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What Do You Do With 1 Million Atari Games?
gr8fulnded sent us a CNet story that will knock your socks of: this guy has over a million
unopened Atari 2600 and 7800 games sitting in a limestone mine-turned warehouse for sale for a bug a cardtridge. If you still have a machine, check it out (at a buck a cartridge, its quite the deal). Or else you could get the cartridge and make your emulator legal! (michael: Bill Kendrick sent us the proper device on which to play these carts: a 2600/Nomad combination.)
Someone should warn them of the potential pitfalls.
;)
Excellent choice of words...
--K
----
Deepthroat my submarine, swallow my seamen.
You can see this guy's website at http://www.oshealtd.com/. The server seems slow already, so you might have more luck at the Google cache.
His hit-counter is at 86,473 at the moment. I wonder what it'll be at this time tomorrow...
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Hey forget about the atari games. What interests me is the "Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers" mentioned in the article.
If this isn't a good example of marketing gone, well, awry, I don't know what is.
I mean, ya gotta wish you were a fly on the wall when the marketing guy sat down and made his pitch to management: "Hey, I got this new idea. You're gonna love it. I'm pretty sure we're first to bat with this one..."
:)
Nah. I'm saying that there are different kinds of progress. Yes, we have shinier chrome now, but fundamentally they aren't doing anything much more fundamentally new & progressive. It's like the auto industry -- we can make some mighty fancy looking cars now, but they still all go 65 mph down the highway.
Newer doesn't necessarily mean better. Sometimes it does, sure (BeOS! :), but often newer is just used as a euphemism for "more", and honestly doesn't do any more for us than the old version did. I think this is more true for games than any other area I can think of at the moment.Sometimes the new version of the status quo is very satisfying -- I'm having fun with Pokemon on my new Game Boy, for example. But often, the old things that we remember, are in fact remembered because they were so good in the first place.
Like "Citizen Kane" for example :). I'll take it over "The Matrix" (just to pick a recent movie) any day. That's not to say that there's not any good movies now -- David Fincher, the Coen Bros etc are making real classics -- but some of the old stuff is time-tested and just as fresh as ever. I like that.
Oh brother, see now that's the kind of nonsense that I have a hard time dealing with. Creative, expressive, takes a lot of work to make yeah yeah yeah I can accept all that. But Art Form? As in "John Carmack is the next John Coltrane"? I don't think so, personally. It's not that I don't notice, it's that I'm not impressed & therefore I don't really care. Time will tell, however, and you may be right. I doubt it though.
You can have your Carmacks & Quakes & PS2s, and I'll be perfectly happy with my Coltranes & Tetrises & games written for Palm Pilots. You take the high road, I'll take the low, etc.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
No, but Citizen Kane is a pretty damn good flick, along with Roman Holiday, Nosferatu and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
And there are plenty of people who like watching them. I hate walking into a arcade with a bunch of friends and they all play DDR, while I walk around hoping for a Pac Man or Star Wars (the original "The Force is with you" version) cabinet.
And in the movie industry, you can still get Citizen Kane and Roman Holiday in the latest media (DVD), even though if they were computer games they would be dropped due to old technologies like Black and White film.
Hey, I just saw the new movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Good flick. I watched it in the same theater that I'll go see Rocky Horror again this Saturday. Sunday, a bunch of people are gonna come over to my house to watch a Prisioner marathon, and next Friday we'll all go see Anti-Trust.
But computer games? The old ones suck... nobody would want to play them.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Only a bug a piece? Having written about a million bugs, I could probably afford all of them....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Please state the facts properly. Emulators are and always have been legal. What you meant were ROMs, which are potentially copyright infringing.
IANAL, but I think that technically, it is illegal to distribute ROMs in any case. It is legal to dump them for yourself, but not distribute. Likewise, it isn't quite kosher to get the ROMs from someone else, even if you do own the cart. You have to dump them yourself. This isn't really a distinction to worry about; if you own the cart to a commercial game, you're probably okay. (Someone correct me if I'm not quite right)
But the emulator is ALWAYS legal. And there are many freeware ROMs that you can play on them, strengthening the position that they will remail legal.
-Grant aka JimTheta---
My stupid web site
The problem is not with those games. The problem is with you.
Ever had the experience of experiencing as an adult something (a place, a building, a movie) that impressed you a lot as a child? 90% of the times you feel disappointed, because it doesn't measure up at all to the idea that you had kept in your memory.
