Some Gnarly Atari Games

Am I allowed to use the word gnarly?  I think I was a bit too young in the 90s when that was popular.  Visions of Bill and Ted are flashing before my eyes now…

Though retro game pickings have been mostly dismal over the past few months, I did see a classifieds ad for some Atari games pop up.  As a relatively casual collector for that system, I wasn’t quite sure whether or not any of the seller’s games would be worthwhile for my tastes, or whether any were particularly sought after that I could snatch up.  TheDeviot over at Comma Eight Comma One recommended I check out AtariAge for some information on rarity, and it was incredibly helpful (thanks again!)   After doing some research and watching some gameplay clips online, there were definitely a few gems in the pile, so I negotiated what I thought to be a reasonable price for 8 games, and actually went back on another day to pick up a few others to round it all out.

Of the games I picked up there was only one double in my current collection, and that was Frogger.  The rest were entirely new to me!  It was obviously great to find a copy of some Nintendo games like Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Jr., but I was even more intrigued by Pitfall II.  It’s not a game I had known very much about before owning it, but after trying it out and seeing that it was like a little adventure title, I was very surprised to find that it has an ending!  That’s a bit of a rarity on a console normally geared towards racking up points, and I played that game for two evenings straight just to listen to the great music and get to the end of all the obscurity of collecting what might have been a bunch of glowing cheese and a shaking monkey – I didn’t have an instruction manual after all.  I even went so far as to record a playthrough of it, but though my voice and the game’s audio were captured fine, there was so little detail in the video’s picture that it’s going to take some tweaking of the setup before I try that one out again!

The two games I ended up going back for on a separate occasion after doing some more research were Crackpots and Radar.  Crackpots honestly looks like a game I can get behind and involves smashing spiders with flower pots as they try to ascend your apartment building.  Radar I picked up for the simple fact that it was a Zellers-exclusive game, meaning that it was a Canadian-only release and likely has a higher rarity than some of the others here.  I know that most of the games from that set are just blatant copies of other games, and this one is no exception: it’s a copy of Cruise Missile.  Either way, it was great to find a third game in that bunch, with the other two I currently have being Dragon Treasure and Earth Attack.

In other news, I’m heading to a swap event soon, so hopefully I’ll find some more really great stuff there and report back with that in the next few weeks.  We recently had some new shelving custom-built and installed for the Nerd Room, and it’s looking fantastic.  We have so much more storage that’s quickly filling up with all the things we didn’t previously have room for (mostly all the stuff from Joe’s collection I picked up a few months ago), so who knows how much more collecting I can realistically do before we need to have shelves built on the ceiling in there?  I am hoping to do a post in the next bit showing the before and after of that space.  That will be something fun and a little different!

I hope your weekends are all off to a lovely start.  As always, thanks for reading!

-GG