Return of the Atari

Today, after getting home from work, I saw a package addressed to me sitting outside my door.  I took it inside, and after emptying my pockets of all the crap I carry with me at work, I opened the box.  Inside was one of the greatest birthday gifts my brother has ever given to me.  Seriously, this may beat the U2 tickets he got me two years ago!

It was an Atari Flashback!

It's like a Atari 2600, but it doesn't need the cartridges!

When I was a little boy, Super Nintendo was all the rage!  Everyone had one…but not us Ronzinos.  We were still using an Atari 2600:

Remember these babies?!

We loved that system; it was great!  We had all of the best games: “Kong”, “Asteroids”, “Centipede”, “Pitfall”, “Pac-Man”, etc. etc.  It was flippin’ awesome.

Anyway, we moved to a different town when I was 9, and through the process of boxing everything up, my mother (love you, Mom!), “accidently” threw away the Atari…which was a big mistake, because we never let her live it down.  Although, getting a Game Boy (the original gray brick) for my 10th birthday was more than enough to make up for it.

I still own it...and it still works!

Ever since then, I’ve wanted another Atari, but I never bothered to go on eBay and pick one up.  I had better things to spend my money on, like 100,000+ baseball cards that my Dad and I liked to buy and look through.  But over the years, and as video gaming technology became better in graphics and more sophisticated, I have often told people that my favorite gaming system was the old Atari 2600.  People would look at me like I lost my mind, but I didn’t care, nostalgia held out.  Atari was always cool in my eyes, even though in “Adventure”, you played as little colored square.

So today, on my 26th birthday, I was excited when I opened a package and saw an Atari!  I have already hooked it up, and have been clobbered by the computer in “Pong” (not cool, computer, not cool!).  Even though it’s not exactly the old gaming system, it’s close enough, and it brought me back to the days when I would beat my sister at “Sneak’n Peek” (seriously, why was that a game?!).

Thank you, Michael, for a birthday gift that I will enjoy for years to come…just like the Game Boy Brick!