted in Stuart Ashen's book. No matter what the system, or the country, that experience of the lucky dip of budget gaming seems to have been very similar.
There are screenshots, one per featured title, but no colour. Unlike his previous books, there isn't a companion piece from another publisher on my shelves at the moment, although the Atari 2600/7800 Compendium from Bitmap Books could be a very good contender. No doubt at some point, I'll have to get my hands on a copy. Where other images are used, these are clearly reproduced with no issues present.
The bibliography takes up nearly five pages and quite a few are contemporaneous to the period of the 2600's time of the market. There are many of these I wouldn't mind reading, so there are more titles for the ever growing wish list.
This is yet another enjoyable title from the author and one that should be in anyone's Atari or videogame history library. Is this book just for fans of the 2600? No, of course not. It's an important look at the state of gaming on one of gaming's great machines. No, it wasn't powerful, or at least seen as powerful once the 1980's came along and, like some many computer/games companies throughout the history of the genre, the upper management were clueless (a judgement made with the benefit of hindsight, but they totally mis-understood the creative nature of videogames), but without the 2600, the world of gaming would be a very different place.
At this point, I would like to say that Mr Lendino only has one other book out that is on my list, but that would be a lie. As of mid-March 2022, he has a new tome, Starflight, which looks at the heady days of DOS gaming from 1987 to 1994. That will be my next purchase, as I loved reading about the type of games that you could only get on the PC back in the day. I mean, I didn't have a PC. When a colour Amstrad 1512 cost two to three times what a CPC cost, there was no chance of that at all. But that's for another time.
You can buy Adventure from Amazon here, and follow the author on Twitter here.
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