Skylark68

Video Olympics (4 players), and Math Grand Prix...

Those boxes are really awesome. That's a great find! Seeing those Earthworld and Fireworld boxes really bring back some memories. The Earthworld box looked so awesome back in the day (still does). Too bad the game wasn't near as awesome. I was a really let down 7 year old when i plugged it in the first time.

Most of mine was found in the wild. I have the original Made in USA Coleco Telstar that I bought complete in the box at a yard sale a few years back for $1.00. The sticker price was $2.00. I was going to just buy it but she said she'd take a $1.00 before i even had a chance to speak. A lot of my collection was bought in the late '80s and early '90s when garage sales were full of Atari and old videogame stuff. Most everyone upgraded to a Nintendo or Genesis by then so it was open season on the old stuff. Some friends gave me their Atari collections when they upgraded. The only systems that I have not bought in the wild was the Atari VCS heavy sixer, the Odyssey 2 and the Nintendo top loader off of Ebay. I have 3 other Atari VCS/2600 and 1 Sears Video Arcade, Intellivision, Colecovision, Telstar, Lynx, 2xTurbografx 16, Super Nintendo that i managed to get in the wild. The only systems that i had from new in the box was my 1st Atari 2600 (parents bought back in 1980), and my PS2. Nowadays though, it seems to be hard to find anything Atari in the wild except for some appearances in the local Craigslist site.

I've never even been to the mature section of ebay. haha

Most of the artwork for the Atari was totally awesome. My favorites were Vanguard and Adventure. Vanguard was just freaking sweet overall. The whole premise of the game was just cool. The artwork just added even more to the effect. I would seriously like to know if some of the old original artwork was available. I hope Atari didn't just throw it all out (or Time Warner).

The movie was pretty good i agree, but they totally screwed up Megatron. I guess the toy companies aren't too keen on having a main character turn into a Walther P-38 handgun anymore. I really couldn't tell what he was supposed to be in the movie even in robot form. It just looked like a big blob of CGI. The '84 edition of Transformers was definitely the best. I don't know how much it contributed to the death of Atari, but I know for sure that I got my parents to buy me some Transformers instead of Atari games. That was even while the games were $.99 sometimes. My brother got Optimus for Christmas that year, and i had to settle with Skywarp. From then on my brother bought the Autobots and I got the Decepticons (except when Smokescreen came out - he was too cool). Kind of weird how that works out.

I remember the crash pretty well even though i was only about 8 years old. I had a subscription to Atari Age (which quit coming), and a subscription to Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated. I don't remember which month it was, but the cover was talking about the Coleco Adam flopping out. I think it showed a huge atomic blast in the background. I remember my Dad reading the article (he was thinking about buying a deeply discounted Adam) and saying that the videogame industry was just about done with. Previously, about once a month, my parents would go to the local Sears and let my brother and I pick out one game from their stock. Most of the time they were a "Tele-Games" since my parents were big time Sears people and thought the Sears titles were better quality than the third party games. Interestingly though, we got the Atari (4 switch wood grain) at Gemco, which was sort of like a slightly upscale Target or Service Merchandise. Anyways, eventually Sears stopped carrying the games and I remember the local Kay Bee Toys and Circus World toystore at our local mall started heavily discounting games. I remember bazillions of copies of Swordquest Earthworld and Fireworld, E.T., and a bunch of other "silver boxed Atari games" for 99 cents mixed in with a bunch of third party games (mainly Activision and Imagic). Kay Bee in particular had a huge bin of "Tax Avoiders" for $1.00 or so. I guess no one really knew what that game was about. My Dad thought it was some kind of tax program so we shyed away from that one. I still remember buying Space Cavern, Space Jockey, Word Zapper, Sneak N Peek, and a couple of Spectravision games for $2.00 a piece at some Electronics discount store (don't remember which one). I was a huge Atari freak, and while I was a little disappointed that Sears quit carrying the games, they didn't immediately disappear from the toy stores, so i didn't realize the impact on the industry. I thought it was cool that even years afterwards I could buy the games at pretty much any toy store, especially in the late '80s with the black and white boxes of the older Atari games. I bought the Atari trak ball for a few bucks in the late '80s or so I guess, along with a bunch of the maroon boxed Atari games. My parents refused to buy me an NES when they came out, and we ended up with a Apple II GS. It was okay, but i stuck with my 2600 for a long time. We'd go to garage sales and I would buy up old Atari collections all of the time in the late '80s. There seemed to be a plethora of those once the NES came out. The crash was an interesting time period for me, and i really remember how much it impacted me. It was good in a way, because it allowed me to buy a bunch of games, but bad in the fact that Atari kind of died a really slow death.

Wasn't there a mention of this kind of adapter back when the Lynx was new? I seem to remember something in either a catalog or video game magazine.

I actually beat Earthworld back in the day, but i could never beat Fireworld. In fact, i got so frustrated that I took the copy of Fireworld out of my VCS, burned it and buried it in a shallow grave. Unfortunately, I forgot that i had 5 more copies of the game. I think the bargain bin at Kay Bee Toys back in '84 had those games marked down to $ .99 at one point. I have never played Waterworld unfortunately.

