Do you remember the Atari video game console?

By Emilio Castellanos

The other day I found a nice large picture of an Atari game console. It brought back sweet memories of carefree childhood. Later that day, through some research, I also found some Atari emulators (a small program that turns your computer into an Atari console) along with the entire collection of videogames.

I was one of the lucky few who during 1980 got one of the first Atari systems (there were quite a few of us actually) and still remember how thrilled I was that I no longer needed my friends to have an awesome time in front of the TV set. Trying to figure out the games, console and control was great! The only game I had back then was paddle tennis (it might have been the default game) and asteroids but it did not matter, these simple games were all I needed to forget about my young and uncomplicated life; I spend hours playing them.

With paddle tennis, you played against the computer or another player and I was thrilled when my father joined in the fun, then came my mother. What family bonding. My brother was still too young to be good but was still a worthy adversary for some games like Combat.

So I downloaded the Stella Atari Emulator and all the videogames: Frogger, Tennis, Bowling, Combat, PacMan, and the other 529 games available. Figuring out how to install the emulator and run the games took me a few minutes but it did not compare to taking the new console out of its box and plastic wrapping… can’t beat young excitement, smells, sights and sounds.

Playing the games was a real flashback even though I did not have the Atari joystick --still available through Ebay. I used my computer keyboard to clumsily go through some of them with some amount of difficulty and I highly enjoyed it. I’ve just gotten through about 10 or 15. One of these days, I will go out and get a couple of regular joysticks and give it a go on my TV set to recapture some of that childhood lost.

You can get the emulator here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stella/
You can get the games here: http://www.atariage.com/