The End of a Videogame Era

December 21, 2008 10:10 AM

The video games of the 1983 Sears Wishbook
posted by empath (74 comments total)

Found this as well the other day on the same site - Return of the Jedi Toys and Merchandise from the 1983 Sears’ Wishbook.
posted by gman at 10:14 AM on December 21, 2008

Playing Pitfall on my friend's Atari 2600 and Donkey Kong on my babysitter's Colecovision are two of my best childhood memories. When my brother got an Atari 7800 and we got to play Ms. PacMan, well, life got even better. I don't remember Coleco Gemini at all. Was that like "Colecovision plus," the way Sega Genesis was like Sega plus?
posted by Rudy Gerner at 10:15 AM on December 21, 2008

Holy cow, the Vectrex is out of this world!
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 10:19 AM on December 21, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

My 2600 (which is sitting on the floor by the tv) still works. The only reason it survived was that it sat abandoned at a summer house for years. The kids love it. Space Invaders has legs, Yars Revenge - not so much.
posted by R. Mutt at 10:24 AM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The vectrex in action.
posted by empath at 10:26 AM on December 21, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

Wow, cool!

I spent an incredible amounto of time as a kid staring at the toys pages of catalogues - my particular object of desire was the "Big Track" programmable vehicle - which I suspect would have been a huge disapointment if I ever got hold of one but which in catalogue form was a thing of wonder.

Our 2 year old seems to be continuing the tradition: she loves reading her "magazines" - catalogues for playmobile and thomas toys we picked up at a toy store and which have been a feature of every car ride since.
posted by Artw at 10:27 AM on December 21, 2008

empath - I love the colour overlays!
posted by Artw at 10:30 AM on December 21, 2008

Omg, my friend's brother had a Vectrex! Now I remember!
posted by Rudy Gerner at 10:36 AM on December 21, 2008

ha...i remember the misprints ...that's ms pac-man for the 2600 not the 5200 btw...i actually got that game that year...on the 5200...man, it was like it was REAL.
posted by sexyrobot at 10:37 AM on December 21, 2008

I don't remember Coleco Gemini at all. Was that like "Colecovision plus," the way Sega Genesis was like Sega plus?

The Gemini was an Atari 2600 clone, the result of Atari attempting to sue Coleco for an earlier product that allowed 2600 games to be played on the ColecoVision and losing. If you notice, for the 2600 games the catalog says "Cartridges for the 2600/Gemini/Sears Video Arcade". The Sears Video Arcade was a rebadged 2600 with Atari guts.
posted by DecemberBoy at 10:48 AM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Maybe I should have made this FPP about the vectrex.

The story behind the Vectrex.

Homebrew Vectrex Games are still being made.

There's an emulator.
posted by empath at 10:50 AM on December 21, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Videogame ads
posted by Artw at 10:53 AM on December 21, 2008

Colecovision >> Vectrex
posted by Justinian at 10:59 AM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Vectrex images are misleading, the games only had one colour and you got a transparent overlay to put on the screen to make it red or blue or to put a reticule on the screen. Having said that, Vectrex is way cool!

Also, who doesn't wish they still had their Wico joystick?
posted by furtive at 11:05 AM on December 21, 2008

Yeah, the Vectrex seemed to be the geekboy lust-magnet when it came out. My brother and I would play the demo model at a game store in the Fairlane Mall in Dearborn, Michigan.

Never bought one. But I often think if I had the room, I'd love to have my own little computer and game system museum, with everything set up and ready to play. My living room already has Super-Nintendo, N64, Dreamcast, Xbox, Xbox 360, and Wii, so I think that's enough.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 11:05 AM on December 21, 2008

I loved Intellivision, and exhibited this early fascination by ruining no less than three of them up by turning them on and leaving them to burn up.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 11:18 AM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think I remember poring over this actual catalog. I was 7 in 1983 and Xmas Eve that year was probably the most exciting night of my life so far. Is that sad? I remember wanting to go to sleep as soon as the sun went down so that it would be the next morning. wondering if my sisters and I would get a new game for the Intellivision that was our gift for Xmas 1982. I believe we found Star Strike and Lock 'n Chase under the tree, so it was a great christmas.

