Academie Priscum

For some time now, the number 300 has been the standard by which I’ve puffed out my bony little chest and boasted about the size of my Atari 2600 collection.

Yep. Just like that.

“Three hundred carts!” “Slightly over three hundred carts!”, or some variation thereof for quite a while now, and perhaps for too long, given how 2600/VCS games – common and rares, have become increasingly harder to find in the wilds of thrift stores and flea markets. However, following the alphabetizing project I’ve realized that actual number of unique titles I have is more like 295, and that my figure of 300+ has been largely propped up by a surprising number of duplicates.

I’m not talking about uber-common titles like the half-dozen Pac-Man carts rattling around in the bottom of my trade bin (and whose numbers are not factored in here).  I’m mostly talking about these situations where one manufacturer secures the rights to republish an existing title, e.g. – Donkey Kong and Mouse Trap, both of which were first released by Coleco, then re-released by Atari some years later as red label carts.

Sears, of course, was the biggest purveyor of republished games which, unlike the aforementioned rights acquisitions deals, were published concurrently alongside their Atari-made contemporaries for Sears Telegames-branded consoles. Excepting for three Sears exclusive titles (all of which I own), they were all simply re-labeled, re-named Atari games. Anyone who’s been at this for a while will tell you that there’s probably no better way to pad your total cart count than to factor in a big stack of Sears and Sawbuck.

The question that the collector faces is where should one draw the line concerning duplicate titles? This question has already been debated to death in Digital Press and other collector forums, but becomes again paramount in the calculus I’m trying to formulate concerning the balance between desiring a nicely-sized representation of the VCS library and the more pragmatic consideration of finite physical space within which to display it. Do I really need, say, the Atari-published version of Defender as well as the Zeller’s version (released in Canada and renamed Earth Attack) when the game program on both carts is perfectly identical?

Speaking strictly as a collector, here’s where I’m at mentally in the present with all this (but ask me in five minutes and my answer might change): Do the carts possess significant aesthetic variations from one another? If the answer is yes, then I should keep both. If not, into the trade bin with the excess.

I am of the opinion that there is not much in the way of significant aesthetic variation between, say, the text-label Combat cart with the big red “01” on the side and the one without. I would even go so far as to say there aren’t significant aesthetic variations between the text label Combat and the one with artwork. Some will disagree, and they’re welcome to that opinion. But as I said in my last entry, my OCD doesn’t run quite that deep.

On the other hand, SAV’s (that’s a lot to type. Is it alright if I abbreviate that now? Thanks.) are plainly apparent in most cases when a game has been distributed by two different publishers and the physical structure of the cart, or labeling, has drastically changed. Consider when Activision acquired the rights to,  and re-issued certain Imagic titles. Adding insult to injury, Activision eschewed Imagic’s distinctive cartridge shape and shiny labels in (to use the term loosely) favor of standard rectangular cart shapes with their awful we-just-don’t-care-anymore blue labels which, for some reason, remind me of the utterly bland packaging you’d see on something like a military-issued box of band aids.

If anything, these cross-company publishing efforts give you something of a visceral history of the  console’s ascent and decline.  The red label carts, for instance, are emblematic of the 2600’s sunset days, as Atari snatched up so many publishing rights (cheaply, too, I imagine)  from now-defunct manufacturers to reissue them in a last attempt to squeeze as much cash as possible out of the machine before it faded into the land of nostalgia as the 1990’s kicked into full swing.

Finally, we come to the elephant in the room, and the elephant’s name is Sears TeleGames. Do these games represent SAV’s of their Atari counterparts or not? Other than the fact that many of these Sears titles used different names than Atari originals, I’m inclined to say mostly no. The label typefaces are “Atari-ish” enough that the casual observer wouldn’t even notice, although they tended to use more muted colors. Many of the early-to-mid 1980’s releases use the exact same names and artwork (Yar’s Revenge, Pac-Man, etc), differentiated only by the presence of absence of a small Sears logo. For several years now my wholly subjective impression of most Sears-published titles is that they are not significant aesthetic variations, but merely inferior imitations of their originals.

I know that may not sound fair or rational, so I concede it’s mostly a gut response. And from that, coupled with a need for some space, I have decided to purge most, but not all, of my Sears titles from my collection. I’ll still hang on to the three Sears-exclusive titles since they were published by no one else (not even Atari), and one or two of these renamed ones that are unusually high for a Sears game on the DP rarity scale e.g. – “Cannon Man”, which is the Sears version of Atari’s Human Cannonball, is an R6(?!). The rest goes into the bin, thereby leaving a Sears-shaped hole in the collection. But who knows? With a little perseverance maybe I can really and certifiably get above 300 unique carts this time.