Atari 2600

Released in 1977, the Atari 2600 is the machine that dragged video games out of the arcade and into the living room. It didn't invent the swappable cartridge (Fairchild's Channel F had beaten it to that the year before), but it was the 2600 that turned the idea into a mass-market phenomenon. Earlier consoles could only play the handful of games built into them; the 2600 would play whatever Atari, and before long anyone else, cared to release. Buy the console once, then keep buying games for it forever. That simple idea built the entire games industry, and we're still living in it.

It was also, by any sane measure, a nightmare to program. The hardware was so basic it couldn't even remember what was on the screen, so developers had to draw the picture line by line, on the fly, frantically keeping pace with the television's beam as it swept down the tube. Coaxing anything playable out of it took real ingenuity, and the programmers who managed it became legends.

The magic moment arrived in 1980, when a home version of Space Invaders had people buying a 2600 simply to play it: the first time a game sold the console rather than the other way around. Pitfall!, Adventure (which hid one of gaming's very first Easter eggs), Yars' Revenge and a hundred others followed, and an upstart called Activision invented the very idea of the third-party games studio. Then it all came crashing down. By 1983 the market was drowning in dross, the notorious E.T. cartridge chief among it, and the bubble burst spectacularly. Yet the 2600 simply refused to die, selling tens of millions and soldiering on into the 1990s: the grand old survivor of the console age.