Those programmable trucks were crap from what I remember. You "programmed" them by inserting different cogs into a mechanism on top, which would have the truck perform 5 seconds of automated movement, usually wiggling along or making an L-turn.
posted by autodidact at 11:28 AM on December 21, 2008

Speaking of joysticks, the one in this image looks unsettlingly buttpluggy.
posted by Dr. Wu at 11:30 AM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Oh! My husband has a Vectrex, complete with every game ever made for it! Nifty!
posted by sadiehawkinstein at 11:30 AM on December 21, 2008

I used to deliver Sears catalogues as a kid, although I think 1983 was a little before my time. Those Christmas wishbooks were brutally heavy.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 11:33 AM on December 21, 2008

I loved Intellivision, and exhibited this early fascination by ruining no less than three of them up by turning them on and leaving them to burn up.

That's how we determined that we had "beaten" the game Astrosmash, by passing level six and having the screen eventually go black when the console overheated.
posted by furtive at 11:59 AM on December 21, 2008

That's a cool site. He posts the toy section from the 1986 Sears Wishbook, which reminds me I'm still pissed off about how shitty Transformers toys became in their post-movie incarnation. They were such crap it just pissed me off after how awesome the first two years of TF toys were. By Xmas 1987 I was 11 and it was all about Captain Power for me!
posted by autodidact at 12:12 PM on December 21, 2008

Those programmable trucks were crap from what I remember. You "programmed" them by inserting different cogs into a mechanism on top, which would have the truck perform 5 seconds of automated movement, usually wiggling along or making an L-turn.

No, no I had a Big Trak, and it had a membrane keypad on top used to program it. I even had the Big Trak Transport which was a programmable dump-truck trailer. You can see it in action here.

It was mildly entertaining.
posted by LordSludge at 12:21 PM on December 21, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

How random, I put a Vectrex ad up on my Flickr site a few months ago. I'll link to the one on the videogame ad site. But what I love about this ad is how insanely happy everyone is but noone is looking at the screen.
posted by jeremias at 12:28 PM on December 21, 2008

X-Entertainment has commercials for many of these toys:

Coleco Tabletop Arcade Games

Atari Home Computer Systems

Atari's Pitfall

Electronic Simon

The list goes on and on.
posted by Muddler at 12:32 PM on December 21, 2008

Ohhhh, the Sears Wishbook.

When I was little, I was always excited and happy to get a new action figure. Not so much for the toy as for its packaging, which usually featured pictures of the other toys in the series on the reverse side of the cardboard backing (Sensitive toy collectors should probably stop reading here). I'd cut them out and play with them on huge scrolls of 8.5x11 paper that I taped together and drew backgrounds on, eschewing the fun offered by a couple of three dimensional action figures for a two dimensional shared universe populated by every brave hero and craven villain immortalized in cardboard. I was unimpressed by and a little contemptuous of kids who bragged about how many toys they had - didn't they realize they that with some scissors and imagination, they could have all the toys for the price of one?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle packages were okay, usually depicting the actual figures, though I remember carving up this backing and feeling vaguely ripped off because the toys with the orange background were bigger than the ones with with the yellow and blue backgrounds. Granted, most of the toys on the orange were hideous and in impractical poses and therefor unusable anyway, but it totally made things unrealistic when my TMNT Cut-outs ("MoOom, they're not paper dolls, they're Cut-Outs, jeez!") were menaced by a Mouser twice as large as them.

Despite lush and dynamic illustrations, GI Joe packages really sucked - as more toys were added to the line, the pictures on the back were shrunk and cropped. I remember playing with a Cobra Officer Cut-Out harvested from here who was forced to run around on a pair of stumps, and making him trip and fall down a lot. Cut-Out War is hell.

