rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2000-10-15 (07:34:37)
In which our plucky young hero has the patch.

Every now and then, I get a creeping nostalgia. Fortunately, whenever it creeps too much, I get to experience the thing anew and it goes away... sad, really, but now I know better than to care about Knight Rider reruns. Recently, though, I've been jonesing and jonesing hard for the Atari 2600.

I wonder why this is. The majority of games were junk (Indiana Jones, anyone?), the graphics were not great, the sound was pitiful (I dare anyone who would challenge that assertion to grab a Keystone Kapers ROM and emulator and try it for themselves).

And yet, the thing was electronic crack. It created a billion-dollar industry that managed to burn itself to death but has risen, Phoenix-like, so that you need to shoot the orange parts and then the blue rotating thing before you hit the boss.

I don't know why I keep thinking about this, or keep thinking about how mysterious that woodgrain box and its black plastic cartridges were to a young boy (in reality, the Atari 2600 was built entirely from off-the-shelf components and it was a bitch to program), but I do know one thing:

I beat the Atari at Ice Hockey, and I wish I still had the patch.

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