How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?

[Vic George 2K3]

To anyone whose childhood started with an NES, any game system earlier than that might as well be like Pong -- too primitive to even bother trying out. It's like the fight between casual games and hardcore games nowadays -- if it's too simplistic, it isn't worth playing and hence is NOT A GAME. Of course, the only early games that even bothered to suck you dry of any money were arcade games, since their difficulty was ramped up to make you want to spend quarter after quarter if you want to player harder and longer.

[CapitanClassic]

 

This could explain it, do official Nintendo controllers use conductive glue? I still use my original NES controller from 1988, the rubber is worn a bit but is just as responsive as Christmas morning when I opened the box, but most of my Genesis controllers have rubber worn down and poor response even when opened and cleaned. I thought maybe I should reapply some carbon to the rubber, but most look like the carbon is fine.

NES controllers (as well as the Dogbone, SNES, etc.) all use similar carbon glue with plastic buttons on top of rubber membrane.

http://images.pcworld.com/news/graphics/207907-nes_14_slide.jpg

 

For the most part, this should last a very long time. My SNES controllers just wore out faster than NES/Genesis because of the kinds of games that I play. I broke an original Atari controller before as well. The plastic shaft for the joystick that is covered by the rubber sleeve cracked in half. Anything with moving parts will wear down eventually. My guess is the conductive glue was much cheaper than using a pick-and-place machine (probably not invented yet, or at least cost prohibitive. I know where I work these machines cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.) or using labor to solder the switches to the PCB board.

[Tickled_Pink]

I'm actually the absolute complete opposite to the types of people the OP described. But that's because I'm 20 years older. I dismiss absolutely everything Nintendo and SEGA and tend to think of those who seem to believe that the games industry started there as imbeciles.

 

It brings my eyeball juices to the boil when I see the Top 20 this or the Top 20 that on YouTube and EVERYTHING stops at either the SNES or NES. Although they are retro, I don't consider them to be collectable or classically retro. It might be because they were late to the party and weren't there at the inception of the home gaming revolution.

[CapitanClassic]

As to the topic at hand though,

 

I grew up with Atari 2600, and I can understand skipping it. Most of the games don't have an ending. Games of the era are about beating someone else's high score. I don't think most people who grew up on or after the NES era are interested in playing a game so much that you can master it and roll the score. The only reason I play th VCS these days is to compete in the High Score Club.

 

Another big drawback is that most players discover the VCS through emulation. There doesn't seem to be a big community for Network play of VCS (does Stella even support it?). Where as the SNES has at least some servers that can help you find other players to go head-to-head with. Another issue with emulation is that playing the rom might be difficult without the instruction manual. Whether it is knows the objective, or understanding the Game Selection numbers, trying to figure out a VCS game can be daunting without a rule book.

 

Some emulation features don't serve a useful purpose for the VCS. Save-states will let you restart an NES game right after you have successfully completed a level. Save states are pointless when you are playing for a High Score. I don't think many people want to take the time or effort to get really good at VCS or NES games (but, with save-states on the NES, you don't need to be too good)

[Buyatari]

Atari is something that is appreciated best by those who were there when it happened. To look at most Atari games without the childhood nostalgia that most Atari fans have just won't produce the same results.

 

Someone said that Atari was an acquired taste and I'm not sure I agree. It may be possible for younger generations to learn to appreciate just how much was done with so little but for many you just had to be there.

[Gentlegamer]

If I haven't said it in this thread already, allow me: Tank Pong is the greatest game ever devised.

[Keatah]

Another big drawback is that most players discover the VCS through emulation.

 

Another issue with emulation is that playing the rom might be difficult without the instruction manual. Whether it is knows the objective, or understanding the Game Selection numbers, trying to figure out a VCS game can be daunting without a rule book.

 

Some emulation features don't serve a useful purpose for the VCS. Save-states will let you restart an NES game right after you have successfully completed a level. Save states are pointless when you are playing for a High Score. I don't think many people want to take the time or effort to get really good at VCS or NES games (but, with save-states on the NES, you don't need to be too good)

 

Awesome! Emulation is bringing the classics of the 70's and 80's to today's generation in style. It's like going to opera in a RollsRoyce! You arrive in style!

 

Yup. Some VCS games do indeed need the manual for the Game Selection Matrix, rules, tips, and tricks. And even a short 1 paragraph story to set the stage. And that is why there are .PDF scans of just about all the VCS games out there. PDF scans of the box and manual are integral to any emulation setup.

