Younger members: how/why did you get into Atari?

[+Karl G]

Most of us here used to play the VCS "back in the day", but I'm curious about those who discovered the system later on: how did you get into it, and what keeps you interested in the system now?

[pacman000]

My mom & dad.

 

I didn't know how to skate, but we went to a birthday party at a skating rink anyways. They had an arcade, & my mom showed me how to play Pac-Man. I lost quickly, but I still loved it. I'd run to her when I was out of credits to get more quarters.

 

When we got home, my dad pulled out the old Atari 2600, & we played the home version. Been interested in video games & Atari since then.

[redsteakraw]

I was born after the crash so the Nintendo NES was synonymous with video games early on. I did hear that there was a video game console before the NES and it was almost a mythical system. I then later received an Atari from a neighbor and it was good, but I didn't have the av connector and reallied on the NES's rf adapter and it basically looked horrible so it didn't get much use. Then two years ago I looked into how the games work and what games were made for the system and the relative cheap cost of said games made collecting for it fun and given the simpleness of most games and the pick up and play nature made playing them fun. The alternate controllers such as paddle controller made the gaming experience something even modern gaming systems can't replicate which drew me in even further. Then the crazy things such as Nintendo and Sega both having games for the system including a Mario game and other oddities that the VCS's a point in gaming history.

[Cepp]

Born in 84. I played a Master System at my uncles and begged my parents for a console afterwards. They bought me an Atari 2600 Jr for £20 out of Argos around Xmas 90/91 along with a small 14" TV.

 

It wasn't too long until I got a NES but I have fond memories of playing Centipede on the Atari.

[digdugnate]

maybe i'm middle of the road (at 40)?

 

I was gaming first on the TI 99 4A/Commodore 64- dad really didn't buy a console for us till the NES in 1986(ish). At the same time, though, he picked up an Atari 2600 from Goodwill with a box of games, lol.

 

I didn't really get back into the Atari stuff till maybe 6 months ago when i bought a Sunnyvale 4-switcher, then just recently I ended up picking up a RCA-modded 2600.

 

I think what captivates me is the simplicity and mechanics of some of the games. I have a couple of homebrews (Ladybug and Pacman 4K), but i've spent the vast majority of my time playing Centipede and River Raid.

[bugcatcher88]

Well, I played the original Centipede cabinet quite a lot when I was a little kid in the 1990’s. As the years went by, I completely forgot all about that game until I was in high school.

 

When I was in my junior year, I ended up purchasing a copy of Retro Atari Classics for the DS out of curiosity (not a good compilation, but whatever, I didn’t know at the time). When I played Centipede in that compilation, memories soon started flooding my mind of the original cabinet I played many times all those years ago.

 

That pretty much started my interest in Atari and I began looking into it even more. That same year, I acquired an Atari 2600 at a local shop (Vader version). I still have that console and occasionally buy a new game for it every now-and-then. Since then, I've really gotten into Atari collecting and today, I own every Atari console as well as two Atari computers. Out of all of them, the 2600 is my favorite and probably third favorite of all time (after SNES & N64 respectively).

 

The vast library of games (both old & new) and its popularity continue to keep me interested in the 2600. Heck, I just recently bought several games for it a few days ago off Ebay and am patiently waiting for them to arrive. Can’t wait to play some Wizard of Wor, lol.

[rockman_x_2002]

I was born in 1984, so just immediately after the crash. An older sibling owned the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64, so I got to experience those growing up, along with the consoles which came thereafter (NES, SNES, and so forth).

 

As for why I continue to play games on the 2600, part of it is for nostalgic reasons, but also part of it is because many of the games are still fun even today. They're great for quick pick-up-and-play sessions, unlike a lot of the more modern titles (and by that, I mean modern in relation to the 2600 even), which require you to really sit down and dig in for great lengths of time. The games on the 2600 and its contemporaries put me in mind of a lot of games available for mobile devices today, at least the good ones.

[Shawn]

maybe i'm middle of the road (at 40)?

 

I was gaming first on the TI 99 4A/Commodore 64- dad really didn't buy a console for us till the NES in 1986(ish). At the same time, though, he picked up an Atari 2600 from Goodwill with a box of games, lol.

 

I didn't really get back into the Atari stuff till maybe 6 months ago when i bought a Sunnyvale 4-switcher, then just recently I ended up picking up a RCA-modded 2600.

 

I think what captivates me is the simplicity and mechanics of some of the games. I have a couple of homebrews (Ladybug and Pacman 4K), but i've spent the vast majority of my time playing Centipede and River Raid.

 

40 is still first gen, I'm in your age group as well but I got a 2600 in 84 and didn't get an NES until a few years later. I do have to admit after I started playing NES games I might have played the 2600 once or twice more before not looking at it again until I was in my 20's. It was the just after the PS1 and before the Xbox\PS2 that I started to loose interest in modern games and went back to the old favorites.

