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A neat piece of history, but hundreds of bucks for what amounts to a crunched version of a game I already own? I don't know. This is the kind of thing I'd rather look at at some kind of museum exhibit instead of owning myself.

Actual 2600 style paddles? Not as far as I can tell. Closest I've seen is some oddball 3D printed Etsy thing, thought I'm pretty sure it's a refurbished set. You can definitely get reproduction 2600 joysticks that look like the originals, though. I have a couple that I got off Aliexpress and they were only about $15 each, shipping included. They're not exactly 1:1, but they at least function and feel the same as a 2600 joystick, just without 40 years of wear and tear. Sadly I guess the paddle controllers just aren't alluring enough for there to be a market for reproduction versions...

Aw, cool! I've been wondering if another one of these was ever going to surface. And it only took... three years I've tried to do research every now and then and I still know just about as much as when I originally made the post. There's basically zero information online about why these cartridges exist or why there's so few of them. The plot thickens! UK seller, and from 1986? Maybe these were some final run of the silver label cartridges before transferring to the red label? And used orange on white for the final batch for some reason? I don't know, this is pure speculation. I am still in possession of my copy, though I do have a regular Pole Position to play on instead. (And besides, I prefer Enduro anyways :p) I keep mine somewhere safer these days. interesting that, even with as much technology and documentation that we have access too, this 45 year old system can still throw us a mystery every now and again. And maybe not every mystery needs to be solved. It's kind of cool having this rare oddball cartridge and not knowing why it even exists!

Not to mention how much lower the bar for entry is to get into this hobby! It's a lot easier to keep a box of old plastic electronics around than it is to maintain a 100 year old automobile.

I'm barely half your age and I'm into it I first got into retro gaming growing up and watching online reviewers like AVGN and ClassicGameRoom. Their videos were humorous but also taught me a lot about certain parts of the video game industry and its operations in the early days before I was around. I can specifically name the AVGN Atari Sports, Pong Consoles, and Swordquest videos into exposing me to the history of Atari-era video games. That's what got me into it and I learned more of my own accord and started my own collection! Obviously I'm far too young to have any kind of nostalgic connection to Atari, but the early pioneering days of the video game industry are super interesting to me and there's lots of neat stories about the companies that existed at the time. Plus, a lot of the games are still fun! Even though I grew up around consoles like the Gamecube, Wii, and Xbox 360, there's still plenty of fun to be had with the 2600. The takeaway is that, yes, there will be plenty of younger people interested in these consoles who won't let your collection go to waste! It''s not even just me: I alone have multiple friends about my age who also own 2600 consoles and collect games for them. It won't be a dead hobby for a long while. It'll just shift from being more nostalgia-driven by people who grew up with the console to younger people more interested in preserving the history of old video games and consoles.

I think the 8-bit NES era has just about been milked dry on that front, and now they're heading for the 2600.

Good golly that's a lot of buzzwords. Not quite enough to get me to spend hundreds of dollars on a jpeg of a Pong cabinet, though.

Definitely. Saves them the effort of having to go rent a photo studio, set up the console and accessries, and essentially redo the whole boxart over something that really just amounts to a minor cosmetic change. You ever buy an appliance that says in small print on the box something along the lines of "actual product may vary slightly from depiction?" This is usually why.

It was in the video game bargain bin at Wally World for $25 so I picked it up last spring. Being able to play all sorts of rare 5200 and especially arcade titles I probably never would have otherwise was a lot of fun. They all work about as well as any other of these old game re-release dealios. The box says there's 150 games, which isn't a lie, but the game choices range from essential classics like Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command, to games that absolutely nobody asked to be rereleased on a modern system (Oh boy, Flag Capture and Video Chess! My favourites!). I guess with a 150 game compilation like this there's always gonna be some filler titles though. I got used to using the thumb stick for things like Breakout and Pong eventually, though obviously it'll never feel as natural as a proper analog paddle controller. It would be awesome if ANY game company came out with some kind of modern analog dial controller, but I guess it's just such a relic of its time and the applications are too limited for it to really be useful except for games specifically built around it. Overall 150 retro games for $25 is a pretty solid buy, even if you probably won't ever touch a good few of them. Hopefully it didn't cost much more than that at release, though. I can't imagine spending much more than that on what's basically an emulator compilation.

Those "Activision Beach Olympiad" shirts look so cool! It'd be awesome if someone could get their hands on one.

Good lord. At $300 that better be a copy from the New Mexico landfill.

Throwing a sensitive analog controller at a floor and then being angry it broke? Sounds about right...

Oh man, these weird-ass Chinese knockoff multicarts are a guilty pleasure of mine. The poor quality never ceases to amaze me.

From Wikipedia: Hilarious.

If nothing else, thanks for a laugh ahahaha