A little over a year ago, I bought a print for my office.
It was a simple canvas featuring seven stacks of Atari cartridges. I thought it looked cool, and for about ten bucks it seemed like an easy way to add some personality to the room.
Then Sherri suggested something that, in hindsight, was probably dangerous.
What if we collected all of the games in the print and recreated it on the shelf underneath?
At the time it sounded like a fun scavenger hunt. We’d pick up a few cartridges here and there, visit flea markets on the weekends, and slowly work our way through the list.
That seemed perfectly reasonable.
Fast forward to today and I own more than sixty Atari cartridges, know which games are harder to find, and recently spent $32 on a copy of Miner 2049er. Apparently I’m also part of a local flea market legend known as “that couple looking for Atari games.”
This is how hobbies happen, I guess.
The funny thing is that none of this required an Atari console.
The print worked without one. The shelf worked without one. The hunt definitely worked without one. For most of the project, I was focused on finding the games, displaying the games, and occasionally writing about the games. Actually playing them wasn’t really part of the plan.
At least not at first.
Somewhere along the way, though, I started becoming curious. The more cartridges I added to the shelf, the more I found myself wondering what some of them were actually like. A few I remembered from childhood. A few I’d played at friends’ houses. Others were complete mysteries that somehow ended up becoming part of my collection.
Then there was the obvious problem: even if I wanted to play them, my original Atari stopped working decades ago, and modern televisions aren’t exactly built with forty-something year old game systems in mind.
So last week I did something that feels completely inevitable now.
I ordered one of the new Atari 2600+ systems.
Specifically, the Pac-Man edition, because if I’m already buying decades-old cartridges at flea markets, I might as well commit fully to the bit.
What appeals to me about the system isn’t really the nostalgia factor, although it certainly has that. It’s the fact that it gives me a simple way to actually use the collection I’ve been building. For the first time since this whole project started, the cartridges on the shelf won’t just be reminders of old games.
They’ll be games again.
I’m not sure what to expect.
Some of them probably won’t hold up. Some of them might be better than I remember. There will almost certainly be at least one game that makes me wonder what people in 1982 were thinking.
But that’s part of the fun.
For the past year, the Atari project has mostly been about memories, collecting, and the hunt. Ordering the 2600+ feels like the start of a new chapter.
After all, I’ve spent an awful lot of time tracking down these cartridges.
It might finally be time to see if they’re any good.
Leave a Reply