 

I beg to differ on the save states. They are just as valuable on the VCS as they are on some mindless NES platformer. Some VCS games ramp way up there in difficulty. And you just have to pass the next level.. Save.. If not you can spend 2 hours getting working your way back.

[Keatah]

[..]

5) The night and day emulation not being able to perform against original hardware is obsolete and irrelevant. Sure, special snowflakes want us all to believe it, but face it, digital is here and emulation is now. At best, the 2600's most famous titles were ported down to it. So it's not even the original game, it's the Atari version of said game. This is why I mentioned the collections. Sometimes those collections make the most sense when playing old ass games. If emulation is so bad, why does everyone do it? If MP3s are so bad, why does everyone listen to them? In these situations, it's not because the people are dumb, it's because the upside outweighs the downside. Everything is give and take. And if I already have the Space Invaders, Centipedes, Millipedes, Donkey Kongs and Qberts of the world in a compilation or on the ever popular NES, who in God's name is gonna rush out to buy these games they already have again with lesser quality?! Atari fans only, I guess, since they just regurgitated this stuff onto the 5200 and 7800 and people didn't want it in 1987, either.

 

[..]

7) Nobody cares about collections. No one cares about mine, no one cares about yours, no one gives a fuck. We can all sit and fiddle with this shit until the cows come home, it doesn't make any difference. "I'm a vinyl collector" "I am a game collector". How about people stop collecting and stop attributing ridiculous superficial items to be their personalities and go out there and just be awesome. Nothing is more annoying than when people label themselves as a true collector, because nobody cares. And even if they did, we would never come to agreements on what Atari is to you, what Atari is to me, where retro gaming ends, whether boxes and carts and all this shit really matter or not. On the most rudimentary of levels, we could all either emulate or play the games on real hardware, enjoy the games and talk about the games. But we can't even do that together as a whole. Because everything needs to have some sort of ridiculous label. Bill can't play River Raid on the 2600 and Bob can't play River Raid on the PS2 without Ron saying neither of them have played the game because neither used a CRT. This shit is so superfluous, it needs to end.

 

Yes. Both points are right. I'm happy to have seen all of this evolve from inception to present day. And I've been in the collector's corner, the gamer's corner, the hoarder's corner, and now the enlightened corner. Done it all. Played original hardware on CRT. Played modern-day emulation on LCD. Roamed the arcades. Played the remakes, the compilations. Got the hi-scores.. The patches..

 

I have little desire to collect (hoard) the original hardware and walls of cartridges and physical arcade cabinets which need maintenance and consume space. We just have 1 big room and some auxiliary closets and boxes to offload. It seems never ending. Just when I thought I was done more stuff seems to come out of the woodwork.

 

All our classic gaming and computing activity is in the final stretches.

[Andromeda Stardust]

There's also no real difference between the glory of High Scores from the truly classic gaming era and today's Trophy mania, except trophies are earned for all sorts of things as opposed to raw skills. Arguably, there were various tricks and glitches that could be used in some games of the classic era… Either way, both are about bragging rights.

 

The classic games weren't easier. If they were easier, modern gamers who do exceptionally well with modern games would also be masters of the classic games if they chose to pursue them.

 

 

The death (or, at least, marginalization) of the high score is a big part of the reason why I don't like modern gaming. The trophy nonsense is no substitute--that always struck me as more of a "participation ribbon" system than a system that objectively measures ability at a video game.

 

Another thing with modern games is that a lot of them have absolutely nothing to do with skill--just invest the 100+ hours and you'll "finish" the game just like everybody else. That same 100 hours will give the higher Missile Command score to the better player.

Trophies are just an objective, like beating the game. Some are easy, some hard, some random or just obnoxious. I've actually earned trophies for playing badly, ie die 30 times on a level.

 

The fact remains players look up strategy guides online for the sole purpose of unlocking trophies rather than simply playing through the game. But big difference with high score is there's always room for improvement. You can play the game over and score higher. But once you've unlocked the trophy, there's nothing more to do except earn more trophies.

 

I tend not to bust my ass over trophies and just enjoy the game. One thing that does annoy me however are time-sensitive trophies or objectives in an RPG or adventure game, meaning once you progress past a certain point, some side quests may become inaccessible without starting over a brand new game.

