RickR

It helps to look at the market at the time to get context.  For example, Combat was a good transitional choice at the time -- "Tank" games were new in the arcades then.  And Atari was inventing the industry.  Plus the original VCS lineup of games was pretty weak.  LV Poker and Blackjack showcased what Intellivision was capable of with nice graphics and a lot of game options. 
 
But "Super Breakout" with 5200 really stands out as an odd choice.  By that time, breakout games were several years old and really tired.  Why did they have a breakout game at all on the system?  And the competition of Colecovision, which came with "Donkey Kong", was almost a knockout punch right out of the gate.  I really think the 5200 would have had a better chance if it came with Pac Man as the pack-in game originally. 
 
One of my favorites was Dreamcast, which came with THREE excellent sports games. 
 
But I think the very best pack-in game of all time has to go to the Wii with "Wii Sports".  Talk about a perfect game to showcase what a system was all about.  My gosh, we still fire up Wii Sports when Grandma comes over for a few rounds of Wii Bowling. 
 
And then there's the phenomena of companies that switch the pack-in game during the life of a system, and it ends up being like flooring the gas pedal.  "Sonic" with Genesis, "Super Mario Brothers" with NES are two great examples. 

I'm not familiar with Wii Sports.  Never purchased a Wii new.    
 
I'm trying to think of my favorite pack-in game, and I guess it would be Tetris for the GameBoy.     It was just perfect, and the timing was too.

It helps to look at the market at the time to get context.  For example, Combat was a good transitional choice at the time -- "Tank" games were new in the arcades then.  And Atari was inventing the industry.  Plus the original VCS lineup of games was pretty weak.  LV Poker and Blackjack showcased what Intellivision was capable of with nice graphics and a lot of game options. 
 
But "Super Breakout" with 5200 really stands out as an odd choice.  By that time, breakout games were several years old and really tired.  Why did they have a breakout game at all on the system?  And the competition of Colecovision, which came with "Donkey Kong", was almost a knockout punch right out of the gate.  I really think the 5200 would have had a better chance if it came with Pac Man as the pack-in game originally. 
 
One of my favorites was Dreamcast, which came with THREE excellent sports games. 
 
But I think the very best pack-in game of all time has to go to the Wii with "Wii Sports".  Talk about a perfect game to showcase what a system was all about.  My gosh, we still fire up Wii Sports when Grandma comes over for a few rounds of Wii Bowling. 
 
And then there's the phenomena of companies that switch the pack-in game during the life of a system, and it ends up being like flooring the gas pedal.  "Sonic" with Genesis, "Super Mario Brothers" with NES are two great examples. 

Wow, I had forgotten that the 5200 went with Super Breakout as a pack-in.    I think that beats Las Vegas Poker&Blackjack for worst pack-in game ever.   What were they thinking? 
"Lets put in a game that could be played on a calculator as our pack in to really show people what the 5200 can do!"    

Intellivision deserves its own share of scorn for a poker game, but it was fun for my dad, I guess lol  Heck, Combat was a poor choice for the Atari 2600 if you ask me....they needed something an only child could enjoy.  Thankfully my Dad was smart enough to get us Space Battle when we got our Intellivision!

As much  as I love the Atari generation of gaming, NES and later gens did a MUCH better job with pack in games.

Very beautiful machine you have there!  And it was one of the first models I believe.  And if I'm not mistaken that model is closely related to the same players found in the arcade cabs Dragon's Lair and others.  
 
As for copy protection...it's there.  CEDs have it, too.  Some of them anyway.  The 200 plus CEDs I had in the past I tried to put on VHS before the player and movies gave out.  Only a handful of CEDs copied including Annie and couple of others.  A few MGM musicals and most of the Disney movies didn't.  It's hit and miss.  All you can do is try it and see.  
 
LaserDiscs are still analog.  They are not digital.  Basically what went on CED and VHS also went on LaserDiscs.  If copy-protection was in other formats they might be on the laserdisc versions as well.  
 
