Early Gaming in a (plastic) Nutshell

Front labels- Nothing very special except for the plastic casing on the Donkey Kong cart being a beige plastic.

Top view of the carts- I love the Coleco logo on a Nintendo game playable on the Atari 2600, its like none of the companies knew they'd be spending the 1980's trying to phase each other out.

This pic below shows both carts on the underside. I noticed that the black Atari cart on the top of the pic has a special spring-loaded guard that covers the chip, keeping the dust out. Coleco's Donkey Kong Cart, has the chip section exposed. Atari was very forward thinking, but the mechanics probably made the carts a little more expensive to produce. Later in the 80's Nintendo would keep the chip exposed, making the cost to produce them a lot cheaper, and also make the 30th time you attempt to load the game impossible unless you blew into the cart until you blew a blood vessel.

Ah.. The 80’s the time of big hair, snake skin mini skirts, cartoon character underroos, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But fuck all that. To retro gamers there are only 2 words that mattered in the birth years of MTV: Nintendo and Atari.

The world of gaming today is very compact when compared to the 1980’s. Thanks to the CD media that dominates the world of gaming today video games are now easier to manufacture and also easier to destroy. All of us that have systems like the Playstation or even the early ill fated Sega CD can remember scratching a disc and permanently losing a 40 dollar investment. Perhaps due to insanity or due to high profits to be made for gamers replacing their destroyed games, video game manufacturers haven’t yet given the market an indestructible media for games.

Cartridge media in the 1980’s and on into the mid 90’s was THE way to manufacture games. Other companies with systems like the Turbo Graphix 16 console put their games on small ‘Hu-cards’ that looked like credit cards of the future- while it looked nothing like a bulky SNES cart the it still used the cart concept. The idea was simple and sane on every front weather it was a SEGA Genesis or a Super Nintendo: Electrical contacts feeding a game system information and displaying it on screen. The only drawback was the task of keeping those contact chips that protruded from the bottom of the cart free from the polluted and corrosive outside world.
I’m huge buyer of ridiculous but cheap and collectible crap. I love crap- as long as its interesting crap. Send me into a Goodwill or an antique shop and I’ll leave that place with something I never needed, did not come in for- but can’t possibly live without. In the case of last month I found two glorious gems: Atari Carts with unique and important gaming histories behind them.

Donkey Kong and ET: The Extraterrestrial

Atari had the gaming world in a virtual monopoly in the late 70’s and into the early 80’s. The 1982 gaming crash gave the company a huge setback that would allow Nintendo the opportunity to scoop up the mess and reconstruct the video gaming market. Or so the story might say. Many people exaggerate the 82 crash, stating as if the gaming market would have never risen again if Nintendo hadn’t picked up the pieces. The truth is, Nintendo was in the right place at the right time. Atari didn’t die, and the company is still in the market as a publisher.

Another truth can be seen in the pictures above, on the Donkey Kong cart. Coleco- the manufacturer of the cart , Nintendo- creators of the famous game, and Atari-the makers of the 2600 system, had themselves a 3 way business back in the day, all of them working together to make the first home installment of the most popular arcade game of that time. (too bad it wasn’t as good.)

ET has a much more notorious history. The film by Steven Spielberg was the biggest hit of its time, meaning that merchandising was fair game. And like its predecessor -Star Wars- anything you could slap that almost phallic alien face on would (and did) make money. Except for this fucking thing. Atari was willing to gamble the company’s future on what would be the first ever video gaming license from a major motion picture and subsequently they would later be falling flat on their face (or to be literal into a landfill).

Three crucial things were mishandled and caused the company millions and would give Nintendo an open field to play on.

1. Short development time: This game was a rushed effort and if you’ve been unlucky enough to play it then you’d know. The controls barely respond and the gameplay is needlessly tedious. It’s the worst day of your life- REPEATED. Falling into a hole 16 times isn’t fun no matter what famous character from a famous film. Famed designer of games like Yar’s Revenge was given a meager 5 weeks to bang out this game and even for the primitive technology of the 2600, that’s not nearly enough time. This was the FIRST time any video game was to be based on a big hit movie and they didn’t even cough up a decent schedule. Plus Atari spent a TON of money to license the game- which brings us to…

2. Bad calls with numbers. Atari spent over 20 million dollars to get the rights to make this game, and that was unheard of at the time. Coleco spent only $250,000 on the rights to Donkey Kong for the later made Colecovision console- so that puts it all into perspective. To make matters worse is even when the game flopped on its release, Atari had also made over 4 million carts of the game. Trouble with that is that there were fewer than 2 million Atari 2600 systems in US households at the time. The idea was that maybe system sales would pick up, but Atari should have known better since they had done that same damn thing with Pac-Man and lost millions.

3. The game just plain blows. It does. The object of the game is to make ET fall into holes and find pieces of his phone to ‘phone home’. However once in the hole a glitch in the game keeps you from coming out of the ditch. That points out the ‘repeated nightmare’ thing I mentioned earlier. I was just a baby at the time this game was made, but as a retro gamer I cannot believe this… thing was allowed out of the door at Atari corp. We all make mistakes but with a 20 million dollar + investment, mistakes should at least allow you to break even. There isn’t a strong enough word to describe this fuck up. In the end Atari was $500 million in the hole and millions of copies of ET were bulldozed and buried in New Mexico. The ailing video game company would later be sold and divided.

Now with histories like this, you’d think that these two carts would be worth some cash right? Wrong. I checked values of these two ‘gems’ and found that of the 50 cents each I paid - the carts values are only a buck apiece. Oh well, a dollar made isn’t bad. But for me the money's not the point, I now have two bits of gaming history that would otherwise been thrown away, propping up a table, or buried in New Mexico.

Wait, this isn't from the 90's at all. Shit.