About a week and a half late posting this: 32 years ago!

[Dauber]

So...this is my brother and me after opening a package under the tree, addressed to the two of us...I'm the grinning blond kid! Christmas 1982. I recently was looking for this picture and asked my folks to just grab a random photo album from their stash so I could find it...and *boom!*....found it!

 

I had asked for the Coleco table-top Pac-Man game. I was (and still am!) a huge Pac-Man fan and wanted that thing. Now...I thought it was going to be an exact duplicate of the arcade game -- think MAME in a table-top box! -- so obviously I never actually saw it or heard it in action! My parents had talked to other folks about it and heard horror stories about it, so, as my dad told me, they thought the Atari would be a better investment. And they bought the Pac-Man cartridge and slipped it in the box.

 

The next day there was a sale at a local department store, so my brother and I decided to pool money we got for Christmas and get a few Atari games. For whatever reason, Street Racer was on the list (probably because 1) it was on sale and 2) it would give us an excuse to use the paddles). Also for whatever reason we had to decide between Outlaw and Superman -- I opted for Outlaw because I played it before and liked it. Then up for discussion was Missile Command (my brother wanted that), and Defender (my choice); Missile Command won out because it was cheaper.

 

Still have the original five games (although i might have sold off my Street Racer recently after getting a lower-case label variation), but not the original console - shortly after we got this the controller port stopped working, probably due to frequent swapping of joystick and paddles, so the console was taken back for a replacement, which many years later I sold to Inky after I got my 7800. And no, sadly, we didn't keep the box.

 

 

Edited January 5, 2015 by Dauber

[Antiriad]

Great photo!

You had also the pac-man t-shirt!

Edited January 6, 2015 by Antiriad

[chas10e]

Great photo!

You had also the pac-man t-shirt!

those look moar liek Jammie-Jams

 

awesome looking TV too

 

+1 on the photo as well , great story

[sloth-machine]

This is awesome, I love windows into the past like this. Thank you for sharing. I have fond memories of playing 2600 games with my brother

[4Ks]

Good on you for keeping that photo. Childhood keepsakes like that are always fun to pull out and look at years down the line. My parents have whole albums full of photos from their early days, and every once in a while they like to pull them out to show me what life was like back in the '70s.