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Atari Memories


jknu80sfan

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Hey all.

I am new here and wanted to read some of your favorite Atari 2600 memories. Whether it be opening the bad boy up at Christmas or staying up late to try and conquer a game....tell em all!

 

Two of my earliest memories were playing Pac Man at my cousin's house in about 82 or 83. I was about 6 at the time and my older cousin was pissed at me for eating all the power pak's first. I guess I didn't get the concept.

 

Another memory is coming home from Boston at 7 years old. I had eye surgey as a kid. When we were walking through the airport, my grandparents greeted me and my mom with my own first Atari 2600. Can't remember what kind but I didn't care at the time. We headed straight over to an old store called Gold CIrcle and I ended up getting Bowling. I was a huge bowling fan at the time and was in heaven for awhile with that game. I remember borrowing Donkey Kong from a neighbor the next night and was even allowed to stay up past my bed time to play it.

 

Awesome!

 

ok, your turn

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I can remember playing Space Invaders when it first came out at my cousin's house pretty much all night long. It wasn't too long after that that my parents bought us our own Atari, to replace the Coleco Telstar (Pong clone) we had before that. Since they knew I obviously loved Space Invaders, they bought that to go along with Combat that came with it. And then my sister and I each got to pick out our own game for it. I chose Asteroids and she chose Missile Command. Both were good choices, I think. :)

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I wrote a thread in the "Atari section" of our italian retrogaming forum exactly to "recount" my personal story with the VCS...

I named the thread "Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday!" and here it is !

 

[sorry, but maybe the translation is not completely correct... ]

________________________________

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday!

 

Hello and Merry Christmas to you all !

...

...

...

Yes, you're probably wondering the reason of this thread placed in the "Atari" section and, above all, the "Happy Birthday" on the topic...

 

Of course you will find the answer in these mine "FOUR ROWS" that I usually write about all those personal gaming events whose counted for me more than "something"!

Unfortunately, time has inevitably caused some gaps in the Gigabytes (!?!) of my memory, but I can assure you that the memory of what I am going to write is still rather "live"!

 

January 1981

At that time it happened to me to be at the home of a classmate of mine (I was in the fifth grade school) to exchange, without the knowledge of my parents, a box of Lego-Technic that I had just been "achieved" on XMas, with one of those games we could call "handheld videogames": the beautiful "Basketball" (Bambino)!

Bambino-Basketball.jpg

This was a great game that I had been able to play in the "shop around the corner" but I also had never considered it because at the time I really did like the aforementioned "Lego" and "Meccano" (hehe, the "DIY spirit" pervaded me since the "tender age" and I have NEVER left it...!)

But the enthusiasm for my new acquisition was brutally ravaged by the vision, in the house of that friend, of a "strange" device resting on the massive TV that the (wealthy) little family have in the living room.

A machine that was very different from the "usual" Pong-clone TV game with 100 variations, however all pretty much the same, that the TV was usually "holding" and to whom we were even tired of playing at...

 

Nowadays, this memory always brings me back to a sequence of a well-known movie and I really can't fail to show you a picture, "captured" for the occasion from my "20th Anniversary Special Edition DVD" (which, among the other things, turned 10 years old just at THIS 2012' XMas, as well as the film in question turned 30 !):

NDVD_000.jpg

...

...

...

If you have not already "caught it" then I propose the same image again, now with the detail underlined:

NDVD_001.jpg

BUT ... it is an Atari VCS !

 

Ok, movie (ET for those who have not already guessed ...) apart, in "our" case the living room has not such an "American" appearance, but the TV was undoubtedly better looking! However, what I saw was just a brand new VCS (a model that is now referred as a "Light Sixer / L6") which had been given to my friend on the occasion of the just spent Christmas 1980 !

 

Then, that day I went back home terribly in late, and mom and dad rightly "castigate" me, just because I suffered the classic "lost track of time" ...

