Justin

I still don't understand how we never got Crystal Castles on the Atari 7800. Perfect system for that game and should've been a release title.

My New High Score: 114,100 Awesome game. This is hands down my favorite Bomberman on the TurboGrafx-16, including Bomberman '94 which came a year later.

LETTSSSSS GOOOOO

WINNER: @Justin Blackbelt Legends Pinball February 20, 2022 ROUND 1: @Justin ROUND 2: @btbfilms76 ROUND 3: @Justin BTB and I played against each other on Blackbelt and went "Best of 3". Blackbelt is an original pinball table with a karate theme that was released by Zaccaria in 1989. We played the 2018 update on Legends Pinball. No special rules were applied. We were texting our scores back and forth, I won the 1st Round, @btbfilms76 dished it back at me in the 2nd, and I had a killer score in Round 3. Blackbelt is part of the Zaccaria Pinball pak which can be played on the AtGames Legends Pinball table and also on the Nintendo Switch. This is one of my favorite pinball tables to play, and both of our families love playing the pinball machine. I'm sure we'll be back to play this one again!

Interesting! I've never seen Touchdown Football this high on someone's list before, let alone tie for 1st. It was marketed as a "Super Game" but I always thought it was pretty lame compared to 10-Yard Fight.

My New High Score: 68,200 Played on real hardware using TurboDuo. Working on breaking this high score tonight!

So what happened with me and my love for Out Run, and confusing the Atari 7800 with the Sega Master System? At the same time I was experiencing this "Atari Renaissance" in 1993, I was also forming a tremendous appreciation for other "forgotten classic" 8-bit systems like the Sega Master System, and the variety of "boutique" game systems that were still on the market at the time like TurboDuo, Atari Lynx, Neo•Geo and 3DO. It was this quest for Atari that gave me an appreciation for these other systems and allowed me to discover "classic gaming" on my own. Here's a "side chapter" to this story with me talking about my rediscovery of the of the Sega Master System that summer at my friend Jon's house:

I first got my Atari 7800 on Christmas 1986. Somewhere I have a picture of me opening my 7800 for Christmas, I wish I could find it. My love of Atari stems from going to Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater at an early age, and playing all of the Atari arcade games they had there. I lived in Michigan at the time, not too far from @nosweargamer and we had a fantastic Chuck E. Cheese. It was one of the original floorpans and was HUGE. What I loved most was playing the driving games. Our Chuck E. Cheese had both Night Driver and Pole Position II. They were right next to each other towards the back of the gaming area behind a little half-wall that would come up about waist high, and I would run straight back to those driving games as soon as we'd get there and pump them both full of quarters. While I enjoyed all of the arcade games and played a nice variety, including Missile Command, Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Centipede and Crystal Castles, I LOVED the driving games, especially Pole Position II. At 4 and 5 years old I was setting high scores on that machine. I loved shifting through LO and HI gear, memorizing each turn, and getting my timing down just right. Then one day we came in and there was a new driving game parked back there next to Night Driver and Pole Position II. It was Out Run! It was the top of the line "sit-down" motion-simulated arcade machine. You would climb in, sit down in the chair, and as you drove the car in the game, the machine would tilt and swivel with every turn, and there were little fans that blew air on your legs the faster you drove. Graphically Out Run was an improvement over Pole Position, and I really loved the starting stage driving past the beautiful palm trees, sandy beaches and clear blue ocean. Instead of a Formula 1 car, we drove a Ferrari Testarossa convertible, the car all of us had a poster for on our bedroom walls. As I was growing up, my family didn't have a ton of money to throw around. Things weren't handed to me, and I saw "video games" as something rich or older kids would have. Still, I loved these games and wanted to bring the Chuck E. Cheese experience home. When November came around, I sat down with my parents at the dining room table and flipped through the Sears Catalog / Wish Book, and we put together a Birthday and Christmas list for that year. As I flipped through the pages, I came saw the Atari 7800 beautiful displayed in the Sears Catalog, my eyes got big and I was so excited! I put the Atari 7800 at the very top of my Christmas list that year! Here's the wildest thing! ... I think I confused Pole Position II with Out Run and ended up asking for an Atari 7800 by mistake! Both Pole Position II and Out Run were my favorite Chuck E. Cheese arcade games at the time, and I think I either confused the two games, or thought Out Run was from Atari the same way Pole Position was. I asked for the Atari 7800 for Christmas because in the Sears Wish Book I saw it came with "the race car game from Chuck E. Cheese" when what I really should've asked for was the Sega Master System with Out Run. WOW! Either way I likely wouldn't be here in gaming today if it hadn't been for Pole Position II and Out Run. How lucky am I that I received an Atari 7800 for Christmas that year! For a while I was the coolest kid in school. Everybody else either played their big brothers Atari 2600 or ColecoVision. My Cousin Jason would come over on the weekends and he thought the 7800 was the coolest thing he'd ever seen! We'd make snacks and would play Atari on rainy Saturday afternoons. We loved playing Pole Position II, Asteroids, Dig Dug, Food Fight and Ms. Pac-Man. We were the Atari team! After a while though Nintendo caught on. My best friends who lived in the house behind me and used to come over to play Atari, got Nintendo and invited me over to play it for the first time. We played Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 2, Duck Hunt, R.C. Pro-Am, Excitebike, Hogan's Alley, and The Adventures of LOLO. I was just blown away. I really loved playing Mario, and started to feel the urge to get a Nintendo of my own. I was at Kay-Bee Toys at saw "Mario Bros." for Atari 7800 and bought it thinking it was the same game I had played on the NES, and although I enjoyed the game I was disappointed when I got home and found out it wasn't the same Mario game at all. In the Summer of 1989 our family moved from Michigan to South Florida, and we had a garage sale weekend where we got rid of a lot of items so we wouldn't have to pack and move things we didn't need. This was shortly after my neighbor friends got their NES, and although I was "Mr. Atari" I was struck with Nintendo fever! My parents said that if I sold some of my old baby toys, got rid of some things at the garage sale, was "a good boy" and helpful during our move to Florida, that I would have enough money to get a Nintendo once we got to our new home. My dad ended up selling our Atari 7800 to my Aunt and Cousin Jason for $20. His thoguht was that I only needed one video game system in the house. If I had an NES why would I still need the 7800? When we got to Florida I was thrilled to get my new NES! We hooked it up and our entire family loved playing LOLO, Duck Hunt and Super Mario. For a few years during Nintendomania I was a proud Nintendo kid. I had the lunch box, I was there opening day for Super Mario Bros. 3, loved playing Contra, Metroid and Zelda. Had Donkey Kong Classics, Marble Madness, Paperboy, Spy Hunter, and so many others! I was fortunate enough to get the NES with the Power Pad and played the heck out of that thing. About four years would go by, and as we marched into the 16-Bit era, something clicked in my mind as I stopped and took a pause. I looked back and felt like I was missing something, like I had left something behind. Gaming was entering the age of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2. But what had happened to Atari? It was the biggest company on earth, and now it felt like a lost civilization. What happened to Centipede, Asteroids, Dig Dug and Pole Position? What happened to the fun games I used to play with my family at Chuck E. Cheese. What happened to Out Run? And wasn't there that 8-bit Sega system before the Genesis that had Out Run and After Burner? Doesn't Atari have that Lynx which is like a better, color Game Boy? In the summer of 1993 my "Nintendo Fever" was over and I relapsed back into Atari and became "Mr. Atari" again. My Pac-Man Fever resurfaced. Something clicked in my brain that got me so interested in these games. We started going to our local Chuck E. Cheese which had a Pole Position cockpit right next to a RoadBlasters cockpit. I'd go to every Toys R Us and Kay-Bee Toys and search the aisles endlessly, hoping to find anything from Atari. I loved the graphics and gameplay of these classic games, and all of the game theory that went into these single screen arcade games that had no princess to save but were just so fun to play endlessly. This was 1993 and we didn't have the internet as we know it today. I was searching through old Sears Catalogs to try and find a picture of the Atari 7800. Just to be able to look at the games again and put together a collection that we could all play. I was incredibly intrigued by this lost Atari generation, I was thirsty for knowledge and learned all I could from old catalogs and ads in old editions of National Geographic Magazine. I began telling my friends that I was into "Classic Gaming" - a term I had come up with myself, and fully believed that I was probably the only person left with any interest in these games. I was fortunate enough to work for many years with Gene Landrum who launched the 2600 and Atari's Home Consumer Division and had created and developed Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater for Nolan Bushnell and Joe Keenan, and shared these stories with him. We always had great talks about this. My fascination peaked with a fateful trip to Kay-Bee Toys in September, 1993 when I stumbled upon a messy pile of Atari 2600 Asteroids and E.T. games in the clearance aisle for $0.98 each, and my story culminates with my ordering a brand new Atari 7800 and 25 brand new games directly from Atari, years after they had left store shelves. That chapter of my story continues here, I hope you'll enjoy it: You can also read about my hand-written Atari 2600/7800 Strategy Guide that I made in 6th Grade, and the beginnings of this website here:

