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Games Entertainment

What Do You Do With 1 Million Atari Games? 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that-is-simply-mad dept.
gr8fulnded sent us a CNet story that will knock your socks of: this guy has over a million unopened Atari 2600 and 7800 games sitting in a limestone mine-turned warehouse for sale for a bug a cardtridge. If you still have a machine, check it out (at a buck a cartridge, its quite the deal). Or else you could get the cartridge and make your emulator legal! (michael: Bill Kendrick sent us the proper device on which to play these carts: a 2600/Nomad combination.)
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What Do You Do With 1 Million Atari Games? More

What Do You Do With 1 Million Atari Games?

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  • Someone should warn them of the potential pitfalls.

    Excellent choice of words... ;)

    --K
    ----

  • Website (Score:3)

    by Mike1024 ( 184871 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:25PM (#494753)
    Hey,

    You can see this guy's website at http://www.oshealtd.com/ [oshealtd.com]. The server seems slow already, so you might have more luck at the Google cache [google.com].

    His hit-counter is at 86,473 at the moment. I wonder what it'll be at this time tomorrow...

    Michael

    ...another comment from Michael Tandy.

  • Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers? (Score:4)

    by StoryMan ( 130421 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:25PM (#494754)
    Hey forget about the atari games. What interests me is the "Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers" mentioned in the article.

    If this isn't a good example of marketing gone, well, awry, I don't know what is.

    I mean, ya gotta wish you were a fly on the wall when the marketing guy sat down and made his pitch to management: "Hey, I got this new idea. You're gonna love it. I'm pretty sure we're first to bat with this one..."
  • I setup an emulator on my son's system so he could play some old 2600 games on his system because I was reminising to him about the games I used to play when I was his age. Well, my son who only has played on new glitzy photorealistic games thinks the old games are just as cool as the new ones.

    Yeah 90-95% of the games then stink like they do now, but there are some classics that he loves playing now that he's discovered them like pacman, ms pacman, dig-dug, asteroids and galaxians are cool. I agree that Adventure, Pitfall & Pitfall II suck, we both burned out playing them in about 10 minutes. Even if the graphics suck the play was awsome and addictive on some of them.

    He's now after me to get my old C-64s setup so he can play Archon, Moon Patrol and all the other games I have laying around for that system. Really good games never go out of style.

    I do have one major problem with the C-64 games and even some of the early IBM PC games. The issue I have is that most all of them are copy protected and now that the disks are getting 15-17 years old they damage easily and are loosing their data from bit rot. But because of the DMCA I *CAN NOT* legally make copies of them because making working copies requires bypassing the copy protection. So I am now, under law, a felon if I try to backup the games to try to preserve them for mine & my family's use. The law sucks and needs to be gotten rid of or modified to allow for this!

    - subsolar

  • I believe the parent topic was asking how many different games were made, as well as noting that 2.3 million is alot of atari games, period.
  • I've got one word for you: C-L-O-S-E-O-U-T :)
  • Only if you've got more than 6,000 pieces in stock. :-P
  • Check his website. Space Invaders is sold out.
  • before you get completely bored with the lame Atari 2600 version and go searching for an arcade with a good collection of the classics.

    Strangely enough, that's what I did, only the collection of classics is in my back room. Tapper (Bud version), Marble Madness, Galaga, Q*Bert, Tron, Jungle King, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Arkanoid, Mortal Kombat (don't ask...), Joust, Pac Man, and Dragon's Lair. Plus High Speed and Pinbot, for pinballs :) Room for two more (Spy Hunter and Tempest) then we need to get a bigger house :) :)

  • What is there to "get" or "not get" about Yar's Revenge.
    It's a perfect game for relaxation. Just turn off your brain and go to town.
    Get yourself a big cannon and shoot the fireball when it comes after you.....or was it a comet?
    Damn.... I'm gonna have to go play that now....
  • Then use the DRI project [sourceforge.net] and get 107. Not quite as impressive though...
  • And somebody else in this thread said that I got old...

    :)

    What you're essentially saying is that you object to progress in video games.

    Nah. I'm saying that there are different kinds of progress. Yes, we have shinier chrome now, but fundamentally they aren't doing anything much more fundamentally new & progressive. It's like the auto industry -- we can make some mighty fancy looking cars now, but they still all go 65 mph down the highway.