[Andromeda Stardust]

Atari is something that is appreciated best by those who were there when it happened. To look at most Atari games without the childhood nostalgia that most Atari fans have just won't produce the same results.

 

Someone said that Atari was an acquired taste and I'm not sure I agree. It may be possible for younger generations to learn to appreciate just how much was done with so little but for many you just had to be there.

I have said that Atari is aquired taste. I too went the emulation route, downloading an early version os Stella and about 50 ROMs from a warez file sharing network. I looked at Space Invaders with the seemingly random bars on the side and clashy colors and was like, "eww." Then I loaded Pacman and promptly dumped the emulator and ROMs in the recycle bin. I think it was around 2001 or there abouts. I had fun for a while with NES emulation but didn't get hooked until I found one in my garage circa 2002. And I finally decided to take a leap of faith and buy an Atari in 2012. Worst case senario, I could resell it for a small loss if I didn't like it. I got hooked instead.

 

So I don't think it's necesarily "you had to have been there" but more or less "you have to experience it firsthand" whether present or past. The games do not change although our perception of them can. I was wowed by Mario 64 as much playing it the first time in 2004 as kids were playing it in 1996. And play Atari for the first time in 2012, I was like, "you know, these games aren't as bad as people say they are..."

[Keatah]

Counterpoint:

 

Sorry that your early emulation experiences were not optimal. Emulation was pretty rough in the early days. Command-line interface, razor-sharp edges with no Blargg effects or color adjustments, slow host systems. But today, with 20+ years of refinement emulators behind them, they are really the way forward and gaining in popularity.

 

Believe it or not, you spend less time setting them up and configuring them than you do dickn'round with aging hardware. You just need to be a little more computer savvy and understand how things mesh together. Good and accurate layman's knowledge is all you need to know.

 

 

Atari is something that is appreciated best by those who were there when it happened. To look at most Atari games without the childhood nostalgia that most Atari fans have just won't produce the same results.

 

Someone said that Atari was an acquired taste and I'm not sure I agree. It may be possible for younger generations to learn to appreciate just how much was done with so little but for many you just had to be there.

 

Atari is an acquired taste for newcomers. It would have to be. It's just too different when pitted against today's games. And it's not only about how much was done with so little, but about the innovation and creativity and exploration of a whole new medium of expression.

 

It's pretty much the same thing for the old timers of today, we don't see any depth in most modern games. All we see is cash grabs and constant patching and DRM issues. Most gaming today is about churn and the search for the next biggest hit. Most oldsters bitch about buggy games and problems in the marketplace and partake in discussions that are not about the games themselves but the politics and forces of the industry.

 

For the old timers who've been there and done it - Atari means a whole different thing. If you weren't there you can't possibly know what you're talking about. Its the nostalgia thing all over again too, evidenced in this thread.

[Schizophretard]

I have said that Atari is aquired taste. I too went the emulation route, downloading an early version os Stella and about 50 ROMs from a warez file sharing network. I looked at Space Invaders with the seemingly random bars on the side and clashy colors and was like, "eww." Then I loaded Pacman and promptly dumped the emulator and ROMs in the recycle bin. I think it was around 2001 or there abouts. I had fun for a while with NES emulation but didn't get hooked until I found one in my garage circa 2002. And I finally decided to take a leap of faith and buy an Atari in 2012. Worst case senario, I could resell it for a small loss if I didn't like it. I got hooked instead.

 

So I don't think it's necesarily "you had to have been there" but more or less "you have to experience it firsthand" whether present or past. The games do not change although our perception of them can. I was wowed by Mario 64 as much playing it the first time in 2004 as kids were playing it in 1996. And play Atari for the first time in 2012, I was like, "you know, these games aren't as bad as people say they are..."

That makes sense since you were there because you were born seven months before me but I experienced it first hand back then while you didn't. It was the first console we had and I think my parents bought their first one before they had me because I can remember thinking I did amazing achievements when I walked without holding onto the couch and using a toilet for the first time, my grandfather dying when I was 2, my younger brother being born at 3, and other early memories that supposedly I'm not suppose to have but I don't remember a time without an Atari.

