My Atari 2600 brain fart

Steven Patrick Morrissey once wrote “You can’t go home again.” Or was that Wilde? Or Wolfe? Or some other “W?” Hard to tell. Well, I have come to figure out, that when it comes to old video games, the same holds true. I remember days of sitting around, ruining my left thumb with the very un-ergonomic Atari 2600 joystick, blasting (or eating) pixels. The pixels were shaped like flickering aliens or flickering airplanes or flickering ghosts, though the pixels didn’t really look like aliens, airplanes or ghosts, but I remember the great fun I had.

Hold on tight to your ancient video game memories, people - you can’t get them back. Even with emulation software.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of disappointing time playing retro Atari 2600 video games last week on Stella, an Atari 2600 emulator for the Mac, P.C. or Linux (you can get the actual games here). Why would one do this?

The good games were OK. But the bad ones were really, really bad, or badly translated from their arcade namesakes. It is not totally the faults of the developers because the system was very limiting for its time. The 2600 came out in 1978 and by the time it reached its peak in 1983 it was already 5 years old and showing its limitations with systems like the Matel Intelivision or the Colecovision nipping at the Atari’s heels with more memory and better graphics. (There are emulators for those systems as well, but their games not as great as you remember. Trust me.)

I was one of the few owners, back in the day, of a Starpath (Arcadia) Supercharger. The device was a cartridge that was a little more than twice the size of a normal Atari cartridge that hooked up to a cassette player. You would then take the game, which came on a cassette, put it in to the cassette player, hit “play,” the game would load in about 25 seconds and you could them play slightly better, slightly better LOOKING, and slightly more complicated games. The only exception to this was “Escape from the Mind Master” which was the earliest 3D maze game that is reminiscent of the old Castle Wolfenstein (not in the violence, mind you, but in the way you maneuvered around.) Also there was a version of Sega’s Frogger that was licensed to Starpath that competed, in a way, to the Parker Brothers cartridge based version of the same game. Starpath's version looked pretty darn good. This was possible because Starpath did not need the “cartridge” rights to the game, they needed the “magnetic media” rights. Remember the cassette? Pretty sneaky Sega. Knowing this trivia is so damned useful, I put it on my resume.

I think, what probably, breaks the joy of replaying your childhood video game memories is the obvious. Everyday we look at great looking interfaces for our computers and even if you stopped playing video games 10 years ago, like me, something like 1992’s Castle Wolfenstein ruins you and there is no going back. The benchmark is set and that new and novel experience must be better than the last.

To the future...