Best were The Masters of the Universe packages, which featured nice illustrations and fairly neutral, and therefore versatile, poses. Was Terror Claw Skeletor preparing to rip out Donatello's guts, or was he just waving hello to his neighbor, Cobra Commander? Why couldn't he do both?

But the best source for Cut-Outs was the Sears Wishbook. Ohhhh, the Sears Wishbook. Free, easier to cut than cardboard, and in terms of sheer quantity, the freaking motherlode. Unfortunately my mother, due to her hatred of children and love of stifling their imaginations while crushing their creativity, wouldn't let me mutilated her precious catalogue until after Christmas.

But once Boxing Day came I carved that shit up like a Turkducken stuffed with win.

Ohhhh, the Sears Wishbook.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:44 PM on December 21, 2008 [96 favorites has favorites]

Aw! I want my old atari back! Although I was far too young to have anything like these in 1983 (I was 2) my parents got us an Atari in 1989. All the kids in my building would come and play at our house. We had it set up in the kitchen's dining room, snacks handy! We became "cool" with the gang for a little while at least. My country wasn't what you'd call technologically advanced at the time, we got things a few years later than anyone else so the Atari was SO freaking cool! Even in 1989. We also got a stereo system that had a record and cd player and 2 tape cassette deck!

Anyway, the Atari came with 162 games built in, so we never used the cartridges (was it cartridges it used? we wouldn't have been able to get them anywhere anyway) my favorite games were pac-man, ice cubes, a sort of math game, one where a giant tube of toothpaste bombed candy and pretzels and other foodstuff just like in asteroids and the most awesome ever: PINBALL!!!

Shortly after the Atari novelty at our house, we upgraded to Nintendo (maybe a year or 2 later), although we heard stories about Sega and how awesome it was, it wasn't sold anywhere near us so it was the stuff of legends. No one we knew had one or even had seen one, stories were made about how awesome it was. If it was for some of the kids, a Sega console dispensed life-sized Jedis and teletransport you in time.

I am still the queen of pinball (ANY arcade and the actual pinball machine) and mortal kombat. My parents should be proud.
posted by ratita at 12:51 PM on December 21, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Aaaaah, the Atari 2600. I spent a lot of my youth on that thing. I still remember playing Superman on it.

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep. {This was Superman walking}

STATIC NOISE. {This was Superman flying. Wonkily. Forcing me to land.}

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep. STATIC NOISE. Beep. STATIC NOISE. Beep beep. STATIC NOISE.

Yep, I remember playing Superman on the Atari 2600. For all of 30 seconds before giving up on it.
posted by Effigy2000 at 12:59 PM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Pick Axe Pete for the Magnavox Odyssey 2 rocked.
posted by Lukenlogs at 1:04 PM on December 21, 2008

Oh, my Colecovision. Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, that 2-player head to head Asteroidsish game, and those crazy-ass super-controllers for baseball and football...

Good times, good times.
posted by rokusan at 1:04 PM on December 21, 2008

I had maybe ten TMNT figures, tops, when I was a kid, Alvy. I wish I would've thought of the cardboard cut-out mega-game! Thrifty and imaginative.

* * *
As far as the FPP, I was born in '84, so I'm much more nostalgic for the NES—mostly watched siblings and cousins play, but that was OK—and then, the Genesis—could beat my siblings and cousins and some jerk at a wrestling competition stole my copy of Eternal Warriors—but these scans are very, very cool. I love how unpolished everything was; charming, indeed.

My biggest video game disappointment? The short-lived Sega CD. Begged and begged for one, but it was mostly a dud. After that, I said no to Sega and got a Nintendo 64. I loved the hell out of it—could just play Mario 64 over and over, really—but the PlayStation (. . .Sony?!) became the system to have, so I felt left out again.
posted by defenestration at 1:07 PM on December 21, 2008

but the PlayStation (. . .Sony?!) became the system to have, so I felt left out again.

