If your hobby is collecting something, you can really get deep into the weeds (and deep into your wallet)

This was my collection of Atari 2600 game cartridges about a month ago, when I had something like 102 of them. The collection is larger now, and if I have my way, it's going to get much larger.

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.

Having the Atari 2600 back in my life has been a game changer

 

It felt like they were several years late to the party, but in 2023, Atari released an updated version of the 2600 system that revolutionized home video gaming back in the late 70s and early 80s.

The Atari 2600+ looks just like the original console that occupied so many living rooms, dens and basements 40+ years ago. And that is of course by design. Nostalgia is a big part of the way they market products like this.

I, like many others my age, purchased the 2600+ based solely on fond memories of playing the original when I was a kid. I didn't have to test it out to know whether it would be worth it.

I just knew I had to have one.

The new 2600+ makes a few necessary concessions to the modern world of home entertainment. Rather than having the old-fashioned "Game/TV" switcher box on the back of your television, for example, you just connect it to your flatscreen with a standard HDMI cable.

As you might suspect, it looks beautiful on a 65-inch high-def TV.

In terms of power, it doesn't come with anything you can plug into the wall. Instead you're given a USB cable, and it's assumed you have a wall plate or something similar into which you can plug the cable to draw electricity.

But the rest of it is essentially the same as it was when I got my first Atari 2600 for Christmas 1980. It has the same switches on the console, the same joystick and paddle controllers (the paddles had to be purchased separately), and the same cartridge slot, though this one accepts both 2600 and Atari 7800 games.

Actually, the cartridge experience itself is a bit different from what it used to be. The system comes with 10 original Atari 2600 games, but rather than giving you 10 different cartridges, they put everything onto one cartridge. You then access the different games by setting a series of DIP switches on the cartridge case.

It's a little clumsy, but it works. (Original cartridges from the early 80s still work on it, as well. I just bought a set of eight old-school Activision games like Freeway and Kaboom off of eBay and have been having a ball with those.)

One of the first things I did when I set up the system was to engage my son Jack in various games of Combat. Combat was the cartridge that came with most Atari 2600s back in the day, and it is extremely primitive by any modern video gaming standard.

Still, while the graphics and sound are sometimes awkward, there's no denying that Combat (like so many Atari games) is fun. Jack and I engaged in a few tank-to-tank battles, then we switched to controlling little airplanes that flew in and out of blocky, pixelated onscreen "clouds" while we tried to shoot each other out of the sky.

We had a blast. It was especially great playing with Jack, a typical 19-year-old XBox gamer for whom advanced gameplay and design are just expected. If he can enjoy Atari games that are nearly half a century old, anyone can.

Among the games I've been playing a lot myself are Adventure, Missile Command, Yar's Revenge, RealSports Baseball, and Breakout. All are testaments to the talents of old school Atari programmers who were challenged with making fun cartridges within the rigid confines of a low-power system like the 2600.

My skills aren't what they used to be, given how long it has been since I first played these games and the fact that maybe my reflexes aren't (and never can be) what they once were.

But that doesn't matter. Having an Atari again, so many years later, is a wonderful experience. Win or lose, I'm loving everything about it.

Some things are universally fun, regardless of the era in which they originated.

My dad would have loved (and maybe occasionally hated) 2023

This was our living room tech set-up in the 80s, featuring a big old Curtis Mathis VCR and a cable box resting on top of a wood cabinet RCA TV. Displayed on the screen is the 24-hour weather data feed Continental Cablevision used to broadcast. It was a hot, hot day in Wickliffe by the looks of it.

My father was a gadget guy.

He embraced technology, particularly in his later years. Thus, we were fairly early adopters of everything from VCRs to home computers.

Dad hoped to live well into the 21st century, if only to be there for The Next Big Tech Development, whatever that turned out to be. Unfortunately, he died in October 1999, just a little shy of the digital revolution that has irrevocably changed all of our lives.

He would have given almost anything to have witnessed it, I'm sure.

On the other hand, being politically somewhere just to the right of Archie Bunker, I don't know that he would have been thrilled with everything that has happened in the world socially over the last quarter century. And I don't say that judgmentally – positive or negative – but simply as an observation with which anyone who knew him would very likely agree.

