
The result was a complete disaster for Atari, and yet it was still the best-selling game on the 2600, ever (7 million copies). At any rate, Atari manufactured 12 million copies, 2 million more than the userbase at the time, believing that the game would boost hardware sales too. Its infamy spawned a myth that Atari released an unfinished version of the game to get the game on the market as soon as possible.
It was heavily criticized for its flickering ghosts (since the 2600 couldn't draw all four on-screen at the same time), lack of fidelity to the arcade version and ugly color scheme ( Atari had a policy of forcing all games that weren't set in space to not use black backgrounds, as they wanted to showcase the color capabilities of the 2600). the Extra-Terrestrial, sometimes claimed to be one of the primary causes of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983.
Pac-Man, the reigning king of infamously bad porting jobs and, alongside the similarly-infamous rush job of E.T.
The walking being slow and jumps barely clearing enemies had no such excuse.
Miner 2049er was back-ported by Tigervision from Atari 8-Bit Computers to the Atari 2600, so the downgraded graphics and reduced number of stages (two releases with three each) were to be expected. Unlike the NES though, the 2600 does manage to retain 2P co-op play but does so by employing a lane-based system where each player fights an individual opponent and are restricted to their own lane, so it's not much of a "co-op" experience. It never stood a chance with its stick figure graphics and simplistic mechanics as a result of the system having only a single-button joystick. Double Dragon was released at a time when Atari relaunched the 2600 as a cheaper alternative to the NES and Master System. According to VCS version of Donkey Kong's programmer, Coleco forced them to use the 4 kilobyte cart instead of the 8 kilobyte cart, resulting in simplified graphics, lack of music and the removal of the 50m and 75m stages. Not that using two joysticks at once, especially the 2600's joysticks, isn't without its own issues. The later superior port of Stargate ( Defender II), which used both joysticks for the controls, showed that this was inexcusable. The player has to go off-screen to use hyperspace or the Smart Bomb. Defender had horrible flicker, blocky cityscape graphics, and a game-breaking invisibility glitch when you fire.