NSG's Atari 2600 Easter Eggs

[nosweargamer]

At the time of this posting, Easter is just around the corner, so I decided to show y'all a bunch of Easter Eggs on the 2600. I plan on adding more as the week goes on and perhaps in the future as well.

[nosweargamer]

Realsports Volleyball (One of my favorites of All Time)

[nosweargamer]

Carnival

[nosweargamer]

Reactor

[nosweargamer]

Kool Aid Man

Edited March 22, 2016 by nosweargamer

[nosweargamer]

E.T. (Some really neat ones here)

[nosweargamer]

Fathom

[fergojisan]

Holy cow, you beat Fathom? My hat is off to you sir. Wow.

[nosweargamer]

Holy cow, you beat Fathom? My hat is off to you sir. Wow.

 

Yeah I did and I will post a walkthrough video of it later.

However I must admit, I uses a guide for the star locations.

I just didn't have the patience to play levels over and over just to find the stars, especially since you would have to restart the game a lot to do so.

That game must of took a long time for kids to figure out and beat in the 80's!

[RickR]

Holy cow, you beat Fathom? My hat is off to you sir. Wow.

It's hard to fathom. BOOM!

[Arenafoot]

here's my Easter Egg............. 

[Chris++]

I used Scott Stilphen's map to beat Fathom back in '02, and I bring this up because, when I had my own channel and did a complete Easter-egg series, my comments on the game were either exactly or very close to: "I started out really enjoying Fathom, but by the time I beat it, I thought, 'Yay! I never have to play this game again!'"
 
It's not as if I "don't like" it...the concept, graphics, smoothness, adventure-game layout, "game world" hugeness, etc. are all great. And I always applaud originality; it's a biggie for me. I admire Fulop for the creative risk-taking alone.

 

But smoothness, precise graphical interaction, etc. are all typically superb on the 2600, so those aren't out of the ordinary. The thing is, those qualities make a lot of games feel good to play. Not this one. "Painstaking" is the word I would use.
 
First off, it has a time limit (a personal bugbear) and calls for too much precision. The half-Jousty controls should have been made entirely Jousty. These elements boost the difficulty to the level of Unnecessarily High, along the lines of something like the eight-bit dog Manic Miner: Don't screw up a single thing, or you're done!

 

If you accidentally leave the sky screen where you've revealed a trident piece, it's gone. You can make it come back, but by that point, you've used up all of the "good clouds" and now lose time for every "bad cloud" you touch. Perhaps a boundary to keep your bird from being bounced through the damn border would have made it more fun. (Say that three times fast.)

 

Still, I wish this level of giddy originality and fantastical invention weren't lost to time.

 

(These aren't show comments, Ferg -- I never see the point of writing in just to share negative opinions. The exception was, of course, Swordquest: FireWorld.)

[nosweargamer]

After playing the game Chris, I can totally see where you are coming from.

 

Here's my next Easter Egg and it's a classic:

Adventure

[RickR]

Check this out...it's from the very first issue of Electronic Games magazine in 1981.  It's a mention of the Adventure Easter egg, an an acknowledgement that there may be future ones!

 

Imagine a kid version of RickR thumbing through this brand new video games magazine at a KMart back in 1981.  I had and loved Adventure for the VCS...I see this little blurb...and immediately insist to my Dad that I NEED this magazine.  Well he bought it for me!

 

Thanks for the memories.  It took me a while to learn how to find this Easter Egg (I think the tip I needed was in a paperback video games guide book).

 

 

eastereggs-EG magazine Winter 81.pdf

[RadioPoultry]

Check this out...it's from the very first issue of Electronic Games magazine in 1981.  It's a mention of the Adventure Easter egg, an an acknowledgement that there may be future ones!

 

Imagine a kid version of RickR thumbing through this brand new video games magazine at a KMart back in 1981.  I had and loved Adventure for the VCS...I see this little blurb...and immediately insist to my Dad that I NEED this magazine.  Well he bought it for me!

 

Thanks for the memories.  It took me a while to learn how to find this Easter Egg (I think the tip I needed was in a paperback video games guide book).

 

Looks like they were calling them "Easter Eggs" pretty much right from the beginning.

[nosweargamer]

Defender

[nosweargamer]

Missile Command

[nosweargamer]

Here's the last one before Easter.

I plan to post more at later dates.

 

Yars' Revenge

[nosweargamer]

Adventures of Tron

[RickR]

Let's say you could go back in time, and you were the head of Atari....

 

If you give developers credit and a percentage of profits for their games, plus a little bio page like Activision did....would that have held off the idea of third party developers from ever happening? 

[nosweargamer]

Let's say you could go back in time, and you were the head of Atari....

 

If you give developers credit and a percentage of profits for their games, plus a little bio page like Activision did....would that have held off the idea of third party developers from ever happening? 

 

It may have delayed it and it's very likely Activision would have never existed and possibly also meant that games like Pitfall and Kaboom never got made.

 

That's some serious Back to the Future thinking right there.       

[nosweargamer]

California Games

[Scott Stilphen]

I used Scott Stilphen's map to beat Fathom back in '02, 

 

I created that map for the first issue of Jeff Adkins's newsletter, Classic Systems and Games Monthly, way back in October 1991, using my crappy Okimate 10 printer and Atari Artist (attached). 

 

Here's more notes about the game:

http://www.ataricompendium.com/game_library/easter_eggs/vcs/26fathom.html

 

I interviewed Rob Fulop years ago, and he mentioned Fathom wasn't a particular favorite of his:

 

http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/interviews/rob_fulop/interview_rob_fulop.html

Edited March 16, 2017 by Scott Stilphen

[nosweargamer]

Not a true Easter Egg, but here's the Rampage glitch.

[nosweargamer]

Sprint Master