vanderveen88

Well, thank you all for your input. I expect the game will be arriving shortly, so I guess I'll wait to see how much I like it before I declare any "buyer's remorse." By the way, I recall reading (on TSR's site, maybe?) that as many as 300,000 were made, but only 100,000 were actually sold. I guess that's still quite a large quantity in the grand scheme of things, but I suspect many of them have been snapped up by collectors by now. I'm happy with the price I paid but as others have said, I'm sure it could be had cheaper with a little patience and a bit of luck. Then again, last night I snagged Zombie Nation for $5. Perhaps that evens things out a little bit?

Just purchased some Intellivision games from Chris. Everything went smoothly and I will add my name to the list of satisfied customers. Thanks!

This morning I bought a copy of Tengen Tetris on eBay. Being in Canada, my choices are limited, but I found a seller based in Ontario. For the loose game, the total came to $38.99 in US funds, including shipping. This seems quite reasonable to me, certainly compared to the prices at which other sellers had it listed. I'm sure I could have found a marginally better deal if I'd waited longer or bid on an auction instead of buy-it-now. I'm curious to know, however, what the folks here would pay for it. When I first started paying attention to NES collecting about 10 years ago, it seemed like Tengen Tetris was the system's "Holy Grail" -- certainly in terms of its notoriety and relative scarcity. I know I haven't seen one in the wild and I have spent my fair share of time at thrift and pawn shops, game stores and yard sales. But I don't know if it still has that same reputation. All the talk now is about Stadium Events, it seems. Perhaps Tengen Tetris was akin to Chase the Chuck Wagon in that its notoriety overshadowed its actual rarity and drove up prices. I'm happy with the price I paid -- I haven't received it yet, of course, but being a big fan of Nintendo's Tetris I'm looking forward to trying this one. So what would you pay or demand for it?

I have noticed this too and like the above posters I figure it's a combination of a few things. The gatefold boxes were a convenient way to keep everything together, much nicer than the simple boxes Atari used (which were later adopted by Mattel or INTV anyway). If you needed a place to keep the overlays it probably just made sense to keep the whole package. I noticed one seller on eBay who was liquidating his own collection of Intellivision games. His method of keeping the overlays organized was to punch holes in the top left corner and keep them all on a large ring. Very handy at the time, I'd imagine, but 25 years later he appeared to regret having thrown away the boxes. (I bought his set of Intellivoice-compatible games so the four of them match up in my collection, anyway!)

Yes, they probably had their hands full between the NES, the SMS, the 2600, the 7800, and whatever other consoles and home computers they were supporting at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't a lot of INTV's sales in the mid/late '80s done through mail order? That might have also discouraged other third parties from jumping on board.

My friend recently purchased an Xbox 360 and decided to purchase a couple of games through the online marketplace. For some reason, however, he couldn't get them to download properly. It took him several dozen tries, a few weeks and maybe half a dozen phone calls to finally learn that it was our wireless router causing the problem -- it simply refused to download files so large (2 GB and up). No error message, no clues, just a download forever hung at 1%. For their part, the Xbox support team did help him get it figured out and now he's happy playing Tropico 3 and Civilization Revolution. But I like the fact that I can pick up a game for essentially any of my older systems -- even the ones that are 30+ years old -- bring it home, and it will just work, no troubles at all.

Mine are largely "organized" by company, then label type, then alphabetically -- much the same way I organize my games for each system. Duplicates are kept together, and boxed games are kept separately from loose games. However, my 2600 collection is anything but organized at the moment. I left a couple hundred cartridges at my parents' home in Ontario when I moved out west, and now I've amassed around 50 games here in Saskatchewan. I'll focus on putting them in order once I have them all in the same place, but who knows when that will be...

PM sent.

Not sure if this counts, but I remember finding an SMS with several games at a yard sale years ago for $10 or so. Not knowing anything about the system, I grabbed it anyway. Among the titles, as I recall, were Double Dragon, Rampage, Black Belt and Great Baseball, as well as the built-in games (didn't discover those until the one time we turned the system on without putting the game in properly... great surprise!). We had a blast with it, especially with Rampage, which seemed to me such a novel concept at the time. To this day, I don't know if there are any SMS titles I'd put in my "all-time favourites" or "must-own" list, but it's still an underdog system of which I'm quite fond. (A few years later I found another system set at a church bazaar for $5... so I'm pretty much good to go!)