The new was seriously astonishing, because at that time, playing an arcade port (or something similar) such as "Space Invaders" right on the screen of a home's TV was something almost unheard ! Well, after about an hour and half of good playing at Space Invaders and Combat, I ended up back to my home and I realized I had forgotten that "just-traded" Basketball handheld game to the friend's house!

 

Needless to tell you that from that moment I continued to "crush the balls" to my parents asking if I could have a VCS !

Unfortunately, the purchase price in Italy was disproportionately high for the finances of my family ... Damn (to say the least ...) ! I could see it everywhere: in that mentioned "shop around the corner", In TV commercials (italian's famous "Atari ? Maybe !!!" Oh, yeah! ... Maybe ! :() and also in the famous italian Postal Market catalog (well. .. there were also many other beautiful "little things", some of which would shortly teased the very first SEXUAL fantasies...), as well as, OBVIOUSLY, in the home of that lucky friend who also bought a large number of titles within a very short time !

 

Christmas 1981

 

STILL NO VCS FOR ME !

 

Bah, never mind, because I was (and still am) not "eager" to have something ... so I went back to play with that (damned! :D) "Gamatic 7704" I have since 3 or 4 years (can not remember)

VideoGame%252BLegoTechnic_%252770.JPG

and which was occasionally connected to my "personal" TV: a wonderful (...) GBC 12", strictly in b/w, of the same model of the one in the picture below, with the only difference in the color of the chassis exterior that in the one of mine was orange.

[ Picture from Radiomuseum ]

GBC_12p.jpg

 

1982

 

In the winter of that year, the price of the VCS had a "small" decrease, but those 485000 Liras were still too "heavy" for us (I do not remember how much my parents could earn at that time, but I remember the words of my father when he told my mother that for that "thing" he could have to pay more than half of its regular salary ...!).

So, it was only due to a sort of "joint venture" between parents, uncles and grandparents in

CHRISTMAS 1982

that I could finally see a large box under my XMas tree:

VCS_box.jpg

I remember that on "my" package there was the "Melchioni" (the former distributor of Atari branded products) sticker instead of that "Ingersoll", of course there wasn't the "UK" sticker and, just as obviously, inside there was NOT an "Heavy Sixer / H6" as the picture on the box could have left to understand ("Why the VCS in the picture is different from mine? Boh? ..." ) but a "L6" !

 

IN ANY CASE ...

AT LEAST I had my VCS! ;-)

 

[... albeit with a few years of "delay" than other (lucky) fellows (and not to mention the fact that in the U.S. the VCS was already "around" as well since FIVE years!) That maybe they were also already "done" the 'HomeComputer! ]

 

In fact, I already knew that I would have the VCS (because my pa' told me as a "preview"), and just before that Christmas, I took the opportunity to make an "extra" purchase... So I programmed to go with that friend / classmate and his parents to the only giant hypermarket we had in our country, one of the first "IPER" in the Province of Pavia !

I remember the journey, inside their car (it was a "Fiat Argenta", brand new!), while listening to the wonderful audio cassette "The Turn of a Friendly Card" by Alan Parsons (I remember especially the extraordinary song "The Gold Bug ")!

Today we are accustomed to the magnificence (...) of our immense shopping centers, but thirty years ago when you walked into such a place you could also feel quite bewildered, confused and even somewhat dazed!

Many products, of all possible and imaginable kinds, all "together" in only one huge place ...

... without detailing the whole story, that night I went back home very happy, with the cartridge of "Space Invaders" for VCS in my hands, anxiously waiting to finally be able to use it !

 

...

 

After all this time, the same VCS, although devoid of the original box, is still in my hands, fully functional and without ever having the need for maintenance, except for the joystick, whose instead I "fixed" several times !

Of course, during all these years I have recovered cartridges that I had "lost" (let's say so ...) before, and in addition, as many of you who know me already know, I have taken several other...

 

So, HAPPY 30th BIRTHDAY, VCS !

 

For the occasion, I moved it from its usual shelf in the tavern in order to have it in my living room (even if connected to an LCD...) and play with my wife and daughter!