 

I remember time feeling really long back then because it felt like forever before my dad upgraded it to the Vader model. He presented it to us with this sales pitch while getting Darth Vader's name wrong but with a presentation that made me think it was the greatest thing ever,"This is the all new all black Dark Vader model!" It was almost exactly like the scene from A Christmas Story when the father presents the leg lamp and the kids were like,"Wow!". Then after that it felt like forever before my brother got the NES for Christmas when it launched but all this time took place between birth and maybe I was in kindergarten by then. Anyway, it felt like we had Atari for ages and then this new Nintendo Atari like thing is being unwrapped. We were all just as excited as my father's Vader presentation but after he hooked it up my dad and I looked at the controller like,"WTF? Where is the joystick? It is just buttons! Is it broke?" I adapted but my father never played a new console again.

 

Anyway, that was my early experiences up to the NES but after that I was constantly coming across old consoles that were new to me and I saw Atari stuff in stores like Toys'R'Us all the way through the 80's to such an extent that I think the video game crash taking out Atari has been exaggerated a little. With the older consoles that were new to me it felt like an 80's version of GameStop but flea markets, thrifts stores, garage sales which garage sales in general seemed much more common back then, etc. There were ColecoVisions, IntelliVisions, etc. everywhere. Collecting and experiencing as many as one could seemed like normal behavior to me back then. I remember me mostly into the Atari still and not even needing an NES because my brother got a massive collection that looked like what collectors present today. Then his friends would bring over other consoles to show off. I remember one of his friends bringing over this computer console thing with this bad ass game that looked completely amazing to me and he had all these cool accessories for it. I thought it was a modern console competing with the NES. Later I figured out that the game was Bump 'N' Jump and what he brought over was the ColecoVision with the Coleco Adam. He had it all. Even brought a monitor to use with it. I made the same mistake when at day care I saw an Atari 400 computer because PACMAN looked so advanced. I thought it was new.

 

My entire childhood was like that. My brother would show off his new SNES collection and a friend would be like,"Well, check out my Turbo Grafix or my SEGA Genesis!" I remember being blown away that a friend had a service with his Genesis to order games over the phone. I remember my younger brother finally getting a console and I was like,"Wow! A Sony CD player that plays video games!" then we played ESPN Extreme Games for hours while laughing at the dorky chick that tried to sound hip by saying,"Mo money! Mo Money! Mo Money! Yeah!". I remember being in Junior High and a friend showing me his Odyssey 2 that I fell in love with right away.

 

Anyway, AtariAge and the gaming culture around it just seems like an online version of the exact gaming culture I grew up with. It was consoles old, new, and obscure everywhere with everyone wanting to collect and/or experience what they could. I guess my point is that it surprises me when I discover people in the same age group like yourself that had a more limited experience of consoles back then because the 80's and 90's I remember was Atariage. The whole,"I just experienced a few Nintendo and SEGA consoles because the video game crash wiped everything else out like a nuke to be rediscovered later online because it all became so rare." wasn't the childhood I experienced. It was more like before all the retro games ended up on eBay I could easily experience a lot of it just by going to different neighbors' houses or going to a different booth at the flea market. For me the video game crash didn't happen until eBay because up until then most was obtainable in the wild and easily so. I mean, Hell, I have met a Mennonite woman our age online who has spent her whole life in an Amish paradise that knew what the Atari was when I brought it up because she had one as a kid.

Edited December 9, 2015 by Schizophretard

[HoshiChiri]

Atari is something that is appreciated best by those who were there when it happened. To look at most Atari games without the childhood nostalgia that most Atari fans have just won't produce the same results.

 

Someone said that Atari was an acquired taste and I'm not sure I agree. It may be possible for younger generations to learn to appreciate just how much was done with so little but for many you just had to be there.

 

This is a sentiment that, honestly, I find very worrying. I don't expect that I would have the exact same feelings/appreciation for Atari that the children of the 70s do... but it seems like the feelings/appreciation myself & the other post-crash kids have is getting kinda glazed over because 'you weren't there, man!'

 

All I can think is, 'do you want Atari to die with you?' We're the ones who are gonna be the old guys at cons in 20 year's time, trying to convince the kids and teens why this really old stuff their grandparents and great-grandparents used is still worth their time. Nostalgia can't be the only worthwhile thing about the games if it's going to be remembered down the line. I don't know, I just feel like there's too much 'you can't understand, you're too young' instead of an attempt to let us understand. It's a disservice to what are some very good games, if just presented correctly so we know how to play them!

