The 2600 was vaguely affordable for a middle-class family and very popular at 30m units sold and had no real competitors during its run. Even later competitors

The 2600 was vaguely affordable for a middle-class family and very popular at 30m units sold and had no real competitors during its run. Even later competitors that had superior hardware and graphics had a hard time fighting the 2600. The Colecovision[1] far surpassed what the 2600 could do and provided near arcade quality, but was fighting a losing war against the 2600, which was still on a 1977 design on store shelves in 1982, even as it had to compete with the less popular and more expensive Atari 5200 and tough competitor Intellivision, all at the same time. Of course people will talk about something more popular, especially if they owned one. 30 million people owned the 2600. That's a lot of mindshare. Owning an Atari computer was much more rare. The Atari computer line-up had real competitors and did not have monopoly status. They had to contend against popular products like the Commodore 64, Apple //, etc. By a lot of metrics, especially game quality and selection, the Atari computer was the poorer choice and the market simply chose against them. It didn't help that the Atari 800 was nearly twice the price of the C64. The C64 had a poorer color palette but could instead do more sprites and had more colors per sprite, which is something that favored gaming and pushed it more towards being a favorite with those who wanted a computer, but also something that could play games well. [1] This was a Z-80A based console. The Z-80A is actually what the arcade PacMan ran on, so it was like an arcade machine that could take carts, in your home! Its an underappreciated gem that more or less got caught up in the great video game crash of 1983-1985 and hamstrung by various issues Coleco had including its long delayed computer based on this system called ADAM. By the time ADAM launched it couldn't compete and the Colecovision was more or less dead. Wonderfully enough there was a version ADAM that was just a cart you plug into your Colecovsion, but I think it also suffered from "too little, too late" as by then C64, PC, and Apple ruled the home market without much room for new players. Video below showing how some games were almost identical to their arcade equivalents: https://youtu.be/SUMzVkzoRjs?t=4s https://youtu.be/SUMzVkzoRjs?t=4s