It still stands out as an actually-fun game on the 2600.
The 2600 is before my time. I grew up with the NES and its library. I do see 2600 nostalgia in older generations, but for me, Pitfall is pretty much the only title worth playing.
You may find many of the Activision titles still hold up. River Raid, Megamania, Seaquest, Frostbite. There's a lot of fun to still be had in those games, especially if you're competing head-to-head.
But for my money the most fun you can have on an Atari 2600 today is 4-player Warlords with well-maintained paddles.
My vote for River Raid, H.E.R.O., and Enduro. Cool fact that I only recently discovered: River Raid was designed and programmed by a woman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Shaw .
Carol Shaw is married to Ralph Merkle, of Merkle Trees fame, used in many applications, including git, Cassandra and many cryptocurrencies (including the original Bitcoin).
Yeah! 2-player (or 4-player!) simultaneous Warlords or Medieval Mayhem are really fun, even in 2022.
After many decades I finally managed to try it out, on a real CRT and everything. It's not something you generally want to play for hours or anything like Mario Kart... but it is really really good.
“River Raid” stands out to me as the most actually fun Atari 2600 game.
Despite having awkward controls, “Combat” is also fun due to couch multiplayer. “Jungle Hunt” is similar to Pitfall but faster. I also managed to spend a lot of time playing the 2600 version of Asteroids, but I don’t know if it actually holds up.
Yep. Anybody hating on Combat never played Combat the way it was meant to be played. I treated it as the game you just put to the side as a kid because we were too busy playing Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Breakout, Chopper Command, Galaga, Galaxian, Defender, Adventure, Vangard, etc. But once you've played Empire Strikes Back ten dozen times and the fun of shooting glowing pixels on the backs of AT-ATs wears off... Combat was still there and took almost zero explanation for how to play.
Others have mentioned some other good games (Ms Pac, Keystone Kapers, River Raid, etc).
There was something about the first generation Activision games that seemed to stand out compared to the rest. Whether simple or complex, they had some hard to pinpoint quality that was just... 'good'. David Crane mentions this in one of the linked videos. "2 line kernel didn't look good. 1 line kernel was harder to do, but looked better, so we just did that". He's referring to doing more work to be able to make visual updates every scan line, instead of every other scan line. This made their games so much more visually sharp and appealing compared to what came before on the same hardware.
So the TIA (the Atari video chip) has a "delay" slot for its "player" graphics--a player being an 8 dot wide object - the CPU is supposed to program in new data the player graphics register during the HBLANK portion of the display for each scaline it's visible.
The intention was that the CPU would spend 1 scan line updating P0 graphics, then the next scan line updating P1 graphics, and by setting the delay for P0, both player graphics would appear on the same 2-line portion.
So "2 line kernels" were doing it in a way the TIA supported and providing time to do other things like check paddle status (because you're supposed to be programming a Pong game). Of course the TIA has been wonderfully pushed and twisted in ways never imagined by the designer. I think someone even experimented with interlaced 160x400 graphics.
The two-player games were all fun, the arcadey stuff like Centipede and Missile Command were addictive. My memories of Pitfall were mostly that it was repetitive and hard, but I was pretty young so presumably sucked. I do remember that things like Submarine Commander and Star Raiders/Solaris felt very, very sophisticated though and I can imagine they'd be worth a revisit.
A YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkDllyETiBA) showing the complete walkthrough where all 32 treasures are acquired leaves less than a minute on the 20 minute clock (actually 8 seconds left). Nintendo hard doesn't have much on certain types of Atari hard.
The best tool-assisted speedrun for this game comes in at 18:11. According to the runner, a lot of the obstacles, like swinging vines, all run on the same timer. This means that saving a bit of time on one room may not put you ahead (because it just means you have to wait longer for the next obstacle), but missing a "cycle" on an obstacle is an unrecoverable setback.
If you've got the paddle controllers in good condition, and a low latency screen, super breakout in progressive mode is a treat. And paddle controllers disappeared since then, so hard to replicate. Arkanoid with a spinner on newer systems is similar but different.
Probably haven't, but I'm not usually enamored with home console ports of arcade games when I can just as easily fire up MAME. I can recognize them for what they are on the hardware they target, but nearly always the arcade original is preferable.
The 2600 is before my time. I grew up with the NES and its library. I do see 2600 nostalgia in older generations, but for me, Pitfall is pretty much the only title worth playing.