[Buyatari]

This is a sentiment that, honestly, I find very worrying. I don't expect that I would have the exact same feelings/appreciation for Atari that the children of the 70s do... but it seems like the feelings/appreciation myself & the other post-crash kids have is getting kinda glazed over because 'you weren't there, man!'

 

All I can think is, 'do you want Atari to die with you?' We're the ones who are gonna be the old guys at cons in 20 year's time, trying to convince the kids and teens why this really old stuff their grandparents and great-grandparents used is still worth their time. Nostalgia can't be the only worthwhile thing about the games if it's going to be remembered down the line. I don't know, I just feel like there's too much 'you can't understand, you're too young' instead of an attempt to let us understand. It's a disservice to what are some very good games, if just presented correctly so we know how to play them!

I don't think Atari 2600 will die with us but most of its fan base will. Compare it with the first silent films. There are small pockets of collectors and historians out there but many people if polled couldn't name a single film.

 

It has nothing to do with what I want or what you want. It is just the way things will be and we have seen early signs as stated in the thread already. Atari 2600 games will slowly start to disappear from the 100 best games of all time lists and will only only be found on lists such as the 100 most significant games of all time.

[high voltage]

I don't think Atari 2600 will die

WALL-E

[bretthorror]

Yes. Both points are right. I'm happy to have seen all of this evolve from inception to present day. And I've been in the collector's corner, the gamer's corner, the hoarder's corner, and now the enlightened corner. Done it all. Played original hardware on CRT. Played modern-day emulation on LCD. Roamed the arcades. Played the remakes, the compilations. Got the hi-scores.. The patches..

 

I have little desire to collect (hoard) the original hardware and walls of cartridges and physical arcade cabinets which need maintenance and consume space. We just have 1 big room and some auxiliary closets and boxes to offload. It seems never ending. Just when I thought I was done more stuff seems to come out of the woodwork.

 

All our classic gaming and computing activity is in the final stretches.

Imagine the pain in the ass all the Atari dinosaurs will be in 10 years when they're in the nursing home posting. By then they'll be upset that the tab color changed on a can of cola and will be telling the nurses how you've never drank a soda until you've cracked one with a proper tab. The smell of the aluminum. Admiring the old can art. Reading the ingredients. Ahhhh the good old days. And daggonit, they had a 2600 collection but since the nursing home doesn't allow CRTs, they wanted no part of it.

 

But hey, maybe erectile dysfunction is the reason some people are so keen on using the sticks over d-pads? But then you'd think Mario grabbing that big flag pole would more than compensate.

 

(I tried my best in this thread, now I merely resort to folly.)

[ubersaurus]

Personally I never had a problem getting into pre-crash console gaming despite being part of that NES generation - I had a 2600 (and 7800) in my very young days, but they weren't necessarily formative. But really the important thing is that there's just not a lot of knowledge and information out there for Atari consoles, Intellivision, Colecovision, etc. when it comes to popular podcasts, websites, youtubers, etc. just because those people may not have a ton of experience or interest in those things. They grew up on the NES on up, and the game industry as it is today essentially has too. Both aspects keep those in the public eye while pre-crash consoles are just kind of forgotten or glossed over with "the games were bad." The fact that so many of them are RF-only hardware that modern TVs have trouble displaying doesn't help.

 

But really it just comes down to showcasing games that an individual person will like to change their tune. I've got a longtime gaming friend who has come around on the 2600 after I brought along about a dozen games for her to try, and another who is now interested in a Colecovision after messing with its library too. There is certainly a number of stinkers from that era, but there are also absolute gems that can sell someone willing to try them out. And hey, if another friend can get his son so interested in old school games that he's excitedly telling his classmates about Burgertime on Intellivision, I think there's still hope.

[sega_SHARK]

That makes sense since you were there because you were born seven months before me but I experienced it first hand back then while you didn't. It was the first console we had and I think my parents bought their first one before they had me because I can remember thinking I did amazing achievements when I walked without holding onto the couch and using a toilet for the first time, my grandfather dying when I was 2, my younger brother being born at 3, and other early memories that supposedly I'm not suppose to have but I don't remember a time without an Atari.

