Ever wondered what would happen if the Atari 2600 mated with the Atari 5200?
When the video game world crashed in 1983, the gaming universe needed a savior. Atari had a system in mind: The Atari 7800 ProSystem, which featured a design that was a hybrid of previous Atari game systems. It had the sleek, state of the art design of the Atari 5200 and the size of the Atari 2600 (closer to the Sega Genesis to be exact), a huge silver streak running across the middle of the system, four buttons near the bottom (Power, Pause, Select, and Reset), two joystick ports, difficulty switches, and an expansion port. The 7800 had all the right touches that made her a beauty to look at. It also featured an attractive price, about $120 dollars. The Atari 7800 would be the last system to be developed under the Warner Bros. regime. Atari really wanted to make this system right. First, the controllers.
Atari didn’t want a repeat of the 5200’s controllers disaster, so they borrowed the same futuristic design but removed the numeric pad and function buttons, made it smaller, and replaced the horrible non-centering joystick with one that would center perfectly. This controller would rival Atari’s own 2600 standard joystick.
What about Atari 2600 compatibility? No problem! Atari promised that they had learned their mistake from
their 5200’s 2600 adapter and would delight gamers by allowing the 7800 to run all of the 2600’s huge library of games without the need for an adapter or add-on!
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