I didn’t find it horrible. But it was pretty weird. The grapple section was so finicky (and failure there meant game over, IIRC). It had disparate parts that at times corresponded to the movie but other parts were just out of nowhere (e.g. the Spider). It had a merchant (or 2?) and you could buy stuff and keep an inventory. That was so fascinating at the time. I seem to recall there were pitfalls that could ruin a playthrough. Beyond dying, I mean. Maybe doing the amulet wrong before the grapple section, or something.
Figuring out how to navigate the challenges (quite literally in some cases, e.g. that grapple section) was frustrating at times but once I mastered the game I returned to it quite a bit.
There was a weird secret room! Can’t recall how it worked though.
I could never afford a 2600 (or Atari VCS as it was known then) and there was no way my parents would spend that kind of money on me, but I played it at various friends’ houses – I was a huge arcade kid, and just never found any of the games on Atari’s first console any good at all – they were just so badly inferior to arcade games.
The only one I’d pick on this list would be Adventure, since it offered something that wasn’t available at the arcade, and gave me hope that we’d one day get something that offered what I liked about AD&D at the time.
I did finally manage to get a console when Atari 5200 came out, and it was clearly the best little machine of the pre-Nintendo era. Although it didn’t ever succeed in offering an RPG or similar adventure, it did have the first space sims (well, at least Star Raiders, one of my favorite games ever), arcade adaptions that at least started to resemble the original games, and some other great original games (Dreadnought Factor, Miner 2049er). But it was a commercial bust and had those defective soft button controllers that all busted.
I’ve never been tempted to get one of those Atari 2600 nostalgia machines because the games were terrible, but I was always saddened that the 5200 never got one.
There were a lot of good 2600 games, if you accept the basic simplicity and the crude graphics. Warlords is basically perfect, for example. The vast majority are unplayable now but the cream is still good fun.
This was my first utter videogame disappointment/call back to reality. As a little fan of the arcade game, witnessing the Atari version was crushing, to me, the same way what the Pac-Man fans must have felt.
It is funny, because overall, I had the reverse approach to arcade games - which might have been because the machines here were so badly maintained: the controls in the arcade were often horrible, while even with that cheap microswitch-less Atari stick, a lot of the Atari good games felt very snappy. Visually and aurally though, there was just no comparison to be made.