My favorite game on PS when we first got one was Metal Gear. We got a PS and once again we became cool with the gang. It was so awesome my mother hooked the ps in their bedroom's tv, so when we played it was a sort of a communal play, she wasn't good with the controllers, so she would do the "strategy" while my brother and I would take turns with the controller. Good times indeed.

I liked Spyro the Dragon, actually to this day. And Medievil, a game that featured a medieval skeleton fighting zombies (?) to get jewels for king Arthur. Or something like that.

And also a rip off of Doom called Shadow Warriors.
posted by ratita at 1:26 PM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

When I was little, I was always excited and happy to get a new action figure. Not so much for the toy as for its packaging, which usually featured pictures of the other toys in the series on the reverse side of the cardboard backing (Sensitive toy collectors should probably stop reading here). I'd cut them out and play with them on huge scrolls of 8.5x11 paper that I taped together and drew backgrounds on, eschewing the fun offered by a couple of three dimensional action figures for a two dimensional shared universe populated by every brave hero and craven villain immortalized in cardboard. I was unimpressed by and a little contemptuous of kids who bragged about how many toys they had - didn't they realize they that with some scissors and imagination, they could have all the toys for the price of one?

^ THAT IS AWESOME. :D
posted by ratita at 1:29 PM on December 21, 2008

omg before "real" video games like the 2600, we had the stuff on page one; the "Driving Game" and the "Pac-Man" arcade style minigame.

I LOVED them. ridiculous.
posted by exlotuseater at 2:00 PM on December 21, 2008

Also, who doesn't wish they still had their Wico joystick?

IME on the Amiga, the Slik Stick (#22 in this catalog page) was the best. Wicked with Speedball.
posted by troy at 2:02 PM on December 21, 2008

To feed the nostalgia, Stella is an open source emulator for 2600 that works on Windows/Linux/Os X. You can search for the ROM dumps.

For the more geeky inclined, StellaAI lets you write your own AI agents for Atari 2600 games.
posted by lenny70 at 2:02 PM on December 21, 2008

Oh, man, I had that "tabletop" Ms. Pac-Man game. I'm betting my parents had it on lay-a-way, because I remember the Day We Got To Go To The Store And Pick It Up and boy was that an exciting day. I'M GETTING A VIDEO GAME!

The mazes changed slightly from level to level, but I discovered a board pattern that worked for every level the game could throw at you. I was only 8 and hadn't heard about no board patterns in maze games or that the AI in stuff like this was wicked simple, so the discovery was a mystical one for me. I called it the Secret Path and refused to show my little brothers how it was done. I could play forever without losing a life! It was godly knowledge!

It all came to a head during an 8-hour road trip to Grandma and Grandpa's. Seeing as how I had all the time in the world and nothing else to do, I took the game with me and played it endlessly in the backseat, seeing exactly how far you could go. I methodically applied the techique of the Secret Path, over and over and over again. I suspect it appealed to some OCD tendency, honestly. Patterns is relaxin.

Eventually I rolled the score over, but I didn't know what that meant at the time. All I knew was that my score was no longer numbers but crazy gibberish. Obviously I had gone too far, played too deep, and had broken the game. Just like Tron! Still, the game refused to outright quit and cede victory to the superior human being. It kept giving me mazes, so what could I do? I played on.

The answer to "how long can you play" turned out to be the same answer to "how long can your parents stand listening to you play", since the game had no volume control and the blips and bleeps were loud. There was a very ugly scene at a rest area somewhere near Wilkes-Barre. Mom ended up with the game's batteries and I sulked for the rest of the trip.

Eventually the game was left in a closet for too long and the batteries inside burst. Godspeed, little video game.
posted by Spatch at 2:17 PM on December 21, 2008 [19 favorites has favorites]

Shadow Warrior wasn't really a rip off of doom, it was just a 3d-realms game based on the Build engine.

