TJR

I could've sworn I saw Xybots, by Tengen, for the NES, for sale at a mall record store back in the late '80s. Later I found out that although Xybots was supposed to come out for the NES, it never did. I must have seen it in a magazine or a Tengen catalog and somehow the connectors in my brain created a memory of seeing it on a store shelf.

Ya know, in the 25 years or so that I've been playing Adventure, I never saw it that way before I mean, you can grab the thing from any side. I always assumed the pointy end was the killin' end. More like a spear, I guess. Anyway, it was the best layout for the design

Hiya, I've posted here before attempting to advertise my own line of videogame t-shirts, available from my online shop at www.cafepress.com/krushervision under the Gamer Gear section. Most of my designs are pretty specifically geared toward hardcore fans -- either you get 'em or you don't Anyway, one of my latest designs is called Ye Valiant Warrior, and it's for fans of Adventure. Please check it out, along with my other designs (AtariAge visitors might dig the Heavy Sixer design too!), at the Official Krushervision Krush-O-Mart: Gamer Gear section! Thank you for reading and I hope you like 'em!

Aw perfect!! Thanks so much guys!!

Vixy doesn't seem to work with LiveVideo (or at least I can't get it to) -- is this video available anywhere else? I'd love to save it as a .mov and burn it to DVD.

Hey, I just found this thread. I can add to it. My friend, gamer and collector David Park of Neenah, Wisconsin, owns an Atlantis II, boxed. He got it from his uncle, who was an avid gamer back in the day, and got it from entering that original Atlantis high score contest. I wrote to AtariAge about this way back when they first posted the "Atlantis II Discovered" article years ago, because David had obtained the cart (along with a ton of other nice vintage videogame stuff, including a boxed Chase the Chuckwagon) from his uncle around 1996 or '97. At the time, I was an active member of #rgvc on IRC, and when I brought up this Atlantis II that my buddy had gotten ahold of, nobody on rgvc had heard of it so they basically called me a liar and/or an idiot. ("Post scans or pictures of it to prove it," they would say..."It's an Atlantis box with a typewritten Atlantis II sticker on it! You wouldn't think it was real even if I DID post a picture!") Well, when AA finally put up the "discovery" of Atlantis II, I felt vindicated and hoped that all those doubters were reading. Anyway, you can add that one to the list. And no, he does not want to sell

Dragonfire's always been one of my favorites! And yes, once you get up to the white dragon, it just repeats white dragons for as long as you can play. Fun tip I found when I was a kid: If you have your difficulty switch on the easier setting (don't remember if it's A or B), the far left side of the screen in the dragon rooms is a safe spot from the first dragon up until the red one. On the red dragon's screen, the far right side is safe. After that, there is no hiding!

Lessee, here's my mostly-out-of-order list... Odyssey 2000 APF TV Fun Coleco Telstar Regent Coleco Telstar Alpha Sears Super Pong IV Odyssey2 four 2600s 2600 Jr 5200 7800 Intellivision INTV III Milton-Bradley Microvision Vectrex Entex Select-A-Game Colecovision a few NESes Nintendo Famicom Famicom Disk Drive Yobo FC Game Console Super NES Game Boy Game Boy Color Virtual Boy TurboDuo two Genesiseseses (original model) SegaCD (top-loader) Sega32X Sega Power Base Convertor (which essentially means I have a Master System) Sega Game Gear JVC X'Eye Game.com (second model) Neo Geo AES Neo Geo Pocket Nintendo64 PlayStation Saturn Dreamcast PS2 Xbox Gamecube Game Boy Advance Game Boy Advance SP Nintendo DS Sony PSP Xbox360 ...I think that's it! ...Plus the following arcade machines: Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, Turbo, Satan's Hollow, Super Breakout, Space Invaders, Tron, Mr. Do!, Pole Position, Mat Mania, a JAMMA cabinet (for which I have Street Fighter II CE, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Vampire, Vampire Hunter, Vampire Savior 2, Rockman Power Battle, and Salamander 2 boards), and a Neo Geo 1-slot MVS (and for it Puzzle Bobble, Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown, Samurai Shodown 2, and Blazing Star). My wanted list includes an Emerson Arcadia, Bally Professional Arcade, NEC PC-FX, WonderSwan, Wii, and a PS3 once Metal Gear Solid 4 comes out

Hi all, A couple months ago I started a Cafepress shop so I could make t-shirts of some of my art. I do mostly stuff like monsters and pinup girls, but as a lifelong gamer, it was only time until I started coming up with ideas for videogame-themed swag as well! So I just put up a new section for gamer gear and three new t-shirts -- one in particular, a "Heavy Sixer" design, might appeal to AtariAge visitors. You can visit my shop via my website at www.krushervision.com (click on the SHOP! link) or directly at www.cafepress.com/krushervision. When ya get there, just check out the "Gamer Gear" link. Please check 'em out if you have a chance -- there are more to come, and I hope you like 'em! Thanks for reading.

