I'm going to stray a bit from drivel you've probably heard from most people. Yeah,
so the 2600 VCS was the system that everyone grew up on. I am included in that bunch of
people, though I was also fortunate to be one of the kids that had TWO systems,
the other being a Mattel Intellivision. Looking back on things, I seemed to have preferred
my Mattel console over the Atari, though 2600 VCS was far more successful than its
contemporary. After the fire died in the early console scene and lots of people moved
to home computers, I (being a young fry) was given an 8-bit computer, some software, and
told to have fun. As a result of this, I never even knew that Atari had developed
the successor to the 2600, the 5200 Super System, and then the post-crash 7800
Prosystem. So, it was quite a shock for me when I finally saw some of these things
and the games that I could play on them.
I undid the damage and acquired several of these beasts, and I love all three of my
Atari consoles and their games. They all have their own merits. I also think back with
great pride over the hours spent in front of my Atari 800 computer playing Spinnaker
titles and finding ways to hack the titles written in BASIC. Shamus, Crossfire
and Jawbreaker were among my favorites and still are.
Atari Catalogs
As a result of Atari's domination of the classic video game scene, there are
literally DOZENS of different catalogs around for their systems. More than I care to
speak of. I've the disk space to accomodate scans of them all, fortunately, but I'm
not going to spend the time to make fourteen hundred scans of each of them. I'll
present some of the ones that are among my most favorite, but if there are some that
you would like to see here and are willing to scan, please contact me at
kalla@aspark.ece.uiuc.edu.
Atari catalogs came in many different forms. As you'll see below, they distributed them
with two major themes, a serious artwork theme, and a not-so-serious
artwork theme. I tend to enjoy the serious artwork a bit more because it makes the
VCS seem like something that was professional and respectable to own. The not-serious
stuff is just silly, in my opinion. The following are six or eight different catalog
covers which will give you an idea of these styles and the sheer number of
different catalogs that Atari distributed.
-
Catalogue of Games:
An international catalog with a cool cover.
- Another
Catalogue of Games, featuring a wizard with outstretched arms!
-
Less Serious catalog, the cover for the catalog detailed below.
-
Slim red Catalog, less serious. Proclaims "more games, more fun"
-
Slim blue Catalog, with people and silly dragon. I like this one, even if
it is less serious and makes the VCS seems like a kid's toy.
-
Slim yellow Catalog, same as the slim red one except it's yellow.
-
Serious Red Cover, the cover for the serious one below. This is probably the
most common Atari catalog there is; i've got tons of them lying around.
Go back
