Interesting find: Atari 2800 Discovery?

I just picked the above Atari 2600 game up off of Yahoo Auctions.  Gangster Alley is the name, shooting is the game.  I am always on the prowl for Atari 2600 games to feed to my (admittedly difficult to use but nonetheless much beloved) Atari 2800 system.

This random Atari 2600 game though I think might be a really interesting discovery, a piece of video game history that I haven't been able to track any information down on the internet.  It therefore intrigues me and I want to write a bit about it here.

First to rewind a bit.  The Atari 2800 was Atari's disastrous attempt to introduce the 2600 to the Japanese market.  They chose 1983 to do so, the same year the Famicom came out.  You can guess who won that battle.  So few Atari 2800s were sold that it is quite a rare console to find today.

The 2800's lifespan was so short that only 30 titles were officially released for it.  These were all Atari 2600 carts that had Japan-specific boxes and manuals made for them, which are pretty cool and, like the console, very hard to find.  Well, the loose carts are indistinguishable from 2600 carts, so really its just the boxes and manuals for the games that are rare.

This brings me to my new copy of Gangster Alley.  Take a look at this list of Atari 2800 games.  Note that Gangster Alley is not on it.

Now take a look at that box.  Note that everything about it is the same as the Atari 2600 box for that game.  Except the lower right hand corner, which has a label which says:

アタリ2800用
ビデオゲーム カートリジ

("Video Game Cartridge for use with the Atari 2800")

This seems to have been an Atari 2600 game that did not get a re-make for its box art but nonetheless was released in Japan for the 2800 with just a sticker applied to the box.  I have looked around the internet, both English and Japanese (incidentally Japanese people almost never write or blog about the Atari 2800, it was that unpopular here) but haven't been able to come up with any information about this.  It makes me wonder what other Atari 2600 games in addition to the standard 30 might have been released here.

Any Atari experts out there know anything about this?

Some More Atari 2800 Love....and Hate

The mailman brought some more Yahoo Auction Goodies (YAG) yesterday: seven CIB Atari 2800 games!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, as of May this year I officially became an Atari 2800 owner. The 2800 is basically the Japanese version Atari 2600 (later released as the Sears TeleGames in North America) but much much rarer since almost nobody bought them in Japan.  It was released just a few weeks before the Famicom, which sealed its doom alongside the Bandai Intellivision, Epoch Cassette Vision and Sega SG-1000.

Only 30 games were released for the Atari 2800, all of them Atari 2600 games.  In fact the cartridges are completely identical - the Japanese carts still say `Atari 2600` on them.  So the only way to know if you have an Atari 2800 game is if you have the boxes, which were made specifically for the Japanese market.

The seven games I got all had their boxes, albeit in fairly beat up condition.  They were all pretty common titles on the 2600 - games like Space Invaders, Missile Command and Asteroids - but there were probably only a few thousand 2800 copies ever sold.  The boxes look pretty cool, I love the artwork:

 I think Asteroids is my favorite:

 As I also mentioned in that earlier post I have been having a hell of a time trying to play my Atari 2800 - and all my other old RF consoles - thanks to the fact that our (evil) new big screen TV doesn`t have an RF or Coax connection.

I did the natural hipster thing and bought a 1989 Sony Trinitron TV off of Yahoo Auctions to give me something to play my old beauties on.  I based that purchase solely on the fact that it was an awesome red TV and I think red TVs just look cool.  While it does look cool sadly my red TV is pretty lousy at playing games.  If you have ever used an old Japanese TV perhaps you are familiar with the many frustrations of having to manually tune the set.  It is not fun.  After close to an hour of fiddling I was finally able to play one of my new games -Super Breakout - in all its glory:

 After about 10 minutes of that though a slight gust of wind moved some dust which had accumulated on the upper right corner of the set.  The change in weight was enough to cause the tuning to go all out of whack and no matter how much I theatened it, it did not return and I was left with:

So now I am faced with the fact that if I really want to enjoy these games I will probably have to buy one of those ugly grey TVs from the early 2000s which sell for about 500 yen each.  They don`t look anywhere near as cool or retro (or red) as my nice old Sony but they probably will actually allow me to play a game without much aggravation so I think I`ll bite the bullet.

The Atari 2800 Saga

 I made a pretty nice pic up on Yahoo Auctions last week: my very own Atari 2800!!!

That is correct, Atari 2800 and not Atari 2600.

