Basketball: Atari Archive Episode 17

[@natethefighter]

I used to bring my VCS over to friends' houses for sleepovers when I was a kid, and Basketball always remained in heavy rotation.

[@sandal_thong8631]

Kids went over to play sports games at the kid's house who had Odyssey² since they were pretty good. When I said Atari Basketball was much better and invited them to play, they either didn't believe me or didn't want to come over.

[@thetman0068]

It’s crazy to me that VCS games and consoles were still being sold from the manufacturer into 1990! Thats mad longevity!

[@Phediuk]

Excellent work digging up all those old sources.

[@sandal_thong8631]

I'd seen in another video this month the Real Sports Basketball that was never released. Basketball (1978) could have been two-on-two if the human players were on the same side, I think. It's difficult to do sports games for a joystick with only one button.

[@allenhuffman]

That computer player was so aggressive.

[@sandal_thong8631]

The more the computer was losing the tougher he got, I think. Not "when scores were close" as he mentioned.

[@sheets75]

I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention the game's cameo appearance in the movie Airplane :)

[@sandal_thong8631]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYKkoHuqZdmsma8

[@sandal_thong8631]

Too bad most people, like the two below, don't read comments to see if someone already made the same comment previously (there's not that many comments here).

[@allwaizeright9705]

It also played in the movie AIRPLANE as a gag.

[@milovanmiljenovic7666]

Sorry for my bad English, I use google translator, I hope you can understand me what I mean. I like your channel for atari VCS, videos are much more detailed and better than others youtubers with similar contents about the atari you should put the video more often to attract more subs others create a video of 2 minutes and have over 50,000 subs I think you had a lot more when you were a bit more active :)

[@mattdgroves]

Xenia, Ohio is "zeen ya" not "zen ee uh", just FYI. I am LOVING these videos. Some incredible research here!

[@AtariArchive]

Good to know! It's incredibly easy to mess up the pronunciation for all these names I've never had to try and say out loud before.

[@sharkofjoy]

Excuse me, my extended family would disagree that the Magnavox basketball's arc is entirely random. If it were, I wouldn't be able to so soundly kick their butts every Christmas. We always thought the distance traveled while holding the ball had a direct influence on the way the ball would move when released, but if that's wrong, that's truly hilarious. Our little Basketball cult is centered on a lie!

[@Flyingcar100]

I love this game

[@Phediuk]

Also, the Atari 8-bit version of Basketball is notable for featuring the first unambiguously black character in video game history.

[@sandal_thong8631]

The green (1979) and blue (1982) Logbook Challenges are slightly different. Play game 2 with difficulty on B: Pro (All-American): Win by 2, green-Master: Win by 4, blue-(All-Pro): Win by 6, Wizard (Hall of Fame): Win by 8. I think this was one of the several games I got at the same time as I got Atari (Christmas 1979?). It's too bad I didn't have the green Logbook then to record my score, as I think I was better at it when I only had a few games to play. I made All-American in 1983, but only made All-Pro when I came back to it in the 1990s, and I didn't want to write the date, then. I still haven't made Wizard, unless I did it before 1982. The only criticism I had of this game is that it's silly to shoot a basket up through the hoop, then have it go back down to score. I do think they could have gone 2-on-2 (here or in Real Sports) with each human player only controlling one player, sometimes on the same team, with a mechanism for passing.

[@sandal_thong8631]

Someone said if you wiggle the other controller you can throw off the computer player. They got multi-color characters in Superman in 1979. Too bad they didn't figure out how to do that in 1978. Of course they were still featuring in catalogs nearly all of their carts in 1981-3, instead of retiring them or updating them to be a little better and have more features.

[@Musicradio77Network]

Nice history about “Basketball” for the Atari 2600. This game was so popular, they were used in the movie “Airplane” in which one of the traffic control guys played this game which makes sense. If you have not seen “Airplane”, go check it out.

[@shawncarter7188]

8 miles turn right to heading zero-four-four

[@shawncarter7188]

8 miles turn right to heading zero-four-four!!!

[@philipneedstowrite1799]

Great video! Until watching this, I didn't have much interest in playing 2600 Basketball, but this video does have me intrigued. Unfortunately, I do not currently own any Atari hardware, and my only way of playing Atari games at the moment is on the Ps2 Atari Anthology, which for some reason does not include Basketball despite including many of its contemporary Atari sports titles. Do you know of any reason why it wasn't included?

[@AtariArchive]

I have no idea! Perhaps their emulator didn't play nice with the game, or they simply felt it was too primitive (though as you note, they still had Home Run on there). The game is playable on the recent Atari Flashback Classics compilations (volume 1 on the PS4 and Xbox, as well as the Switch and Vita collections) at the least.

[@philipneedstowrite1799]

@@AtariArchive That does make sense, now I think about it though it could've been a memory limitation? But that doesn't hold water either, with the small ROM size. I've been meaning to look at the Atari Flashback Classics, but if I'm paying £40+ for old Atari games I might as well go hunt for a 7800.

[@Pikachu132]

@@philipneedstowrite1799 Atari Vault on Steam includes Basketball, and is like $10, probably the cheapest way to get the game these days.

[@Pikachu132]

As for why the game wasn't included in certain collections, it seems they were just picking and choosing a bit at random. I was looking through the Atari Vault list and noticed that release for some reason includes Earthworld and Waterworld, but leaves out Fireworld. Having a round number of games (Atari Anthology includes 85 games, Atari Vault has 100) seemed to matter more to them than completeness.

[@yay4this]

Xenia, Ohio.. (zeenya) lol 6:09