Something that many, including myself, love about playing video games on a console is the ease of use. There’s no adjusting sliders or fiddling with settings, you just pop in a disc or cart, or nowadays download from a digital storefront, and you’re off to the races.

At least that’s how it used to be. Now as technology and displays rapidly evolve, it’s not exactly ideal to hook up your older consoles to a 4K display and expect your favorite games to look like you remember them. Without the knowledge to modify your old boxes or getting ROMs working on emulators, you’re at the mercy of upscaling cables that don’t still quite don’t do the trick.

It’s for these reasons that the announcement of Atari’s latest piece of hardware starts a trend that hopefully will be followed by other hardware manufacturers. Announced yesterday for a November 2023 shipping window, the Atari 2600+ allows you to play Atari 2600 and 7800 cartridges on one box that outputs through HDMI. The 2600+ accomplishes this feat, according to the FAQ on the product page, through the use of emulation.

Atari released a list of games that are compatible with their upcoming console, and what should excite readers of this site is that both Spider-Man and Superman for the 2600 are on the list. So if you’ve been holding onto either carts for decades, or picked them up to add to your collection, the 2600+ will allow you to easily play them for perhaps the first time in decades, or even the first time at all.

The disappointing news is that the Atari 2600+ is only available for pre-order for residents of the United States, so even people like myself who live in Canada are out of luck. The product page does state, however, that international retailer partners are coming soon, so fingers crossed we’ll hear about them sooner rather than later.

A few years ago, Nintendo kickstarted a trend of mini-consoles pre-loaded with a list of beloved classics but they never let you enjoyed the carts you owned. Should consumers flock to the 2600+, the thoughts of Nintendo, Sony, and Sega following suit would be a dream come true. Can you imagine a box produced by Sega that allowed people to play Saturn and Dreamcast titles, or an all-in-one solution for Nintendo’s cartridge based devices?

US residents can pre-order the Atari 2600+ HERE