 

Gentlemen, you know that for me it was a real pleasure to remember what I have just told you, but it is equally great pleasure to see my daughter who at the age of six is playing Space Invaders and pass TWO ROUNDS without losing a life!

 

Valentina with Space Invaders

100_1084.jpg

100_1080.jpg

 

Combat

100_1085.jpg

 

Asteroids (acquired during 1983)

100_1086.jpg

 

Defender (acquired during 1983)

100_1087.jpg

 

Pac-Man (AAARRRGGGHHH!, acquired during 1983)

100_1088.jpg

 

Vanguard (purchased for Christmas 1983)

100_1089.jpg

 

Jungle Hunt (also purchased for Christmas 1983)

100_1091.jpg

 

Moon Patrol (acquired during 1984)

100_1090.jpg

 

Phoenix (acquired during 1984)

100_1092.jpg

 

Centipede (acquired during 1984)

100_1093.jpg

 

Ms. Pac-Man [ I had it FOR FREE in the '84 by shipping the (stolen) warranty of the 2600 "Vader" owned by a friend who didn't know that "trick" ;) :D ! ]

100_1094.jpg

 

Pole Position (purchased for Christmas 1984)

100_1096.jpg

 

Dig Dug (purchased for Christmas 1984)

100_1095.jpg

 

... not to mention titles like Pitfall, HERO, Demon Attack and Decathlon, all "third-party" games purchased in 1983, 1984 and 1985 ... I was at about a rate of 1 game every two months (prices at the time were rather "high" ! "Out of an eventual commercial promotion", a "respectable" cartridge cost from 59 to 89 thousand Liras !)

 

 

 

Well, I'm done... FOR NOW ! And I'm going to bed !

 

 

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS to all !

 

________________________________

 

Well, I hope you'd like that "four rows"... ;)

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My family got a 2600 around 1982, and my youngest uncles (teenagers at the time) got one of their own around the same time, so we would always exchange and play each other's games. I remember getting Star Wars: Jedi Arena for my birthday one year, as a reward for getting good grades in school, and I also remember playing Vanguard and Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time at my grandparents' house with my uncles. We got Yars' Revenge, Defender, and Missile Command around the same time, too, although I don't remember who got them first. I also remember other relatives who showed me Pitfall!, Super Breakout, and Asteroids for the first time. I still have most of those original cartridges, in fact, along with the original controllers, some of which I recently restored and still use today.

 

I was fascinated with Raiders in particular because it seemed like such an incredibly deep game at the time. But for all the games, the package artwork and the manuals (which were more like comic books to me) added greatly to the sense of depth: they gave me images and a story that my imagination could project onto the relatively primitive games as I was playing them. It was an experience that I've never received from more modern games, which usually leave nothing to the imagination, and I remembered it so fondly that I picked up sealed copies of most of these games from Venezuela last year, just to see those boxes and manuals again.

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Good thread! I got an Atari for Christmas of 1981. My dad wouldn't allow me to play it in our living room because he was afraid it would harm the TV. Therefore I was holed up in my bedroom playing on a 13 inch black and white TV. That was fine with me though since I was elated just to have the Atari!

 

I got to choose a game for my birthday present in the Summer of 82. Unwittingly, I chose Starmaster because it was a new release and looked really fun. This was easily my best game choice ever. Not because it was fun, although it was, but because of a few words in the little box under the "Tips from Alan Miller" in the instructions. Those words said...

 

NOTE: StarMaster by ACTIVISION is designed to be played on color television sets only.

 

My mom made my dad let me hook the Atari up in the living room. It bothered him so much that he bought me a small color television for my bedroom. One of the best birthdays ever :)

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Great idea for a thread and great stories from everyone.

 

The first time I ever played an Atari was maze craze by myself staying at a cousins house . I became obssesed with owning one and remember reading the game catalog over and over and over .