As I've mentioned before, we were among the first people in our town to get cable TV in 1980. As I recall, Dad walked a couple of streets over to talk with the Continental Cablevision work crew and find out when they would make it to Harding Drive and what day was the absolute earliest he could sign up.

He bought us a VCR around that same time, and I'm not talking about one of the lightweight, sleek units that would be in vogue a decade later. I mean a big, heavy-duty Curtis Mathis job that could be used equally to watch a movie, record an episode of "M*A*S*H*," or throw at a would-be intruder as a show of deadly force.

We had a home video game system as far back as 1977, when he sprang for a black-and-white Radio Shack Pong console. We also got an Atari 2600 before almost any of my friends. Same with the Commodore 64 and my green-screen IBM XT computer.

The man loved new hardware, and I benefitted from it all as an equally tech-crazy teenage boy.

The first time I used a cell phone was when Terry was pregnant with Elissa in 1994 and I had to be reachable at a moment's notice in case she went into labor. I received the phone on a day I was covering a wrestling match a half-hour's drive away for my then-employer, The News-Herald (which as I recall lent me the phone).

I got into my car, and the first person I called was my dad.

He and I were amazed that we could carry on a conversation while one of us was driving and no CB radio was involved.

Now cell phones are everywhere, and it's sometimes difficult to tell how much of a good thing that really is.

Regardless, if my dad was still around, he would probably own both an iPhone AND an Android.

You know, just in case.

All these years later, I still miss the guy.

Many of us were home video game system pioneers

In the fall of 1977, Atari released its 2600 cartridge gaming system. When someone asks whether you had "an Atari" back then, this is almost always the unit they're referring to.

We did eventually get "an Atari" in our house, but that wouldn't be for another two years. Instead, one evening in '77 my dad came home with a Radio Shack Electronic TV Scoreboard (it looked just like what you see in the image above).

It was essentially a black-and-white console that featured a number of variations on Pong. Sure, the games you could play included "tennis," "hockey," and "squash," but really, they were all just slight reworkings of Pong.

Still, I was immediately hooked. And fascinated. Back then, the idea of doing anything on your TV besides watching Channels 3, 5, 8, and 43 was remarkable. You could control what was happening on the screen. I can't emphasize enough how novel this was.

I played that Radio Shack game a lot. Then, the following year, I received a color gaming system for Christmas. While it was made by Atari, it still wasn't the 2600. It was this:

You could play four different kinds of pinball as well as Breakout, Break Away, and Basketball. Those knobs on the side controlled the pinball flippers, while the dial moved your paddle in the other games.

I would come home from school for lunch almost every day and play that thing to death.

Then came The King, or at least The King of its time, the Atari 2600. That was my big present for Christmas 1979. It was a huge part of my life for the next four years until I got my Commodore 64. Like my friends, I amassed a pretty big collection of cartridges. We would go over each other's houses and play all the time.

All of these systems were extremely primitive by today's gaming standards, but as I said, for the time they were revolutionary. My dad being an early adopter of a lot of electronic gadgets, we actually had a whole bunch of things that could be characterized as "revolutionary" (or at least "extremely neat").

None of it was Call of Duty or Fortnite, but then again, at the time, it didn't need to be.

Remember when kids used to have their summers free?

(NOTE: This is our once-a-month "Blog Rerun" post. This one originally ran on June 12, 2013, and it still resonates with me. Let kids be kids. Let summer be summer. That's what I say.)

I will try my best not to turn this into a "hey, things were a lot better when I was younger" post. Because I'm not someone who generally thinks that way.

But I will say this about the experience of being a kid now vs. the days when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s:

Back when I was a lad, summer vacation meant...well, it meant "summer vacation." It meant you had half of June and all of July and August to yourself. To do with as you pleased.

Apart from family vacations and the occasional little league baseball game (which occurred, what, twice a week maybe?), you were on your own.

And it was glorious.

Of course, being a kid, you absolutely took for granted the whole concept of waking up on a warm summer morning and having nothing but a blank slate of a day ahead of you.

Only when the first day of school rolled around did you really appreciate what you had just lost.

And that first day of school, by the way, was always after Labor Day. Always. Now, I'm fairly certain my kids start a new school year about 20 minutes after the previous one ends.

Anyway, we had gigantic chunks of unstructured time in the summer months, and we used them to engage in what was, for me, a lot of fun stuff.

We played sports and games outside. We played our Atari 2600 systems inside.

