We were happy to have dinner when I was growing up. My only toy was a $2 soccer ball.
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Immo you made my day.
Peace ... No need for SBR anymore.Comment -
the coleco controller was top notch
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LOL all the old balls coming out in this thread.
Remember the ET Atari game? THERE WAS NO POINT TO IT! YOU JUST RAN AROUND AND PICKED UP REESES PIECES!!
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qbert was da sheeyit. and pitfall!!
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i had this game. believe it was Riddle of the Sphinx. The natural progression of the game was to scroll upward toward the top of the TV, but there was an item you needed that was towards the bottom from where you started.
some of my favorites to play with my dad were golf, circus, river raid, and yar's revenge.
and Combat came with the console. one of the combat games had a bomber against three fighters and the bomber never had a freakin chance to win.Comment -
Didn't the games cost like $39 for a new one? Does anyone remember how much the Atari console cost?
My fav was Asteroids.Comment -
If you took the select switch and the off and on switch and turned them on together the guns on the astertroid game would be like a machine gun and would fire super fastComment -
Certain turns were tough. Let off the gas...Oh Shit
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Confident that the game would be an enormous hit due to the success of the movie, Atari made 4 million copies of the black plastic game cartridges and quickly sold almost half of them. Buyers took the game home, put it in their machines, and quickly discovered that E.T....sucked.
It was terrible.
According to one article on Snopes.com, “The result was a virtually unplayable game with a dull plot and crummy graphics in which frustrated players spent most of their time leading the E.T. character around in circles to prevent him from falling into pits.”
Even twenty-five years later, the game remains a popular target for the gaming world’s most intense loathing. Comprehensive lists in Electronic Gaming Monthly, FHM magazine, and PC World have all declared E.T. to be the worst video game of all time. The game was a disaster, and according to then-CEO of Atari, Ray Kasser, “Nearly all of them came back.”
At the time, Atari owned a manufacturing plant in El Paso, Texas, where most of the literally millions of unsold and returned copies of E.T. were stored, and in September of 1983 those games were loaded into fourteen industrial dumptrucks, driven north into New Mexico, into the south-central New Mexico town of Alamogordo, and unceremoniously dumped into a tiny, desert landfill. Also buried with E.T. were unpopular prototypes of the Atari Mindlink game controller—designed for players to wear on their heads and control with their eyebrows—and copies of Atari’s first adaptation of Pac-Man, a game Atari had rashly produced two million more copies of than there were consoles to play them on.
The September 25, 1983 Alamogordo Daily News reported that the little dump had been selected because scavenging was forbidden there and because the dump’s garbage was crushed and covered every night. Nevertheless, one entire truckload of games was hijacked and allegedly driven down to Mexico to be copied, Alamogordo teenagers snuck into the landfill to dig out free games, and area stores were suddenly besieged by people trying to sell them Atari’s shoddiest products. To stop the site from being looted further, many of the games were crushed by D9 Caterpillars, and a layer of concrete was poured over what was left.
Atari told the dump that the games were being destroyed because the company was about to introduce an upgraded console, but the inescapable truth was that Atari was losing money rapidly and E.T. had become a major embarrassment for them—one they literally wanted buried.
The September 28, 1983 New York Times reported that Atari had lost over $310 million dollars in only three months, and that Atari’s El Paso plant was being converted into a recycling center. Atari faded rapidly from popularity, and E.T.’s desert burial became a symbol to America’s media, investors, and consumers that the video game boom was, at least temporarily, over.
E.T.’s bizarre life and death, however, would continue on, growing and evolving as a modern legend. It would be written about in books—from Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari to The First Quarter: A 25-Year History of Video Games. It would be analyzed and dissected on hundreds of websites, including on one almost book length study, The Atari Landfill Revealed. And it would even be reinvented as a music video, in which the members of Wintergreen, a Los Angeles pop-punk band, venture into the Alamogordo desert to uncover the long-buried digital treasures.
The games have not been dug up, though. They’re still there—beneath the desert, dirt, and time. The landfill is now a sort of recreation area, and anyone willing to drive to Alamogordo, head down White Sands Boulevard, and do a little digging, might just find something strange.Comment -
Lol i did...just like C64, NES and all the good old stuff.
My all time favorite is prolly The Last Ninja on the C64.
Oh yeah, and Bubble Bobble.Comment -
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Defender was my favorite!, still have like 5 or 6 of those game cassettes.Comment -
Fvckin ET. That game was absolutely terrible. Fall in a hole, never get out.Comment -
Compaq that review was spot on. I was like, 13, and I wrote that review. Just dreadful.Comment -
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I wonder if my old Atari 2600 is still sitting in my parent's attic?Comment