I AGREE!!

Good sleuth work @nosweargamer! You were right in thinking there is a difference between copyright law and trademark law. The name of a game is different than the copyrighted works of the software program and any patents that may also apply to the game itself. Two different things. Agreed @nosweargamer has had the best coverage of this imo.

Thank you @Silver Back! I'm glad I still have it after so many years. Wish I had covered more games back in the day. It's a nice glimpse into my life as a classic gamer when there was no internet and I thought I was the only person on earth doing this. Absolutely! GREAT idea!!

1985, released 1988 😳

I generally don't think of these as "classic" computers, but both are over 20 years old. For design alone I'd like to nominate these bastards:

Exactly! It might not be a bug, it might be a feature of the game that was removed before it reached US audiences. The Crown symbol confused players too, and it looks quite similar.

This is the Japanese cartridge playing on the Japanese system? Is that the Crown symbol?

this was a classic look too

I second this. The 1200XL was going to be my choice. Regan Cheng is a true talent who crafted a masterpiece. I loved Atari's wedge look during the Roy Nishi / Regan Cheng era. The 1200XL, the Atari 2700 RC VCS, the 5200, 7800 and so on. Inspired by the designs of Bang & Olufsen. Just beautiful.

I think it's really cool that not only are these old computers living on forever, so is the influence of the forward-thinking early adopters, living and past, who were enthusiastic about the computer age and remain a great part of our community today.

That is very true

@Willie! is always very thoughtful, very generous, and very cool. The "Mystery PCB" is a Masterplay Clone that lets you play with an Atari 2600 Joystick on the 5200! You plug the 2600 Joystick into the smaller port on the PCB, and connect the larger port on the PCB to the controller port on the Atari 5200. The PCB converts the joystick signal, and provides the Keypad buttons needed for play. More info here: https://www.smbaker.com/yet-another-masterplay-clone Enjoy!

That's wild! Absolutely! I think even today it's worthwhile for C64 novices and intermediate users to enjoy this video. He's knowledgable and interesting to watch. Here's a tribute to Jim Butterfield from a colleague that was made shortly after he passed away:

Jim Butterfield cosplay by way of Italy: