Nice stealth "Hey ERA, how old are you?" thread, OP.
The same way that people look back at the first generation of iPhones (you needed to buy a flashlight app? lol), the first generation of automobiles, the first generation of anything usually looks terrible after several generations.
Younger folks on here might not realize how few computers were out in the world in the mid 80s. The only way to play video games was either an arcade, or your local pizza place (that had one, maybeeeee two games). The fact that you could play games, even primitive ones at home was mindblowing at the time. Some of the games went for $30 at the time, roughly the equivalent of $70 today - and those games sold like crazy until the crash.
Then there's technical limitations - OP's avatar image is about 41kB, basically nothing by today's standards. But the size of the 2600 cartridges started at 2kB, eventually going up to 8kB. So you could fit 5 copies of the most advanced 2600 cartridge in OP's avatar. Checking "Racing the Beam" sometime if you ever want a taste of the tight hardware restrictions these games were made under.
That being said, I'd agree that the vast majority of 2600 games don't really hold up. A few classics still are fun - Combat, Yar's Revenge, Pitfall, Solaris, River Raid, and a few others. My secret shame was that I was really good at the E.T. game. During the crash, my relatives gave me cheap 2600 games during the holidays, so I had a shit ton of terrible games. The Indiana Jones games (Raiders of the Lost Ark) was surprisingly deep but obtuse.
People clearly like video games, as the market has shown. The ability to play them at home was the draw, not the quality of the games.