[+atari2600land]

Born in almost 83. I got into it because I saw one at a video game store back when they were rare there. Now I see some regularly. So I bought it. I think it was in 2005. And I loved the simplicity of the games and stuff. Or perhaps it was because the thing was older than I was. Or something. And then it grew from there. Now I have an INTV, a Channel F, Odyssey 2 and 1, etc. A major plus of me keeping it was the invention of batari Basic so I could program my own games for it.

[Shawn]

Born in almost 83. I got into it because I saw one at a video game store back when they were rare there. Now I see some regularly. So I bought it. I think it was in 2005. And I loved the simplicity of the games and stuff. Or perhaps it was because the thing was older than I was. Or something. And then it grew from there. Now I have an INTV, a Channel F, Odyssey 2 and 1, etc. A major plus of me keeping it was the invention of batari Basic so I could program my own games for it.

 

And a handful of good games you have made for sure!

[ubersaurus]

Born 83, grew up on a 2600 my parents got around 82 and the dozens of games they bought during the crash. When the system broke we got a 7800 because it was backwards compatible, and so even after getting an NES I was buying games from thrift stores, yard sales and clearance shops! Interest in the pre crash era was solidified when I was a kid and found a book written in 82 talking about it all. I find the period fascinating, and the games are rather unique compared to most of what came after (for tech and other development reasons)!

[+KaeruYojimbo]

I'm not really "younger" (42), but I didn't have a 2600 growing up. I went to arcades regularly and my family got a Colecovision and eventually a Commodore 64. I had a few games for the C64, but I was more interested in trying to make game than playing them and I kind of moved on from video games after that and got more into comic books and music. Then when I was in college things like the Activision Action Pack and Williams Arcade Classics started appearing and my interest was rekindled. At that time 2600 stuff was everywhere and dirt cheap, so it was pretty easy to build up a collection (I had over 200 games by the time I finished school). It's still my go-to system (even though the Colecovision is the sentimental favorite) because of the large library and great homebrew scene.

Edited April 26, 2018 by KaeruYojimbo

[+save2600]

...Cant wait to play some Wizard of Wor, lol.

Excellent game on the VCS!

 

Just remember, you need to use a joystick in port #2 in order to play. Yes, a one player game.

[XEGS]

I slightly missed the boat on the VCS back in the day, and as others have said, it was a mythical creature. I was always fascinated by it, I would read mentions of it in magazines, but I didn't go to any thrift/second hand stores until I was an adult (although I would have loved them as I've always had a fascination for old stuff). Didn't actually get to put in real hands on time with one until the past few years or so.

Edited April 26, 2018 by XEGS

[8th lutz]

I am not what you call a young member, but I did not own a 2600 before 1988.

 

What happened was I wanted an Intellivision ii for Christmas in 1983 or 1984 and I got for Christmas that year. I can't remember the year anymore. Mine includes a system charger. I had also had some 2600 games along with some Intellivision games .

 

The other thing is I remember not playing any video games from 1985 to the later part of 1987 at home despite me playing games like Q*bert at Chuck E. Cheese. What I did in that era was play stuff like Transfomers, Hot Wheels, etc. at the time. My dad got my younger brother and I into video games. I got the Atari 2600 game console in 1988 when my dad took me along to get a new system with budget being one of the things considered. I was between the 2600 and 7800 at the time and I picked the 2600.

 

I got a 7800 a year later, but I continued to played 2600 games through 1991. I recalled having over 130 different 2600 games through 1991. I found alot of 2600 games cheap at flea markets or at discounted prices at places such as Circus World. Some of my top highlights for games from my 1988 to 1991 Atari owner era included Road Runner, Midnight Magic, Jr. Pac-man, Millipede, Phoenix, Wizard of Wor, California games, and Q*bert. I called those games some of my top highlights because they were some of my favorite games I grew up enjoying.

 

I didn't get back to playing Atari till the late 1990s when I was in college. My younger brother and I still buy games for the system today including hacks, reproductions, and Homebrews.

Edited April 26, 2018 by 8th lutz

[BassGuitari]

***Warning: Megapost ahead***

 

I grew up during the height of the Bit Wars. Sega and Nintendo were dug in and slugging it out like it was the trenches of Verdun. Mainly Genesis and Super NES, but "regular Nintendo" remained popular in my hometown well into the mid-'90s (I knew exactly one kid who had a Master System, and the first time I ever heard of it was when I went to his house to see his new Saturn). Anything that wasn't Sega or Nintendo was fascinating to me, and at the time, that essentially meant going back in time.

 

Sure, magazines like GamePro and EGM advertised boutique systems of the day like the 3DO, Jaguar, and even Amiga CD32, but for all intents and purposes, they didn't really exist--nobody actually had them in my neck of the woods. And yeah, PCs* were around (proud owner of the DOS version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles here! ) and a few people still had Apple //c computers--and those were fun in their way, and certainly better than nothing, but were hardly considered ideal game platforms in the early '90s. (*I'm talking 286/386 machines with PC Speaker sound and, at best, EGA graphics, here...it was a few years before gaming-competent 486 systems were commonplace in my area.)