I had a bunch of games on the atari, but these were the ones I played a lot:

Maze Craze This was doom deathmatch before 3d, especially if you played with the maze hidden.

Kaboom -- pure twitch action. I think its the first game that I ever played enough to reach that kind of Zen "mind-no mind" state that the best pure arcade games induce.

Star Wars the closest thing to a narrative that you had in an atari game. It was also the subject of a memorable Harlan Ellison essay which I can't find online anywhere.

Raiders of the Lost Ark -- lucas arts graphic adventure game long before Kings Quest and Maniac Mansion.
posted by empath at 2:19 PM on December 21, 2008

Someone needs to recreate the simple joys of the old Tiger electronic games on the internet. The ones where you could see every possible animation by pressing the reset button.

As far as the Wishbook... Between it and the JC Penney's catalog, so many dreams were born. In my catalog fulled dreams, a robot would bring me a can of soda while I played with the USS Flagg.
posted by drezdn at 2:23 PM on December 21, 2008

Game & Watch games online.
posted by empath at 2:37 PM on December 21, 2008

For any youngsters out there, Colecovision was like the Nintendo Wii of its day. The hand-grip controllers were like Wii Fit.
posted by Jaybo at 2:54 PM on December 21, 2008

Y'all are on the goofballs. There was only one best 2600 game, and it was Strawberry Shortcake. Purple Pieman had the best song.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:12 PM on December 21, 2008

LordSludge: Wow, thank you for reminding me that Big Trak existed. One of my brothers had it and I always had this vague memory of it but could never remember exactly what it was and every time I tried to describe it, my brother would say "I never had anything like that and I don't know what you're talking about." This settles an age old mystery for both me and my bro! Can't wait to call him up and e-mail him that wikipedia link!
posted by Rudy Gerner at 3:13 PM on December 21, 2008

Also: Every single game ever advertised in every single Sears wishbook is somewhere in here.
posted by jeremias at 3:21 PM on December 21, 2008

...my particular object of desire was the "Big Track" programmable vehicle - which I suspect would have been a huge disapointment if I ever got hold of one...

Sorry to break it to you, Artw, but the Big Trak really was as cool as it looked. It was a satisfying Boopeldy beepeldy boopeldy, beepeldy, boooooooop! followed by the joy of scaring the heck out of every four-legged animal in the house and the certain knowledge that if you programmed an angle wrong, it always resulted in the toy heading straight for the stairs.

Ah, good times.
posted by ThusSpakeZarathustra at 3:35 PM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Also, who doesn't wish they still had their Wico joystick?

I still have mine (and the Amiga 500 it plugs in to).
posted by MikeMc at 3:52 PM on December 21, 2008

Is it just me or could the Command Control Deluxe Joystick possibly have a second purpose?
posted by MikeMc at 4:11 PM on December 21, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

You know, a highly compressed YouTube video is not the best venue for showing off the virtues of the Vectrex.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:37 PM on December 21, 2008

I have a Vectrex in a box somewhere. And a Nintendo Virtual Boy for that matter.

One day I will find their power adapters and set them up.
posted by rokusan at 5:13 PM on December 21, 2008

My biggest chanukkah disappointment as a kid was not getting the Coleco Adam.

The Intellivision stuff in this catalog is amazing - especially that svelt 49-key keyboard!

Ah, memories.

pixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpix
pixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpixpix
pixpixpixpix
posted by ericbop at 8:27 PM on December 21, 2008

Fucking Intellivision.
Intellivision vs. Atari was the PC vs. Mac of the early '80's, in our neighbourhood.
Our friends up the street had Intellivision and I could never grasp the ergonomics of that stupid round disc that wasn't really a steering wheel or a joystick...what the fuck was it? At our house it was Space Invaders but go to their house and Whee! it's GOLF with that fucking wheel disc that you touch ever so carefully in a certain spot to aim your swing. Fun.
Arrogant name sealed its fate.
posted by chococat at 8:44 PM on December 21, 2008

Is it just me or could the Command Control Deluxe Joystick possibly have a second purpose?