I can't remember the title, but it was for the Atari 2600 - I played it as a kid on my uncle's system.
I remember that you were a dot or something, and you went around these "rooms" collecting treasures and avoiding traps. There were so many treasure, like a diamond, and things - and each room was like a maze, or a trap - with walls, etc. I remember one room had these walls that if you didn't time it right, would crush you between them.
It was called "Treasure of the ???" or something similar (maybe it was a single word?).
I know this is very vague and all, but if someone could tell me, or give me a "possibles" list (or links to screenshots, maybe) - that would be real helpful. I have been searching for this game for a loooong time, and maybe this guy has it?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Burn them!
Or you could drop them on Iraq to see if they could make ICBM's from them... They could use those PS2's and shoot atari games at us...
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
...with a million Atari games; Two chicks at the same time. I've always wanted to do that. And if I had a million Atari games I think I could manage it. Yah, I know not all chicks like Atari games but the kind that would double-up on me do.
Its a really big one. Can I get two games?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Here's WIRED's blurb from July. The games were only $.80/piece then.
I've got Windows2000, could I buy 65,000 games ?
I lost my copy of the green golf ball joke can anyone find it for me?
Being from Missouri, I can say I've seen the warehouse, and the boxes are there. Some are in great condition, some boxes are beat up, but everything appears to be in good shape, and there are a few boxes which you'd probably want a warranty/guarentee on before purchasing. But those are few and far between. 90% of you are going to get great quality, and I'm prety sure the other 10% will get deals/refunds upon request.
Now, if I'd just convinced my father to keep our atari and C64 when I was in third grade, and still had everything to play today. I miss them damnit.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
There is a small but rather impressive shrine built on top of tomb #4, with an eternal flame burning bronze effigies of Tod Frye and Howard Scott Warsaw.
Etched on the Warsaw bust, the words that Warsaw said to Steven Spielberg during the short development cycle of E.T., "Steven, this game is going to make your movie famous."
And etched on the Frye bust, the words that Rick Mauer said to Tod Frye after hearing of his $1,000,000 paycheck for PacMan, "You ought to put a photocopy of that on your office door at Atari. I think it'll help programmer morale."
and, just for completeness' sake, we should mention the Pokemon seizure episode that sent something like 500 kids to the hospital in Japan. Alternating flashing colors in that episode of the cartoon tv show caused the seizures old video games don't. A short time after the cartoon was released, btw, somewhere on the net someone put up an animated gif with alternating colors, like in the cartoon, and I couldn't stare at it for very long without feeling incredibly sick to my stomach - scary stuff!
If you replaced the ABC station identification spot with one that contained the proper flashing colors, you could really pull a number on a hell of a lot of people.
Then this. Wow.
The idea of getting UNOPENED games seems slightly pornographic, but even better are those sweet Atari t-shirts. I'm all over that. And my girlfriend is gonna freak when she gets a Pac-man t-shirt for her birthday.
Thank you geeks!
You're looking in the wrong places. You seem to think your local car dealer is going to sell you the latest most revolutionary car there is. Wrong. Your local car dealer will sell something that's guaranteed to sell. That's going to be a boring standard nothing-revolutionary car.
There have been revolutionary new engines: for example the orbital engine which is 2x more powerful and 1/2 the weight and gets 3x the fuel efficiency.
But you'll never see this engine sold in a car from your local dealer.
It's economics. The infrastructure is nearly impossible to displace that quickly. There are 100s of billions of dollars invested into primary and secondary manufacturing plants, training and education for post-production mechanical repairs, secondary production for parts suppliers, etc.
It takes time to displace infrastructure. The biggest problem facing fuel cell cars right now isn't the car (they are powerful enough, and are safe enough). It's the fact that you'll get one tank's worth of driving then you'll not find any pumping stations to refuel at.
You're wrong if you think revolutionary change isn't going on. It's just that the infrastructure resists change. The revolution occurs quietly and in niche areas first.
You can get that Triumph the insult comic dog hand puppet like on Conan O'brien dirt cheap!
http://www.oshealtd.com/puppets.htm
You're referring to "Venture". I know it. I own it.
