I’m back!  Yeah, it’s been a while, I know.  Long story short, I’ve had a string of issues in real life and with my computer that’ve prevented me from really devoting much time to this thing I have going here, but hopefully all of that is behind us now and we’re ready to rock and roll once again!  Hopefully I still have some readers left after that unexpected hiatus…

…and hopefully I’ll have some left after this article, in which I blow up one of the most widely-held beliefs in the retrogaming world:  That the Atari 2600 versions of E.T. and Pac-Man are the worst games of all time.  I’ve said time and time again that those two cartridges are no more the worst games of all time than Plan 9 From Outer Space is the worst film of all time.  And just as any fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 can rattle off a laundry list of cinematic dreck that makes Plan 9 look like Citizen Kane, so too can an ardent student of video gaming lore, such as myself, easily make the claim that E.T. and Pac-Man aren’t even the worst 2600 games of all time!  I have, in fact, made this claim many times over the past few years, but have never been able to back up my claim by naming names, always saying I’d get around to it “someday.”

Ladies and gentlegeeks, “someday” is today.

What follows the page break is a relatively in-depth discussion, or at least as “in-depth” as these games can get (or deserve), of my personal bottom-ten list of cartridges for the legendary Video Computer System.  And I can personally assure you that not a single one of them will include the likes of a greenish alien searching for telephone pieces in tar pits, or blocky yellow discs munching blocky lines in blocky mazes while avoiding blocky ghosts!  The 2600 library is so large, and so filled with garbage, that there are easily games out there that are plenty worse than either of those high-profile disasters.

And so, at great personal risk to my mental health, I embark on a journey to disprove this long-held myth of gaming.  Wish me luck, I’m gonna need it to get through all this…

DISCLAIMER: In the interest of fairness, I am limiting myself to titles that were commercially and professionally released during the 2600′s primary lifespan, 1977-1990.  No homebrew, prototype or unreleased games are included, as more often than not such games need to be graded on a curve.  My list is also constrained only to those games which I have actually played, at one time or another, on the original Atari 2600 hardware.

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