Pitfall came out on the 2600 a whole year after Donkey Kong came out in the arcades.  It was called catching up with the platforming phenomenon, and sucking at it.

Only Atari 2600 game my friends and I still play is 4-player Warlords.  Haven't done it in a while though, but it rules.  There are a few other classics I need to eventually get my hands on though.

I still enjoy an occassional Mike Tyson's Punch Out, Ninja Gaiden, Kung Fu, and Zelda. I don't really think it can be considered the best of all time, but the best of its time.

Ill stand by my decision and say...
PS3 60gig b/c

best system still has to be the ps2...if only my ps2 were a lady and knew how to cook....

     No, Pitfall didn't suck at platforming.  It was clearly superior to the original Mario Brothers and the 2600's version of Donkey Kong.  It also introduced item collection to platforming.

     Pitfall II was even better. 

This is not a matter of taste. NES can be considered as the best gaming console because of many valid points (see the light side thread http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=68154&page=1).

If someone is claiming that title for another console it must first proves my 5 points wrong.

 1- The NES revitalized the dying video-game industry after the crash of 1983-84.

Trivial when you consider the fact that there probably never would have been a videogame industry at all without the Atari 2600.

Nintendo does have a history of being in the right place at the right time.  But, I don't think revitalizing an industry (although if they hadn't someone else would have) can be compared to creating an industry out of whole cloth.

Here is some reasons why the NES can bear the title of Best console of video game history :

1- The NES revitalized the dying video-game industry after the crash of 1983-84.

2- The NES put on the map most of the major 3rd party publishers of the present day. Among them are Capcom, Konami, Hudson Soft, Koei, Tecmo, Rare, Bandai (now known as Namco-Bandai), THQ and Square, Enix and Taito (now known as Square-Enix).

Well, major 3rd parties like Acivision, Sega, and even Nintendo (if you count Coleco's port of DK) received their first starts on the 2600l

3- The NES is also the console who introduced or popularized the most of the major franchises of today. Among them are Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Punch-Out!!, Excitebike, Kirby, Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, Metal Gear, Tetris, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Castlevania. And I'm sure there is so many others that I missed.

Several of today's games draw upon the 2600 as their source of inspiration.  Games like Geometry Wars and Mass Effect look back to earlier Atari 2600 classics like Asteroids and Moon Patrol.

4- Technically, the NES is the console who improved its graphics the most during its lifetime. Its earliest games looked like 2nd gen games :

Compare games like Pitfall II to Pitfall I, Ms. Pacman to Pacman, Enduro to Grandprix, Realsports Basketball to Basketball.  The 2600 did this too.  Look at how much better later games from companies like Imagic looked on the 2600 in comparison to earlier games on the system like Combat and Surround.

5- Finally, the NES sold 62 millions units. With the expansion of the market of the last two decades, a gaming console like the NES could easily reach the 200 millions mark by today's standarts.

If all the markets that had been open to the NES had been open to the 2600 during its peak years, it could have done 100 million in its lifetime.

I'm not talking about the 2600 version of Donkey Kong or the arcade version of Mario Bros.  I'm talking about the arcade version of Donkey Kong, which was superior to Pitfall and came out earlier.  Of course the 2600 version of Donkey Kong sucked.  The 2600 couldn't handle the glory of Donkey Kong, and brought it down to Pitfall's level of slow awkward jumps.

Donkey Kong had hammers, conveyor belts, vertically moving platforms, and moving objects all over the screen.

Please tell me how Pitfall was superior.

Here are some reminders:

Exactly. PC says hello!

You can't compare Pacman to Ms. Pacman when Pacman was a rush job and considered a failure in sales to what it was supposed to achieve since it was so rushed. As much as I loved the Atari 2600 it didn't improve too much graphics wise. The gameplay got better but the graphics barely improved. Grand Prix was a pretty bad ass game for the time. You are comparing Grand Prix which came out in 1982 to Enduro that came out in 1983. What is the point of that??? That is just telling us that it depended on the developer which strangely Activision developed both Grand Prix and Enduro.