1. Slime World - Easily one of the best Lynx titles overall. 2. Gates of Zendocon - Pretty easy game, but it was my first game outside of CG when the Lynx first came out (and the one that was demo'd at Babbage's). 3. California Games - Very polished game, and the BMX track especially is totally awesome. 4. Zarlor Mercenary - Fairly difficult, but fun to play through. I like the top down perspective. 5. Blue Lightning - Some levels are really hard, but the ground attack missions are fun. 6. Electrocop - I found this game very frustrating, and I like the mini games better that are included. 7. Gauntlet - Terrible game playing solo, "lynxed up" is O.K. 8. Chips Challenge - I hate puzzle games so i guess i'm not all that objective on this one.

This isn't that specific I guess, but I like the space themed games....I know that includes a heckuva lot of 2600 games.... Space Cavern and Space Jockey are 2 of my more favorite games.

That's way too funny! At my high school we had a free period (5th out of 7) that was supposed to be used for study and homework (this was back in '91). My teacher actually allowed me to bring my Lynx and play it as long as I wore my headphones. How cool was that? A friend of mine got one and we'd comlynx on Warbirds and Slime World all during class!

I second that motion! Would we have the Atari Wii now?

I think it's unfair to pick on the early games since everything was relatively new. However, anything like Basic Math (or Sears "Math") or Hangman (or Sears "Spelling") is pretty crappy. I think the worst graphics on the 2600 were the Zellers artwork on the boxes... haha

Yet another mystery of the Atari era... I wonder if some of these will ever be solved?

Thanks for the info. That's too bad that there was never any info about it to resolve the issue.

I've had Solar Fox since before the crash, and it's always been one of my favorite games. I never was able to get all of the letters in the challenge levels, but saw that "HELIOS" was the answer. So was this going to be CBS' next game? Were you supposed to mail the answer in to CBS? Anybody know? It's always been one of those mysteries floating in my mind.

Two Tigers is it!!!! Thanks for the quick reply! Now I just have to track one of those babies down... Thanks again for your help!

My brother and i played this game at the local junior college cafeteria/game room back in the mid '80s when my Mom was getting her associate's degree. During the summer she would give us some money and let us play the video games while she was taking a class. Anyways, the game was a side view airplane game. It was supposed to be World War 2 era and was over an ocean. Your plane would dogfight enemy airplanes and you could also bomb ships that came into view periodically. I think i remember that your bombs would hit the ships in a manner like Canyon Bomber, that is, the bomb would take a small chunk out of the ships when you hit them. Eventually the ships would sink if you made a hole in them. If you did not sink them in time, the ship would eventually move off of the screen. You could play simultaneously with another player (I think). It was a really awesome game, and I imagine it was fairly uncommon because I never saw another one of them. Any help would be appreciated!

Those are great! They bring back some good memories. Too bad you don't have a "Yesterday's" token. It was a little arcade in San Jacinto Mall in Baytown, TX (just outside Houston) back in the early '80s. I spent a lot of time there. I do remember going to an Aladdin's Castle back in the day. That's really nice. I used to keep one token from each arcade that i would visit. Wish i knew where that collection is now. I guess somewhere in my parent's attic collecting dust.

Like the above poster said, i visualized Adventure to be a much larger game. I used to imagine as a kid that there was an evil wizard (denoted by a square with a small triangle above his head - his hat) that would appear on the black castle screen at the top and could shoot laser blasts at you. I also imagined there were enemy soldiers (various colored squares) that would try to get you as well. It was/is still a great game, but your mind as a child puts a lot more imagination into things then when you are older.

Favorite back in the day was Asteroids, Missile Command, Adventure, and Yars' Revenge. It sounds funny now but i was so jealous of my neighbor because he had an Odyssey 2 with all of the Gamemaster series (Conquest of the World, Quest for the Rings, etc.) and the Voice adapter. I would go over to his house just about everyday to play Attack of the Timelord. The voice made it that much cooler! Nowadays my favorite is still Asteroids. I could play that all day long even now. It's all about the gameplay. My PS2 is gathering dust, and i break out the Atari all of the time.

Sky Diver for most humorous (unintentionally) death sequence. I think Space Cavern has the harshest death sequence as your body irradiates and then disentegrates into dust.

Coleco Tel-Star Atari 2600 Heavy Sixer (Sunnyvale) Atari 2600 6 switch (Taiwan) Atari 2600 4 switch (woodgrain) Atari 2600 4 switch (Darth Vader) Atari 2600 Jr. (RIP) Sears Video Arcade (6 switch) Odyssey 2 with voice Intellivision with voice Colecovision NES (toploader) 2x Turbografx 16 Apple II GS Lynx SNES PS-2 Flashback 2 (if you consider that a system) (Briefly had a Jaguar, but i gave it back to the original owner.)

Space Jockey is a good game and cheap. Not sure why a lot of people hate it. I did think that it was a little strange blowing up people's houses though.