You're this little dude with a bow, represented with a smiley circle with a bow attached to it. There are multiple screens, with each having four rooms. Outside of these rooms, you are just a dot on a big map, but when you enter a room, the view zooms in on the rooms interior and you can see your full smiley head. In each room is a treasure and either 3 monsters or 4 moving trap walls. When you get all four treasures from the four rooms, you advance to the next screen.
Does that sound like the game you're looking for?
And you're in luck! It's available from the guy!
-Grant aka JimTheta
---
My stupid web site
Oh yeah, except for the fact that road deaths are down from their all-time high of 50,000 dead per year (USA) in the 60s. All thanks to Nader's perseverance and the auto industry's realisation that people actually do want to live.
Oh, and that cars are now get 3x the mileage than their 60s predecessors. The exception being the recent (mostly USA) trend towards great big behemoth trucks instead of cars. Regardless, the engine is still more efficient.
Oh, and the introduction of car computers and fuel injection and traction control and antilock braking and 4-wheel steering. The use of lighter alloys and stronger frames and safer rollcages.
Looking only at a car's speed is a ridiculous way to measure progress. Sure, it's evolutionary not revolutionary. This doesn't justify a stupid claim that cars today aren't any better than the cars of yesteryear.
Personally, I feel like a lot of the modern games designers have become so drunk with the technological progress available that they've forgotten how to make the things simple & fun. I'll take Pac-Man & Tetris & the old wire-frame Star Wars over Diablo and whatever the big game of the week is this week -- any day.
Obviously, it isn't the graphics that make these games appealing, and you're glossing things over to call them all single player (you never had "Combat" as a kid, did you?) but it's flat out dismissive to ignore the game play. A lot of those old games, aware of the weak graphics, were smart enough to put game play ahead of anything else.
Personally, I got off the video game wagon when all my friends knew the dozens of moves for Mortal Kombat, and I just didn't care. I wanted Double Dragon back, or Gauntlet. "Red Warrior needs food badly!" Hell yeah, that's about as much as I want to think in my games. It's supposed to be fun & escapist, not intricate nonsense...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
But what surprises me most is that he managed to sell half of them, even with a few titles that are still common as dirt at Goodwill thrift stores, and even with a bunch of Atari 7800 titles, considering how well that console didn't sell.
If you think that's bad, how about what Atari did with Pac Man and E.T. They actually made more Pac Man cartridges than they did consoles! So in order to take a loss on these things (both written in six weeks or so, instead of the six months that the average 2600 game took to write--and they show it!), they had them buried in a hole in the desert as a tax write-off. The IRS even made them pour concrete into the hole on top of all the cartridges. Anyone for an archaeological expedition to Arizona?
My suggestion? Use them as construction material. Maybe cover a wall with 'em, sort of like a retro Z-Brick theme for the game room.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Yeah, but where can I buy a good atari 2600 console? Is there any place that still sells a new 2600 and joystick? I don't mind if it's one of the "new" (Jr.?) ones that is smaller than usual.
(Ever notice how Atari, Nintendo, and Sony all made smaller versions of their most popular consoles?)
Mod this up, (+1, Informative)!!
Unopened Atari games are no doubt a collector's item. But what happens to their value when you flood the market with a million of them?
You get the same result that is bound to happen to all the people who carefully packed their Episode 1 action figures in boxes in hopes that it would pay for their retirement.
And somebody else in this thread said that I got old...
What you're essentially saying is that you object to progress in video games. I respect the Atari for being first, but that certainly doesn't make it better. I also respect the skills of the first cave painters. Does that mean I should throw out my Mondrian prints? Are Peter Greenaway films intricate nonsense, and should we just keep watching Citizen Caine over and over again instead?
Computer games are an evolving form of expression that are destined to be the first true new art form of the 21st century. It's sad that you can't bring your level of understanding up to where it needs to be to appreciate the work of geniuses like John Carmack.
Hey I had one of those! You could play games on them and they were portable! I loved moving it from TV to TV as if I was doing something important. I haven't seen one of those around in forever!
--
Scott Miga
suprax@linux.com
A truly scarey place. But they have excellent climent control, which is why they use them for this.
I thought the idea nuts when I was in 2nd grade and got my first tour. Now that I see what people store in them these days, I know I was right.
I can vouch for this place; I heard about them a pretty long time ago (over a year and something ago) and I immediately send out money to buy one of every cartridge they had.
The result can be seen in this older photograph of my entertainment center. All those grey boxes in the lower left are brand-new, still in box Atari and Jaguar cartridges.