The Atari 2800 was Atari`s abortive attempt to export a version of the 2600 to Japan.  They were a bit late to the game with it though, releasing it in 1983 just as the Famicom was about to hit.  That meant it was a total failure in a commercial sense and they only sold a handful of them.

That, in turn, means that these consoles are extremely hard to find today.  Until this one arrived in the mail in all of my years of combing retro game shops I had never seen one with my own eyes before.  I think they are about as close as you can get to a holy grail of retro Japanese consoles (sadly this fact was reflected in the price I paid for it, but I think it was worth it).

When I got it in the mail a few days ago I was so psyched, but I was in for one big shock when I tried to plug it in.  This is probably old news to most people, but I hadn`t realized that new flat screen TVs don`t take RF input.  During all my years in Fukuoka collecting retro games both of the TVs in our house were old-school analogue ones so it never came up.

When we moved we got rid of those and I bought a brand new flat screen.  I had been using my AV Famicom to play games up until now so I hadn`t noticed that it didn`t take RF until the Atari 2800 just wouldn`t work on it.

So I went back onto Yahoo Auctions, found an awesome 1989 Sony Trinitron 14 inch TV for about ten bucks and picked that up.  Today it arrived:

I had a hell of a time trying to get it to work, but eventually I did.  The console came with four games (Space Invaders, Night Driver, Baseball and Missile Command) so I decided Space Invaders would make a good game to break it in on.

I don`t have any furniture to keep the TV on (it is in our spare bedroom now) so it is just sitting on a box for the time being, which is actually kind of a cool way to set up a mini retro-console station.  I love how hard it is to play, I have to fiddle with the RF switch for ages just to get a reasonably clear picture and then when I play the game I am never sure when the slightest move will cause the screen to go completely blank.

Oh and bonus thumbs up to old-school TVs for having the ability to have game consoles placed on top of them, thus saving space.  That is one cool thing future gamers will miss out on with these damn flat screens.

True old school.  This is how retro games are meant to be played.  Old system on an old TV that barely works.  Should keep me busy for a while!

Atari 2600 Air Raid and the Relative Value of Collector`s Holy Grails

A couple of months ago I was browsing Ebay for Atari 2600 stuff. I was interested in buying a console (very hard to find in Japan) as it is one of those iconic classics that I have wanted to add to my collection for a long time.

Unfortunately it is also a really really heavy classic console, so the cost of shipping one across the Pacific made me drop the idea. My time spent searching wasn`t entirely wasted, however, as coincidentally at that time someone had put up a copy of Air Raid for auction.

The Ebay listing was quite interesting. The seller (see here) noted:

Based on research I have conducted, this is only the 14th known copy of Air Raid by Menavision. I bought this game new in Texas in 83 or 84. It has been boxed up and following me around the country for decades...

The game, which was cart only, ended up selling for $3,575. It seems to have been completely legit, including his assertion that there are only 14 known copies of the game in existence.

Air Raid is one of the holy grails of retro video game collecting. Along with Stadium Events for the NES and a couple of others it is probably the most valuable retro game out there. If you want to have a complete set of Atari 2600 games, and a lot of people do, you need this game. This has made the lone known CIB copy of it the most valuable Atari game out there, selling for $31,600 in 2010. The only game that has sold for more as far as I can tell was a sealed copy of NES Stadium Events which sold for $41,300.

Now I really hate it when people talk about video games primarily as an investment. I don`t view them as such myself. They are fun games to be played and enjoyed for what they are.

At the same time though, as a collector, this sort of thing does intrigue me. While I hate the way money can infect a hobby and strip it of its fun, I also like the fact that these holy grails are floating around out there with people chasing after them and putting a high price on them. Given their prominence, historical importance and rarity some of these things actually do deserve to be worth something.

Unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) the Famicom doesn`t have any holy grails. Well, it has some of course but they don`t really count in the same way that Air Raid does. There are gold versions of some games (Punchout, Hot Scramble, Rockman 4) and special giveaways for contests (Recca Summer Carnival 92), but I don`t count those as part of the regular set. Those are more the type of contrived rarity that is way less interesting than actual rarity caused by things like, as in Air Raid`s case, the game being massively unpopular.

Anyway, what interests me most about that Air Raid game, and particularly the complete copy that sold for $31, 600, isn`t how much it sold for but how little.