 

While waiting for turns on the new Mortal Kombat II at the arcade, I'd bide my time jamming out on the likes of Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man, aged, passe, and relegated to the back. Their lonely glowing pixels and 1981 copyright dates seemed lost in space, speaking to me from another time, another world. Voyager probes waiting to be intercepted by some uncomprehending but enthusiastic far-future digital anthropologist. I wanted to know more. I wanted to find out what else was out there.

 

In these pre-internet days, the only resources I had at my disposal were the school library and public libraries, and I'd try to find any book I could about computers or video games that looked like it might be older than I was. I found snippets, blurbs, and mentions of Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure, and elementary information about computers and games in general, but nothing of real substance. (To be fair, I was 6 or 7. Hardly trained in academia and the arts of scholarly research.) I remembered the ancient Commodore computer my family had for a brief time in 1989-90, when I was 4-5 years old, before I accidentally killed its power supply somehow. And the neighbor kid's Apple //c. More specifically, the games we played on them, of course.

 

Somewhere in there, I heard murmurings of "Atari."

 

Atari. The word resonated like a mythical, long lost mystery. A forgotten secret guarded by The Elders (a.k.a. my friends' older siblings and cousins who were old enough to have had "Atari," which as yet was still a nebulous, abstract thing...little did I know there were actually several different "Ataris," but even The Elders didn't seem to know that, either). A Holocron waiting to be discovered by a new generation of Jedi.

 

I was told of a video game system that was "like Nintendo before Nintendo." Before Nintendo. Just the concept was tantalizingly alien to me.

 

It would be a few years before I got a taste of the 2600 in the flesh (plastic?). In the meantime, I had to make do with continuing to scour the local libraries--whose comparatively small collections I'd mostly exhausted and was retreading (I grew up in a town of about 30,000)--and feeding quarters to the golden oldies at the arcade and local restaurants, finding references and ads in related period material (such as a Burger King promotion for The Empire Strikes back, in which one of the prizes was an "Atari Video Computer System") and consuming and exploring to the fullest extent any possible contemporary link to "Atari"...such as: Pitfall!: The Mayan Adventure, with the 2600 original hidden as a secret game; Mortal Kombat II, which had secret Pong and Galaxian-type games; used copies of classic arcade ports for NES; modern editions of games like Space Invaders for Super GameBoy, and retro compilations like Galaga/Galaxian for GameBoy, Williams' Arcade's Greatest Hits for PC, SNES, et al, and Activision Classics for the PlayStation a few years later.

 

But a watershed moment--maybe the biggest--came when a friend gave me a copy of the new February 1997 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly for my birthday that year (I turned 12). The one with the first peek at Tekken 3 on the cover. This magazine would become my Bible, my Magna Carta, my Rosetta Stone all rolled into one (really wish I still had my original copy, grr...but at least I cut out and saved the important pages). Inside was an article--a poorly-researched article containing some lazy, speculative, and patently incorrect information, which was fascinating at the time nontheless--detailing a selection of lost game consoles of yore. The first page (well, second, after the intro blurb framed by pictures of glorious, towering stacks of 2600 cartridges, which alone threw my imagination into overdrive) talked about the Atari systems.

 

And there it was, at the top of the page: The Atari 2600.

 

That abstract idea I'd been pining over and wondering about for years now, finally given shape in that magazine. And everything about it was curious to me: the basic shape of it, the woodgrain, the angle of the cartridge interface, the chrome lever switches. Yes, even the power switch was something of a mind bender--I'd only ever seen push-button and rocker switches. A lever thing? How does that work? Sounds absolutely ridiculous now, I know, but that's really how absolutely foreign the system was to me then. The thing looked like it could just as easily have been an old waffle maker or answering machine or something. The answers to my questions only brought more questions.

 

I also got to read a little bit about:

Atari 5200 ("...there were different models of the 5200 available--not all were gigantic." Uh...no.)

Atari 7800 (header misprinted as "7200")

Odyssey 2 ("...this one used cartridges instead of screen overlays or toggle switches which was quite impressive. They even had handles!..." Indeed.)

Odyssey 300 ("...Now that we think about it, most systems back then looked like something out of a bad sci-fi movie than anything else and that's probably why they're so darned cool." Hard to argue there.)

Odyssey 500 ("...Since the 500 was more of a family machine, the three games and three dials instead of one came in handy..." The editor clearly didn't even so much as hook the thing up and just made shit up.)

DINA* (Colecovision blurb; I can only guess nobody on staff had an actual CV, so they grabbed a DINA from Telegames, which they shill for here in a sidebar about where to get old games.)

Intellivision (Intellivision II pictured; "...who can forget playing 7-card stud with the shifty dealer?" I, too, love that Wayne Newton was in Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack.)

VFD/LCD tabletop arcade games.

 

(*To this day, when I hear "Colecovision," my first thought is the DINA system/Telegames Personal Arcade. Rightly or wrongly--"extremely wrongly," most Colecovision fans would no doubt say --the DINA is still the definitive "Coleco" system in my mind. Powerful first impression, I'd say.)

 

And the floodgates were open. Somehow, I knew, in time, I would have to play all of these things. Of course, tracking all this stuff down was a pretty daunting, improbable, and unrealistic task for a sixth-grader in the mid-'90s, with no real way to find them in the first place, outside of just asking around and hoping for the best--internet was just starting to be a thing; we had Netscape Navigator at school!--and no way to pay for them anyway. Even though this was mostly just old junk rotting in the crawlspace that nobody wanted anymore, somebody was bound to charge money for it, right? And besides, as far as I knew, "video game collecting" wasn't something that people did. It wasn't a hobby that was recognized. It didn't occur to me that that was something you could actually do. Yeah, lots of people had "collections" in the literal sense, as they kept their old games while they got new ones, but I don't think anybody thought of it then in the sense we do now. Certainly, trying to deliberately obtain as many of these obsolete stone-age consoles and games as possible defied logic and would have been tantamount to a worrisome degree of eccentricity, if not outright lunacy.

Thus, I figured I would probably have to settle for just one of these systems ("*snicker*" - 2018 self), and that would be my goal. It wasn't a difficult choice. It may not have even been a conscious one--I don't remember choosing to make it, at any rate. But I decided to go after the one definitive retro video game system (NES wasn't retro yet, just old junk), the one that stoked my curiosity and that had driven me this far: the Atari 2600.

 

Later that year (I think it was that year?) we were at a family Christmas at my aunt and uncle's place, and I finally witnessed an Atari 2600 firsthand, hiding inside a dusty Hartzell Video Game Organizer. I took the lid off, and I was mesmerized. The paddle controllers; the orange-ringed, rubber-handled joysticks; the woodgrain and silver switches; that bizarre 45-degree (ish) angle the cartridges inserted at; the artwork and sophisticated-sounding text on the "Game Program" labels; the cartridges themselves, which struck me as charmingly and curiously diminutive (remember, I was accustomed to comparatively ginormous NES and SNES cartridges--that was my reference); "Video Computer System" in silver print on the face of the switch panel. I really can't articulate just how cool this all was to me--I think the best I can do is liken it to the scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan Kenobi first gives Luke his father's lightsaber. "An elegant weapon from a more civilized age." Sadly, my aunt said it didn't work. Chances are it worked perfectly fine and she just didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to hook it up. Oh well.

 

Not long after, I was hanging out at my friend's house after school, looking through my rapidly wearing Bible-Magna Carta-Rosetta Stone-EGM issue. He saw the Odyssey, and he actually happened to have not one, but two Odyssey systems--one belonged to his older brother, the other came from an aunt who I guess kept it for her kids and nephews and nieces to play gave it to my friend's family when she no longer had any use for it. I thought he was talking about the Odyssey 300 for some reason, but he gets this boxed Odyssey 2 system of a closet in the hallway and a box of games. We played for hours that evening while his PlayStation and his brother's Nintendo 64 looked on with the inert puzzlement that only an inanimate object can. And we played the Odyssey for hours several other evenings over the next couple of weeks before I decided I had to have it. He had two, after all, and I was hooked. I traded him a gaggle of PlayStation games for one of the Odysseys and eight or ten cartridges. He wouldn't deal away his Voice, though. Poop.

 

Not too long after that, I learned that a friend of my brother's actually had an old Intellivision. I paid the kid $40 for a boxed Sylvania Intellivision with about a dozen CIB games.

 

In my quest to get an Atari, I kept happening into stuff that was like an Atari. Targets of opportunity. That was fine with me, though--I was loving the ride. The games I was playing on the Odyssey 2 and Intellivision had me hook, line, and sinker. They're two of my favorite systems to this day.

 

Finally, in December 1999 (I'm not quite 15), about two weeks before Christmas, at long last, I got my Atari Video Computer System, from a kid in Salt Lake City who went by "Dade" that I had been IMing with for a few months prior (I don't recall how we connected, and we lost touch not long afterward. No idea whatever happened to him.). It didn't come with any games, or even a power supply--I had to get one of those generic white 9V deals with the interchangeable tip connector from Radio Shack--but my Boy Scout troop was having a meeting at our house, and one of the guys brought over some games and a set of paddles he found in a closet at his house (I guess they were his dad's? Apparently the old man didn't care). I wanted to have as authentic a "first Atari" experience as possible, so the first game we played was Combat. We all had a lot of fun with that one. Pac-Man was a hit, believe it or not, and of course Space Invaders. And Breakout, Super Breakout, Warlords, Donkey Kong, Chopper Command, and M*A*S*H*.

 

Suffice to say, after all that, the Atari was everything I hoped for and more. A bottomless fount of mystery, discovery, and just plain fun.

 

From there, I guess the rest is history!

Edited April 27, 2018 by BassGuitari

[up2knowgood]

I'm only 28, so I missed all of Atari, but one year my Mom got my Dad a Flashback system as a gag gift, but I was interested in the old games. I found them more enjoyable than the Nintendo 64 games of my cousins.

 

Years later I bought my own original Atari and some games, from there I found it amazing that the history of the system and games was so easy to find, and I have stayed interested.

 

The community here has helped too.

[Shawn]

"regular Nintendo" remained popular in my hometown well into the mid-'90s

 

That is what most people I knew called the NES as well when the next gen was on the market. Friends would ask each other if they had a super nintendo or a regular nintendo Good times for sure. Thanks for jogging that memory for me. I've not thought about the namesake "regular nintendo" for a very, very long time

[7800 2]

My mom had a 2600 and I got interested in Atari though that.

[Andromeda Stardust]

I started collecting Atari in 2012, ten years after I started collecting Nintendo (2002). I guess I was branching out. Born into generation Y ('81 baby), everyone I knew growing up had a Nintendo, except me. Sadly my parents were very frugal and did not believe in wasting money on video games, though I did amass a collection of Tiger and Game & Watch LCDs. I was obsessed with Mario, and would demand to play Super Mario Bros whenever I went to a friend's house, even though it was old in the tooth and I sucked at it from lack of practice. Other times I would sit and watch as my playmates played game after game on the NES, wishing it was me.

 

Unbeknownst to me, my mom finally purchased a complete in box nes action set (with Mario/Duck Hunt combo, albeit missing along with the zapper) from a family friend who was saving up for a snes. Due to terrible behavior on my part, I got shipped away to boarding school and the nes sat forgotten in the garage for a whole decade, until one fateful day they were cleaning it out after my dad passed, and low and behold, at 21 years old, i return home from community college to find a complete in box nes and a brand new crt sitting in my bedroom. I was exstatic! Reunited with my lost childhood! After much huffing and puffing and fidangling of the cartridge port, my friend and I got it working. The next day I went hog wild buying up old classics at Gamexchange.

 

Moving on, over the next five years starting in 2002, I plowed through 20 years of Nintendo history, culminating with the Wii shortly after launch in december 2006. Never one to forget my roots, the NES remained my favorite console.

 

A bit of backstory. Atari was synonymous with trash as far as schoolyard banter went growing up. And for years, I maintained that doctrine that all precrash systems were old junk, and nothing noteworthy came out prior to Nintendo. I did have fond memories of the console wars between Sega and Nintendo in the early 90s, and I had many friends with both Genesis and SNES. Sonic wss an old favorite of mine, so in 2011 I picked up a model 1 Genesis from Game-X-Change. It was thedreaded va7 model, but it was awesome nonetheless, and many of the games had this cool factor and edgyness that snes lacked. At this point I owned every Nintendo console to date (excluding virtual boy), and wondered what would follow.

 

I was discovering a newfound appreciation for classic rock at the time, thanks to my recent investment in an xm satallite radio for my car. If all this awesome music existed from before I was born, what else was I missing out on for most of my life? There was a discussion on nintendoage about why Atari prices had crashed on the collector market. The thing only had a paltry 128 bytes of ram after all. What could a programmer possibly do with such limited resources? No wonder the games sucked so hard. But I had to find out for myself if it was really as crappy as my peers claimed growing up. So in may 2012, I bought a 4-switch woodgrain and a few bulk lots of carts on eBay, and figured I could just resell at a small loss if I didn't like it. I also picked up "racing the beam," a book which gave a fairly non-technical explanation of the vcs/2600 limitations, which instilled in me a newfound appreciation for the little system that started it all.

 

I joined Atariage in June 2012 and never looked back... Also I say this with a word of caution: homebrew collecting can get addicting!

[Andromeda Stardust]

***Warning: Megapost ahead***

 

I grew up during the height of the Bit Wars. Sega and Nintendo were dug in and slugging it out like it was the trenches of Verdun. Mainly Genesis and Super NES, but "regular Nintendo" remained popular in my hometown well into the mid-'90s (I knew exactly one kid who had a Master System, and the first time I ever heard of it was when I went to his house to see his new Saturn). Anything that wasn't Sega or Nintendo was fascinating to me, and at the time, that essentially meant going back in time.

 

Sure, magazines like GamePro and EGM advertised boutique systems of the day like the 3DO, Jaguar, and even Amiga CD32, but for all intents and purposes, they didn't really exist--nobody actually had them in my neck of the woods. And yeah, PCs* were around (proud owner of the DOS version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles here! ) and a few people still had Apple //c computers--and those were fun in their way, and certainly better than nothing, but were hardly considered ideal game platforms in the early '90s. (*I'm talking 286/386 machines with PC Speaker sound and, at best, EGA graphics, here...it was a few years before gaming-competent 486 systems were commonplace in my area.)