    Newer doesn't necessarily mean better. Sometimes it does, sure (BeOS! :), but often newer is just used as a euphemism for "more", and honestly doesn't do any more for us than the old version did. I think this is more true for games than any other area I can think of at the moment.Sometimes the new version of the status quo is very satisfying -- I'm having fun with Pokemon on my new Game Boy, for example. But often, the old things that we remember, are in fact remembered because they were so good in the first place.

    Like "Citizen Kane" for example :). I'll take it over "The Matrix" (just to pick a recent movie) any day. That's not to say that there's not any good movies now -- David Fincher, the Coen Bros etc are making real classics -- but some of the old stuff is time-tested and just as fresh as ever. I like that.

    Computer games are an evolving form of expression that are destined to be the first true new art form of the 21st century.

    Oh brother, see now that's the kind of nonsense that I have a hard time dealing with. Creative, expressive, takes a lot of work to make yeah yeah yeah I can accept all that. But Art Form? As in "John Carmack is the next John Coltrane"? I don't think so, personally. It's not that I don't notice, it's that I'm not impressed & therefore I don't really care. Time will tell, however, and you may be right. I doubt it though.

    You can have your Carmacks & Quakes & PS2s, and I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots. You take the high road, I'll take the low, etc.



  • 10 years from now, when us kids that grew up with atari start hitting out 40's and feel the need to reclaim our lost youth, this guy will make a mint. Fortunately for myself, i have the forsight to realize this, so i picked up my atari 2600 10 years ahead of this schedule, yesterday to be exact. Other Gen X kids would be wise to get theirs while they are still cheaper than they were new. check out ebay, if you want one with all the controlers and some cool games, your gonna fork over at least $100. With the recent return of The A-Team to syndication, I wouldn't be surprised to see an Atari craze sometime soon. If Mr. T can make a comeback, surely the most popular gaming system ever can

    ^. .^
    ( @ )

    Soylent Foods, Inc.
  • They did hand out all that cheese. anyone could get a free 5 pound chunk of crappy american cheese, you didn't even have to be poor. My parents got some. Mmm, grilled cheese sandwiches for weeks. I think they also handed out huge tubs of peanut butter and buckets of honey, but most people just remember Government Cheese. I think atari was still popular around this time.

    ^. .^
    ( @ )

    Soylent Foods, Inc.
  • wow, what I'd give to play that gem again. "thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump... doo dooo DOOOO! ...thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump thrump... DOOOO dooo doo!" Lookout for that "bat!" Damn, that was the worst game ever. Worse than the bible adventure games. Just awful. And they hyped it through the stratosphere in the Atari Magazine, too.
  • If you like Tetris®, you might like a Tetris clone I wrote that simulates the effect of hallucinogens(no, Tetripz is that other one) called TOD.

    This is getting a bit like Kibo on Usenet... no-one can mention Tetris on Slashdot without you advertising your *#!@^%$ game.
  • Are Peter Greenaway films intricate nonsense, and should we just keep watching Citizen Caine over and over again instead?

    No, but Citizen Kane is a pretty damn good flick, along with Roman Holiday, Nosferatu and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

    And there are plenty of people who like watching them. I hate walking into a arcade with a bunch of friends and they all play DDR, while I walk around hoping for a Pac Man or Star Wars (the original "The Force is with you" version) cabinet.

    And in the movie industry, you can still get Citizen Kane and Roman Holiday in the latest media (DVD), even though if they were computer games they would be dropped due to old technologies like Black and White film.

    Hey, I just saw the new movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Good flick. I watched it in the same theater that I'll go see Rocky Horror again this Saturday. Sunday, a bunch of people are gonna come over to my house to watch a Prisioner marathon, and next Friday we'll all go see Anti-Trust.

    But computer games? The old ones suck... nobody would want to play them.

    --
    Evan

  • 1 of my 2 2600's is still kicking, so longevity isn't too much of a problem.
  • My god... I could get 200 bucks for my atari? I know it's fun to play and all, but that's a decent amount of cash there. You'd think with 30mil of these sold they wouldn't go for as much. Couldn't you go to GoodWill and find one?

  • Beating a dead horse (Score:5)

    by plopez ( 54068 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:25PM (#494771) Journal
    Only a bug a piece? Having written about a million bugs, I could probably afford all of them....
  • I remember a while back /. had an article about some people selling large lots of vintage unopened video games on eBay and getting a nice price too. Although, even at $1 per cart, a cool million won't be bad.
  • I suspect this man is keeping a million Information Society [kilna.com] concert t-shirts in another mine and probably a million DeLorean [delorean.org]s in a third.

