It’s My Life: IV – Out With The New, In With The Old?
Hello and welcome to “It’s My Life“. This ain’t a blog for the broken-hearted.
Back in the early 1980s my parents entered into, and won, a competition. To this day the only time this happened that I’m aware of, despite many more competition attempts being submitted.
The prize? The newly rebranded Atari 2600 (previously the Atari Video Computer System). A chronically and often seriously unwell child (a story for another time), I spent a great deal of my early years in hospital, a hospital which as luck would have it, had been donated an older model Atari VCS, later upgraded to the more slimline ‘Atari 2600 Jr’ though by that point I no longer required hospital treatment and could play my very own Atari 2600!
Anyone familiar with the Glasgow of the 80’s and 90’s will be familiar with ‘The Barras’ an hybrid open air/ under cover market situated on the eastern side of the city centre. A unique blend of 100% legal market traders, actual shops, antique dealers, cafes and of course, everything illegal you could possibly think of, if you knew where to look and/ or who to ask. Every few months my dad would take me to the Barras Market, both so he could stock up on tobacco and so that we could look for Atari 2600 cartridges. I don’t think he knew how much it meant to me that we did this. Given that he’s no longer with us, he never will. RIP Dad.
I still have *an* Atari 2600. It’s not the original I had back then, that’s long gone, I also still have a load of cartridges. I also still have *a* Commodore C64 and many more cassettes for it than cartridges for the Atari. Both power up and have loaded anything I’ve tried to load however given their age, both are one less than perfect power up away from silicon heaven. I’ll retain that degree of plausible ignorance. I’d like to say it was because I had an epiphany and meticulously collected and kept in pristine condition all the retro gaming things in order to have a video game collection worth millions but the less exciting truth is that my grandparents were big car boot fans and at least once per visit, of which there could be several in any given year, in the late 80s/ early 90s, we would end up going to at least one car boot sale where Atari cartridges and/ or Commodore 64 cassettes could be picked up in large quantities for very little cost, so long you didn’t mind the lack of original packaging. Luckily the same car boot sales also had a similarly large quantity of music cassettes cases and what I believe were 8 track album storage boxes which were surprisingly good for keeping otherwise unprotected video game cartridges safe and secure.
With patience, eBay is (or can be) a decent source of the same and you’ll, increasingly less often, find that bulk lots of cartridges/ cassettes can be gathered for surprisingly little cost, if you are willing to accept that you may end up with only a few working titles and zero packaging/ manuals/ etc.
The next obvious solution is emulation. We could argue back and forth over the legalities of emulation but my philosophy is simply IF I own the original title, in its original physical format, I see no compelling argument why I should not be able to play that same title in a digital format via emulation if that’s more convenient.
One absolute boon is the fact that many of these titles are now legitimately available through platforms such as Steam meaning there’s no legal argument whatsoever, I own* a legal version of the game in its release format, which I can play on my computer with no need for emulation or moral quandary.
A few years ago I formed a gaming group called “Gamers Without Shoes”, if you look hard enough, remnants of this group can still be found online. Whether I opt to do the same in future is not yet decided. What I do plan on though, is to play and hopefully capture video of said play, even more hopefully with others.
I’m a retro gamer, and proud of it.
If you made it this far, consider leaving a comment. Constructive feedback is always welcome and it needn’t be positive. Don’t like something? Let me know. If you’re looking for more of my ramblings, a more in depth argument, or just want to berate me in a more public setting, consider joining the Infinite Realities Discord server where you can engage with members of the community and follow the general happenings. Alternatively, engage with the community on the subreddit.
With 100% complete sincerity, I don’t care what you think of me, I can’t do a damn thing about that. None of us are getting out of this alive and, like Frankie says, I’m doing it my way.
See you tomorrow?
Chris
