Atari Alumni

Being a pack rat does have its advantages if the stars are properly aligned - take Tanner Sandlin’s case for example. He forked out anywhere from $5 to $10 when he was a 10-year old kid for the Air Raid Atari 2600 videogame, only to realize that it fetched a $31,600 price point on eBay [...]

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Before changing its color to a more kid-friendly BLUE, the original kids controllers were standard Atari 2600 black like most of its other peripherals, this is Pilot-Run #28. It is fully functional and has all the same mechanics as the production released kids controllers, the only thing missing are the underside arrows pointing [...]

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This must have been one of Atari’s favorite original games. It has been reincarnated several times. Originally as arcade coin-op, then here as a standalone system, then as a cartridge for the Atari Brain Game System, then as a cartridge for the Atari VCS 2600 video game console. [...]

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After conquering homes and arcades with Pong in the early 70s, Atari sought out to reinvent the home gaming market with a console unit capable of a constantly growing library of interchangeable games. This would eventually evolve into the Atari 2600, a system that dominated video gaming and broke records over its 13 year history. [...]

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In an industry where an obese plumber can become a cultural icon, it’s no wonder that in video games, weird is normal. However nutty they get, these oddities were never as strange as the ones for the Atari 2600. Ironically the most bizarre of these came out around the crash of the video game industry, [...]

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Even back in the fabled, long-ago infancy of video games, when the Atari 2600 was not only the state of the art, but practically the whole damn market, genius marketing executives realized they could sell games by tying them to popular films. Given the ultra primitive graphics, raw sound and minimalist control schemes available, most [...]

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How many times have you clicked on a “World’s Greatest Video Games” link only to discover that most of the games listed were released within the past few months? Or even worse, the list omits such important video gaming milestones like Pong, Asteroids, or Tempest 2000?
Welcome, classic Atari gamer, to The Top 20 Greatest Games [...]

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We’ve all heard of the Atari classic Space Invaders, right? Sure, of course, because we’re not a pack of pop-culturally ignorant mother-scratchers. The same can be said about Dig-Dug and Breakout and Asteroids. These are the major titles, the games we all know and love to play.
Then there are the minor titles that only the [...]

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Most people don’t realize that I didn’t get my start at the San Francisco Chronicle as the universally beloved pop culture critic that you know today. I was actually a Chronicle paperboy in the early-to-mid 1980s.
My best friend Bryan and I had adjoining paper routes in Burlingame, and we would spend most of our profits [...]

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In an industry where an obese plumber can become a cultural icon, it’s no wonder that in video games, weird is normal. However nutty they get, these oddities were never as strange as the ones for the Atari 2600. Ironically the most bizarre of these came out around the crash of the video game industry, [...]

[Read more →]