Posts tagged with atari

Authored by our student worker, Grace Allbaugh: Wednesday is highlighting Retro Games, or games from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. The CVGA has a bunch of retro consoles to choose from, including the original Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, Atari and even an upright Arcade Legends game that has over a hundred arcade games. The CVGA has an assortment of awesome games for each of these systems.

People have donated so many game manuals over the years that we (sadly) end up keeping in storage because we just don't have the games themselves to go with them. It's a pity because there are quite a few in our hidden collection that have amazing game art, full of color and bringing back a sense of game nostalgia that few other sources can inspire.

Gerald "Jerry" Lawson, who is often thought of as the inventor of the first modern gaming console, died last weekend at age 70. Jerry designed the mechanics of what eventually became known as the Channel F, a predecessor of the Atari game system, and invented the ability to have interchangeable cartridges in a console, which influenced several cartridge-based game consoles throughout the next couple of decades.

The first casualty of our video game archive was our Atari Flashback 2. It just up and stopped working one day a couple of weeks ago. I plan to purchase a replacement, but first I figured I'd put my long-neglected electrical engineering degree to use to see if I could find something obviously wrong (like perhaps a loose wire connection). I didn't find anything, but did snap some photos of the insides.

Things are still going slow with the game collection, but they should start to pick up in July as I'll finally be able to start purchasing games and systems and hardware and stuff. No worries, everything is still on track for an opening in mid to late August. In the meanwhile we've received a couple of classic game systems as donations. These are the games from my own childhood!