It may be tough for the kids to believe it today, but the Atari 2600 unit was the Netflix of its day. It brought into the nation’s homes entertainment could otherwise only be found at pizza parlors, laundromats, the cooler grocery stores, movie theatre lobbies, middle-end tattoo joints, bus stations, arcades, and maternity wards. If you didn’t mind that Pac-Man was much less visibly round and the music for Space Invaders wasn’t as awesome, you could while away your days in rudimentary graphic fun and never have to put your quarter on the screen to call the next game. You had the whole world at your fingertips in your cartridge organizer.

Toward the end of its run, Atari got knocked out of the market by consoles with better visuals and more complex gameplay. But while it lasted, Atari and other developers were making games to suit every kind of player imaginable.

Thoreau’s Camp Out!
You get to be Henry David Thoreau, writing his classic Walden Pond! The challenge is to get your thoughts down on paper before the nearby train comes through and ruins your concentration. At the end of each level, you face off against Don Henly, who bounces into your shack singing “New Kid In Town” demanding you sign legal papers. It’s the beauty of nature as you’ve never seen it before!

Ishtar: The Game
Look, everyone thought this was going to be a hit. Atari had released its Atari 7800 console the year before, and it seemed like the perfect entertainment industry synergy. Hoffman and Beatty had never been more lifelike. Show tunes were optioned, rendered lovingly in dulcet 8-bit tones. Players get to pick which star they want to be, and then ramble through the desert in a scrolling adventure similar to Pitfall but without the challenges. If you “play” long enough, you eventually reach Babylon and are allowed to sit down. A real collector’s item. Because no one else wants it.

Clown Car
The title says it all. You are in charge of getting clowns out of a car. As many as you can in three minutes. They get out of the car and run off screen. There’s one! Now you’re another clown. Run! There’s two. What, another clown? Three! And so on. This one is also known as “Pizzahead” amongst its cult following on Reddit, because it was impossible to design anything that looked like an actual clown on the Atari 2600.

Fart!
Nothing quite makes a teenage boy giggle with delight than run up to a friend and farting at them. Each player has a stack of party pizzas, and they eat until they “level up” enough gas to go on the attack. The gameplay was actually quite intricate, as you had to run up to your friends and then turn around before letting loose. The timing was difficult, and the character didn’t look any different facing forward or backwards. First player to fifteen completed “blasts” wins and then the level changes, from basement rumpus room to casual restaurant all the way up to the deck of a space station. Initially dismissed as an Outlaw rehash.

Sartre’s No Exit
The last game ever designed for an Atari console, intended for the Atari Jaguar in 1992. This was supposed to make Atari a viable company again, competing with the flashy new products from Sega and Nintendo, but you can tell from the gameplay they knew the end was near. Three player sit in a room and debate their existence by manipulating the new abundance of face buttons on the controller to pick a series of scrolls, each containing different philosophical propositions. Theoretically, choosing the right path would allow you to prove your individual worth to the other players and thus escape the room. In reality, a bug in the Jaguar’s chipset made it impossible to win the game. The companion line of trading cards was scrapped when the game tanked, leading Atari to decades of hibernation before nostalgia and Hasbro would finally rescue the brand and market it to stoned college kids.