Giving the Jakks Atari Paddle a Spin

Summary

Some things I like to talk about on this blog are “paddle” games that use a potentiometer to control the player position, and plug-and-play consoles. Oh, and the Atari 2600. Well, it just so happens that Jakks Pacific in 2004 released something that combines both of them: the Atari Paddle. It’s like they had this blog in mind. Hardware The Atari 2600 had a few different types of controllers used with it. The four-way joystick is the most famous, but second to that are probably the paddles. After all, this was an era where Pong could still be a selling point for your game; well, if you dressed it up and called it Video Olympics, anyway. You might notice a big difference from the real Atari paddles, though. Not only are there a few more buttons and switches, but there’s only one! The Atari paddles actually came in pairs you plugged in both to the controller port; paddle games were very much multi-player focused. And yet, when Jakks put out the Atari Paddle, they had both one-player and two-player versions. And I got the one player. The Atari joystick has one button. The Atari 2600 paddles have one button. However, because the two paddles are wired to the same joystick port, they use different pins; specifically, Atari routed the left and right paddle action buttons to the left and right joystick directions. While this is mostly fine, it has some interesting implications. For example, in Street Racer above, the left player mostly sits there getting into car crashes. For Pong, a game that they included in addition to Video Olympics, they had to implement a CPU player. So it’s pretty clear that this thing is not running the original Atari 2600 games. Take a look at the other arcade game included, Warlords, and you’ll also realize that this isn’t running Atari 2600 hardware at all. There may be a lot of magic in modern 2600 homebrew, but the console just can’t put out pixels that small. So, what is it? In 2004, Atari put out the Atari Flashback 1, designed by Legacy Engin...