 

While waiting for turns on the new Mortal Kombat II at the arcade, I'd bide my time jamming out on the likes of Galaga and Ms. Pac-Man, aged, passe, and relegated to the back. Their lonely glowing pixels and 1981 copyright dates seemed lost in space, speaking to me from another time, another world. Voyager probes waiting to be intercepted by some uncomprehending but enthusiastic far-future digital anthropologist. I wanted to know more. I wanted to find out what else was out there.

 

In these pre-internet days, the only resources I had at my disposal were the school library and public libraries, and I'd try to find any book I could about computers or video games that looked like it might be older than I was. I found snippets, blurbs, and mentions of Pong, Colossal Cave Adventure, and elementary information about computers and games in general, but nothing of real substance. (To be fair, I was 6 or 7. Hardly trained in academia and the arts of scholarly research.) I remembered the ancient Commodore computer my family had for a brief time in 1989-90, when I was 4-5 years old, before I accidentally killed its power supply somehow. And the neighbor kid's Apple //c. More specifically, the games we played on them, of course.

 

Somewhere in there, I heard murmurings of "Atari."

 

Atari. The word resonated like a mythical, long lost mystery. A forgotten secret guarded by The Elders (a.k.a. my friends' older siblings and cousins who were old enough to have had "Atari," which as yet was still a nebulous, abstract thing...little did I know there were actually several different "Ataris," but even The Elders didn't seem to know that, either). A Holocron waiting to be discovered by a new generation of Jedi.

 

I was told of a video game system that was "like Nintendo before Nintendo." Before Nintendo. Just the concept was tantalizingly alien to me.

 

It would be a few years before I got a taste of the 2600 in the flesh (plastic?). In the meantime, I had to make do with continuing to scour the local libraries--whose comparatively small collections I'd mostly exhausted and was retreading (I grew up in a town of about 30,000)--and feeding quarters to the golden oldies at the arcade and local restaurants, finding references and ads in related period material (such as a Burger King promotion for The Empire Strikes back, in which one of the prizes was an "Atari Video Computer System") and consuming and exploring to the fullest extent any possible contemporary link to "Atari"...such as: Pitfall!: The Mayan Adventure, with the 2600 original hidden as a secret game; Mortal Kombat II, which had secret Pong and Galaxian-type games; used copies of classic arcade ports for NES; modern editions of games like Space Invaders for Super GameBoy, and retro compilations like Galaga/Galaxian for GameBoy, Williams' Arcade's Greatest Hits for PC, SNES, et al, and Activision Classics for the PlayStation a few years later.

 

But a watershed moment--maybe the biggest--came when a friend gave me a copy of the new February 1997 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly for my birthday that year (I turned 12). The one with the first peek at Tekken 3 on the cover. This magazine would become my Bible, my Magna Carta, my Rosetta Stone all rolled into one (really wish I still had my original copy, grr...but at least I cut out and saved the important pages). Inside was an article--a poorly-researched article containing some lazy, speculative, and patently incorrect information, which was fascinating at the time nontheless--detailing a selection of lost game consoles of yore. The first page (well, second, after the intro blurb framed by pictures of glorious, towering stacks of 2600 cartridges, which alone threw my imagination into overdrive) talked about the Atari systems.

 

And there it was, at the top of the page: The Atari 2600.

 

That abstract idea I'd been pining over and wondering about for years now, finally given shape in that magazine. And everything about it was curious to me: the basic shape of it, the woodgrain, the angle of the cartridge interface, the chrome lever switches. Yes, even the power switch was something of a mind bender--I'd only ever seen push-button and rocker switches. A lever thing? How does that work? Sounds absolutely ridiculous now, I know, but that's really how absolutely foreign the system was to me then. The thing looked like it could just as easily have been an old waffle maker or answering machine or something. The answers to my questions only brought more questions.

 

I also got to read a little bit about:

Atari 5200 ("...there were different models of the 5200 available--not all were gigantic." Uh...no.)

Atari 7800 (header misprinted as "7200")

Odyssey 2 ("...this one used cartridges instead of screen overlays or toggle switches which was quite impressive. They even had handles!..." Indeed.)

Odyssey 300 ("...Now that we think about it, most systems back then looked like something out of a bad sci-fi movie than anything else and that's probably why they're so darned cool." Hard to argue there.)

Odyssey 500 ("...Since the 500 was more of a family machine, the three games and three dials instead of one came in handy..." The editor clearly didn't even so much as hook the thing up and just made shit up.)

DINA* (Colecovision blurb; I can only guess nobody on staff had an actual CV, so they grabbed a DINA from Telegames, which they shill for here in a sidebar about where to get old games.)

