© Copyright Clive Young

Wideshot o' Clive's Atari Crap
Clive's Atari Crap

Everyone has their addiction. Some people smoke, some drink and others gamble. Me, I rummage through thrift stores and garage sales looking for old Atari 2600 stuff from the late '70s and early '80s. Somehow, I think my past-time is a little less harmful than those others. Sure, I admit it's a dopey hobby, but no more so than, say, rotisserie baseball. I've collected Atari stuff since 1994; here's what my pile o' stuff looks like, 10 years later.

I don't have a lot of room to keep this collection in--just a small corner of my small home office, so everything is piled high. Since most of these games came out in the early '80s, their packaging is all loud, garish colors, which was a very hip thing at the time. Unfortunately, that makes the collection a bit of an eyesore; if I was rich, I'd get a cabinet to hold all the stuff on the bookshelf, so I wouldn't have to see it whenever I come in the room. That said, I've done my best to go slightly more highbrow in my storage decisions, such as the brown dresser on the left, which I keep cartridges in. It's a step up from the Xerox paper boxes I used to have!

I own about seven machines at the moment--three boxed systems, including a "Heavy Sixer," which is a six-switch unit made the first year of production that is heavier than later models; a "Service Exchange Only" unit in the SEO box; a very clean one that I use for playing; a Sears Video Arcade II unit (a "clone" built by Atari for Sears); a "Vader" unit (so-called by collectors because it is all black); and a Coleco Gemini (another clone).

Other highlights of this photo: My pal Dave's Bar Mitzvah TV, which he gave me years ago (it's died since this photo was taken); a blue Atari lunchbox I found in an antique shop; a signed, numbered print of Duran Duran that I got when I interned at Capitol Records in the late '80s; and a copy of my book, Crank It Up, which I heartily encourage you to buy elsewhere on my website.
QuadrunQuadrunQuadrun

This is probably the rarest game I own: Quadrun, which I picked up (with the manual) for $2 at a used video game store in 1998 or so. It typically goes for a coupla hundred bucks on eBay, but that's a stupid amount to pay for a game, much less an Atari game. The most I ever paid for a cartridge was $18 (Star Wars: The Arcade Game) and I hope I never succumb to paying that much again.

Quadrun was an instant rarity from the day it was made, mainly because it was only available via mail order from Atari. Its primary distinction is that it was the only game to feature synthesized speech--a true technological marvel in 1983. That said, the speech is just a voice that says "QuadrunQuadrunQuadrun" when you turn it on. Quadrun itself is a weird catching game; some people love it, but I've never played it for more than a few minutes--it just isn't my thing. Pearls before swine, I know.

Quadrun's rarity is rated 9 on a scale of 1-10 by AtariAge.Com, a collector's site with news, bulletin boards and a comprehensive guide to every Atari game ever. If you venture into the forums (bulletin boards) on the site, I post notes there under the name "Dolt"--a screen name which fits me all too well.

 Atari 2600 running Quadrun
Drawer o' Atari games
Drawer Lore

Here's a typical drawer holding some of my cartridges. Each drawer holds 60 (63 if you really cram), so the whole dresser holds 420 games (441 crammed). I own 381 different games at this point, not including label variations (which are a jumping-off point for collector's insanity) so I have a lot of room to grow still. At this point, it's rare for me stumble across a game I don't have, so it'll probably take me another 10 years to fill this dresser (thank God).

In this particular drawer are some really fun games like Tapper; some truly awful games like Star Fox and the six wretched titles above it; and a few rarities, such as the five below Star Fox: a complete run of games by Avalon Hill, which I found with manuals in the same pile of games as Quadrun--did I mention that was a very good day?
Boxed In

Sometimes I have the gift of premonition. When I first started collecting Atari in the early '90s, I shared a tiny apartment in Brooklyn where I had very little space to myself. At the time, I bought a system with perhaps 25 games, all in their boxes, at a garage sale for $10. I kept all the games but threw out the boxes because I didn't have room for them and I figured only an idiot would keep them anyway. Even as I did it, however, I said to myself, "Someday, I'm going to regret this." I was right.

I've only started collecting game boxes in the last year or two. Finding games is getting tougher as time goes on--Atari is almost 30 years old now--so I started keeping boxes on the rare occasion that I found them. Ironically, even though they're harder to find than the games themselves, they're not worth much unless they are for a rare game. The rule of thumb is that a box doubles the value of a game--but most common Atari games go for less than $3, so the boxes aren't worth much, despite their rarity.

The four coolest boxes I've found are the ones with numbers on the upper front row--12, 41, 51, 61. The first year Atari came out, it packaged its first nine games in boxes such as these, and put the catalog number there on the side. The boxes themselves are gate-folded, so they open like a book; they're also made of great paper and have a style to them that gives a real sense of added value to the games. Atari abandoned the numbering scheme after a year or so, as well as the box design too--later boxes all opened from the top. Currently, I own eight out of the nine gatefold boxes, so if you have an "11 Indy 500" box rotting in your attic, consider giving it to a good cause: Me!

 Too many Atari boxes