About a year ago, I wrote here about the fact that I had acquired an Atari 2600+ and was enjoying playing the primitive video games of my youth.
I still play those games on our basement TV, but now that pastime has evolved into an honest to goodness hobby: collecting old Atari 2600 cartridges.
I use the world "old' intentionally because, believe it or not, there are many people in 2026 designing "homebrew" games for the venerable 2600, a console that came out in 1977 that still holds a place in the hearts of Gen Xers like me.
My focus is the games that were commercially released during the golden era of the Atari 2600 from '77 through roughly 1991.
The numbers vary, but according to this list on Wikipedia, a whopping 472 games "were released during the system's lifetime." Many of those are easy and relatively inexpensive to get your hands on (here I'm thinking of the games many, many of us played back then like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Combat, etc.)
eBay, Facebook Marketplace, retro video game stores and garage sales are havens for these "staple" cartridges. In most cases, sellers are more interested in having you take these ancient games off their hands than they are in making any real profit from them.
As it turns out, though, there are many other Atari games considered rare or scarce that can only be had if you're willing to shell out $100 or more.
One is Crazy Climber, a popular arcade game that was adapted for the Atari 2600 but offered only to members of the Atari Fan Club. Not many copies were made back in the 80s, so not many are available now.
My go-to spot for buying old cartridges is Video Game Nirvana in Madison, Ohio. The owner, RJ, is a great guy and a fount of classic gaming knowledge. He has one copy of Crazy Climber in his store, and the price tag is $150.
I'm determined to have it...eventually.
Initially my intention was to acquire every commercially available cartridge for the Atari 2600 over a period of several years. But already I've realized that's an unlikely feat for me.
For one thing, some of those games are twice the price of Crazy Climber (or more), which seems pretty excessive. Then there's the fact that I'm not sure where I would even store 472 Atari cartridges.
So I think that, with the possible exception of Crazy Climber, I'm just going to focus on games that are $50 or less that I know I'll want to play. That should limit my collection to around 300 cartridges, which is still borderline ridiculous but at least defensible.
"Defensible," that is, to my wife, who has been kind enough to indulge this little passion of mine so far.
If someday I come home and find my Atari consoles and cartridges in trash bags on the curb, that will be a sign I probably crossed the line at some point.