**Parker:** Not really, because it was Atari and was state of the art back then.
**Bobby:** And because people were stupid and liked addictive games. People were like, “Wow—such good graphics! I mean, they got a dot with a key. Woooo!”
Via Jason Kottke [1], “Child's Play II [2]”
[Atart 2600 Football] [3] Guess the kids really didn't like the Atari 2600 Adventure game [4]. Growing up, my friend Hoade had that game and we played for hours walking around (as far as a large square dot can “walk”) slaying the [DELETED-ducks-DELETED] dragons and even finding the invisible dot.
Loads o' fun I'm telling you.
My absolute favorite Atari 2600 game, in terms of “my god this is so horrible I can't stop rolling on the floor, laughing so hard I can't breath and my side–my god does it hurt—I'm dying here” has to be the Atari 2600 Football game [5] (which my friend Bill owned). The entire field on the screen (and given the low resolution of the system, that's a mightly small field), eight players (four badly flickering blobs per side) and a square dot for a football. Once thrown, you could control the football, moving it left and right as you tried to navigate it around your opponent's men (who tended to move offscreen as if going for hotdogs and beer) to one of your own (who tended to move offscreen at the other end for hotdogs and beer).
Popping that cartridge in was good for a solid hour of side splitting laughter it was that bad.
Kids today just don't know what they're missing.
[1] http://www.kottke.org/remainder/04/12/7179.html
[2] http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3137498
[3] /boston/2004/12/26/atari.2600.football.gif
[4] http://www.atariguide.com/0/068.htm
![[3] /boston/2004/12/26/atari.2600.football.gif](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2004/12/26/atari.2600.football.gif){kind=link}