Category: Nostalgia

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.

Last weekend I spent $32 on a single Atari cartridge.

If you’ve been following my Atari shelf project, that probably doesn’t sound like much. But up until now, I don’t think I’ve paid more than about $8 for any one game.

A few weeks before the wedding, the owner of the retro game stand at our local flea market told me he was getting a copy of Miner 2049er. He didn’t know what he was going to charge for it yet, but he knew I was working on recreating the Atari print hanging in my office and thought I’d want to know.

When I got home, I looked it up on eBay. Most copies seemed to be selling somewhere between $25 and $45. That was enough for me to decide I wasn’t going to rush into anything. If the game was still there after the wedding, after the honeymoon, and after life settled down a little, I’d think about it.

Then life happened.

The wedding came and went, the honeymoon came and went, work got busy, and the flea market wasn’t really on my radar for a while.

Last weekend was the first time we’d been back in quite a while. When we stopped by the retro game stand, the guy behind the counter immediately recognized us. He told us he had specifically asked his boss to add Miner 2049er to their inventory system because, as he put it, “there’s this couple that comes in every few weeks looking for Atari games.”

Apparently his boss’ response was, “Really?”

Honestly, I probably would have had the same reaction a year ago.

Then he pointed toward the row of glass display cases that hold the more expensive games. Lots of NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 cartridges. Mixed in among them was Miner 2049er.

Still there.

Still waiting.

The price was $32.

I stood there looking at it for a minute longer than I probably needed to. It wasn’t because I didn’t think it was worth it, and it wasn’t because I couldn’t afford it. I was mostly trying to figure out if I was really about to spend four times more on a single Atari cartridge than I ever had before.

Of course, Sherri had already weighed in on the subject earlier. She knows I sometimes have a hard time spending money on myself, and her opinion was pretty simple:

If it’s still there when things settle down, buy it.

Eventually I handed over the money and became the proud owner of Miner 2049er.

After I got home, I did a little research and found out there’s a reason the game costs more than most Atari cartridges. It wasn’t produced in the same numbers as games like Combat or Pac-Man, and over the years it built a reputation as one of the better games on the system. It’s not especially rare, but it’s uncommon enough that collectors tend to grab it when they find one.

Honestly, though, that wasn’t what stuck with me.

What stuck with me was the realization that I never really debated whether I was going to buy it.

I was only debating when.

A little over a year ago, this whole thing started because my wife suggested it would be fun to recreate a print hanging in my office. At the time it felt like a silly scavenger hunt. We’d wander through flea markets and antique stores looking for specific titles, crossing games off a list and slowly filling the shelf beneath the print.

Somewhere along the way, though, the project changed.

Now I know which games are common. I know which ones are harder to find. I have opinions about label variations. I check display cases when we walk into a retro store. Apparently I’m the kind of person who spends part of a Saturday morning debating the value of a forty-year-old cartridge called Miner 2049er.

And the funny thing is, I’m completely okay with that.

The cartridge is sitting on the shelf now alongside the rest of the collection. There are still plenty of games left to find before I can recreate the print completely, and I’m sure at least a few of them will end up costing more than I’d like.

But if there’s one thing I learned from buying Miner 2049er, it’s that I crossed that line a while ago.

I just didn’t realize it until I was standing in front of the display case.

When my fiancé and I started turning our finished basement into my office, the goal wasn’t just to create a place to work. She wanted it to feel like a space that was totally mine.

At first, it was just a sofa and a small desk. Functional and quiet. Not particularly personal. I put out some of my treasures that I had collected over the years, but that only went so far. So we started spending weekends browsing flea markets and antique stores, looking for things that might help the room reflect my interests.

One afternoon, we came across a print that made both of us laugh.

It was simple, almost too simple. A plain white canvas with neat stacks of Atari 2600 cartridges arranged across it. Seven stacks, fourteen games each. Ninety-eight total. It wasn’t rare or valuable. It looked like something that might have origianlly come from a craft store or maybe TJ Maxx. But it had a kind of strange charm.

It was ten dollars.

So I bought it and hung it on the wall without thinking much about it.

At the time, it was just decoration.

Then one day she casually said, “You should try to collect all of those games and recreate the print in real life.”

It sounded like a joke. Or at best, a mildly ridiculous long-term project. But the more we talked about it, the more it started to feel like something worth trying.

Now, whenever we go to flea markets, antique stores, or anywhere that might have old games, we automatically start scanning shelves for those specific titles. We keep a shared note on our phones so we always know what we’re still missing. There’s a retro game vendor at the flea market we visit at least once a month now. The guy behind the counter has started to recognize us, which I’m choosing to interpret as encouragement rather than concern.

So far, I’ve tracked down 50 of the 98 games.

Directly below the print, a floating shelf now holds the cartridges we’ve collected, arranged in stacks that mirror the image above it. The order isn’t perfect yet, but that’s part of the process. The goal is to eventually recreate the print exactly — to turn something that started as wall art into something more physical.

What began as a ten-dollar purchase has slowly revealed itself to be a significantly more expensive idea. So far the Atari cartridge has cost around five dollars, this “simple” project will eventually total at least five hundred. Realistically, probably more. Some of the titles on the print go for twenty, thirty, even forty dollars on their own.

But the cost isn’t the point.

When I think about Atari, I don’t think about graphics or gameplay mechanics. I think about sitting on the floor in front of a huge console television with a woodgrain exterior, holding that chunky joystick, surrounded by wood-paneled walls. The console was wood. The TV was wood. The walls were wood. I’m pretty sure if we’d had a woodgrain joystick, no one would have questioned it. The games were abstract enough that imagination had to do most of the work. Every cartridge felt like a doorway into something special.

What I didn’t expect was how peaceful the whole process would be. This has become something my fiancé and I do together… a kind of ongoing, low-stakes treasure hunt that gives us an excuse to wander through flea markets and antique stores looking for tiny plastic relics.

The print is still hanging on the wall.

The shelf beneath it is slowly catching up.

It started as decoration.

Now it feels like the beginning of a project I didn’t plan, can’t fully explain, and probably shouldn’t think about the cost.

But I’m really glad we started it.