A new meaning to the term "sphincter control."
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 10:44 PM on December 21, 2008

I still have my Odyssey 2.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:54 PM on December 21, 2008

My biggest chanukkah disappointment as a kid was not getting the Coleco Adam... posted by ericbop at 8:27 PM on December 21

My friend had a Coleco Adam with the game Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom on cassette tape. We'd want to play and so he'd put the tape in and press PLAY on the tape player thing. And I'd say "Now do we play?" and he'd say "No, now we go have lunch while it loads."
posted by blueberry at 3:27 AM on December 22, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Worst thing about the Atari was losing the damn game not through any fault of your own, but because the frickin' rubber sleeve on the joystick slid off while you were playing. We spent so much time frantically pushing it back down mid-game.

It still amazes me how much fun Adventure was. Stupid bat will remain one of my favorite video game enemies of all time. Oh, you have a SWORD. Bat will trade you for a DRAGON. How nice. (Somebody get this freakin' duck away from me!)
posted by caution live frogs at 5:42 AM on December 22, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Youngsters. My first home video console was the first home video console, the Odyssey. No on-screen score, no sound, totally analog. That's some serious old-school shit right there.
posted by MrMoonPie at 8:23 AM on December 22, 2008

It wasn't even powerful enough to keep the score of the games being played, so games were shipped with cardboard scorecards so that players could keep track.

Wow. The Odyssey sounds like the defintion of "not quite ready for prime time".

Magnavox probably made more money off lawsuits and royalty payments than sales of the actual system.

Or perhaps ahead of it's time...
posted by Artw at 8:29 AM on December 22, 2008

Thanks for the Odyssey link! (NO, not Odyssey II, you n00bz!!!!)

My big brother bought an Odyssey for the family when it first came out, and dang did we spend hours and hours playing it. Roulette was a huge hit, although an actual wheel would have been less cumbersome than the TV, overlay and game system.

The racing game would be considered absolutely pathetic if you saw anyone playing it today. Even a third world orphan, on his first day in the US, in awe of our land of plenty, would see that game and say, "That sucks!"

Anyway... as you were. With your newfangled "electricity."
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 8:46 AM on December 22, 2008

I had an unfortunate device called the RCA Studio II...it's probably still in my grandmother's closet...
posted by troybob at 9:35 AM on December 22, 2008

Oh, man, troybob's link led me to a video of the Odyssey in action. It really was exciting to have one. The whole neighborhood would come over to watch. To put it in context, we got it when our family got its first color TV.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:52 AM on December 22, 2008

When I was little, my older brother told me that if I would run Pitfall Harry into the brick wall in Pitfall for half an hour straight, he would finally break through and lead you to the bonus level with all kinds of treasure.

Um...save yourselves the effort.
posted by Twicketface at 10:53 AM on December 22, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

I had an unfortunate device called the RCA Studio II...it's probably still in my grandmother's closet...


It's probably sitting right next to my Fairchild Channel F. Not that I know your Grandmother...well, not in the biblical sense anyway.
posted by MikeMc at 11:19 AM on December 22, 2008

This was my first system, the Radio Shack TV Scoreboard. We played it constantly for the couple of years before we had the Atari VCS (2600)

A couple of years ago I stumbled across an Atari and bought a few games from eBay. They're not as fun as we remember them.
posted by bondcliff at 12:24 PM on December 22, 2008

They're not as fun as we remember them.

Yeah. Felix Jr. is a 7 year old with a Nintendo DS. I got him one of the 'relive the ancient legacy of old timey videogames' cartridges -- Namco Museum, featuring Pac-Man, Galaga, Xevious, Dig-Dug 2, Galaxian, Mappy and Tower of Druaga.

