When I was a kid, you were either an Atari guy or a ColecoVision guy, and that was pretty much it as far as video games went. Well, unless you were an Intellivision guy. But Intellivision guys didn't really count, because nothing good ever came of Intellivision. Okay, so forget Intellivision guys.

Anyway, I was a Coleco guy.

Well, all right, not always. I started out an Atari guy — by necessity, because that's the system my best friend Billy had. I myself had no video games to speak of, so I guess technically I was more like a Parcheesi guy. Still, a few hundred hours of Atari 2600 baseball was all it took to convince me that there had to be a better way. The joysticks were always busted, the graphics were pretty base... and a double into right-center took about three minutes to execute because the outfielders moved so damned slowly. Basically, it sucked.


Coleco was different, though. Coleco had the graphics, it had a lot more games worth playing, and even though the original Coleco controls sucked eggs, they came out with those grip handle thingies with the rainbow-colored buttons [We think he's talking about the "Super Action Controls" —ed.] that let you move the joystick without taking your fingers off the action buttons, and let me tell you, those things were bitchin', to use a phrase popular with us kids at the time.

So once my folks broke down and bought my brother and me a ColecoVision, they couldn't get us off the damned thing. Entire Los Angeles summers were frittered away playing not real baseball, but Super Action Baseball, or Rocky Super Action Boxing, or the occasional game of Miner 2049er. It wasn't a waste, though — playing those games taught me a lot, most notably how to lie gracefully ("Mom! I'm almost done with this game! I'll turn it off in a second, I swear!").


Nowadays, kids have a hell of a lot more options. There's no more simple Coleco vs. Atari, Good vs. Evil dichotomy — now it's a Super Nintendo/Nintendo 64/Sega Genesis/Sony Playstation/SuperMegaMondoDrive milieu. Kind of makes me long for even a good old Atari (though not an Intellivision). So it was cool to find some people on the Web — in fact, right here on the Tripod server — who remember the old days, when times (and video game choices) were simpler. You know, the '80s.

So here are a few of those pages that helped me time-warp back to early adolescence, even if they lean a little heavy towards the Atari side. I picked these ones because they're all pretty complete and their creators seemed pretty into it, just like me. The graphics? The layout? Who the hell cares? We're Coleco/Atari people, not Nintendo 64-heads. Sheesh.

Some Fly Tripod Member Pages About the Early Days of Video Games

Game Over: A Tripod member put this page together because he or she got "nostalgic for the 'old-school' of video games." Word. I like the animated screen shots right there on the homepage. I only wish I could get the Pac-Man screen to work as my desktop pattern — complete with animation.

Video Game Emulator page: [Warning: This page seems to be crashing Netscape! Don't say we didn't warn you...] There's some weird gibberish on this page. And the jpegs aren't all there, and things don't all line up. But guess what? I don't give a damn. Download one of these emulators and you, too, can turn a $2,000 piece of machinery into the equivalent of a $5 novelty item. And play Dig Dug while you're at it!

Kevin's Atari 2600 page: The guy's got links aplenty, he's buying, he's selling, and you can even peruse scans of rare games he owns. OK, so it's another Atari site. And yeah, he refers to Atari as "The Greatest of All Time." But the man's put his heart into the page. And besides, even he admits that he only got the Atari when his cousin junked it — for Coleco.

Well there you have it, my member page gems. The only gripe I have is, there just aren't enough pages out there called "Joe's ColecoVision Rules the World Page." Anyone want to step up to the plate? In the meantime, if you dig these pages as much as I dig these pages and you want to find more, well, why not visit Tripod's Gamesta Pod? (Or just look 'em up yourself.)

BACK TO RETRO VIDEO GAMES

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Dan Reines is a Tripod editor and a freelance writer. He's stuck in the past, clearly.

This whack article appeared in a slightly different form in Tripod's
now-defunct TriTeca section on February 14th, 1997.