Atari 7800+ Review: The Most Pure Plug-and-Play Console Experience Ever

The Atari 7800+ is the most pure gaming experience I’ve had from any device in a long, long time. I don’t have nostalgia for the original console, which came out in 1986, eight years before I was born. Yet, using it evokes a feeling beyond nostalgia. Playing old cartridges—both Atari’s new re-releases and 40-plus-year-old original titles—on a modern screen, I’m reminded just how necessary work like the Atari 7800+ is for allowing more people to experience gaming history.

When was the last time I ever needed to blow into a cartridge? It must have been more than 20 years ago when I last used the Nintendo 64. Nowadays, the only cartridges you’ll find are for the Nintendo Switch, and they’re practically as small as an SD card. Hell, even that is considered archaic by modern standards. The endorphin hit I get from the tactile feel of slotting in a 7800 game is not to be overstated. You can get these games easily online and emulate them with ease, but the 7800+ makes things easy for both the modern gamer or nostalgic millennial.

The $130 Atari 7800+ isn’t a console remix. Unlike the upcoming Analogue 3D, an FPGA-emulation N64 redux, it does not sport any additional launcher where you can get achievements or use to take screenshots. Instead, it uses open-source emulators Stella and ProSystem to match the hardware on the original 7800, which makes the cartridges playable on a modern screen. There’s no extra system for saving states and no built-in Bluetooth or WiFi connectivity. At 80% the size of the original 7800, the 7800+ is a small, black box with that classic 80s-style rainbow gradient that you hook up to a TV, plug in a controller, slot in a cartridge, and go to town.

It’s as pure an experience as you can get in today’s modern age without going out and buying a used console and a TV to hook up the age-old RCA cables. This version of the Atari 7800 uses HDMI and can support both widescreen and 4:3 aspect ratios. Still, the console doesn’t modify each cartridge to make each game fit your exact screen dimensions. Text in some games looks blown out to the expanded size, but it’s far from unplayable.

It’s so low-key it doesn’t even include a charging brick, just a USB-C to USB-C wire. Atari sent us their “VIP kit” that packs every re-release and first-time official cartridge the company sells for the 7800+ at $30 a pop. The box has a console, a single wireless thumbstick controller, and a copy of Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest. You may find the original console with more controllers and games for around $50 less through resellers on eBay or potentially at your local retro games shop.

However, those consoles don’t benefit from easy HDMI connectivity or the simple yet effective improvements to the 7800’s minimal UI that make switching cartridges easy and intuitive. The wireless controllers are easy to pair and feel clicky and responsive, even when the rough, rectangular plastic feels quite old-school.

Atari’s biggest improvement to the 7800 is its new game selection. It’s a great sign when a legacy publisher works with community developers to bring playable cartridges of ports and homebrews to the new system. These games may not be great—some aren’t even fun beyond their novelty—but they’re a piece of gaming history and deserve to be capable of playing on a modern TV.

The Atari 7800+ is exactly what we wish a company like Sega or Nintendo would do with its own legacy of systems. We don’t need another faux console like the NES Classic or SNES Classic, which merely plays a limited selection of past greats. We want a console that will legitimately play old cartridges. If Nintendo packaged up an NES rerelease that could play old and newly made cartridges, it would be a boon to players and preservationists alike.

Atari 7800+ Review: Setup and Controls

Out of the box, the Atari 7800+ is as simple as they come. There’s a port apiece on the back of the device for power and HDMI. You’ll also find a manual switch on the back for entering the widescreen, 16:9, or 4:3 aspect ratios. There’s a power, reset, pause, and select button. Once you plug it in, you basically don’t need to do any other setup. Once your TV is on the correct input, slotting in a cartridge will take care of the rest.

You can switch between the two aspect ratios on the fly, even in a game. This benefits certain titles that rely on you reading text stretching across the screen. In a game like Asteroids Deluxe, the wider display is actually a little more beneficial, as you have more runway before you teleport from one side of the screen to the other.

The wireless controller that comes with the 7800+ doesn’t connect directly to the console. Instead, it connects to a dongle you plug into the console. This takes very little time, even if the ports on the console feel more squishy than snappy. The rectangular controllers only have two buttons and a joystick. Playing the games with the system’s Rockchip 3128 SOC was fast, and I didn’t spot any issues with off-colors or glitches.

