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What Do You Do With 1 Million Atari Games?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Fri Jan 19, 2001 05:05 PM
from the now-that-is-simply-mad dept.
from the now-that-is-simply-mad dept.
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.)
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What Do You Do With 1 Million Atari Games?
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Re:Old Games are more dangerous than new games. (Score:5)
Excellent choice of words...
--K
----
Website (Score:3)
You can see this guy's website at http://www.oshealtd.com/ [oshealtd.com]. The server seems slow already, so you might have more luck at the Google cache [google.com].
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.
Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers? (Score:4)
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..."
Re:Yeah, but those games suck (Score:3)
:)
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.
Beating a dead horse (Score:5)
CORRECTION: Emulators _are_ always legal (Score:4)
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---
I think you should (Score:3)
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!
I'll tell ya what I would do... (Score:3)
I have a cockroach. (Score:5)
Re:Only a bug per game? Sweet! (Score:5)
The Atari Landfill, and the hidden shrine... (Score:5)
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."
Re:Yeah, but those games suck (Score:3)
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...
O'Shea (Score:3)
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.
Re:Website (Score:3)
And judging by the name of the form action, "email.pl" I suspect that this CGI-BIN then emails your submission once again across the Net unencrypted.
Re:Mr. Potato Head Foot Massagers? (Score:5)
"Honey, what's this on the credit card bill?"
"Oh, it's a foot masager."
Yeah, right.
Hrrm (Score:5)
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..
oops again for slashdot (Score:5)
nor are they a buck a game.
They're $2/game.
Not all of them (Score:3)
Yeah, probably 90% of the games released in that era were crap too, but the best of them are still playable and enjoyable today.
Offtopic -- I know those mines (Score:4)
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