After I got the 2600 for my 13th birthday my first game purchase was adventure . I was a D&D player and it was a dream game . I followed that up by trading for missile command and i sold a pair of binoculars in order to purchase laser blast .I also remember paying $10 for pitfall from a class mate who dd not like the game ....his loss , it was the best $10 I ever spent .

 

 

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I got mine, who knows what year, I think Missile Command was just out or not quite yet. We bought it at Bradlee's. $149 I believe. I played Space Invaders on the 13" B&W TV in my sister's room every waking moment until I finally got my own 19" color TV as a birthday gift which was a big deal.

 

Combat, Space Invaders, Laser Blast, Night Driver. I think those were the first games I had. Then Missile Command, Asteroids.

 

Funny that I never bought Pac-Man or ET

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I got my Atari for christmas in 83 or 84 - can't remember exactly. My brother, 4 years older than I, got his own tiny portable colour TV the same year. The plan of my parents was that we could use the two together. Only my brother wasn't into videogames too much. Can you believe that he wanted to use that TV for actually watching TV? Interestingly, the TV "timeshare" did work pretty well. We didn't fight over it a lot, though we did fight a lot, as brothers do.

 

The system was delivered with Pac Man back then. I remember being sufficiently fascinated by it during the holidays (in Germany, we get our presents on the 24th), but what really got me hooked to the machine was "Phoenix", which I got from my grandma on the 25th. I still play that one more often than any other game.

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I think my biggest thrill was when they released Berserk for the 2600. I wanted that game in the worst way, and finally managed to get it. The green packaging and the instruction manual thrilled me to no end. I was in heaven when I popped it into my old VCS and started playing....for hours. The game never got old, either. I played it constantly and had to remind myself that I had other games to play, and had to make time for them as well. But Berserk was one of my all-time favorites when I was a kid. Once my collection grew, I thought I wouldn't visit the arcade all that much anymore, but I still made time to go down there and hang out with my friends. That was our social gathering spot (filled with smoke from cig's and the "other" kind as well) where we would talk smack and see who was really the best at any particular game. But I would always go home and perfect my skills on the Atari 2600 counterparts, thinking that would give me an edge.

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Good thread! I got an Atari for Christmas of 1981. My dad wouldn't allow me to play it in our living room because he was afraid it would harm the TV. Therefore I was holed up in my bedroom playing on a 13 inch black and white TV. That was fine with me though since I was elated just to have the Atari!

 

I got to choose a game for my birthday present in the Summer of 82. Unwittingly, I chose Starmaster because it was a new release and looked really fun. This was easily my best game choice ever. Not because it was fun, although it was, but because of a few words in the little box under the "Tips from Alan Miller" in the instructions. Those words said...

 

NOTE: StarMaster by ACTIVISION is designed to be played on color television sets only.

 

My mom made my dad let me hook the Atari up in the living room. It bothered him so much that he bought me a small color television for my bedroom. One of the best birthdays ever :)

 

What kind was it? Anyone remember tube type color TV's.

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Reading your posts I see that I forgot to say I COULD NEVER hookup the VCS to the living room's color TV my father bought a couple of year earlier (I think in the 1977 or '78)...

Maybe he did never know that, but when he and mom were outside of the house for an expected time of more-than-one-hour ( :D ) my VCS did litterally jump inside that 22" Nordmende :D !!!

dsc03338g.jpg

[ picture luckily found in the net... it really is the same TV we had in those years !!! ]

 

I remember how spectacular was to see games so huge and coloured as Vanguard and Pole Position :) !

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I got mine late in the fall of 1980 along with space invaders, and paid for it by saving up my paper route money. I had saved up enough to consider the Intellivision. My cousin had one of those, but I hated the controller and didn't like the fact that many of the games required two players. Besides... I just had to have space invaders. I didn't buy both in the same store though. The store where I got the VCS (don't remember which one) did not have space invaders in stock.So, i dragged my parents to another store. Normally, they would not have done that, but I had saved my money!