RickR sounds like me.  My player I paid for but it was damaged.  I had to literally remove the facing to fix the frame of the player.  It was badly dented (still has one dent in the rear which is not seen in the entertainment center), the door on the loading tray looked like someone kicked it in, and it simply refused to power on. It took me about an hour to rebuild it but once I did it worked just find.  It's been working ever since.  The Pioneer emblem is missing but that's about all that is.  No remote but almost every feature can be accessed on the front panel.  It even has a headphone jack and volume control.
 

 
This is what mine looks like.
 
And if you want more movies http://www.discountlaserdisc.com/
 
It is an interesting format with good picture and sound...just be prepared for laser rot.  Not all will but the LD format was bad about it.

As I mentioned above...quality in the Tramiel years was not very good.  It's amazing how many XEGS' are broken.  I got mine from Correagonzales because it was broken.  I also have an extra working motherboard if anyone needs it. 

Well, what can I say....it was free and I love old stuff....
 
There is a pretty lively Laserdisc collector community here, and recently a really nice person in the group offered up a player for free.  I've always been curious about the format.  I've owned a few discs over the years just for the cool giant label art.  And the player was slightly broken...I think you all know my fondness for fixing stuff. 
 
So now I'm the owner of a gigantic top-loader Pioneer Laserdisc player.  It's been fixed, and seems to work great.  Here are some pics along with 3 movies I also received. 
 
I've got to be honest, I don't know what to make of the technology.  I surely do appreciate the evolutionary steps for home video...but this player is absolutely enormous!  It must weigh 30 pounds easily.  Takes up my entire workbench.  These movies come on two discs, which means 2 side flips and 1 disc swap for one movie!
 
Anyways, I'm very thankful for the generosity of the guy who gave this to me, and I'm going to keep and enjoy it. 
 
Anyone else have any opinions or memories of this technology?
 
 

So I assume then that there's no copy protection...I could copy these films to VHS?  That's pretty cool! 

In doing limited research, this player I have is one of the very earliest models.  They must have gotten smaller and better over time. 

Join me, brother.

Or "Super Breakout" for the 5200 -- an absolutely terrible choice. 

Yeah, you're right.  I had no idea it had such a poor reputation.  Maybe it's because the Genesis kind of took off once they switched the pack-in game to Sonic.  Maybe because it's kind of slow and chunky-scrolling.  Whatever.  I'm going to keep playing and enjoying. 

I always liked Altered Beast a lot.  I agree with you, it's a decent port of the arcade version.  It has speech and the cool steroid-up transition screens.  I have fond memories of it since it came with my Genesis as a pack in game. 

Every time I see a store like this I wonder how many Atari systems and games (and other consoles) must have come out of that store and gone to new homes to be played and loved over the years. So very sad to see this.

Great picks!  But I put a Hot Wheel in there just for you  

Not really, it just fit perfectly in the space left. 

I have never owned laser discs myself, but I remember when they were popular. I also remember a similar type of movie that you all have heard of: CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc), which is a movie disc that was really a record. They were popular around the time of Laserdisc. However, they phased out as well. The process of making CEDs is well hidden. No one knows how to do it anymore. I think RCA still has the writing technology, but they have not shared it with anyone else. They are just resting on their laurels with it when they could find an advanced way of producing it for the populace. I am sure that it can be done. but, that is just me. Laserdisc, however, was still being produced in the 1990s. I remember "Down Periscope" in widescreen format on Laserdisc. It was and is a great format for watching movies. I also like the Laserdisc games, Like "Dragon's Lair", and "Space Ace". Those were the best games I played in a long time. I could not beat them in the arcades, but did on the Atari Jaguar. Pretty cool stuff.

This is kind of unrelated, but I remember visiting OMSI in Portland when they had a Star Trek exhibit in the early 90s (back in their old building). I can't remember if they had any original props. It had an educational focus. There was an TNG-style bridge with various consoles you could interact with, I think one was a simple science quiz, and when I finished it, I got to select a video to play on the big view screen. Downstairs there was a very empty room with a projector showing episodes of the original series. There was also a side room with Commodore computers, some of which had games loaded up (I specifically remember Zaxxon and Pipe Dream).

The K-Mart in Portland that I went to as a kid closed a few years ago, and it is sad.  The most shocking thing was that they explained it as "losing their lease".  You'd think a store that's been in that spot for 50 years would OWN the property.  Probably some form of Enron accounting. 