He's actually sold out of a few of them, but on the whole, this is a great, great thing. If it was 1983, I'd look like the richest kid on the block (instead of the most geekily nostalgic).
"for sale for a bug a cardtridge"
Well, I got paid today, so I've got plenty of ants on hand and I've got a few beetles to spare, but it would have to be a mint condition cartridge for my preying mantises.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
warehouse for sale for a bug a cardtridge
A bug a cartridge, eh? Any bug? *rubs hands deviously* I knew that ant hill would come in handy... now how to figure out how to get them all out... <evil laughter>
If you'll excuse me, I have work to do... bwa ha ha ha..
Information is the catalyst for revolution
nor are they a buck a game.
They're $2/game.
Fair enough. But ...they still run on petroleum gasoline, don't they? The better ones might not use quite as much of it, and they might burn it a bit more cleanly, but certainly we're not seeing any real, fundamental progress there. Where are the solar cars? The electric cars? The fuel cells?
There's lots of interesting tech that just isn't being applied. You're right, the progress has been evolutionary, and that's exactly the problem. I think we need some revolutionary design in the auto (& computer, & game) industry(ies), and we just don't have it. That's not for such revolutionary tools being available -- they are -- but they somehow don't make it to market, and what we as regular people have available for purchase is not, I reiterate, anything fundamentally better than what was available a generation ago. Incrementally better, yeah, I'll give you that. But not fundamentally.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Ah yes, the scent of an adolescent after an all nighter trying to solve Rubiks Cube...
--
Also, old games require the player to exercise his imagination to a much greater degree than modern photorealistic games, which reflect reality but do not introduce a warped alternative version of it, like Pac Man or Space Invaders do.
Of course, this imagination is healthy in small doses, but it can be quite dangerous in larger doses. As the people buying these games are likely to be games enthusiasts, they will be more at danger than the rest of us. Someone should warn them of the potential pitfalls.
I say this because my brother became depressed in the late 80's, and the doctor said he should stop playing video games, citing these reasons. He almost immediately improved.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
-
-Be a man. Insult me without using an AC.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Yeah, probably 90% of the games released in that era were crap too, but the best of them are still playable and enjoyable today.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
My dad used to have an office in those mines. They have been coverted not only into warehouse space, but also into pretty cool office space (you have to put up with no windows, of course, but some of the walls are craggly rock -- which is a sort of cool effect).
You may remember a few years back, when Reagan was in office, and it came out that the government had been hoarding cheese for years (to prop up dairy prices), and people were calling for the government to distribute the cheese to poor people. These are the mines where all of that cheese was stored (I don't know whether any of it made it to the poor, though).
I know it's off-topic, but sometimes, you've just got to spout useless facts, and damn the consequences.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
UltraHLE also backed out because it emulates high-level constructs (HLE == High-Level Emulator) created by the early C compilers for the MIPS processor in the N64. As the compilers used for newer games became more advanced (and optimized assembly subroutines became more common), the UltraHLE team could not keep up.
UltraHLE backed out because they felt threatened
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Okay. I have a confession. I loved ET (yes, the game). Years later, and I still claim it to be the distant ancestor of modern console RPGs. The difference between it (and similar 2600 titles like Haunted House, which I also liked) and later console titles like Final Fantasy on through to Shenmue is scope of story due to platform.
Cramming an RPG into the 2600 is neigh impossible. So you have to drop things like AI, beautiful graphics, plot, text... Okay. So you have to drop most everything that makes an RPG an RPG. But the skeleton that you have left is the ability to control a character with your own actions on a quest. One of the cool things about ET is the flower. You fall in a pit and find a flower you can heal... which then smiles at you. At the time, that was pretty damn cool. You have the Doctor, FBI agent and Eliott running around helping or hindering you, with more involvement in the plot than the damn castle guards that always repeat: "Welcome to the Castle!" in later, "better" games.
Sure, it dosen't hold a candle to later console RPGs... but then at least it has fewer FMVs than recent Square releases.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
If they had the 5200 games, I'd try to get a machine and go nuts, the 2600/7800 was never my favorite.
Alex
A buck a game? That's not bad. Keep them unopened and your great, great, great grandkids might not have to work. You never know.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
There are numerous millions of ET: The Extra Terrestrial carts (for 2600) burried in New Mexico somewhere. (They supposedly made more carts than there were 2600's. Idiots)