The Gamer

In the same era of the Polaroids, was the Atari. 

I had always been a gamer, long before consoles. Most of my Christmas presents involved games, but the trick was you usually had to have someone to play them with. 

Some of my earliest memories are of playing Clue and Yahtzee and Life in my Kirkdale house with my parents. 

And whenever I'd have sleepovers with friends, I could break out the games and we'd have a marathon. 

But when no one else felt like playing . . .  you were kind of stuck. The rubick's cube and Merlin hand-held early electronic games were favorites of mine precisely because I didn't have to depend on a second player. 

We 'd gotten an Apple computer around the same time, but it wasn't mine and it wasn't game friendly. The only game I recall was Deadline, a DOS based, almost entire text based thing that was insane. I looked it up. You want to read the commands you needed to solve the thing? Click here. 

So when I got an Atari 2600 for Christmas? Heaven.

note the polaroid camera bag, left

So I went digging around today to find some of the games I remembered owning and man, what nostalgia. If they could bottle up that feeling of hearing/seeing/remembering for the first time after decades, it would be worth billions. 

My top 10 Atari Nostalgia Games

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This last one was actually what kicked off the search today. I remember falling into those damn holes and running out of life endlessly. It was terrible. 

As it turns out, I was not alone. Wait. I could've RETURNED this horrible game?!