I will do this sometimes with very familiar games (Tetris especially) but more often than not, I find it easier to follow the game action with music and sound effects. Here's another question: when you do turn down the sound, what, if anything, do you listen to in its place? I remember once playing Intellivision while listening to the Human League ("Don't You Want Me," "Black Hit of Space," etc.) and found the two seemed to go very well together. That cold, synthesized sound just kind of meshes well with the primitive feel of the Inty games somehow. I bet it'd suit pretty much any game from the late 70s or early 80s. Any others?

At one time I was fond of those combination joystick-paddles that came with the Coleco Gemini. They're shaped a little like the 7800 ProLine joysticks and are probably not built to last especially well, like many of Coleco's products. But they were kind of handy and were also easy to take along if you needed to bring them somewhere.

Here's the set I'm using as of last week. My boss gave me an old TV that was sitting in her basement: a Zenith model, manufactured 1984, cable-ready and complete with wood-grain plastic casing (but unfortunately missing the front panel that hides the controls). I have my NES, Super NES and a recently-acquired 7800 hooked up to the beast... just feels so much more authentic playing the games on an old TV like this.

Nothing too fancy: Blockade Runner, along with one overlay, the manual and a rather crushed box. Looking at it I just noticed the manufacturer, Interphase, was based in Richmond, B.C. -- so I suppose it's nice to have a genuine Canadian game in the collection.

Definitely Sonic 2 on the Genesis. I remember playing this game at a friend's house on Sundays after church when I was 5 or 6 years old. My family didn't have any games at all then; my parents waited till I was 8 before they bought our first computer, and it would be a couple more years before my brother and I bought our first system together (a used Genesis). But I can clearly and fondly recall which systems each of my friends and relatives had at the time. Anyway, we'd always play in 2-player mode and as the guest I'd inevitably get stuck with Tails, but I never minded. I don't remember what other games they had since we never seemed to tire of it. The special stage was the best, of course, but playing any video game at all was just so exciting for me then. It was kind of hard to tell what was going on at times with the crunched screens, but we loved it anyway.

Just received half a dozen Colecovision cartridges in the mail from Joey. The deal went very smoothly. The games arrived quickly, they were packaged properly, and worked and looked great. Very simple on my end -- just sent payment through PayPal and that was it. Couldn't have gone better! Thanks a lot!

Truthfully, the first time I played Pac-Man on the 2600, I wasn't aware of its reputation as an industry killer. I figured it would be crude and unsophisticated, and I enjoyed it for what it was. It was no great shakes, but it was recognizable as Pac-Man, and that's about all I expected. I didn't have that luxury with E.T., though, but as others have said, there are far worse games on the 2600.

I found my first Atari at a garage sale close to 10 years ago. I was 12 or 13 at the time. It was a 4-switch woodgrain model and came with about 20 games in a small wooden case: mostly commons like Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Combat, as well as a couple more obscure titles (Squeeze Box was there, as well as a cart marked "Goliath Video System" that I later sold to someone on RGVC). It also came with a set of paddles, although the knobs on each were missing, requiring us to use the metal stubs underneath. There were no joysticks included, but by some coincidence I'd found a couple of 9-pin joysticks at another garage sale earlier that day. The whole set cost me $7. As to why I've kept it... by this point, I guess I do attach some nostalgia to the Atari, even though it was already a relic by the time I came across it. Its appeal comes in many forms. To some people it's an amusing oddity. But there are lots of games I enjoy and look forward to playing when I bring it out of the closet. By now I can't imagine discarding it. It's a piece of history, for most people the oldest system they're likely to get their hands on*, and something I always enjoy sharing with friends. *At one point in time I did have a Coleco Telstar Combat, which, like the VCS, dates back to 1977. Now THAT'S an amusing oddity.

I did this only once, with a copy of Royal Dealer for the Intellivision. I tore the shrinkwrap but left it on the box, if only to preserve the Woolworth's sticker on the front. (They had marked it down at least once.) There seem to be lots of sealed common Inty games floating around, even here in Saskatchewan. I often come across sealed games at two of the game shops I frequent here, never for more than $5. So I didn't feel terribly guilty about it.