We rode our bikes. We went to the city pool.

We set up failed lemonade stands. We set off firecrackers that one of us had somehow (illegally) gotten our hands on.

We watched TV. We played some more Atari.

You probably have a similar list from your own childhood.

The point is, we did a lot of things without interference from (or really the need for) adults. And both the kids and the grown-ups were just fine with this system.

Then two things happened that started the whole thing spinning out of control.

One was the specialization of sports. And by that I mean the drive to make kids better at their chosen sport through an influx of summer camps, clinics, practices, conditioning sessions, etc.

Doesn't matter what your sport is: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse. Whatever. If you're a kid and you play it, there are programs designed to expose you to that sport year-round.

With that also came the creeping influence of club sports, travel programs, Junior Olympic teams, and so forth. And those have become all-consuming for families across the nation.

Not that I think there's anything intrinsically wrong with these things, mind you. If you choose to participate in them, and if it makes your child happy, by all means, go for it.

But the unintended side effect of these leagues and programs is that kids who just play sports for fun, who will never receive college athletic scholarships, suddenly find themselves pressured to join. You either participate in the travel program in the summer or else you don't play when the actual sports season rolls around in fall or spring.

Well, that's OK, you might say. Kids like that can just join a no-pressure rec league.

Which would be fine, except cities and leagues everywhere have taken their limited resources and directed them toward the travel and premier-level programs, leaving rec programs to rot on the vine with inferior equipment and few trained coaches.

That is, if the rec-level sport still exists at all. Many have just disappeared altogether.

The result is an all-or-nothing, travel-league-or-bust approach that alienates the average kid. So, rather than be left out, youngsters will often submit to the pressure of travel sports, and suddenly their calendars (summer and otherwise) fill up with practices, games and skill sessions that leave little time for any real relaxation or creative play.

The other thing that precipitated this trend is that overworked parents have started implementing structure in the lives of kids who didn't necessary need more of it.

Parents have always felt some degree of guilt over the amount of time they spend (or don't spend) with their children. But nowadays, with magazine articles, TV psychiatrists and authors constantly reminding them just how slack they are in the parenting department, moms and dads try to compensate by exposing Junior to a wealth of new experiences through lessons, classes, and seminars of every kind.

Every. Kind.

Many kids today need an admin assistant just to keep track of their schedules. I had two things on my summer schedule when I was growing up:

8 a.m. - Get out of bed. Go find friends and commence day's activities.

9 p.m. - Come in when I was called and go to bed. Repeat cycle the next day.

And I guess I turned out OK. For what that's worth.

You don't hear many kids complaining about this turn of events, and I'm guessing that's because they don't know any different. They've never had unstructured summers, so they don't know what they're missing.

I'll tell you what they're missing.

A lot.

But maybe that's just the product of the undisciplined mind of a guy who spent his childhood summers playing in his friend's backyards. What do I know?

The Keurig vs. the iPod - Which is the greatest invention of the last 30 years?

As the son of a Gadget Guy, I gravitate naturally toward technology. I can rarely afford to buy it, you understand, but I do gravitate toward it.

Growing up, we were among the first people in our neighborhood to have cable TV, a VCR, and a home video game system.

Actually, I should have put "home video game system" in quotes, because what it was was a cheap, black-and-white Pong-based game from Radio Shack that my dad brought home one night in 1978. He hooked it up to our living room TV, and suddenly I was playing video games. At home. In my living room.

A stunning innovation at the time.

Two years later, he bought us an Atari 2600, and thus began a long love affair with video games and computers that peaked in the mid-1980s when I got really good at the arcade game "Track and Field." This was a game where you had to mash two buttons really, really fast in order to make your little pixellated video game athlete run and jump through a variety of events.

A lot of guys (and it was really only guys who played it) would cheat by putting a comb between their fingers, which allowed them to develop a lightning-fast rhythm that would propel their video runners to sub-8-second 100-meter dash times.

But I played it straight. In large part because I couldn't figure out the comb thing. The point is, I was really good.

Well no, actually, the point is I like technology and gadgets and stuff like that. And for my money, the two best gadgets of the past 30 years are the Keurig coffee maker and Apple's wonderful iPod.

My kids bought me a Keurig for Father's Day a few years ago. I was just getting into coffee then, and getting the Keurig pushed me over the top into full-on addiction. I'm proud to say I remain physically and mentally dependent on the hot brown liquid until this day!