$31,600 might sound like a lot, but when you compare it with what the holy grails in other collecting hobbies it is almost like they were giving it away. Supply and demand being the main determinants of the value of a collectible I thought it might be interesting here to look at the prices of those other holy grails and their relative scarcity (supply) and popular appeal (demand). Lets start with comics.

Comic books

The holy grail of comic book collecting is probably Action Comics number 1, which features the first appearance of Superman:
There are estimated to be about 100 of these in existence, so it is quite rare though there are fewer copies of Air Raid. It is also an icon, given Superman`s place in 20th century pop culture. This gives it a big edge over Air Raid, which is basically a game nobody has ever heard of whose only fame is attributable to the console it was made for. Still though, the difference in price is startling. The best known copy of this sold a couple of months ago for $2.16 million.

Baseball Cards

This is the 1909 T-206 Honus Wagner. The T-206 is a very popular set of Tobacco cards among collectors, but this card is extremely rare due to the fact that Wagner (for reasons that are disputed) refused permission for them to use his likeness. This forced the American Tobacco Company to remove the card from distribution, but somewhere between 60 and 200 copies of it made it into the market and are now far and away the most valuable sports card in existence.

In comparison to Air Raid, there are more copies of this card out there so Air Raid wins in terms of supply. In terms of demand Honus Wagner was one of the best players of his generation, though that was about 100 years ago and were it not for this card most people who aren`t baseball fans would have no idea who he was. So it isn`t anywhere near as significant in cultural terms as Action Comics 1. At any rate, the best copy of this card out there sold for $2.8 million in 2007, which is about 90 times more than what the most expensive copy of Air Raid fetched.

Stamps

The above is an envelope with two stamps from Mauritius which were produced in 1847. These stamps are extremely rare as only 500 of each were ever produced. This envelope (called the Bordeaux cover) is a one of a kind item of particular note because it has both of them on it. It sold for $4 million in 1993 the last time it changed hands and is probably the most valuable stamp related item in the world.

As a one of a kind item it is basically equal in scarcity to the complete in box copy of Air Raid. In terms of its appeal - stamps from Mauritius? An obscure British colony in the middle of the Indian Ocean? Outside of stamp collectors I think it is safe to say that this is of no interest to anyone so I give Air Raid a win on that count.

Conclusion

I could probably draw on examples from other collector`s hobbies but I think you get the drift. Holy grails in other hobbies, even ones that are not as rare as Air Raid, all sell for millions of dollars. The video game collector`s holy grail only sells for $31, 600. If you think about it, this doesn`t really make much sense. In terms of popular appeal, video games easily rank up there with comic books and probably beat baseball cards (only popular to baseball fans) and stamps (almost nobody under 40 collects those). The only reason I can think for the relatively low value of Air Raid is that the video game collecting market is much newer than the market for those other things and most people who would buy them are probably in their 20s or 30s. That is an age bracket which doesn`t have anywhere near as much spending power as the baby boomers who drove up the prices of comics and baseball cards in the 1980s. Twenty years from now though when the first generation who played Atari as kids are in their 50s and 60s and are the CEOs of major companies with craploads of disposable income this thing will probably be selling for obscene amounts too.

Related Posts:
- Opinion: On the Economics of Retro Game Collecting

Atari on the Famicom: Millipede and Stargate

Atari never really made much of an impact on the Japanese gaming market like it did in the U.S. They released a version of the 2600 here in 1983 (the Atari 2800) which along with my beloved Epoch Cassette Vision was quickly crushed by the Famicom.

Atari did at least, however, release a couple of 2600 games on the Famicom - Millipede and Stargate (aka Defender II).

Judging from the difficulty I had in tracking copies of these two down, I think its safe to say that neither of these were big hits on the Famicom. That said, I really like them. This is probably due to my fascination with all things primitive. To put it mildly, neither of them push the limits of the Famicom's hardware. The graphics are incredibly simple - basically what you would expect from Atari 2600 games.

What they get right is the basics. Fast arcade gameplay that offers immediate satisfaction in the form of stuff getting blown up by you. In Millipede you just shoot the Millipede before it gets to the bottom of the screen. In Stargate you just go around in a horizontal landscape (defined by nothing more than straight lines) looking for enemy ships to shoot. When you shoot them all off you go to the next level.

The only thing you are trying to do with both is rack up points - which is the best kind of game in my opinion. No complicated back stories, no massive worlds to explore, no BS - all these things have to offer is pure action. I wish the Famicom catalogue had more like them.