The Atari 2600 is a home videogame console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. released in North America in September 1977 and manufactured until 1992. It popularised microprocessor-based hardware for home gaming, enabling the design of a format for games on swappable cartridges.

It was packaged with a pair of joystick controllers, a pair of paddle controllers, and for the first four years of its manufacture, a tank battle game called Combat (1977). The Atari home release of Taito’s arcade smash Space Invaders (1980) entailed major success selling upwards of 6 million copies over 3 years, with the console becoming a staple in the households of North American, Western European, Australian and Brazilian households. This led to the formation of the first third-party game manufacturers, including some of today’s giants such as Activision. However, poor management decisions led to heavy investment in licencing properties, such as Pac-Man (1982) and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), considered one of the worst videogames of all time. The subsequent drop in profits alarmed investors and led to the North American videogame crash of 1983, nearly finishing the industry until Japan’s Nintendo brought the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 to the US. The console has, nevertheless, been retrospectively acknowledged as the foundation of the game industry today.