Vintage Video Games

You know, it is unbelievable the amount of "stuff" I managed to buy over the past few years of hitting estate sales, yard sales and garage sales.  One thing I just could not walk away from was a good old Atari or Nintendo NES.  I would buy retro video games almost any time I found them.  I actually lost track of how many vintage video games I purchased.  When I started cleaning out the garage and game room, I was a bit embarrassed as the pile of vintage games and vintage video game systems continued to grow and grow.

I have found pretty much every major system produced since the 1970s.  You can't see it them all in thish shot, but this lot includes several NES systems, Sega Saturn Systems, Atari 2600 systems, Super Nintendos, Genesis Systems, Gameboys,  Intellivision sytems, Pong....You get the point.  Of course I also bought hundreds of games to go with this huge lot of video fun!  Picture so much stuff in storage that this could actually hide.  That is how much stuff I purchased over time.

I also acquired an enormous amount of controllers, power supplies, instructions, specialized joysticks and on and on.  I really intended on selling these individually, but they I just couldn't take not being able to turn around any more!

I did a little digging around and found an old commercial from 1978 for the Atari 2600 game console. It features Pete Rose and Don Knotts. One of the lines in it is an umpire telling Rose "Yer outta here!". Do you think they knew something?

I started collecting these not only to sell on eBay but because I really loved playing these games when I was growing up.  I guess my friends and I were the first video game generation.  We started out by playing Pong and each new innovation in video game technology got us to update our Christmas and birthday lists.  Back then, each old system would kind of get pushed aside as the games became better and better.

Now we have a Wii in my house and although I think its pretty neat, I still prefer the games where you use one simple controller to do some basic action.  As old as it is, I think the original Mario Brothers game is still one of my all time favorites and when I hooked up one of these NES consoles to test it with Mario, I couldn't stop myself even though it had been several years since I had last played.  Yep, for us video veterans, there is something special about vintage video games.

I spent countless hours sitting on the floor of the game room memorizing the patterns followed by those pesky Space Invaders.  I can still remember comparing thumb callouses with friends.  We developed them from days of devoted manipulation of the video joystick.  Funny how that one stick with a red button next to it could manage to entertain us.  Compared to what is available on some controllers today, those old sticks were real dinosaurs.

I think the biggest of the early releases that I can remember was Missile Command.  That was one of the cartridges that everyone was saving up to buy.  I believe it went for somewhere in the neighborhood of forty bucks.  That was a pretty rich neighborhood back then, so handing over that much cash came with some pretty high expectations from the game.  It was pretty good, but not having a trackball left us a bit disappointed.  It was a nice leap in graphics quality though, so we were still pretty happy.

Another thing that happened during those early years was the introduction of Activision games.  The graphics on those were much better than what we were used to playing with on our TVs.  They were still very weak compared to what is available now, but Pitfall was a great game.  It was sort of based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie I believe.  It was a bit tougher to beat than the earlier games from Atari (at least it was for me).

Tags: 70s video games, classic video games, colecovision, intellivision, pong, sega genesis, sega saturn, vintage games, vintage NES, vintage video game, vintage video game consoles, vintage video games, vintage video games for sale

Category: Electronics, Games and Toys