"Good for collectors, not so good for players"

Originally designed for release in 1984, the 7800 was put on the shelf after the home division of Atari was sold by Warner Bros. to Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore Computers. Tramiel decided that Atari was going to be a computer company and not a video game company and didn't see a future for the 7800. Fast forward to 1986 and seeing the success of the NES Atari decided to dust off the 7800 as well as a redesigned 2600 to jump on the bandwagon however it was greeted with a cool reception and had a short stay on the marketplace. Interestingly enough the venerable 2600 outlasted both the 5200 and 7800, the systems that were supposed to replace it.

Controller 2/10: Somebody didn't send Atari the memo that joysticks were out and d-pads were in. The biggest problem was button placement, they were placed on top of the controller and on opposite corners on top of the controller, making it very uncomfortable to play over long periods. Later on Atari released a d-pad similar in design to the NES Max but it was too little too late. If you're playing 2600 games or a 7800 game that requires only one button you are much better off using the 2600 controller or a Sega Genesis d-pad (which works in the 2600 and 7800 believe it or not).

Games 6/10: The 7800 had some very good ports of some older arcade games like Ms Pac Man, Dig Dug, and Joust as well as some superior versions of older Atari games like Asteroids and Centipede which allowed for two player co-op action but the problem was in 1986 no one wanted to play ports of 5 year old arcade games, people wanted to play newer games with much more depth like Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda and this really showed how clueless and out of touch Atari was at this time (and would be later shown again with the Jaguar). Case in point the pack-in game for the 7800 was Pole Position 2 whereas the main pack-in game for the NES was Super Mario Bros. The 7800 also lacked the killer-ap to go head-to-head with the NES and had very little third party support. One more point that needs to be made is that most of the games on the 7800 were available on other systems so the 7800 lacked exclusive content to give people a reason to buy it.

The 7800 was backwards compatible with almost all 2600 games, which is a great feature for collectors today but in 1986 it was a feature that few cared for since the 2600 was almost a decade old and gamers were ready to move on. Just be warned that the cart slot is fairly slim and some of the third party 2600 games with weird cart designs will have a hard time fitting into the cart slot.

Collectibility 8/10: The 7800 is a good system to collect for. It has a fairly small library and doesn't have any super-rare games so it is not too hard to have a full collection. A 7800 shouldn't be that expensive, not more than $50, and the games aren't as well with most being under the $5 range. As mentioned earlier the 7800 is backward compatible with 2600 games so you can use it to play those games and not have to hook-up the 2600 and the 7800 has some very good versions of some classic arcade games so that adds to its collectibility as well.

Overall 5/10: It's hard to recommend the 7800 over the NES and Sega Master System due to a lack of good exclusive games, poor controller design, and flat out being inferior to the two but if you're a collector it's worth taking a look at due to being relatively inexpensive and some of the good arcade ports it has.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/03/05