$50 for a copy of Game Paradise for Sega Saturn ("Gakuraku Pack" with the anime VHS included) on ebay. Before that it was used copies of DJ Boy and Beyond Oasis for Genesis, three bucks each.

Are you kiddin? I'm a tattoo artist. It doesn't get much better than that! However, I'd like to work in a bigger city than I do now, so I could do a wider and more interesting variety of work.

Well, as a tattoo artist myself, I have my share. In fact, my lower right leg is devoted to videogame tats. I have a flaming 2600 joystick with a banner that says "GAMER," the 'S' logo from Super Metroid, a Space Invader, and Morrigan from Darkstalkers (which is not yet finished). I have lots of plans for the rest of it, and future tattoos will include Donkey Kong and Junior (an original drawing), a particular symbol from Metal Gear, Dirk the Daring, and many others. I've also done a couple videogame tattoos -- both on my buddy Brad, who used to run a retro arcade in Madison, WI. I did one of the birds from the Joust arcade marquee on his shoulder and the arcade side-art from Pac-Man on his right calf. Last time I was at Ground Kontrol arcade in Portland, OR, one of the owners took a few pics of the Atari stick and the Space Invader. I'll try to post some of my own photos soon.

I had my stack of about 25 Atari games from when I was a kid for a long time, but I was more keeping up with new systems and games like the NES, then Super NES and Genesis, and so on rather than looking at thrifts for old games. Then around 1995 I started getting interested in collecting for older systems -- the 32-bit machines were coming out, I had been a gamer for 15 years, and nostalgia for 1982 was starting to set in, and I remembered that back in the day they released a lot of wacky games like Texas Chainsaw Massacre that I thought I'd like to add to my collection. At the time, you could find Atari, Intellivision and Colecovision games for like a quarter at the thrifts; consoles went for under 10 bucks. A local used game shop had Atari games priced at 3 for $2. I went in and came out with two large shopping bags full of 2600 games -- after that day, suddenly the shop raised their prices on Atari games to a buck apiece. (It was at that point that I realized there was gonna be trouble.) Then around 1996 I got online and quickly found the classic gaming communities, and was able to get a better idea of what games were out there, what was considered "rare," and the prices people were willing to pay. I think at that time, the prices were kinda chaotic because people were still figuring it all out. But then after a year or two, prices skyrocketed to kinda ridiculous levels. I think the craze had its peak years ago, and prices have since settled somewhat. So at this point, it's easier to find stuff thanks to ebay, but the sucky thing is that Goodwill now sells games for 4 bucks instead of a quarter. It's funny too, because even after all this time of being a collector, I've only got around 250 games for the 2600, and I never really got into paying big bucks for them. I'm a patient collector, willing to wait years if necessary to find a good deal on games I don't have (although I will occasionally splurge on a rarer title). Besides, I collect games for all consoles, so I'm sure if I was focusing on the 2600 alone, I'd have a lot more games for it Instead, my collecting budget gets spread across like three dozen different systems. But to the original point, would I start collecting today? Yeah probably. I love games too much not to. And I still don't have Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Sorry for the long post!

When I was a kid, I loved examining the art on the boxes and in the Atari catalogs. Being a budding artist back then, I used to study them and try to copy 'em myself. Cover art like Haunted House, Defender, Outlaw, Berzerk, Yar's Revenge, Flag Capture (arr, pirates!!)...I still love those illustrations, and it was such a great time for videogame package art, because they really had to try to come up with exciting artwork to represent (and help sell) these games which, in reality, had blocky graphics and were not always as exciting as the illustrations would have you believe. So recently I got to wondering about the artists who did the package art for all those 2600 games, especially the original "colored box"-packaged Atari titles. Does anybody know anything about them? Who were they, what were some of their names? Did they work for Atari, or were they part of some marketing department at Warner? I would love to find some info about them, maybe some interviews, and find out what it was like to do that kind of work back then, and hear about the creative process involved in visualizing and rendering what they did. Are there any such interviews out there? If not, is that a project which someone in the classic gaming community might be able to pursue, maybe as a feature for AtariAge or something? Thoughts?