Christmas Disappointment, Atari Style

Non-video game geeks, bear with me here.

Say it's Christmas, 1987. You and every other kid in the universe want a Nintendo. Your parents or whatever adult figure in your life know this, but maybe they're not really clear on what a video game is, or they're hopelessly behind the times. Maybe they're turned off by the 200 dollar price tag. Maybe they have fallen prey to a salesperson who wants to get rid of old stock.

Christmas morning comes, and you rush downstairs and go for the box that you think the NES is in. You hurriedly and excitedly tear open the wrapping to find...

An Atari 2600. Junior. In 1987.

This scenario popped into my head yesterday because we went to a Goodwill, and I found a box full of 2600 games with a 2600 Jr. console, which I bought (I collect them). I noticed there was nary a Combat cart among the 41 carts in the box, nor a Pac-Man, both of which were pack-in carts for the original 2600.. There was a late 80s version of Space Invaders (you can tell by the label), and a few other late 80s games, as well as a few reissued games from the late 70s-early 80s.

The Atari 2600 Jr. was released in 1985 or 86. It apparently was ready a few years before that, but the Video Game Crash put an end to it, until the NES came along to resurrect video games. I think the reasoning behind releasing the 2600 Jr. in the heyday of the NES was to get rid of old stock, and to be able to say that the 2600 Jr. played more games than the NES. Not that they were better, because they definitely were not. Well, that's subjective.

So what I think happened was perhaps that mom and dad saw the huge NES price tag, then saw the lesser Atari price tag (under $50), and also saw that the games were also dirt cheap compared to the NES (I remember seeing 2600 games at Pathmark for a dollar in the mid 80s). So their precious child could have more games for the same price, and could get a lot more games cheaper from their paper route or lawn mowing money. They also could have been out of touch with video games, and figured that the cheap one was just as good as the expensive one. Whatever the reason, I could feel some one's Christmas morning tears welling up through that box of games.