Blackjack (Atari 2600)

Blackjack is an easy to learn and quick to play card game, so as a launch title for the Atari 2600, it could certainly seem like a cheap thrill that easily translates into a video game. With Atari being one of the first major video game home consoles, offering casino games at home in an incredibly simple package might have seen like a no-brainer back then, but even if you try to align your mindset with people back in 1977, this barebones adaptation only captures the mechanics of the game with hardly any of the excitement.

Of course, Blackjack gets the basics down well enough. A dealer sets out cards for themselves and up to three human players, players given two cards and the option to hit or double their bet in the hopes of getting as close to 21 without going over.  The dealer is controlled by the game itself, and depending on how the difficulty switches are set, things will be tipped more in the dealer’s favor than the players. On one setting, the dealer wins all ties where the other just leads to a round where players keep their bets, but the other setting will limit the player’s actions to still give the dealer an advantage, the player not allowed to double their bets if their current card total is too low and their number of total hits limited. No matter what setting you’re on, the Blackjack is fairly basic with nothing with a bit more depth like splitting pairs, but it likely was just an attempt to get this casino game onto the hardware rather than providing something that would hook the player long term.

That lack of a hook certainly shows itself when you see the incredibly basic way the game is presented. At the top of the screen is the dealer’s current cards and you and any other players are lined up on the bottom, the only other info on screen being your current bet, current cash total, and an option you can cycle through to stay on a hand, hit for another card, or double your bet so long as you meet the proper conditions to do so. The Atari 2600 is a system working with blocky pixels admittedly, and you can quite clearly see what card you’ve been dealt, but there’s an utter lack of pizazz to the experiment that makes it hard to get attached to the action on screen. You start with 200 dollars of fake money that there is no real reason to play conservatively with, although the game seems poorly programmed in that it has a bad habit of changing your wager amount between rounds, requiring the occasional tinkering to get it back to where you actually want it. Your max bet for a hand is 25 bucks, although you can double it on a single hit if you like. If you bust by going over 21, the game grumbles at you, if you win or lose the round, you hear your money rise or fall, with the game only bothering to celebrate an instant 21 with a weak bit of fanfare. If you hit the 1000 dollar mark the game ends at or you run out of chips completely, there is nothing to really indicate the game is over besides it not letting you continue. A little fanfare, good or bad, could at least have made winning or losing a touch more interesting, but instead the game doesn’t even acknowledge your success or failure.

It’s a thankless task, especially since you can reset easily and bring yourself back to $200 if you do dip too low. Much like other quick casino games, a lot of the thrill of real Blackjack comes from the fact that something is on the line, and gambling with meaningless points you can all too easily revert to a hearty base value sucks a lot of the potential thrill out of the game. The visceral gamble of minor losses potentially paying off with high rewards is completely absent when the only real goal to set for yourself is potentially seeing the underwhelming end of hitting 1000 virtual dollars. Blackjack does try to emulate the experience of sitting at a table with other players by letting up to three humans join in on the game, but it’s hard to imagine this hooking one player, let alone two additional human beings. Your hands are completely visible to each other so only the virtual dealer has any mystery to their play, and once you’ve got two humans together in the same room, it’s hard to justify whipping out an Atari to play something that a pack of real cards could do so much better. It would necessitate one player being the dealer of course, but there could be a lot more interaction, intensity, and stakes than the dull virtual Blackjack game they’d get if they pull out the Atari and play with fake money with no flair.

THE VERDICT: Blackjack is just Blackjack on the Atari 2600, but the designers made no effort to make it nearly as interesting as the real card game. The game is the most basic computer version you could make of the title without it just being text and commands, and while it is a functional version of the casino game, it can’t really offer anything outside of being able to claim that you are technically playing Blackjack. Your chips are meaningless, the presentation is unexciting, the multiplayer offers nothing besides a virtual dealer with more advantages than the player, and the whole affair mostly boils down to staring at a green screen and wrestling with the game as it tries to make you bet low with insubstantial chips. Blackjack does nothing to invest the player in its video game adaptation save blaring an angry noise at them if they fail.

And so, I give Blackjack for the Atari 2600…

A TERRIBLE rating. Investing a player in a virtual casino or card game can be a tough task, but it’s not impossible. Meaningful stakes, flashy visuals, and ensuring fair play can keep a virtual gambling game interesting even if real money doesn’t get involved. While Blackjack doesn’t sink to the absolute bottom of the barrel of uninvolved meaningless casino game ports like some slot machine games, it still fails to provide anything outside the very basic recreation of the game’s core rules. If you are on your own and need a dealer, it fills that very minor niche but does so worse than anything that will come out after it (and perhaps even before it). Despite being intensely dull to play, it does faithfully capture enough of Blackjack that it doesn’t really deserve to be among the worst games ever made and you still have enough control over things despite the slight lean towards the dealer. It feels more like the kind of program a student might make to learn a coding language than a game meant to be played in any meaningful way, but the student would at least get a decent grade if this was what they turned in for an assignment.

Lackluster in every way besides the generic appeal of playing cards, Blackjack had no real reason to be released as its own independent title besides to prove that you could play cards on the then new Atari 2600. It was technically sound, but being stable doesn’t mean the end product is worth anyone’s time.