 

As far as TVs go, I had the same experience as cvga. My dad was convinced that video game systems destroyed color TVs. So I had to play on a 13 inch black and white TV for the next two years. Finally, my mother convinced my Dad to get me a small color TV. I remember turning it back to B&W for playing Asteroids though as I felt that was more true to the arcade version.Otherwise, I felt like I was shooting at blobs of ice cream.

 

I was very disappointed with how Pac Man turned out, but played it anyways as there was not an arcade near me. I really felt Atari redeemed itself with Ms Pac-Man. Pitfall amazed me... Pitfall II even more so. I liked Space Shuttle, even though most thought it was borning, Most of my collection consisted of the activision games and Atari arcade ports.

 

One memory I had was my mother getting a hold of Rubik's cube for the 2600 since she knew I liked the real thing. I thought the game was boring and never really played it. It sat and gathered dust, CIB, until I sold it off to pay for some NES games. I didn't know any better.

 

Around late 1983-1984, I noticed a lot of cheap games in the drug stores, so I was starting to get them by the fist full. Some were okay... others not so good. I had no idea what was really going on. I figured the 5200 and Coleovision had their footholds. I could afford neither system, so I did not pay attention. I just kept getting 2600 games. I was was pretty good about keeping boxes and instructions though. At some point, I sold most of them to afford NES games a few years later. Who knows how many R6-R8 I had. At that age, I really didn't pay attention.

 

The 2600 got me through the mid-late 80's. I did get a 7800 at some point there, but it was unexciting to me as I felt the games were mostly rehashes of the games I already had with the 2600 with better graphics. Next up was the NES, and as I said, most of my 2600 games went to fund NES games.

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I got my system just to play Space Invaders. I was hooked on the game back then and looked into getting it for the house and Atari was the way to go. So when I bought the game I picked up Space Invaders with it, which was an expensive prospect back then. But I no longer have that game...I ended up with a Sears Telegame. What happened was...for some reason, the fire controll on the right controller got stuck...it didn't matter if a joy stick was plugged in or not, it kept firiing. So I looked into getting it fixed, and Sears said they would take it and have it repaired. So I took it to my local Sears store and with tears in my eyes (well, almost) I handed it over. That was the last I saw of that unit. Weeks went buy and I never got it back. I finally called Sears and they acted like I never brought it in. Finally they found their copy of the receipt and acknowledged they received it. More time went by and still no game. So I got fed up and contacted Atari myself. They said they never received that shipment of games for repair. Turns out, Sears lost the whole lot. They said they didn't...they said there was a strike at Atari and they basically had no clue as to what they were doing. Atari adamantly denied it saying there is no strike and that Sears lost the games. Sears was tap dancing all over the place trying to place blame on Atari, but Atari had nothing to do with it. Sears was irresponsible and lost like twenty games in need of repair. Finally after months of arguing, Sears knuckled down and decided to distribute new games to all who had their games lost for free, so that is how I ended up with my Telegames despite the fact that I bought an Atari. However I now own an Atari Darth Vader system I found on Ebay, so once again I am playing an actual Atari system and it feels good...LOL.

post-33914-0-08367500-1357227201_thumb.jpg

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I've never looked forward to the release of a game as much as I did for Asteroids. This was in 1981, and I was 11. I'm not sure how I knew that the release was imminent (there weren't any videogame magazines at the time), but I probably saw it listed in the Sears catalog as "coming soon" or something. Back then, there was only one videogame store in the suburb of Dallas where I grew up. I called the store just about every day to find out if the game was in stock. I don't remember how long I did this before I got the good news, but I do think that it was at least a couple of months. I still have the vivid memory of walking into the tiny store, seeing wall-to-wall racks holding games, and expecting there to be some kind of mistake about the release. Maybe they would be sold out. I couldn't believe it when the clerk set the iconic reddish-brown box on the counter. That was a great day.

 

The second-most anticipated release for me did not have such a happy ending: Coleco's Donkey Kong for the Intellivision.

