SO! I am the proud owner of … an Atari 2600+! This console, a re-release of the original Atari 2600 from 47 (!) years ago, only a notch smaller and with USB and HDMI outputs. It plays original Atari cartridges, though, which shall be my incentive to hop on my bike and visit the retro game store in nearby Traveler’s Rest which has a selection of original Atari cartridges among all their other retro games.
The first game I remember playing is Adventure, which came out in 1980, and, while I can’t be sure, I seem to remember first playing it in my parents’ new house on Coventry Road, which we didn’t move into until early 1979, just before my birthday.
In fact, as I dig my brain into it, we played Breakout in the den of my parents’s old house on Sedgefield Road, so we must have had access to early-generation Atari. Our neighbors when we moved had a snazzier Odyssey 2 :-), and a few years later another friend from school had an even better game console, though none of the second-generation units I looked up online seem familiar to me.
Therefore, by the process of elimination, either my parents got my Atari 2600 for Christmas for me sometime around 1977 or 1978, or one of our relatives or babysitters loaned us one when we lived on Sedgefield. I have distinct memories of getting a Radio Shack Color Computer in Christmas of 1980, a grey wedge of plastic with a massive 4K of RAM, and remember programming games on it myself – perhaps because I didn’t have an Atari to play with; this makes me think that, at least at first, the Atari was actually the “better game console” my other friend from school had, and that I went over to their house to play.
Regardless, I solved the first level of Adventure in minutes after cracking open the Atari.
No big challenge, but apparently I still got it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the box, and the unboxed start of Adventure.