OK, not something to be proud of, but also not something to be denied. Coffee snobs will tell you the Keurig makes a low-quality drink, but I ignore them. What it does is make coffee as fast and convenient as it can be. It's ingenious, really, and it spawned an entire industry of companies that do nothing but make those little K-Cups.

All of which is cool. But the iPod? Well...the iPod is mythical. When I was a teenager, I was really into music. And the accepted medium for popular music in the 80s was the cassette. I had lots of cassettes. Like hundreds of them, all stored in cheap plastic holders that my dad undoubtedly bought at a discount store and screwed into my bedroom wall.

Cassettes were an extremely portable form of music, if by "portable" you mean "assuming you're willing to lug around a 13-pound boom box on your shoulder." But then came the Walkman, which allowed you to listen to your favorite cassettes in a little metal box that weighed less than a pound.

I figured that was the pinnacle of technological achievement. You had to carry multiple cassettes if you wanted musical variety, but that seemed a small price to pay.

But then – I don't even know how to describe how stunning and revolutionary this was – Apple came out with the iPod in the early 2000s. There were no tapes involved. Everything was digital. And the darn thing fit in the palm of your hand.

I just...I mean...if you're old enough to remember it, you know what I'm talking about. Suddenly, the future was here. You could carry around hundreds of songs. And nowadays it's well into the thousands.

Amazing.

So while the Keurig and the iPod are both life-changing inventions for me, if you ask which one is better, I'm going with the iPod. Every time.

Seriously, I can listen to Iron Maiden AND Air Supply back to back with just a couple of screen swipes? Yeah, I'm buying into that.

When I was a paper boy...

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently announced that it is going to cut home delivery of the newspaper back to three days a week beginning this summer. The paper will still publish every day, but you'll only be able to get it delivered to your front door three times a week.

Actually, "delivered to your front door" is a phrase that probably dates me. Of the relatively few people who still receive a newspaper at home, even fewer actually get it placed in or even near their front door. Most of the time, it's thrown into your driveway or placed in a newspaper tube in front of your house.

Another highly visible change is in the people who still deliver newspapers. When I was growing up, those people were almost always kids with paper bags slung over their shoulders. Nowadays, they're almost always adults driving cars.

I understand the economics of this. Newspapers, which are running on razor-thin profit margins, are better served giving larger routes (i.e., hundreds of customers) to adults than smaller routes (i.e., dozens of customers) to kids.

But that doesn't mean I don't miss the prototypical paper boy/girl. I was one myself.

Back in the early 80s, I delivered The Lake County News-Herald to 40 or so customers in my Wickliffe neighborhood. I had the brown and orange News-Herald paper bag, and every day I would make sure those customers received the news of the world.

This is back when people actually got their news from print newspapers, of course, and not from phones, tablets, iPods, etc.

I never minded delivering the papers. That part was actually kind of fun. It was the collecting I hated. Every two weeks you had to walk around to your customers' houses and hound them to pay you. And for some people, you really did have to hound them.

The good part about collecting, though, was that was obviously how you made your money. The lady from the newspaper would come around every two weeks to take the money and leave me with $30 or $40 profit, which I would use at arcades and to buy video game cartridges for my Atari 2600 system. In retrospect, I probably should have saved some of that cash...

I gave up my paper route in 7th grade once I started getting into more extracurricular activities at school. But I returned to the delivery business several years later as a 24-year-old adult.

By that point in my life, I was a full-time sports writer for The News-Herald. We didn't have any kids yet and we needed the extra money, so I took on a paper route. Again, didn't mind the delivering, but the collecting was less than fun.

I only kept that route for about six months, then dropped it once Elissa was born. But two memories stand out in my mind from the experience:

(1) It was fun doing full-service journalism. I would write articles for the paper, edit copy, help lay it out, etc., then get up the next day to actually deliver it, too. How often do you see that in anything other than a really small town?

(2) Mrs. Piacente, one of my customers, would always wait for me to show up with the paper on Saturday mornings. When I got to her house, she would ask what page my weekly Bowling Notes column was on so she could read it (she was a big bowler, that Mrs. Piacente). She would also occasionally ask me to do little odd jobs for her, including knocking the icicles off her house and changing the batteries in her kitchen clock. These were clearly tasks that fell under the "other duties as assigned" section of the paper boy job description.