That stick screws off in case you want to use the pure D-pad, but even with it on, everything felt very snappy. The large buttons have a very old-school feel without relying on ancient switches. Even during lengthy sessions, I didn’t feel my hands cramping against the squared-off plastic. It feels solid in that kind of way that old folk like to say, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

The 7800+ is also compatible with Atari’s other retro controllers and anything from the days of the 2600 or 7800. I plugged in an actual retro Joystick controller to test it, and yes, it definitely works. What’s great is having all the peripherals together; none of them looked out of place.

When using those older controllers, you realize just how stiff the original joystick controller’s button is, and the knob itself doesn’t have as much give as you might expect just looking at it. Atari put some effort into making these controls comfortable for modern gamers. If you truly want to be as close to the original experience as possible, you’ll find some of these OG controllers for at or less than the price of Atari’s new Cx40+ joysticks.

Some may wish the console had extra amenities, like switching aspect ratios without having to reach behind it. However, there are benefits to these limitations. This console is aping the old design down to the small details. It came from an age that required you to stand up and swap cartridges. When you change the original for the sake of quality of life, you also detract from its verisimilitude.

Atari 7800+ Review: Games and Playability

The presentation is very, very retro. Each re-released game comes with its own slipcase, instruction manual, and flatpack box you need to construct yourself. You can play most of your old games, though the actual list of official 7800 is relatively small. The vast majority of the Atari 2600 should be playable, although we couldn’t possibly test every game Atari claims is playable.

Like the original console, the 7800 redux is compatible with most Atari 2600 games. That includes all the titles Atari released for last year’s 2600+ console, plus the upcoming RealSports collection, Caverns of Mars, and Adventure. You may struggle to get some of these older boxed sets with them being sold out, but I took a little trek to my closest retro shop in Manhattan and found a few games available to play, even if most of them were copies of Baseball.

For our review, Atari sent us a copy of classic games like Ninja Golf and Fatal Run. Several other games required extra TLC before they could come to the 7800+. Atari worked with a minor legend in the homebrew Atari scene, Robert DeCrescenzo, to bring us Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest. He also provided work to bring Bounty Bob Strikes Back! from the Atari 5200 to the 7800. Alongside all that are Asteroids Deluxe, Space Duel, and Frenzy.

I’ve always wanted to play Ninja Golf, and it’s truly as difficult and zany as I imagined. The text looks fine on a widescreen setup, and the controls are responsive as you try to dodge marauding ninjas and groundhogs. Fatal Run was the last game Atari ever released for the 2600, and its place on the 7800 cements it as a truly interesting vehicle combat game that somehow feels as novel now as it likely did back in the day.

Both those games play fine at the 16:9 aspect ratio. Even Frenzy plays fine at widescreen, but other games are better if you switch to 4:3. Even a game like Space Duel (a more colorful version of Asteroids) may look a little too squashed when set on the larger screen setting.

Bounty Bob is the kind of game that makes you clutch your controller in utter frustration. You have a moderate amount of control over your jumps, but since there is fall damage, you won’t survive an accidental leap to a lower platform. It’s a game where you can spend hours with and barely beat the first screen. I had a similar experience with Bentley Bear, which drove me mad by how you need to time precise jumps to avoid enemies without daring to touch a single pixel.

One of the reasons the original 7800 didn’t sell was its lack of quality platformers to compete with Super Mario Bros. on the NES. And still, that original Mario game is king for its tight controls and responsive jumps. Bentley Bears isn’t any real competition for Mario and Sonic, not even from the era of the 7800’s inception. This game selection includes several legitimate classics, but other games exist to tell a story of a time and place in gaming history.

Atari 7800+ Review: Verdict

The Atari 7800+ is a great retro console that does one thing and one thing only: play old Atari games on modern TVs. That wouldn’t necessarily be enough, but Atari went the extra mile to acquire and publish several titles emblematic of Atari’s retro days and today’s community of homebrewers.

You can buy some of these games yourself (potentially spending more for some games like Fatal Run), but the 7800+ versions are essentially equivalent to those original titles. Playing them on this recreation console is as close as many will come to experiencing gaming history in a tactile way beyond typical emulation on PC or phone.

You do have to come to terms with the fact that this is still basically a form of emulation. Purists might scoff at the idea of running these games on anything but the true-blue system or even FPGA, but that’s beyond the scope of this console. It better represents a path forward for other major publishers whose legacies step back into the 1970s and 80s. Even if the games themselves aren’t as fun by today’s standards (although Asteroids still rules), they still deserve to be understood. Atari’s system accomplishes that by embedding itself within the community, and it is better off for it.