Intellivision (Intellivision II pictured; "...who can forget playing 7-card stud with the shifty dealer?" I, too, love that Wayne Newton was in Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack.)

VFD/LCD tabletop arcade games.

 

(*To this day, when I hear "Colecovision," my first thought is the DINA system/Telegames Personal Arcade. Rightly or wrongly--"extremely wrongly," most Colecovision fans would no doubt say --the DINA is still the definitive "Coleco" system in my mind. Powerful first impression, I'd say.)

 

And the floodgates were open. Somehow, I knew, in time, I would have to play all of these things. Of course, tracking all this stuff down was a pretty daunting, improbable, and unrealistic task for a sixth-grader in the mid-'90s, with no real way to find them in the first place, outside of just asking around and hoping for the best--internet was just starting to be a thing; we had Netscape Navigator at school!--and no way to pay for them anyway. Even though this was mostly just old junk rotting in the crawlspace that nobody wanted anymore, somebody was bound to charge money for it, right? And besides, as far as I knew, "video game collecting" wasn't something that people did. It wasn't a hobby that was recognized. It didn't occur to me that that was something you could actually do. Yeah, lots of people had "collections" in the literal sense, as they kept their old games while they got new ones, but I don't think anybody thought of it then in the sense we do now. Certainly, trying to deliberately obtain as many of these obsolete stone-age consoles and games as possible defied logic and would have been tantamount to a worrisome degree of eccentricity, if not outright lunacy.

Thus, I figured I would probably have to settle for just one of these systems ("*snicker*" - 2018 self), and that would be my goal. It wasn't a difficult choice. It may not have even been a conscious one--I don't remember choosing to make it, at any rate. But I decided to go after the one definitive retro video game system (NES wasn't retro yet, just old junk), the one that stoked my curiosity and that had driven me this far: the Atari 2600.

 

Later that year (I think it was that year?) we were at a family Christmas at my aunt and uncle's place, and I finally witnessed an Atari 2600 firsthand, hiding inside a dusty Hartzell Video Game Organizer. I took the lid off, and I was mesmerized. The paddle controllers; the orange-ringed, rubber-handled joysticks; the woodgrain and silver switches; that bizarre 45-degree (ish) angle the cartridges inserted at; the artwork and sophisticated-sounding text on the "Game Program" labels; the cartridges themselves, which struck me as charmingly and curiously diminutive (remember, I was accustomed to comparatively ginormous NES and SNES cartridges--that was my reference); "Video Computer System" in silver print on the face of the switch panel. I really can't articulate just how cool this all was to me--I think the best I can do is liken it to the scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan Kenobi first gives Luke his father's lightsaber. "An elegant weapon from a more civilized age." Sadly, my aunt said it didn't work. Chances are it worked perfectly fine and she just didn't know how or couldn't be bothered to hook it up. Oh well.

 

Not long after, I was hanging out at my friend's house after school, looking through my rapidly wearing Bible-Magna Carta-Rosetta Stone-EGM issue. He saw the Odyssey, and he actually happened to have not one, but two Odyssey systems--one belonged to his older brother, the other came from an aunt who I guess kept it for her kids and nephews and nieces to play gave it to my friend's family when she no longer had any use for it. I thought he was talking about the Odyssey 300 for some reason, but he gets this boxed Odyssey 2 system of a closet in the hallway and a box of games. We played for hours that evening while his PlayStation and his brother's Nintendo 64 looked on with the inert puzzlement that only an inanimate object can. And we played the Odyssey for hours several other evenings over the next couple of weeks before I decided I had to have it. He had two, after all, and I was hooked. I traded him a gaggle of PlayStation games for one of the Odysseys and eight or ten cartridges. He wouldn't deal away his Voice, though. Poop.

 

Not too long after that, I learned that a friend of my brother's actually had an old Intellivision. I paid the kid $40 for a boxed Sylvania Intellivision with about a dozen CIB games.

 

In my quest to get an Atari, I kept happening into stuff that was like an Atari. Targets of opportunity. That was fine with me, though--I was loving the ride. The games I was playing on the Odyssey 2 and Intellivision had me hook, line, and sinker. They're two of my favorite systems to this day.

 

Finally, in December 1999 (I'm not quite 15), about two weeks before Christmas, at long last, I got my Atari Video Computer System, from a kid in Salt Lake City who went by "Dade" that I had been IMing with for a few months prior (I don't recall how we connected, and we lost touch not long afterward. No idea whatever happened to him.). It didn't come with any games, or even a power supply--I had to get one of those generic white 9V deals with the interchangeable tip connector from Radio Shack--but my Boy Scout troop was having a meeting at our house, and one of the guys brought over some games and a set of paddles he found in a closet at his house (I guess they were his dad's? Apparently the old man didn't care). I wanted to have as authentic a "first Atari" experience as possible, so the first game we played was Combat. We all had a lot of fun with that one. Pac-Man was a hit, believe it or not, and of course Space Invaders. And Breakout, Super Breakout, Warlords, Donkey Kong, Chopper Command, and M*A*S*H*.