And now the slow, painful death of newspapers is upon us. The three-day-a-week-home-delivery model, or other scenarios like it, will become increasingly prevalent. And eventually the print newspaper will die out in favor of e-news.

Which I'm actually fine with. But I'll always miss the feel and smell of newsprint. Newspapers have been a part of my life for decades, and they never really go out of your blood.

As long as we're being nostalgic here, may I suggest you watch the following video of a song written by a favorite artist of mine named David Francey? It documents his experiences as a paper boy back in his native Scotland. It's a tune I almost could have written myself. Enjoy:

Don't give the controller to Daddy!

There was a time when I was pretty good at video games. This was approximately 1982 to 1984. Then I started a long, slow decline that continues to this day.

The result is that my kids make fun of my gaming skills, or lack thereof. This actually happened: Jack was playing "Super Mario Bros." on the Wii the other day, and when I asked if I could join him, he hesitated for a second and then said, "OK, but don't be sad when your guy dies."

Slightly offended, I asked what he meant. And he said, "Well, it's just that you're not very good."

Please note that I had never actually played Super Mario Bros. on the Wii before. Jack was just assuming my incompetence.

It turned out he was right, of course. Back in The Day (I find myself increasingly referring to The Day in conversation), I was pretty good at Super Mario Bros. on the old Nintendo NES system. But this new version of Super Mario Bros. is much more complex. Whenever I play, my character must look out of the screen, see that it's me controlling him, and decide it would be just as easy to commit some form of electronic suicide.

Now if we were playing the old Atari 2600, it would be a different story. I could play me some Atari 2600. Didn't matter what the game, I was probably pretty good at it. Combat? Pac-Man? Air-Sea Battle? Basketball? I was The Man at virtually every Atari cartridge.

The main reason for this was that I actually had time to play and practice. You can get good at just about anything if you have time to work at it. When I was 12 years old, I had time for everything. Teachers hadn't yet started doing that thing where they give two hours of homework to elementary school children every night, so time is the one thing we had in abundance (of course, my generation is also functionally retarded when compared with a lot of kids today, so maybe that homework thing would have been a good idea).

Do you remember that scene in the movie "Groundhog Hog" where Bill Murray is teaching Andie MacDowell to flip playing cards into a hat? He tells her, "Six months, four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert." That's how it was with my friends and I when it came to video games.

It helped that my dad was a Gadget Guy. And by that I mean we had most of the cool new electronic gadgets of the 70s and 80s before anyone else had them. I was playing pong on my TV in 1977, thanks to the Radio Shack console Dad brought home one night. We also had the Atari 2600 long before most of the families in my neighborhood. So I was able to get pretty good at almost everything.

Then came the arcade craze. I spent a lot of paper route money pumping tokens into everything from Space Invaders and Centipede to Donkey Kong and Galaga. My friend Mel and I would ride our motocross bikes up to the game room and blow $3 to $5 (that's usually as much money as either of us had at any given time) in an hour or two. We would be wearing our 80s-style painters caps decked out with metal pins of our favorite New Wave bands like Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls. We thought we looked cool. In reality, we must have looked like The Incredible Dork Twins.

My favorite game was one called Track & Field. You would participate in a variety of track events by repeatedly mashing a pair of buttons in rapid fashion to make your onscreen athlete run faster or jump farther. I was good at this game. Good to the point that I once played a game of Track & Field for a full hour on a single quarter.

Once I started high school in the fall of 1984, the time I had available for gaming dropped dramatically. There were sports practices, extracurriculars, actual homework assignments, etc. And the video game world quickly passed me by. I lost track of what was new and hot, and sadly the arcades started going out of business. By the mid-90s, video games cost upwards of a dollar to play and could only be found in the lobbies of movie theaters.

Now I'm reduced to the role of Inept Daddy. We'll be playing Super Mario Bros., and when I inevitably fall off a ledge or run into something I thought was friendly and die, one of the kids will give me the ultimate insult: a condescending head shake, a small laugh, and the words "Oh, Daddy." The message being: "We only let you play so we can laugh at you. You're more entertaining than the game itself."

Whatever, you little brats. Once they invent time travel and we go back to the 80s, I'm dragging all five of them to the arcade and I will school them. And I'll make them wear painters caps, too. Then my revenge will be complete.