Are you sure this is the 2600? I’m old as shit and remember when everybody had this system and it didn’t have wireless controllers.
HippieHarmonyHvn
Wireless controllers in the Atari 2600 era? Talk about gaming ahead of its time! It’s like Atari was setting the trend for tech-savvy gamers even back then. Wonder if they were as chunky and charming as those antennas suggest!
ScotTheDuck
They’re RF too, so they actually work without line of sight to the receiver. A bunch of pre-Wavebird wireless controllers used infrared (like your TV remote) and sucked because of it.
Bog-Star
It feels like something that wouldn’t be worth bothering with as TV’s were so small that you had to sit up close anyways to have any clue what the hell was happening.
photoguy423
I had a set of them. They were terrible. After about 15 minutes they’d get wonky and the direction would be 90 degrees off. So you’d have to occasionally rotate the controller in order to keep playing.
mccannr1
The controllers shown on top of the picture are the regular Atari 2600 controllers. The wireless ones were released later on. They were awful. They communicated with a receiver that you plugged into the controller ports on the Atari 2600 that had to be powered (and served as a passthrough for power for the Atari 2600 itself). So, by going wireless, you weren’t getting rid of any wires overall. The joysticks also burned through 9-volt batteries like crazy, were bulky and would glitch out regularly.
Also, most people were playing the 2600 on very small TVs, so you wouldn’t be sitting far away anyway, making the wireless use kind of pointless.
No_Examination2318
I had a 2600 growing up and didn’t know wireless controllers even existed for it.
ztomiczombie
There is even a motion condoler for the system that uses a mercury tilt swich.
viktorgraves
Yeah a lot of those early gen game systems had wireless controllers available (usually 3rd party) but they were infrared and terrible. You had to aim your controller directly at the receiver like an old TV remote or your guy wouldn’t move at all.
9 Comments
Are you sure this is the 2600? I’m old as shit and remember when everybody had this system and it didn’t have wireless controllers.
Wireless controllers in the Atari 2600 era? Talk about gaming ahead of its time! It’s like Atari was setting the trend for tech-savvy gamers even back then. Wonder if they were as chunky and charming as those antennas suggest!
They’re RF too, so they actually work without line of sight to the receiver. A bunch of pre-Wavebird wireless controllers used infrared (like your TV remote) and sucked because of it.
It feels like something that wouldn’t be worth bothering with as TV’s were so small that you had to sit up close anyways to have any clue what the hell was happening.
I had a set of them. They were terrible. After about 15 minutes they’d get wonky and the direction would be 90 degrees off. So you’d have to occasionally rotate the controller in order to keep playing.
The controllers shown on top of the picture are the regular Atari 2600 controllers. The wireless ones were released later on. They were awful. They communicated with a receiver that you plugged into the controller ports on the Atari 2600 that had to be powered (and served as a passthrough for power for the Atari 2600 itself). So, by going wireless, you weren’t getting rid of any wires overall. The joysticks also burned through 9-volt batteries like crazy, were bulky and would glitch out regularly.
Also, most people were playing the 2600 on very small TVs, so you wouldn’t be sitting far away anyway, making the wireless use kind of pointless.
I had a 2600 growing up and didn’t know wireless controllers even existed for it.
There is even a motion condoler for the system that uses a mercury tilt swich.
Yeah a lot of those early gen game systems had wireless controllers available (usually 3rd party) but they were infrared and terrible. You had to aim your controller directly at the receiver like an old TV remote or your guy wouldn’t move at all.