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I was fascinated with Raiders in particular because it seemed like such an incredibly deep game at the time. But for all the games, the package artwork and the manuals (which were more like comic books to me) added greatly to the sense of depth: they gave me images and a story that my imagination could project onto the relatively primitive games as I was playing them. It was an experience that I've never received from more modern games, which usually leave nothing to the imagination, and I remembered it so fondly that I picked up sealed copies of most of these games from Venezuela last year, just to see those boxes and manuals again.

I used to have the same fascination with Raiders for the very same reason. It was definitely the deepest game I had ever seen on the Atari. My sister and I worked together to complete the game (and get a pretty decent rating at the end), but it definitely took the both of us to do it.
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I got to choose a game for my birthday present in the Summer of 82. Unwittingly, I chose Starmaster because it was a new release and looked really fun. This was easily my best game choice ever. Not because it was fun, although it was, but because of a few words in the little box under the "Tips from Alan Miller" in the instructions. Those words said...

 

NOTE: StarMaster by ACTIVISION is designed to be played on color television sets only.

 

StarMaster is still one of my two absolute favorite games for the Atari (the other one being Adventure). I still probably play Star Master and Adventure more than any other. I can't count the number of hours I've spent staring out the cockpit window shooting at aliens... Even better that it got you the use of a color TV! My parents never let us connect the Atari the "good" TV in the living room. But when they replaced the 19" color TV in their bedroom, I got the old one to put in the game room and use with the Atari, and later my Atari 800, too. So I was very fortunate that I had a decent TV to use pretty much from the beginning.
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One more memory from me... I grew up in a small city in central California so I had somewhat limited access to (and knowledge of) the various Atari games that existed. We had the Atari ones, plus Activision and Imagic, and that was about it. I remember one day going to San Francisco and wandering into a small electronics store and seeing a TON of games I never even knew existed! The ones that really caught my eye were the Apollo Games, especially Space Jockey. My parents refused to buy me anything, so it wasn't for several years that I got to try it (and realized it totally was NOT worth the wait!) :) I was also blown away completely when I saw a SuperCharger and Phaser Patrol for the first time. I was already in love with Star Raiders on the 800 and Starmaster on the 2600 so Phaser Patrol looked like the end-all be-all Atari 2600 game to me. Sadly, this was another one that I had to wait years to get to try myself, and I was glad to see that this one was totally worth the wait.

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StarMaster is still one of my two absolute favorite games for the Atari (the other one being Adventure). I still probably play Star Master and Adventure more than any other. I can't count the number of hours I've spent staring out the cockpit window shooting at aliens... Even better that it got you the use of a color TV! My parents never let us connect the Atari the "good" TV in the living room. But when they replaced the 19" color TV in their bedroom, I got the old one to put in the game room and use with the Atari, and later my Atari 800, too. So I was very fortunate that I had a decent TV to use pretty much from the beginning.

 

Actually, StarMaster is playable on a B&W TV. I played it for over a year before I got that color TV.

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So as the original poster of this question, I feel I need to add more of my own content. These are all awesome stories by the way. My game selection was limited in the beginning. Like I said initially, I had Combat, Bowling, and the borrowed games from friends and family. I actually can't remember the next game I owned. Anyways, I was playing bowling one night and I remember there was some construction going on down the road. I want to say some telephone pole work or something like that. Anyways, its relatively late at night for a 7 year old and I am sitting about a foot away from this big old, console, Zenith TV. It's dark and I think my parents are in another room or something. In fact, to create more of the mood, I think I am sitting up with a blanket over my head so it's just me and the bowling alley. Anyways, all of a sudden, my TV is talking to me. I am hearing these garbled voices coming from the TV! It sounds like human voices but I can't make out what they are saying. Imagine my terror as I go running to get my mom. I think Poltergeist had just come out so I might have had some fears about the TV people coming to get me. It turns out, our TV was picking up some of the radio conversations between the phone company repair people. It freaked out my little mind but I think I still regrouped for a solid 235 game!

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