For many adults, the Atari 2600 was the first video game console system they cut their teeth on. I cherished our family’s system, and personally blame it for starting me down a path of destruction and video game addiction. We had our unit — and played it regularly — for about ten years, because our mom wouldn’t let us get a Nintendo ("You already have a video game thing!").

Among other video game "firsts", the 2600 featured some of the first game adaptations of popular movies. Naturally, these were all pretty much horrid, with a few exceptions, and these games started a trend largely unbroken to today: if it’s based off a movie, the game’s gonna be terrible.

I thought it’d be fun to dig up a few pictures and memories of some of these earliest movies-to-games and see how far our society has progressed in the past few decades.

Adventures of Tron

The only Tron games I remember from the early-80’s era were the arcade ones that tried to simulate the light bike duel. That was actually a pretty fun game, but I have NO idea what this one is or did. Looks like a side-perspective platformer. Whee.

E.T.

This is perhaps not only one of the most famous of the Atari 2600 games — for reasons I will soon explain — but most likely one of the most famous movie-to-video game ever. Back in 1982, Atari made a deal to get the rights to make a game version of the smash hit film, a no-brainer when it came to raking in the dough, as long as they did it semi-decently. Atari ordered hundreds of thousands of these buggers made in anticipation, but no one actually stopped to tell them that the game, to put it simply, sucked alien butt. I remember playing this as a kid, not knowing it was as horrible as I would later find it out to be, and it was a tough game; you had a limited amount of moves before E.T. died to find and assemble all the pieces of your interstellar phone. The only problem was that these pieces found their home at the bottom of deep pits, which you had to fall into over and over again, bringing yourself up out of them with a slow, painful levitation maneuver. Anyway, me and my brothers did beat it, but we didn’t play it that often either. It turned out that Atari misread the public demand for E.T., and the failure of the game, coupled with an over-saturation of the video game market for the time, helped to cause the great video game crash of ‘82. According to urban legend, Atari bulldozed a mountain of E.T. cartridges into a hole, crushed them and cemented over them. For petty revenge, I guess.

Ghostbusters

Obviously, this 1985 game was a second-rate version of the hit Commodore 64 Ghostbusters game, which combined a series of mini-games with basic base-building (buy more equipment, etc.). Never played the Atari 2600 version, but the Commodore one sang to my very soul.

Gremlins

Eee! Are you scared! Don’t get them wet after midnight! You’re tasked with catching falling Mogwai and keeping them from hitting hamburgers, thereby transforming into the evil Gremlins. Then you shoot and kill the Gremlins, because you’re bloodthirsty that way. It always amazed me in these games that they could make figures look vaguely familiar with all of the super-blocky pixels they had to work with. Gizmo here actually looks somewhat Gizmo-ish.

Halloween

Chalk this up under the category of "It existed but no one I knew ever had this game." I like the pumpkins as life meters, tho. You’re the babysitter, trying to rescue kids before Michael Meyers stabs them. Tremendous!

Porky's

Yes, they made a video game of Porky’s. What, you didn’t know that? Idiot. You had to pole-vault over a highway to make it to a stripper club. And you didn’t know that? Sheesh.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Ah, yes, Raiders. Actually a clever, if utterly confusing translation of the movie. Your goal was, of course, to find the Ark, but God help you in figuring out where it was. As Indy, you had a basic inventory (gun, whip, etc.) that you could use to fight bad guys and buy helpful stuff, but… again, nobody I knew could really play this game. I gave it a few valiant tries, and then gave up. This was a problem of Atari 2600 games whenever they tried to be more complex than Ms. Pac-Man — they just didn’t have the controls, graphics or processor power to do anything complex without having to really stretch and cut many, many corners.

Star Wars: Jedi Arena

Another no-brainer movie translation that dropped the ball spectacularly. While the arcade game of Star Wars did gangbusters — you were piloting an X-Wing into the Death Star trenches — the first Atari 2600 Star Wars game featured two stationary balls ("Jedi"), moving sticks ("lightsabers"), and a training drone that you tried to bat back at your opponent. Pause for a minute to let that thrill really sink in. Now pause again and realize that you’re the only person who blindly obeys website directions like this.

Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back

Now THIS is what I’m talking about! Jedi Arena blew spectacularly, but everyone I knew that owned a 2600 usually had a copy of Empire Strikes Back. It was a simple and addictive game: you piloted a teeny-tiny fighter against wave after wave of AT-AT’s slowly marching toward your base. If you let them reach the base, you lost, but then again, there was never an end to the assault (Atari taught us young gamers time and again that winning wasn’t ever going to happen for us, so we should just give it up and never try for anything in life). To make matters worse, downing an AT-AT required a crapload of shots, unless you managed to hit a miniscule flashing target on the walking beast. There were a couple of other innovations, including an invincible power-up that played the Star Wars music, and your craft actually took damage and could be repaired by landing it. Stellar game! And undeniably the first in a long series of Star Wars games that had to feature a Hoth battle level!

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

By the time this game out, few people were still playing the 2600, and this game wasn’t going to sell gangbusters anyway. A dull and confusing Millennium Falcon run at the Death Star, split screen for your entertainment.

Krull

While not popular back then or remembered widely now, Krull got the distinction of being a movie-to-game that was actually fun and well-polished to play. I wish I could say more about it. But I can’t. That’s how sad I am. Boo. Hoo.