As I wrote in a few posts recently, I’ve been checking out the new Atari Vault compilation on Steam. Rather than talking about a specific game today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the value of the compilation as a whole, and why I’m enjoying exploring it.

Atari Vault is a compilation of somewhere in the region of 100 Atari games from the ’80s. The bulk of the compilation consists of VCS 2600 games, but there are some arcade games in there too, including the likes of Crystal Castles, Missile Command, Major Havoc and Liberator.

I’ve owned a number of previous similar compilations in the past, and have typically gravitated towards the arcade games, since they seem more “palatable” from a modern perspective than the extremely primitive-looking 2600 games. I recall growing up with the Atari 8-bit home computers, and in comparison to those, 2600 games looked primitive even back at that time when it was relatively current, and as such, I’ve always found them a little offputting. I’ve made a specific effort to explore them a bit more this time around, though, and I’ve been pleased to discover some really interesting games.

Take Haunted House, for example. This is a fairly straightforward top-down “find all the things” game with an intriguing twist: you’re in the dark. With your character represented as nothing more than a pair of eyes, you navigate around by either bumping into walls or lighting matches to illuminate the area immediately around you. A single game of Haunted House requires that you find all the pieces of a… thing… an urn? And you have to do so while using as few matches as possible and losing as few lives as possible, for this being a haunted house, it has a number of unpleasant beasties lurking around just waiting to nibble on you.

Or take Save Mary, a prototype game that never saw commercial release, but which presented an interesting twist on vaguely Tetris-ish block puzzles. The eponymous Mary is trapped at the bottom of a pit which is slowly filling with water. You control a crane and have to drop blocks into the well for Mary to climb up. You need to get her high enough to be able to grab her with the crane and save her. Once you’ve done this, you have to do it again, only with significantly more awkward-shaped blocks. The peculiar variation on the typical block puzzle formula is the fact that Mary has a mind of her own (albeit a predictable one) and you have to be careful not to squish her with the blocks you drop as she wanders back and forth trying to get to high ground.

Or how about Atari Video Cube, a really simple but surprisingly compelling puzzle game loosely based on Rubik’s Cube? Controlling a weird little man (who has a name and a backstory and everything, though I can’t remember it offhand), it’s your job to pick up coloured squares from each of the 3×3 faces of the cube and lay them down so that each side is a solid colour. To make this more difficult, to pick up a coloured tile, you have to swap it with the one you’re holding, and to make it even more difficult, you can’t walk through tiles that are the same colour as the tile you’re holding, even if they’re on a different face of the cube.

The 2600 back catalogue appears to be filled with these sorts of interesting little games that we’d probably find laughable if released as full-scale, full-price commercial releases today, but as part of this compilation, they provide a surprising amount of entertainment value — and, in some cases, represent types of games that are very much deserving of a modern remake.

My only issue with them from a modern viewpoint is the fact that 2600 games tend to end rather abruptly, regardless of whether you “win” or “lose”, and this can sometimes make victories over a particularly difficult level feel a bit less than satisfying. Still, this was from an age where gaming was quite a social pursuit — many of the 2600 games are very much designed to be played together with a partner — and so, I feel, a key part of the fun back then must have been making your own fun with the games to a certain extent; similar to how a tabletop game doesn’t automatically set off fireworks as soon as you win, neither does a 2600 game. The celebrations and victory rewards are entirely up to you; I recommend betting each other a slice of pizza or a big lump of cake on a game of Combat and see how much you like each other by the end of the evening!