The Atari 2600 gets no respect. Nintendo dominates the vintage video game conversation, with Sega a distant second. Atari is treated as a curiosity. That’s a mistake.
The Atari 2600 production era
The Atari 2600 (originally the VCS) launched in 1977 and was produced through 1992, with the bulk of collector interest focused on the 1977–1983 “classic” era. During those six years, Atari released over 500 unique titles, not counting variants. Many of those titles had production runs under 100,000 copies.
The first-party Atari games (those with the Atari logo on the label) are the most sought-after. Third-party Activision and Imagic titles have their own collector categories.
What’s hot right now
Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, Breakout — these first-party titles are the obvious ones. The less-obvious plays:
- Air-Sea Battle (the original pack-in game)
- Video Pinball (early production with Atari-branded overlays)
- Surround (one of the launch titles)
- Combat (the original 1977 pack-in)
- Superman (Atari 2600, not the famous 1979 comic game — Atari released their own Superman in 1978)
The variant game
Atari was notorious for re-releasing games with minor changes. A label color shift, a new box design, a “Made in Taiwan” vs. “Made in Hong Kong” change — each creates a new variant. Some of these variants are worth 10x the standard version.
The Holy Grail is the “wood panel” Sears Tele-Games version of the console itself. These were rebranded Atari units sold through Sears under the Tele-Games label. Some of those units have fetched five-figure prices.
Where to buy
WATA grading has started covering Atari 2600 games. Heritage Auctions has regular sales. The community is smaller than the Nintendo community but the buyers are more experienced and the prices are less volatile.
The play
If you’ve got a box of old Atari games in your parents’ basement, dig it out. Common titles like Pac-Man and Combat are worth $20–$50 each even loose. The rarer titles can be worth hundreds. And if you’ve got a Sears Tele-Games console, please don’t plug it in until you’ve had it appraised.