Popular titles you never owned

[godzillajoe]

Back "in the day"

 

Not eBay.

 

Because friends had them I never owned Pac-Man, E.T., Defender, Indy 500, Adventure, Yars' Revenge, Raiders....

 

Could just go a few houses up and play them, why buy them.

 

If it was an arcade port I desperately needed, I would buy it, otherwise, not so much.

 

My friend Mike had an older brother who seemed to buy everything, he was the kid who had like a million games while I had a handful

 

And I tended to like the obscure games like Nexar and Encounter at L-7, especially when they were $5 at Osco Drug.

[karokoenig]

Now you mention it... we were at least half a dozen kids, trying to synchronize our wishlists so that we maximize the number of different games. But can you believe this - none of us ever had Asteroids. The first time I played it on the VCS was a few months ago when I started collecting again.

[+Cafeman]

Ha ha, this is gonna be a long list. I bet none of us had the money to own even a percentage of the popular titles, back in the day! We all traded! (that's why you see "JEreMy" and "evAn's CaRt" in permanent marker on carts ...).

 

Well, I never owned Adventure or Yars or Raiders of the Lost Ark or ET back in the day. I did own Pac, Defender, Ms Pac, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Vanguard though.

Edited January 3, 2013 by Cafeman

[rockman_x_2002]

Back in the day, my brother and I never actually owned Adventure, although we did borrow it briefly for a week or two. I also seem to recall not ever owning some of the other fairly common VCS titles like Slot Racer or the like.

[AtariLeaf]

Never owned Space Invaders, Adventure, or Missile Command since my cousins had those and we lent each other our games a lot back then.

[Zwackery]

A friend had Vanguard, and man did I like that game! I finally got it some time in the mid-90s.

[Csonicgo]

"Demons to Diamonds. Demons to Diamonds. Good lord, Demons to Diamonds.

 

I heard a LOT about this title. It looked really boring, and I never liked it when demoed at the store. Yet, Atari would not shut up about it. Months and months of promotional brochures of this "game" that looked really crappy to me compared to the Activision games coming out that year.

 

To this day, I have no idea how to play it."

Edited January 3, 2013 by Csonicgo

[jhd]

I only owned a small number of carts: Asteroids, Donley Kong, Bezerk, Pitfall, Space Invaders, and (of course) Combat.

 

I traded with a friend at school (he was the only person I knew with a 2600) for Empire Strikes Back, Airlock, Pac-Man, and probably some others -- maybe Vanguard.

 

A local video rental place started renting Atari 2600 games at $7/week and I rented (at least) Star Raiders, Cosmic Ark, and Adventure.

[AtariLeaf]

Donley Kong

 

Korean foreign exchange student?

[cvga]

Never owned Space Invaders, Adventure, or Missile Command since my cousins had those and we lent each other our games a lot back then.

 

I didn't have any of those either. I also did not have River Raid, Megamania, Cosmic Ark, Atlantis or Kaboom.

[cvga]

 

And I tended to like the obscure games like Nexar and Encounter at L-7, especially when they were $5 at Osco Drug.

 

 

I had a few $5 games. I got a fair amount of play out of Gopher, Bermuda Triangle and Bank Heist. Not so much out of Sssnake.

[sqoon]

Missed out on Millipede, Yar's Revenge, Demons to Diamonds, Jr. Pac Man, and Star Wars Arcade.

 

I have them all now though.

[+thegoldenband]

The big one we didn't have was Adventure. I don't think we had a lot of the early 1980s arcade ports too, like Galaxian, Phoenix, or Ms. Pac-Man. On the Activision front, we didn't have Enduro, and I don't think we owned Kaboom though I surely borrowed it at some point.

 

I remember all the ads for Demons to Diamonds! I didn't have that one either, but when I finally played it 5-6 years ago, I found out that what I imagined was quite a bit cooler than what it turned out to be.

[AtariLeaf]

As for Activision games, I had more of the B and C list titles like Barnstorming, Fishing Derby and Grand Prix but never had games like Pitfall, River Raid or Seaquest. Weird now that I think about it.

[Matthew]

1) Pitfall 2 (never new it existed)

2) Yars revenge (never new it existed)

3) Ikari warrior (Played Commando, missed this one)

4) Donkey Kong / Donkey Kong Junior.

 

 

One game I had and miss dearly is "Missile Control". I never see it on ebay.

[shadow460]

Pitfall II, Joust, Q*Bert, Mr. Do!, Crystal Castles, DK Jr., Stargate, Star Wars: The Arcade Game (we had a stand up cabinet of it instead), Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, River Raid II, and probably many others. I did play Pitfall II back in the day but we didn't own it. I traded a second Berzerk cart for Joust in 1990 or so.

[Skud]

Yars revenge

[chuckwalla]

Pitfall (traded Pitfall with my neighbor though at times).

Yars Revenge (now one of my all-time favorite 2600 carts).

Space Invaders (ony played for the first time a few years ago and understood the big deal back then).

[Jinks]

Adventure, pitfall, pitfall 2, space invaders(no one I knew had it) bezerk, combat, to tell you the truth, I dont to this day like these games anyways..

[Kurt_Woloch]

The most favorite games for the Atari 2600 I never owned (back then) were Pole Position, Joust, Tutankham and Frogger. A classmate of mine had Pole Position, Tutankham and Joust, and I had a pretty good version of Frogger on the TI-99 written in Extended Basic, so I didn't have to own an "official" port. My classmate also had Donkey Kong, and in fact I didn't even want to own the Atari 2600 version of that because it was so much watered down. We bought the TI-99 version instead, which was a pretty good port. There were more popular games like River Raid and Pitfall which I didn't really want to own... and some games weren't so popular that I'd like to have owned the 2600 version at all, for instance, I think I never saw a Donkey Kong Jr. 2600 cartridge in a store, although I liked to play the arcade original, and no port of that game was released for the TI-99 and the C-64. Oh, and then there's Defender which two of my classmates owned, so I never owned it myself.

[+20ohm20]

Frogger

Pole Position

Ms. Pac-Man

Centipede

 

And I'm pretty sure I didn't own a 20th Century Fox game until around 1990-1991.

[sega_SHARK]

We had Empire Strikes Back, Frogger, Bowling, Video Chess and Combat back in the '80s.

So, I missed out on a lot of games.

Pitfall, Q*bert, River Raid, and Haunted House were playable at friends' houses.

I don't remember many people having Spider-man. That one would have been cool to have.

Edited January 6, 2013 by sega_SHARK

[Unbeliever]

I think I had the basic games like Asteroids, Missile Command, and Pacman, but some I missed until I collected them years later were Ms. Pacman and Demon Attack. I made sure to get Space Invaders and those types but some of the more "exclusive" games I had NO clue about. Glad I have some of them now.

[Atari2600Lives]

I never owned kaboom and it's one of my all time favorite games today.

[AtariLeaf]

I never owned kaboom and it's one of my all time favorite games today.

 

I actually hated that game as a kid but I've grown to love it now.