Activision, Atari, Absolute: How Video Game Companies Once Gamed the Alphabet for an Inside Joke

Notes from a retro game designer

Garry Kitchen
Debugger
Published in
7 min readJan 5, 2021

--

Photo: moparx/Flickr

The Atari 2600, or Video Computer System (VCS), introduced in 1977, would ultimately become the first commercially successful video game console that accepted plug-in ROM cartridges, allowing the consumer to expand their library of games without…

--

--

Garry Kitchen
Debugger

Garry Kitchen is a retro video game designer whose titles include Donkey Kong (2600), Keystone Kapers, GameMaker (1985) and Bart (Simpson) vs the Space Mutants.