The flicker was not that bad on CRT TV's of the time (which had very long phosphor decay times). I still own a few 2600s and a lot of games including Pac Mac wh

The flicker was not that bad on CRT TV's of the time (which had very long phosphor decay times). I still own a few 2600s and a lot of games including Pac Mac which is of course not the same as the arcade version but more of a simplified version requiring a bit of imagination. Which isn't surprising coming from a machine with 128 bytes of memory and no framebuffer ;) Those arcade games didn't improve by themselves though, you needed better hardware for better games. While Atari didn't do themselves a favour by trying to squeeze every penny from the 2600 they did build successors. But by then the economy tanked and the competition from Nintendo started.