My Atari 2600.
When I was a kid my mum and dad bought me an Atari 2600 games console for Christmas. At the time it was the most exciting present I’d ever had. There were only a couple of my friends who were lucky enough to have one and I felt like one of the privileged few!
You always used to get a free game with the Atari called ‘Combat’. This was a one or two player battle with tanks and bi-planes. The trouble was that, even back then, it was crap. Luckily, my parents also got me ‘Space Invaders’ as another present.
I was made up!
My Atari games collection steadily grew over the years. What began as two games (one if you didn’t class ‘Combat’ as a game) became a much larger collection. The games were very expensive when the Atari was first released but, as they came down in price, my collection got bigger…
I had a selection of just about every ‘classic’ you care to mention, including; ‘Phoenix’, ‘Gorf’, ‘Pac Man’, ‘Missile Command’, ‘Defender’, ‘Asteroids’, ‘Dig Dug’ and ‘Donkey Kong’. Believe me, when you had grown up with all of these titles being ‘state of the art’ arcade games it was magical to have them all at home.
When I got to my early thirties I still had my old Atari. It had spent a good few years gathering dust in the attic and I decided it was time to say goodbye… I dragged it all downstairs, cleaned it, tested it and listed it on eBay. There were over seventy games, two sets of joysticks and paddles and God knows what else. I thought I should get a good price for it all. After all, it was retro!
The day arrived when the listing came to a close and I got… twenty quid. I was gutted. All the hours of joy and entertainment it had given me!
I was strong and when I took it to the Post Office I did not cry; but it taught me a very big lesson…