  • Your right. Trolling Slashdot is much more fun.

  • CORRECTION: Emulators _are_ always legal (Score:4)

    by JimTheta ( 115513 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:28PM (#494775) Homepage
    Or else you could get the cartridge and make your emulator legal!

    Please state the facts properly. Emulators are and always have been legal. What you meant were ROMs, which are potentially copyright infringing.

    IANAL, but I think that technically, it is illegal to distribute ROMs in any case. It is legal to dump them for yourself, but not distribute. Likewise, it isn't quite kosher to get the ROMs from someone else, even if you do own the cart. You have to dump them yourself. This isn't really a distinction to worry about; if you own the cart to a commercial game, you're probably okay. (Someone correct me if I'm not quite right)

    But the emulator is ALWAYS legal. And there are many freeware ROMs that you can play on them, strengthening the position that they will remail legal.

    -Grant aka JimTheta
    ---
  • The problem is not with those games. The problem is with you.
    Ever had the experience of experiencing as an adult something (a place, a building, a movie) that impressed you a lot as a child? 90% of the times you feel disappointed, because it doesn't measure up at all to the idea that you had kept in your memory.

  • I can't remember the title, but it was for the Atari 2600 - I played it as a kid on my uncle's system.

    I remember that you were a dot or something, and you went around these "rooms" collecting treasures and avoiding traps. There were so many treasure, like a diamond, and things - and each room was like a maze, or a trap - with walls, etc. I remember one room had these walls that if you didn't time it right, would crush you between them.

    It was called "Treasure of the ???" or something similar (maybe it was a single word?).

    I know this is very vague and all, but if someone could tell me, or give me a "possibles" list (or links to screenshots, maybe) - that would be real helpful. I have been searching for this game for a loooong time, and maybe this guy has it?

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • they really don't. Most people have fun with them. i know I have. They're simple arcade games. Most of the stuff you play on a palm pilot comes from atari concepts. Pong is simple. Pong is fun. Pong is addictive. Same for pacman, space invaders, maybe you're looking through smoky lenses. Atari started the platform game.

    --dave
  • he probably also has 100,000 "Free Nelson Mandela" T-Shirts, a stash of sinclair C5's and some Bay City Rollers albums just in case they make it big again.
  • I thought the person asked how many games EXISTED.

    "sheesh"

  • sounds like, which i know for a fact is on colecovision.

    del the phunky homosapien said it best in protoculture: "I remember my homie Ed Coats had the most A Colecovision-every week I'd visit Playing Donkey Kong Jr., Venture, Rock and Rope Games I thought was dope While our moms was watching soaps "

  • Perhaps its because the servos in the ps really suck.... Doesnt the atarti have no moving parts? I would wager that a semi-solid state game console would be better then not. I think this might prove it.


    Fight censors!
  • Check out http://www.99er.net [99er.net] for the motherlode of TI-99 info.
  • That'd be incredibly cool... You'd have to be sure you get the Cartridge with the picture on it and not the red/black text one though. It'd be cooler to get a whole variety of cartridges (like the 32 diff ones this guy has) and arrange them in some sort of pattern. Then you hang the boxes from the ceiling ala the gourds in Evil Dead (and the bones in TCM that ED copied).
  • Death and dismemberment isnt satanic, unless they did something to bring that upon themselves. In that case you should dismember them with atari games for each point of bad karma they earned!


    Fight censors!
  • There's nothing special about the flashing in 80s video games that causes epilepsy more than now! That's a complete load of crap. Doesn't anyone think that if there was any truth to this "graphics flashing at a particular frequency" at all, that we'd all be very familiar with its effects by now (eg, it would be exploited six ways to sunday- daredevils would stare at flashing screens to intentionally go into seizure, armies would accompany their attacks with flashing of this frequency, etc)?

    And the second paragraph - the cheesy graphics require dangerous imagination to be used? How did people ever survive when they had to exercise their imagination by reading books!?

    Maybe your brother became depressed because he sat around playing games all day, instead of doing healthy things like socializing and getting exercise. Lack of those two things is far more likely to cause depression than video games.

    This is ridiculous.

  • I think you should (Score:3)

    by ConsumedByTV ( 243497 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:09PM (#494788) Homepage
    Burn them!
    Or you could drop them on Iraq to see if they could make ICBM's from them... They could use those PS2's and shoot atari games at us...


    Fight censors!

