Time likes to play tricks with the memory. Think back to your first kiss. What song was playing on the radio? What was the weather like? Was the girl awake? The passage of time clouds our thoughts about history and the past. We all vividly remember the '80s, though. They were a time of social and political unrest. Jimi Hendrix and Huey Lewis rallied young America in marches protesting the War of 1812 and President Samuel L. Reagan knocked down the Berlin Wall with a single mighty swipe of his huge bionic fist. On the gaming front, the decade was ruled by the Atari 2600 -- the console of its day. Activision has collected over 40 games for the 2600, including some that were never released, and put them all together in Activision Anthology.

This is old-school gaming from back when the word "polygon" was only found in geometry textbooks and you would have punched a guy out if he asked you to come to his house to play "Yu-Gi-Oh!"

It's gaming at its most basic. Due to the technical limitations, play is stripped down to the pure essence of the game -- without any of the bells and whistles. The themes here, though, are the same ones that would eventually appear in Xbox, PS2, and GameCube titles. Private Eye is all about getting from one place to another and trying to stay alive. MG: Sons of Liberty is all about getting from one place to another and trying to stay alive. The dude in Private Eye is made up of a couple hundred pixels. Solid Snake is made up of about a zillion polygons. But newer doesn't always mean better. The hero of Private Eye wears a cool black hat. Snake sports a headband.

There's a lot here to awaken the muscle memory in your fast-twitch fibers. There are the obvious titles like Pitfall and River Raid, but there are also some odder titles that are no less enjoyable. I played an embarrassing and ridiculous amount of Fishing Derby while doing this review.

Anthology even includes two games that were developed, but never released. Kabobber is a side-scroller that lets you lead an army of Buvskies against a hoard of Kabobbers. And that's not even the weird one! Thwocker puts you in the role of a bouncing ball that has to collect musical notes in a given order. The graphics blow away anything else on the disc and the bouncing physics are wonderful. According to the game notes, Thwocker is actually only about 80% completed -- and I'm guessing that last 20% was where the balancing would have come in. This is definitely the toughest game in Anthology.

It's amazing how well some of these games stand up. Yes, they're absolutely nothing to look at, but the gameplay in a lot of the cases is just as addictive and compelling today as it was 20 years ago. I probably played half-a-dozen hockey games this year on different systems, but the simplistic Ice Hockey had me swearing and cheering at the screen just as much as when I play Sega Sports' brilliant NHL 2K3 on my Xbox.

The view from the Activision blimp?
To be fair, not everything here is a blast from the past. Baseball will drive you absolutely goofy. Its controls are slow, unresponsive, and unintuitive. Skiing also suffers controller problems. And Oink! is just plain strange. It's a surreal gaming take on the "Three Little Pigs" story in which you try to rebuild your straw, wood, and brick houses before the wolf blows them down. I think…

Playing through Anthology also lets you trace the evolution of different games and genres. You can see the obvious leap in graphics and gameplay from 1980's Boxing to 1987's Title Match. Both River Raid 2 and Pitfall 2 are more technically advanced than their predecessors. Tomcat: The F-14 Flight Simulator is a pretty impressive early flight sim. And Enduro gives you a glimpse at Gran Turismo: A Spec's great-great-great-grandfather.