If you remember anything from 1983, it’s likely to be some of the year’s popular culture highlights, maybe Return of the Jedi, or Michael Jackson’s Thriller. For anyone connected with the video gaming industry though, it’s likely that year will stick in the mind for a completely different reason, as the year of the infamous Great Video Games Crash. Overcapacity in the console market coupled with a slew of low quality titles caused sales to crash and a number of companies to go out of business, and the console gaming world would only recover later in the decade with the arrival of the Japanese 8-bit consoles from Nintendo and Sega. You might expect Atari to shy away from such a painful period of their history, but instead they are embracing it as part of their 50th anniversary and launching three never-released titles on cartridges for their 8-bit 2600 console.
The three games, Yars’ Return, Aquaventure, and Saboteur, are all unreleased titles from back in the day that never saw publication because of the crash, and are being released as limited edition specials through AtariXP, a new venture that the company says will offer “previously unreleased titles from Atari’s expansive library, rare-and-hard-to-find Atari IP physical media, and improved versions of classic games“. It’s fairly obviously an exercise in satisfying the collector’s market rather than one of video game publishing, but it will be interesting to see what emerges. In particular we hope someone will tear down one of these cartridges; will they find a set of old-school EPROMs inside or an EPROM emulator sporting a microcontroller and other 2020s trickery?
This is not of course the first time we’ve reported on collectable 2600 cartridges, but these ones haven’t spent 30 years in a landfill site.
Header image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.
Now if only EA would release Ultima 8 part II.
CCE had their own branded version of Aquaventure they distributed in Brazil.
$150 each for the limited editions, and $50 each for the regular versions. Seems a little insane.
Especially with the original carts still going for 2$ in bulk lots (with exceptions obviously)
then it’s time for a trade-in program and membership/loyalty rewards system.
if that’s not bad enough, a revival of UPC-cutting, rebate offer PDF’s, printers, receipts, the postal service, and a clearing house can be arranged.
All of those titles also turned up on the Atari Flashback II.
And some other Flashback consoles as well. It is not “unreleased” but rather someone’s taking advantage of the fact those 3 games never had official cart release. They are not likely to work on Retron or other cart based emulator system.
$150? Holy snapping crap!
Is there a new system? I have the original system and it definitely can’t connect to my tv. lol 😆
Some of the later Flashback system has HDMI support. Or you could find a mod to add AV or other port to old consoles
AV (aka Composite aka CVBS) would be the most authentic, I guess. It’s what the console uses to fed the RF modulator. That being said, modern TVs support HDMI but do an awful job at displaying analogue 240p/288p signals. Speaking of RF, there’s one thing to consider – early video games heavily relied on the flaws of NTSC and things like gradients/dithering that needed a blurry connection.
http://bogost.com/games/a_television_simulator/
RF were also less strict, early consoles got away with 240 rather than proper 480 (NTSC expects 525 lines per frame but Atari 2600 didn’t obey this), which is why modern TV with legacy NTSC tuner often have trouble with early game systems.
I don’t know if these would be compatible, but the Flasback2 was a 2600 on a chip and can readily be hacked with a cartridge port. It has composite video out.
Well unless you live in a closet if you’re into retro games it’s not a bad idea to keep a 13″ CRT around.
So does this make the 2600 the longest officially supported games platform in history? That is supported by the company that made it?
Depending on the definition of “platform”, I think Milton-Bradley goes back further with Monopoly.
B^)
But he said games platform, which implies you can play multiple games on it, with Monopoly you can only play 2 games, Monopoly and ANTIFA (where you just set the board on fire. :)
LOL!
look up dan kitchen an atari pioneer. he has recently made new atari 2600 games