  • I'll tell ya what I would do... (Score:3)

    by AntiBasic ( 83586 ) on Saturday January 20, 2001 @06:10AM (#494789)
    ...with a million Atari games; Two chicks at the same time. I've always wanted to do that. And if I had a million Atari games I think I could manage it. Yah, I know not all chicks like Atari games but the kind that would double-up on me do.
  • that doesn't seem right... i thought emulators were always a bit of a grey area.... what with all that stuff about UltraHLE being taken down and Bleem! being taken to court and stuff... i think the point is that you CAN actually copyright what your machine does... and if somebody writes an emulator that copies it then they can sort you out... as far as i know, half the reason sony went on about their "Emotion Engine" in the PS2 is to prevent another bleem. the thinking being, if you got a processor that does stuff and you've copyrighted it and all that and you own the name and it does stuff and only you know how it works then you've got a better chance in court when the emulation boys bring out a ps2 emulator. i dunno... i could be talking sh*t... fsck it. please excuse the appaling spelling, grammar and punctuation; i'm drunk. -- cHris

  • I have a cockroach. (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:10PM (#494791)
    Its a really big one. Can I get two games?
  • I live here in KC. Apparently I live in the underground storage capital of the world (though the city prefers to be called "The City of Fountains"). We even have underground paintball in one cave. Most of the caves are under our local amusement park (Worlds of Fun... pretty decent for a non-Disney/Busch/Paramount park). I imagine that at some point one of the caves will collapse and there will be a community response to fill them all with cement or something, but whatever. I'm half-tempted to run over there and ask the guy if I could have a couple carts and t-shirts for free. Heck, I need a job so maybe I could work there - I'm sure they'll need help to counteract the retail-slashdot-effect.
  • 92,398 at of 10:17am. Jan.20th.
  • ... megs of teeny tiny little roms laying around... As is, if there's ever an earthquake here, I'll be assimilated by falling computer parts...

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • Actually certain frequencies of flashes DO cause epileptic seizures, in people suffering from epilepsy. However, I don't think it will actually CAUSE epilepsy. Plus, I think this was supposed to be a joke...atleast I hope so.
  • Wow, thats some cache! I wonder if in ten years someones going to have like a million copies of tekken for sale, or better yet CastleVania. I didn't think there were that many atari games made to begin with, cetainly not enough to end up with a whole million.
  • I recently had the opportunity to set up and work with a Tandy 1000, and yes, it did smell like the 80's. I can't describe the smell really, it's the smell of domesticity you got when you were over a friend's house and stayed overnight for example.

    OK if you don't believe me I could provide directions to the fully funtional Tandy 1000. Yes, the 80's does have a particular smell.
  • I'm thinking the best answer is, be confined in a mental asylum because there is obviously something wrong with your head to even do this.

  • Does anyone have a need for those old TI computers, they were basically a keyboard with a little memory that plugged into your TV? I still have one of those things.
  • It must have worked, I just visited and saw his hit counter at 39 !! Guess \. rolled him!
  • Here's WIRED's blurb from July [wired.com]. The games were only $.80/piece then.

  • Re:Only a bug per game? Sweet! (Score:5)

    by hedgefrog ( 215010 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:33PM (#494802)
    I've got Windows2000, could I buy 65,000 [slashdot.org]games ?
  • Being from Missouri, I can say I've seen the warehouse, and the boxes are there. Some are in great condition, some boxes are beat up, but everything appears to be in good shape, and there are a few boxes which you'd probably want a warranty/guarentee on before purchasing. But those are few and far between. 90% of you are going to get great quality, and I'm prety sure the other 10% will get deals/refunds upon request.

    Now, if I'd just convinced my father to keep our atari and C64 when I was in third grade, and still had everything to play today. I miss them damnit.
  • I learned basic on one of those, TI99 4/A..... Those were the days.......
  • No, I was talking about this [msnbc.com].
  • Just to be a prick, not all emulators are legal. Emulators made with proprietory information (i.e. if I were to make one based off of "official/classified" documents, it would be illegal to release said emulator).

    Also, you're correct in that even if you own a game, downloading it's rom is still technically illegal. You're allowed a backup of YOUR copy, not of someone elses (why it matters I don't know, but then since when are laws supposed to make perfect sense right?)
  • Two independant thoughts in one day, the children must be overstimulated. Willy, remove all the games that envigorate imagination

    I tol' ya, them Atarrrri gemes wer' forged by Lucifer himself!


    Capt. Ron

  • Are these cartridges compatible with PAL Atari consoles?

    Sure !! Only colors will vary ... according to the ANCIEN ATARI PAL*DIVISON [atarihq.com] ...
    or go directly to The PAL vs NTSC FAQ [atarihq.com]
    Well, they also say that your TV-set could cause trouble.
    I'm afraid you have to try - I will !!
  • I won't advertise it. I'll let my sig do the talking.
    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • Yeah !! you all bummers with your last flashing cellphones.
    My friends and I have much more fun comunicating with smoke signs and tamboors..
    While I still like some old games (especially if I have no other choice). There is no way I would ever consider them better than the new ones.
    It's so snob to say "yeah but then, we had much better games with much less hardware"
    DO not even mention the better gameplay.
    The gameplay we have now is very criticized because we expect so much more now from new games, but truth is the worst game we have now available is still the work of several people for a long time, and is not even closely as boring as any of the best atari games you can think of.
    Say, diablo, settlers II and III (just t mention a few) are criticized for being very repetitive.
    Which is true for me. but c'mon... pacman ?? pitfall ?? I spent hours with pitfall and pacman, I really liked them then. but there is no way I thik they were better than the ones we have now.

  • The Atari Landfill, and the hidden shrine... (Score:5)

    by smirkleton ( 69652 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @03:12PM (#494812)
    They didn't bury the cartidges in Arizona- they're in a landfill in Alamorgordo, New Mexico. [zwire.com]

    There is a small but rather impressive shrine built on top of tomb #4, with an eternal flame burning bronze effigies of Tod Frye and Howard Scott Warsaw.

    Etched on the Warsaw bust, the words that Warsaw said to Steven Spielberg during the short development cycle of E.T., "Steven, this game is going to make your movie famous."

    And etched on the Frye bust, the words that Rick Mauer said to Tod Frye after hearing of his $1,000,000 paycheck for PacMan, "You ought to put a photocopy of that on your office door at Atari. I think it'll help programmer morale."

  • Quite right!

    Though Atari was very popular for its time, I can't imagine that there that many games and stations in distribution. I don't mean variety, I mean total! I don't really know where to find the data, but I'd bet that there were only 10-20 million atari games made EVER! Therefore it seems odd that so many could be horded. If memory serves, even Nintendo only sells some few ten million games a year. (I want to say 40 million, but I really don't know). Though Atari was the biggest for its time, by today's standard, it had a very low fan base.(but since I don't have numbers, I just don't know.)

  • ...I could find a warehouse of TI99/4a games... *Drool*
  • eah i feel like a dork.. i loaded this page, then took the dog for a walk, and came back to read this post modded up to +3 Informative with no replies and i didn't see that other people had already called him on it.

    and, just for completeness' sake, we should mention the Pokemon seizure episode that sent something like 500 kids to the hospital in Japan. Alternating flashing colors in that episode of the cartoon tv show caused the seizures old video games don't. A short time after the cartoon was released, btw, somewhere on the net someone put up an animated gif with alternating colors, like in the cartoon, and I couldn't stare at it for very long without feeling incredibly sick to my stomach - scary stuff!

    If you replaced the ABC station identification spot with one that contained the proper flashing colors, you could really pull a number on a hell of a lot of people.

  • Screw the games. I want to get a good
    look at that limestone mine! =)

  • It was Venture, the original arcade version was made by Exidy. I wasted *way* too much time on that game when I was a kid.
  • This is weird. I've been looking for an Atari system for the past two weeks, and I've already got a small collection of carts, and I'm homing in on some possible 2600 systems.

    Then this. Wow.

    The idea of getting UNOPENED games seems slightly pornographic, but even better are those sweet Atari t-shirts. I'm all over that. And my girlfriend is gonna freak when she gets a Pac-man t-shirt for her birthday.

    Thank you geeks!

  • Fair enough. But ...they still run on petroleum gasoline, don't they? The better ones might not use quite as much of it, and they might burn it a bit more cleanly, but certainly we're not seeing any real, fundamental progress there. Where are the solar cars? The electric cars? The fuel cells?

    You're looking in the wrong places. You seem to think your local car dealer is going to sell you the latest most revolutionary car there is. Wrong. Your local car dealer will sell something that's guaranteed to sell. That's going to be a boring standard nothing-revolutionary car.

    There have been revolutionary new engines: for example the orbital engine which is 2x more powerful and 1/2 the weight and gets 3x the fuel efficiency.