He started playing Galaxian half-heartedly at my urging, and then looked at me and said, no lie, "This is boring. How do I unlock the achievements?"

Yeah. So, humbled, I let him get back to his Lego Indiana Jones vs. Star Wars 3d Apocalypse: The Final Hentai Rematch or whatever the hell the kids are playing these days, camping absently as they do on the turf on the front part of my home next to my driveway.
posted by felix at 1:53 PM on December 22, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

I had an unfortunate device called the RCA Studio II...it's probably still in my grandmother's closet...


It's probably sitting right next to my Fairchild Channel F. Not that I know your Grandmother...well, not in the biblical sense anyway.

dang...2 jewels I have yet to find/add to my collection....the few that i've seen have been ridiculously overpriced for what they are.

/odyssey/odyssey2 with voice module (original owner)/odyssey 400 pong clone
/atari super pong/6 switch 2600 (original owner)/4 port 5200 with track ball/7800/jaguar
/vectrex w/ multicart
/SMS/Genesis/CD
/colecovision
/intellivision

it's a wonder that i'm married and my wife still lets me take up all that closet space.
posted by rhythim at 7:07 PM on December 22, 2008

/atari super pong/6 switch 2600 (original owner)/4 port 5200 with track ball/7800/jaguar

Say...you're looking to add a Lynx to your Atari collection by any chance?
posted by MikeMc at 7:25 PM on December 22, 2008

My wife has the Ms. Pac Man tabletop game. We showed it to my 11 year old daughter, who wasn't nearly as excited as I would have been at her age. :-/

We also have Speak n' Spell and Speak n' Math.
posted by Wild_Eep at 7:31 PM on December 22, 2008

How Dare You, Chococat!
I had an Intellivision, Intellivision II (still have it), Amiga 500 and 600, several Macs and Power Computing clones.
So, as you can see I always choose the winning side in technology wars, and I clearly decided from reading the Sears and Toys R Us catalogs at age 10 that Intellivision ruled all over Colecovision.
But yes, I admit that the disc controller sucked, that's why we loved it. Since you had to have one to practice on, we could invite our friends over to beat the crap out of them at lame knockoff games like Astrosmash -too bad they spent all their money on lame commercials with old-ass George Plimpton.
posted by so_articulate at 8:39 PM on December 22, 2008

When I was little, my older brother told me that if I would run Pitfall Harry into the brick wall in Pitfall for half an hour straight, he would finally break through and lead you to the bonus level with all kinds of treasure.

I would tell my mom that if Mario jumped into the pits, she would get extra points.

I just wanted my turn.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:07 PM on December 22, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

My folks are going through the basement and clearing out some of the detritus.

They just gave me my beloved Atari 2600. (Stylish black plastic and woodgrain!) Complete with cartridges and joysticks! Squeeee!
posted by desuetude at 12:04 AM on December 23, 2008

Heck with all that. I was all over the BB gun pages.


Never got one.
posted by cccorlew at 5:56 PM on December 23, 2008

You'll have your eye out!
posted by Artw at 9:29 PM on December 23, 2008

@Alvy: Same here! wow that brought back memories. Thanks.

Twas GIJoe for me. (the cut outs from the back of the packs). This was the only way I could fulfill my desire for total towel domination.

Faded 80s era towels as it happens make for very interesting, inexpensive and versatile (versatowel?) landscapes when lumped together and twisted about. Today’s towels can be too colorful. Er, and I have a job now.

Back then, the cutouts were the only way that I too could gather anything close to an army of little inch-square cutout solders. Say 12 bucks of packaging (what was that, 10 figures?) would yield at least 150 little 2Ddudes. Of course you could only have one of some of the individual characters... but who says you can't double up on some of the guys with masks?
posted by ilovemytoaster at 7:23 AM on December 24, 2008

Big Trak
posted by Artw at 9:32 PM on December 25, 2008