Video Game Collecting

When it comes to bowling video games there are only three that matter: 1. League Bowling for NeoGeo. 2. Capcom Bowling. And 3. Bowling for Atari 2600.

Let’s start with the label.  Atari box and label art is notorious.  It has a charm and beauty to it that has become mostly forgotten.  Bowling is no exception.  Here we see a young Saddam Huissen looking to pick up that spare.  Look how the marketing team at Atari strategically placed a bowling pin smack dab… uh in the middle of the screen.

Bowling is a decent game but like the real thing its more fun with a partner.  These screen shots show the kind of action you’d expect.  You can add spin to the ball after you release it.  Thats about it.  A very simple game of bowling.  If for nothing less, buy it for the box art.

Look at this cool Atari Is On Sale ad for J.C Penny as published in the Eugene Register-Guardian on Jun 9, 1982! Make your TV a whole new ball game. Or shoot out. Or space war. I love this ad for a variety of reasons, but mostly because all of the screen shots are hand drawn! The Pac-Man cartridge is $29.99 but you get a free Pac-Man T-Shirt!

Click to make bigger!

Hey, enjoy this video with footage from various video games for the original Nintendo NES and SEGA Genesis featuring the Macho Man Randy Savage!

Basketball for Atari 2600 is the only basketball game I know of on Atari.  Many people are not familiar with the secret history of this game so I figure I’d share it with you.

Once upon a time a videogame company called Atari produced and released a game called Basketball.  Two sorbet colored competitors would bounce a box around an arena.  Sometimes these gladiators would toss the box at a partial crucifix.  If the box rubbed the crucifix just right you would earn two treasure points.  Meanwhile the PSN came back online so I turned this crap off and went back to playing Red Dead Redemption.  The end.

Is Journey a great arcade game?  Nope.  But it makes for a great backdrop to a story.  A story about simpler times -when a kid’s biggest worry was being rejected when asking his mother for a quarter.

Around 1985 my mother frequently took my sister and I to a Pizza Hut in North Las Vegas.  Back in the 1980′s North Las Vegas was known for two things: 1. It’s college community and 2. Crime.  A lot has changed since then and that Pizza Hut is still there -long since converted into a delivery and pick up joint only.

But as a kid Pizza Hut was classy and for my mom to take us there meant something.  It was probably payday.  It was fancier than McDonalds but cheaper than Sizzler.  But to me they could have served dog food and I wouldn’t have noticed.  All I cared about was the single cocktail arcade game tucked away in the corner.

When we first arrived there I’d always ask to use the restroom, but for no other reason to see which game I’d see along the way.  Sometimes I’d untie my shoe in the restroom then pretend to notice the loose laces precisely when I was walking by the videogame.  In slow motion I’d tie my shoe and revel at the machine infront of me.  “I’d better tie both just to be safe!” is how I’d rationalize wasting more time.

My sister would employ a similar trick but she didn’t care about the video game.  Instead she cared about the Juke box.  To this day I still hate them and would rather eat pizza to the screams of a Galaga machine cranked to the highest volume rather than listen to Cindy Lauper or Debbie Gibson moan and screech like a baluga whale in heat.

But anyways there the Journey game sat and over the course of a year or two the game took maybe two dollars from me.  It didn’t make much sense to me but the almost digitized faces of the band mates was pretty cool.  I don’t remember the audio tape and I certainly don’t remember completing a single stage of the game but that is ok.  Soon Journey was out and a VS Super Mario Bros. And VS Gradius twin red cocktail cabinet was in.  My world and the Pizza Hut was changed forever.

But Journey wasn’t forgotten.  I eventually got a copy of the Atari 2600 game which made less sense than the arcade game.  Could anything be worst than that?  You can bet I won’t stop believing that it could.

Some people might argue that there is little to say about Super Breakout for Atari 2600.  So to summarize you move a paddle back and forth and bounce a ball off it and smash bricks.

It sounds simple enough but this is a rare example where the label art evoked a genuine emotion from me.  Perhaps because I first played it when the Challenger disaster was still fresh in my mind.  I’m not sure but look at the genuine terror in the astronaut’s face.  The rainbow bricks are certainly his mortal enemy and their reflection in his visor makes it even more creepy.  This spaceman is dead for sure.

This is the first known photograph of the dead body of Osama Bin Laden.

Actually its just a screen grab from Prince of Persia.