That K-Mart in Portland was the place I purchased many Atari games and toys as a kid (and sadly, clothes and shoes -- I know now we weren't that well-off back then).  Lots of great memories.  Especially that silly little merry-go-round in front of the store. 

The K-Mart in Portland that I went to as a kid closed a few years ago, and it is sad.  The most shocking thing was that they explained it as "losing their lease".  You'd think a store that's been in that spot for 50 years would OWN the property.  Probably some form of Enron accounting. 

That K-Mart in Portland was the place I purchased many Atari games and toys as a kid (and sadly, clothes and shoes -- I know now we weren't that well-off back then).  Lots of great memories.  Especially that silly little merry-go-round in front of the store. 

I think this is finally complete enough to share: I've put together a tabbed spreadsheet documenting major Sears and Atari 2600 game manual variations.  Sites like AtariMania, AtariBoxed, and VideoGameVariations are all extraordinarily useful, but I don't believe anyone has aggregated info on manuals like I've done here.  There wasn't a whole lot of variation going on with 5200 and 7800 manuals, but the 2600 is a different beast altogether.  A perfect example: including foreign language manuals/supplements, Combat has at least 8 major variants.
 
No, I'm not crazy enough (yet!) to track minor manual revisions...
 
Anyway, as esoteric as the subject of Atari manual variants may be, it's still a part of video gaming history.  There have been many recent/ongoing efforts to preserve and document information relating to old consoles and games, but I feel like Atari hasn't received nearly the level of attention as some others.  Certainly there are a number of online resources for Atari information already -- a few of which I named above -- but there's still lots of room left on the internet! 
 
I'll be continuing to add links to images of the lesser known manuals as I have the chance.  Please feel free to message me here or email me (address is at the top of the sheet) with images of uncommon manuals to be added.  I may eventually also extend this to cover manuals for third-party 2600 publishers and 5200/7800 manuals, but for now it's being limited to just 2600 Atari/Sears.

I like Altered Beast, I never knew it was considered bad.     I loved the arcade version, and the Genesis port was pretty close.    It was my pack-in game as well.

I never had Laserdisc. I watched VHS tapes as a kid, and I think I actually still prefer than over DVDs. We had things happen to our VHS tapes all the time. The tape would tear, the VCR would eat it up, or we would step on the VHS and break it. But Dad would fix them. If the tape was wrinkled so badly in one area that it wouldn't play past that point, all Dad had to do was use scissors to cut the small portion out, tape the two ends back together with scotch tape, and the tape played fine again. There would be slight static when it got to that point, and about two seconds of film would be skipped over, but my brothers and I didn't care. If the VHS tape got stepped on, Dad would just put the tape into a different casing. We still have VHS tapes that are almost twenty years old, that have been repaired many times, and most of them still play just fine.
 
DVD on the other hand? You get a single scratch on one, and it will probably never play again. And when you have little kids in the family, it's going to get a scratch on it.
 
If we had Laserdisc growing up, they probably wouldn't have lasted very long. I knew about Laserdisc since at least the seventh grade, and I knew that it was a predecessor to DVD, but I didn't know what a Laserdisc looked like. Then, a couple years ago, we went to a pawn shop, and they had this big box of VHS tapes (we bought about thirty of them), and a stack of Laserdiscs (which we didn't buy). I noticed how big the boxes were for Laserdiscs, and I asked the guy at the counter, "We're Laserdiscs really this big?" He said they were, and he actually took one out of the box for my family to see, and then he hooked up a Laserdisc player to a TV that he had in the corner of the room, and played "The Mask" on it. That was pretty cool.
 
Kind of an interesting historical piece of video hardware, but I can see why they didn't last very long. I can guarantee that we would have had a lot of those break had we used them way back then.

Or "Super Breakout" for the 5200 -- an absolutely terrible choice. 

Join me, brother.

So I assume then that there's no copy protection...I could copy these films to VHS?  That's pretty cool! 

In doing limited research, this player I have is one of the very earliest models.  They must have gotten smaller and better over time. 

Or "Super Breakout" for the 5200 -- an absolutely terrible choice.