    But you'll never see this engine sold in a car from your local dealer.

    It's economics. The infrastructure is nearly impossible to displace that quickly. There are 100s of billions of dollars invested into primary and secondary manufacturing plants, training and education for post-production mechanical repairs, secondary production for parts suppliers, etc.

    It takes time to displace infrastructure. The biggest problem facing fuel cell cars right now isn't the car (they are powerful enough, and are safe enough). It's the fact that you'll get one tank's worth of driving then you'll not find any pumping stations to refuel at.

    You're wrong if you think revolutionary change isn't going on. It's just that the infrastructure resists change. The revolution occurs quietly and in niche areas first.

  • You can get that Triumph the insult comic dog hand puppet like on Conan O'brien dirt cheap!

    http://www.oshealtd.com/puppets.htm
  • You're referring to "Venture". I know it. I own it.

    You're this little dude with a bow, represented with a smiley circle with a bow attached to it. There are multiple screens, with each having four rooms. Outside of these rooms, you are just a dot on a big map, but when you enter a room, the view zooms in on the rooms interior and you can see your full smiley head. In each room is a treasure and either 3 monsters or 4 moving trap walls. When you get all four treasures from the four rooms, you advance to the next screen.

    Does that sound like the game you're looking for?

    And you're in luck! It's available from the guy!

    -Grant aka JimTheta

    ---
  • It's like the auto industry -- we can make some mighty fancy looking cars now, but they still all go 65 mph down the highway.

    Oh yeah, except for the fact that road deaths are down from their all-time high of 50,000 dead per year (USA) in the 60s. All thanks to Nader's perseverance and the auto industry's realisation that people actually do want to live.

    Oh, and that cars are now get 3x the mileage than their 60s predecessors. The exception being the recent (mostly USA) trend towards great big behemoth trucks instead of cars. Regardless, the engine is still more efficient.

    Oh, and the introduction of car computers and fuel injection and traction control and antilock braking and 4-wheel steering. The use of lighter alloys and stronger frames and safer rollcages.

    Looking only at a car's speed is a ridiculous way to measure progress. Sure, it's evolutionary not revolutionary. This doesn't justify a stupid claim that cars today aren't any better than the cars of yesteryear.

  • Some of us like simplicity, and see it as a virtue. Some of us hate flashy modern games like Quake & it's derivatives. It's not really that one is so much better or worse than the other, but a matter of preference. In the same mold, some people might like playing checkers, go fish, "Chutes & Ladders," while others prefer chess, go, and "Axis & Allies". No big deal.

    Personally, I feel like a lot of the modern games designers have become so drunk with the technological progress available that they've forgotten how to make the things simple & fun. I'll take Pac-Man & Tetris & the old wire-frame Star Wars over Diablo and whatever the big game of the week is this week -- any day.

    Obviously, it isn't the graphics that make these games appealing, and you're glossing things over to call them all single player (you never had "Combat" as a kid, did you?) but it's flat out dismissive to ignore the game play. A lot of those old games, aware of the weak graphics, were smart enough to put game play ahead of anything else.

    Personally, I got off the video game wagon when all my friends knew the dozens of moves for Mortal Kombat, and I just didn't care. I wanted Double Dragon back, or Gauntlet. "Red Warrior needs food badly!" Hell yeah, that's about as much as I want to think in my games. It's supposed to be fun & escapist, not intricate nonsense...



  • O'Shea (Score:3)

    by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:46PM (#494845)
    People on rec.games.video.classic have known this for quite a while, since a couple of years before e-bay hit it big.

    But what surprises me most is that he managed to sell half of them, even with a few titles that are still common as dirt at Goodwill thrift stores, and even with a bunch of Atari 7800 titles, considering how well that console didn't sell.

    If you think that's bad, how about what Atari did with Pac Man and E.T. They actually made more Pac Man cartridges than they did consoles! So in order to take a loss on these things (both written in six weeks or so, instead of the six months that the average 2600 game took to write--and they show it!), they had them buried in a hole in the desert as a tax write-off. The IRS even made them pour concrete into the hole on top of all the cartridges. Anyone for an archaeological expedition to Arizona?

    My suggestion? Use them as construction material. Maybe cover a wall with 'em, sort of like a retro Z-Brick theme for the game room.

  • Re:Website (Score:3)

    by manly ( 69244 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:47PM (#494846)
    Caveat emptor . His Atari order form not only does not encrypt your submission with SSL, it also submits it to a 3rd-party host.