 

I remember time feeling really long back then because it felt like forever before my dad upgraded it to the Vader model. He presented it to us with this sales pitch while getting Darth Vader's name wrong but with a presentation that made me think it was the greatest thing ever,"This is the all new all black Dark Vader model!" It was almost exactly like the scene from A Christmas Story when the father presents the leg lamp and the kids were like,"Wow!". Then after that it felt like forever before my brother got the NES for Christmas when it launched but all this time took place between birth and maybe I was in kindergarten by then. Anyway, it felt like we had Atari for ages and then this new Nintendo Atari like thing is being unwrapped. We were all just as excited as my father's Vader presentation but after he hooked it up my dad and I looked at the controller like,"WTF? Where is the joystick? It is just buttons! Is it broke?" I adapted but my father never played a new console again.

 

Anyway, that was my early experiences up to the NES but after that I was constantly coming across old consoles that were new to me and I saw Atari stuff in stores like Toys'R'Us all the way through the 80's to such an extent that I think the video game crash taking out Atari has been exaggerated a little. With the older consoles that were new to me it felt like an 80's version of GameStop but flea markets, thrifts stores, garage sales which garage sales in general seemed much more common back then, etc. There were ColecoVisions, IntelliVisions, etc. everywhere. Collecting and experiencing as many as one could seemed like normal behavior to me back then. I remember me mostly into the Atari still and not even needing an NES because my brother got a massive collection that looked like what collectors present today. Then his friends would bring over other consoles to show off. I remember one of his friends bringing over this computer console thing with this bad ass game that looked completely amazing to me and he had all these cool accessories for it. I thought it was a modern console competing with the NES. Later I figured out that the game was Bump 'N' Jump and what he brought over was the ColecoVision with the Coleco Adam. He had it all. Even brought a monitor to use with it. I made the same mistake when at day care I saw an Atari 400 computer because PACMAN looked so advanced. I thought it was new.

 

My entire childhood was like that. My brother would show off his new SNES collection and a friend would be like,"Well, check out my Turbo Grafix or my SEGA Genesis!" I remember being blown away that a friend had a service with his Genesis to order games over the phone. I remember my younger brother finally getting a console and I was like,"Wow! A Sony CD player that plays video games!" then we played ESPN Extreme Games for hours while laughing at the dorky chick that tried to sound hip by saying,"Mo money! Mo Money! Mo Money! Yeah!". I remember being in Junior High and a friend showing me his Odyssey 2 that I fell in love with right away.

 

Anyway, AtariAge and the gaming culture around it just seems like an online version of the exact gaming culture I grew up with. It was consoles old, new, and obscure everywhere with everyone wanting to collect and/or experience what they could. I guess my point is that it surprises me when I discover people in the same age group like yourself that had a more limited experience of consoles back then because the 80's and 90's I remember was Atariage. The whole,"I just experienced a few Nintendo and SEGA consoles because the video game crash wiped everything else out like a nuke to be rediscovered later online because it all became so rare." wasn't the childhood I experienced. It was more like before all the retro games ended up on eBay I could easily experience a lot of it just by going to different neighbors' houses or going to a different booth at the flea market. For me the video game crash didn't happen until eBay because up until then most was obtainable in the wild and easily so. I mean, Hell, I have met a Mennonite woman our age online who has spent her whole life in an Amish paradise that knew what the Atari was when I brought it up because she had one as a kid.

This.

 

The video game crash did not create some sort of massive gaming vacuum. We had a VCS, the kid down the street had an INTV. The kid across the street had tons of VCS games to borrow.

Just because I got a Nintendo didn't mean I stopped playing Demon Attack and Treasure of Tarmin on the neighbor kid's INTV. Then another kid got a sega master system...

Console wars weren't even on our radar until the 16 bit marketing hit.

 

I had an O2 in college in 2000. Lots of screaming, Lots of Basketball. Fun times.

 

"Retro Gamers" dismissing pre-NES systems? No biggie. Enjoy digging deeper into that NES catalog. Jekyll and Hyde plays just as well as your average Data Age game on the VCS.

[Schizophretard]

Imagine the pain in the ass all the Atari dinosaurs will be in 10 years when they're in the nursing home posting. By then they'll be upset that the tab color changed on a can of cola and will be telling the nurses how you've never drank a soda until you've cracked one with a proper tab. The smell of the aluminum. Admiring the old can art. Reading the ingredients. Ahhhh the good old days. And daggonit, they had a 2600 collection but since the nursing home doesn't allow CRTs, they wanted no part of it.

 

But hey, maybe erectile dysfunction is the reason some people are so keen on using the sticks over d-pads? But then you'd think Mario grabbing that big flag pole would more than compensate.

 

(I tried my best in this thread, now I merely resort to folly.)

1. I will be a 44 year old dinosaur.

2. 80's Coke came the right way in a bottle which is an option again.

3. I woke up today with morning joystick.

4. The singularity is near so get off my lawn.

 

[Jinks]

100% Emulation would kill almost all homebrews as people would not buy all the roms etc.

So we are lucky everyone has not jumped on the emulation bandwagon. Emulation is an aquired taste for sure.

[Jinks]

Btw brett you should be banned for being anti atari on an atari forum. BOTTLE OF COKE YOU DIPSHIT KID!! I was there!

[bretthorror]

Btw brett you should be banned for being anti atari on an atari forum. BOTTLE OF COKE YOU DIPSHIT KID!! I was there!

That's like saying you should be banned from 2015 because you never made it out of 1981.

 

I AM THE ANTI-ATARI.

 

(Insert definitely NOT cute, cute pixel art here).

[HoshiChiri]

I don't think Atari 2600 will die with us but most of its fan base will. Compare it with the first silent films. There are small pockets of collectors and historians out there but many people if polled couldn't name a single film.

 

It has nothing to do with what I want or what you want. It is just the way things will be and we have seen early signs as stated in the thread already. Atari 2600 games will slowly start to disappear from the 100 best games of all time lists and will only only be found on lists such as the 100 most significant games of all time.

 

Or it could end up like Howdy Doody and be nothing more than a footnote of something old people used to like, quickly vanishing from the collective consciousness.

 

I have no expectation of Atari keeping more presence than the pockets of collectors scattered about- but for that to happen, the collectors that exist today have to be willing to share why they like their games with younger collectors. I worry when I see so many just brush off the 'kids' for 'not being there' that in a generation they're won't be enough fans left to carry the flame- even if it's just a candle instead of a torch.

 

Heck, my interest in Atari is mostly a mix of chance.... until I joined this forum, 98% of my Atari collection was random games bought in bagged chunks from thrift stores as visual aids for a freshman project in high school. They sat in my closet unused for a decade because I didn't have a working system. Then I had a double-whammy of interest in the form of a plug n' play driving controller (one of dad's 'crap I forgot stocking stuffers' walgreen's runs, if I remember right), and some guy at a con asking me to play Combat in the retro game room. Even then, I didn't get a system... that didn't happen until after my fiancé's family found and gave me their old Intellivision. I figured, hey- I'm set up for these systems now, and I've got the games, let's try 'em out!

 

It takes effort to play Atari- there's no retron that hooks up to a modern tv to make things easy, you've got to do the research to get the right bits just to set one up, let alone know what the good games are. If we don't share what's fun, no one's going to have a reason to bother.

 

 

That's like saying you should be banned from 2015 because you never made it out of 1981.

 

I AM THE ANTI-ATARI.

 

(Insert definitely NOT cute, cute pixel art here).

 

*giggles and runs away*

Edited December 9, 2015 by HoshiChiri

[ledzep]

100% Emulation would kill almost all homebrews as people would not buy all the roms etc.

So we are lucky everyone has not jumped on the emulation bandwagon. Emulation is an aquired taste for sure.

 

If it doesn't play correctly on real hardware, it's not a complete homebrew game for whatever system it claims to run on. At that point it's just a retro game you can play on your computer (not the worst thing but not a true homebrew). As far as the Atari 2600 goes (and apparently the 5200, Colecovision, Intellivision and a few others), at the least it would be hoped that if emulation is the platform then real controllers + a 2600daptor or 2 would be used (I bought 2 for the 2600 and 2 for the 5200). Do it right, as close as you can get to right at least, or don't do it at all.

 

Part of the joy (or torture, depending on what side of the argument you're on) of collecting is look/feel of the actual components that make up the collection. Yes, it requires storage space and, depending on how serious you are, attention to detail like boxes/instructions/overlays/whatever came with the game originally. But that's part of the draw, tracking down some of the rarer stuff or interesting tidbits that are not strictly the ROM itself. But I'm not a purist, I'm fine with converting an old console to composite outs, I have a 5200 modified that way. I'm more sad that my old, massive Sony CRT died. I will get another CRT for the games eventually but nothing that big again.

[Bakasama]

2. 80's Coke came the right way in a bottle which is an option again.

I think I rather take Passover or Mexican Coke over 80's Coke