 

Suffice to say, after all that, the Atari was everything I hoped for and more. A bottomless fount of mystery, discovery, and just plain fun.

 

From there, I guess the rest is history!

Just wanted to add, this was an amazing read. As a kid you were like Indiana Jones exploring tombs (dusty old closets and attics) in search of ancient relics (games). Very cool!

[up2knowgood]

I started collecting Atari in 2012, ten years after I started collecting Nintendo (2002). I guess I was branching out. Born into generation Y ('81 baby), everyone I knew growing up had a Nintendo, except me. Sadly my parents were very frugal and did not believe in wasting money on video games, though I did amass a collection of Tiger and Game & Watch LCDs. I was obsessed with Mario, and would demand to play Super Mario Bros whenever I went to a friend's house, even though it was old in the tooth and I sucked at it from lack of practice. Other times I would sit and watch as my playmates played game after game on the NES, wishing it was me.

 

Unbeknownst to me, my mom finally purchased a complete in box nes action set (with Mario/Duck Hunt combo, albeit missing along with the zapper) from a family friend who was saving up for a snes. Due to terrible behavior on my part, I got shipped away to boarding school and the nes sat forgotten in the garage for a whole decade, until one fateful day they were cleaning it out after my dad passed, and low and behold, at 21 years old, i return home from community college to find a complete in box nes and a brand new crt sitting in my bedroom. I was exstatic! Reunited with my lost childhood! After much huffing and puffing and fidangling of the cartridge port, my friend and I got it working. The next day I went hog wild buying up old classics at Gamexchange.

 

Moving on, over the next five years starting in 2002, I plowed through 20 years of Nintendo history, culminating with the Wii shortly after launch in december 2006. Never one to forget my roots, the NES remained my favorite console.

 

A bit of backstory. Atari was synonymous with trash as far as schoolyard banter went growing up. And for years, I maintained that doctrine that all precrash systems were old junk, and nothing noteworthy came out prior to Nintendo. I did have fond memories of the console wars between Sega and Nintendo in the early 90s, and I had many friends with both Genesis and SNES. Sonic wss an old favorite of mine, so in 2011 I picked up a model 1 Genesis from Game-X-Change. It was thedreaded va7 model, but it was awesome nonetheless, and many of the games had this cool factor and edgyness that snes lacked. At this point I owned every Nintendo console to date (excluding virtual boy), and wondered what would follow.

 

I was discovering a newfound appreciation for classic rock at the time, thanks to my recent investment in an xm satallite radio for my car. If all this awesome music existed from before I was born, what else was I missing out on for most of my life? There was a discussion on nintendoage about why Atari prices had crashed on the collector market. The thing only had a paltry 128 bytes of ram after all. What could a programmer possibly do with such limited resources? No wonder the games sucked so hard. But I had to find out for myself if it was really as crappy as my peers claimed growing up. So in may 2012, I bought a 4-switch woodgrain and a few bulk lots of carts on eBay, and figured I could just resell at a small loss if I didn't like it. I also picked up "racing the beam," a book which gave a fairly non-technical explanation of the vcs/2600 limitations, which instilled in me a newfound appreciation for the little system that started it all.

 

I joined Atariage in June 2012 and never looked back... Also I say this with a word of caution: homebrew collecting can get addicting!

That is an amazing story, thanks for sharing it.

[pogfreak]

I'm in my mid 30's grew up with NES and then all the Nintendo consoles. My cousins had an Atari and we would have family gatherings at their place so we would all start playing Atari at any event. The game I mostly remember and still love is Circus Atari. Eventually they donated it and I kind of forgot about the Atari until I was in college and I found one of those Atari joystick consoles that connects to your tv. It had circus atari so I bought it and even though it wasn't a great piece of hardware, it brought me back to those family gatherings and sitting around with my cousins playing the Atari. I still have that little tv console thing. I went to school for EE and that's my day job. I started collecting consoles when I found a busted $5 ps2 slim at a thrift shop and decided I was going to try to fix it. I was able to get it working relatively easy (lifted pad on the power supply connector fixed with solder bridge) and well I caught the bug. I started buying up anything I could find at the local thrift shop which inevitably led to a couple 2600's and a really nice set of complete in box games that included circus Atari! I fixed up a paddle controller, did an a/v mod to fix the video signal and have been loving getting to experience a lot of Atari games that I missed out on as a kid. A lot of the games hold up surprisingly well and I love how simple yet fun/addictive they are.

[JEFF31]

I'm really old (at least my adult kids say so - I'm 64). This tread was an interesting read.

 

My kids think an Atari 2600 is like playing with an abacus - IE they don't.

 

Younger members - keep giving us your thoughts.

 

 

Jeff

[AtariUser2]

(Deleted)

Edited May 29, 2018 by AtariUser2