    And judging by the name of the form action, "email.pl" I suspect that this CGI-BIN then emails your submission once again across the Net unencrypted.

  • Yeah, but where can I buy a good atari 2600 console? Is there any place that still sells a new 2600 and joystick? I don't mind if it's one of the "new" (Jr.?) ones that is smaller than usual.

    (Ever notice how Atari, Nintendo, and Sony all made smaller versions of their most popular consoles?)

  • Re:Moderate it yourself, or just shut up! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mod this up, (+1, Informative)!!
  • Unopened Atari games are no doubt a collector's item. But what happens to their value when you flood the market with a million of them?

    You get the same result that is bound to happen to all the people who carefully packed their Episode 1 action figures in boxes in hopes that it would pay for their retirement.
  • The Mr. Potato Head Foot Massager has nothing on the legendary Hello Kitty Vibrator [highway1.com.au].

  • Re:Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers? (Score:5)

    by Fishstick ( 150821 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:56PM (#494865) Journal
    You do know that's "code" for a 'personal relaxation device', right?

    "Honey, what's this on the credit card bill?"

    "Oh, it's a foot masager."

    Yeah, right.

  • And somebody else in this thread said that I got old...

    What you're essentially saying is that you object to progress in video games. I respect the Atari for being first, but that certainly doesn't make it better. I also respect the skills of the first cave painters. Does that mean I should throw out my Mondrian prints? Are Peter Greenaway films intricate nonsense, and should we just keep watching Citizen Caine over and over again instead?

    Computer games are an evolving form of expression that are destined to be the first true new art form of the 21st century. It's sad that you can't bring your level of understanding up to where it needs to be to appreciate the work of geniuses like John Carmack.

  • Hey I had one of those! You could play games on them and they were portable! I loved moving it from TV to TV as if I was doing something important. I haven't seen one of those around in forever!

    --
    Scott Miga
    suprax@linux.com
  • No. This isn't the only Limestone warehouse. There are about 50 of them last time I checked in the KC area. I grew up there and the Cub Scout troop I was in took a tour once. Then later in High school, some organization I was involved with managed to wrangle a tour in another one.


    A truly scarey place. But they have excellent climent control, which is why they use them for this.


    I thought the idea nuts when I was in 2nd grade and got my first tour. Now that I see what people store in them these days, I know I was right.

  • I can vouch for this place; I heard about them a pretty long time ago (over a year and something ago) and I immediately send out money to buy one of every cartridge they had.

    The result can be seen in this older photograph of my entertainment center [cow.net]. All those grey boxes in the lower left are brand-new, still in box Atari and Jaguar cartridges.

    He's actually sold out of a few of them, but on the whole, this is a great, great thing. If it was 1983, I'd look like the richest kid on the block (instead of the most geekily nostalgic).
  • "for sale for a bug a cardtridge"

    Well, I got paid today, so I've got plenty of ants on hand and I've got a few beetles to spare, but it would have to be a mint condition cartridge for my preying mantises.
    -----
    D. Fischer

  • Hrrm (Score:5)

    by Sheeple Police ( 247465 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:13PM (#494879)
    warehouse for sale for a bug a cardtridge

    A bug a cartridge, eh? Any bug? *rubs hands deviously* I knew that ant hill would come in handy... now how to figure out how to get them all out... <evil laughter>

    If you'll excuse me, I have work to do... bwa ha ha ha..

  • oops again for slashdot (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19, 2001 @01:13PM (#494880)
    they're not a bug a game,

    nor are they a buck a game.

    They're $2/game.

  • ...lots of valid points about how cars today are still better engineered than they used to be...

    Fair enough. But ...they still run on petroleum gasoline, don't they? The better ones might not use quite as much of it, and they might burn it a bit more cleanly, but certainly we're not seeing any real, fundamental progress there. Where are the solar cars? The electric cars? The fuel cells?

    There's lots of interesting tech that just isn't being applied. You're right, the progress has been evolutionary, and that's exactly the problem. I think we need some revolutionary design in the auto (& computer, & game) industry(ies), and we just don't have it. That's not for such revolutionary tools being available -- they are -- but they somehow don't make it to market, and what we as regular people have available for purchase is not, I reiterate, anything fundamentally better than what was available a generation ago. Incrementally better, yeah, I'll give you that. But not fundamentally.



  • "One guy said, 'When I opened up the box, it was as if I could smell the '80s.'"

