Atari, Atari 2600, and me
By
Jerry Jaffe
Posted: 2025-08-16T15:56:05Z
As a nerdy kid who grew up in the 70s, I cannot even begin to describe my glee when I first heard the word “atari” while playing GO. “I used to play video games on that!” Since I didn’t know what “2600” meant either, I assumed that an “Atari 2600” was also a GO move, one perhaps 2600 times as powerful as a normal atari.
The Atari 2600 was a fixture of my childhood, and we had all the games that you would expect. I wasted many hours of my childhood playing Asteroids, Berzerk, Circus Atari, and Jungle King. I have seven brothers and sisters so we would have full on, day-long tournaments in my house. Of all those early games, Circus was my jam, no one could beat me at that. If you don’t know, or remember, that one, you are a clown on a board that bounces up to pop cubular balloons. I could go on and outscore anybody. I was a 5dan Circus player LOL!
That was when I first experienced psychological warfare, since the next thing to happen would be my father sitting down, picking up a controller, and saying, “You can’t beat me!” Which would psych me out every time and he would win! Grrr! Has anybody ever tried that in a GO tournament? Just sitting down across from your opponent and telling them, “You can’t beat me,” to freak them out? I do the opposite. I sit down across from opponents and tell myself, “I can’t beat them,” and freak myself out.
After learning that “Atari” was a GO word, I began daydreaming if Atari games might also be go maneuvers of some kind. An “asteroid” would be swarming your opponent with stones until they had nowhere safe left to go. A “berzerk” would be robotically cornering your opponent’s stones with eye lasers. And a “jungle king” would be hanging from vines and jumping over crocodiles while playing GO. Of course, “Circus” is whenever a clown like me plays!