    Ah yes, the scent of an adolescent after an all nighter trying to solve Rubiks Cube...

    --

  • But then you'd lose all them, because a later article knocked it down to 1 or 2.

    All those games gone... imagine...

    -
    -Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.

  • It is a little well known fact that Old 80's games are more likely to cause epilepsy among people who play them due to the simple nature of the graphics displayed, which often rely on graphics flashing at a particular frequency.

    Also, old games require the player to exercise his imagination to a much greater degree than modern photorealistic games, which reflect reality but do not introduce a warped alternative version of it, like Pac Man or Space Invaders do.

    Of course, this imagination is healthy in small doses, but it can be quite dangerous in larger doses. As the people buying these games are likely to be games enthusiasts, they will be more at danger than the rest of us. Someone should warn them of the potential pitfalls.

    I say this because my brother became depressed in the late 80's, and the doctor said he should stop playing video games, citing these reasons. He almost immediately improved.

  • Those rare Asian beetles are worth 2 bucks, aren't they?

    -
    -Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.

  • Heaven forbid we exercise our imagination! My god, that's HIDEOUSLY DANGEROUS!

    Tell me, do you claim D&D is satanic, too?

  • Not all of them (Score:3)

    by Goonie ( 8651 ) <robert.merkel@b[ ... g ['ena' in gap]> on Friday January 19, 2001 @02:28PM (#494900) Homepage
    I've been playing the *arcade* version of Pacman. I still can't get over just how much fun it is to play, and how just about everything the game design was gotten just right to make the game well-balanced (difficult, but fair).

    Yeah, probably 90% of the games released in that era were crap too, but the best of them are still playable and enjoyable today.

  • Offtopic -- I know those mines (Score:4)

    by youngsd ( 39343 ) on Friday January 19, 2001 @02:29PM (#494912)

    My dad used to have an office in those mines. They have been coverted not only into warehouse space, but also into pretty cool office space (you have to put up with no windows, of course, but some of the walls are craggly rock -- which is a sort of cool effect).

    You may remember a few years back, when Reagan was in office, and it came out that the government had been hoarding cheese for years (to prop up dairy prices), and people were calling for the government to distribute the cheese to poor people. These are the mines where all of that cheese was stored (I don't know whether any of it made it to the poor, though).

    I know it's off-topic, but sometimes, you've just got to spout useless facts, and damn the consequences.

    -Steve

  • UltraHLE also backed out because it emulates high-level constructs (HLE == High-Level Emulator) created by the early C compilers for the MIPS processor in the N64. As the compilers used for newer games became more advanced (and optimized assembly subroutines became more common), the UltraHLE team could not keep up.

    UltraHLE backed out because they felt threatened

    ...not by Nintendo, but by authors of other N64 emulators that provided more low-level functionality.


    Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them? [pineight.com]
  • What, you mean this [slashdot.org]?

    1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.

  • E.T. was the first game that doubled as fertilizer, ask anyone who played it!

    Okay. I have a confession. I loved ET (yes, the game). Years later, and I still claim it to be the distant ancestor of modern console RPGs. The difference between it (and similar 2600 titles like Haunted House, which I also liked) and later console titles like Final Fantasy on through to Shenmue is scope of story due to platform.

    Cramming an RPG into the 2600 is neigh impossible. So you have to drop things like AI, beautiful graphics, plot, text... Okay. So you have to drop most everything that makes an RPG an RPG. But the skeleton that you have left is the ability to control a character with your own actions on a quest. One of the cool things about ET is the flower. You fall in a pit and find a flower you can heal... which then smiles at you. At the time, that was pretty damn cool. You have the Doctor, FBI agent and Eliott running around helping or hindering you, with more involvement in the plot than the damn castle guards that always repeat: "Welcome to the Castle!" in later, "better" games.

    Sure, it dosen't hold a candle to later console RPGs... but then at least it has fewer FMVs than recent Square releases.

    --
    Evan

  • I had an Atari 5200 with games as a kid, but the machine died. A friend just got one on ebay and we played it non-stop over the Holidays.

    If they had the 5200 games, I'd try to get a machine and go nuts, the 2600/7800 was never my favorite.

    Alex

  • A buck a game? That's not bad. Keep them unopened and your great, great, great grandkids might not have to work. You never know.
  • There are numerous millions of ET: The Extra Terrestrial carts (for 2600) burried in New Mexico somewhere. (They supposedly made more carts than there were 2600's. Idiots)

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