E.T. (Atari 2600)

If you were a member of the Atari Club, you could get this steaming pile for $5 off!

Seriously though, there really are many games that are worse than E.T. but perhaps none with such an abysmal hype/quality ratio. In those days, there was no internet so word of mouth was a little slower. Despite how awful E.T. was, it still became one of the best selling Atari 2600 games largely because so many people got it for Christmas. Despite this, there still really were many thousands buried in a landfill in New Mexico.

E.T. is largely credited with the video game crash of 1982/83 but really that’s giving it too much credit. No doubt being such a dud had an effect and maybe if it had instead been one of the best games of all time (i.e. lived up to its advertising and hype) things would have been a little different. However, the fact is that there was so much garbage and so many clones (often clones of the garbage) being rushed to market at this time that the crash was probably a forgone conclusion. Besides, the video game crash helped lead to the rise in popularity of home computers and my Commodore 64 was so much better anyway…

Rambo III (Sega Master System)

Rambo III was a game released in 1988 based on the Sylvester Stallone film of the same name and it is another one of those games that was available on a variety of systems but depending on the system had different developers and was a significantly different game.

The Sega Master System version (title screen above) was developed by Sega and was very similar to Operation Wolf. It is essentially a rail shooter in which you use the light gun (preferably) to shoot at on screen enemies. The game was also an arcade game (developed by Taito), available for the Sega Genesis (developed by Sega), and available for various computers including the PC (DOS), Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga among others (these were developed by Ocean). The Ocean developed games were completely different games than the Sega developed games and even games developed by the same developer for different systems have significant differences.

Spectral Associates: TRS-80 Color Computer (1982)

The Color Computer was a fairly popular and one of the longest supported computers of the 8-bit era. It was not at all related to the standard TRS-80 (Models I-IV) and used the relatively unique 6809 CPU which was pretty advanced for the time and had some 16-bit features. For some reason the Color Computer line never really gained a huge amount of third party software support as compared to others like Atari, Apple and Commodore but it had decent support from Radio Shack for more than a decade (and there was SOME 3rd party support).

The above ad by Spectral Associates, a retailer for Color Computer upgrades, accessories and software, is from 1982. There were three Color Computer models throughout the year but in 1982 when this ad appeared they were still on the original iteration. As you can see from the ad, 1982 was early enough in the life of home computers that software just being written in machine language (as opposed to BASIC) was considered a selling point.

Vintage Photos - Lot 6 (465-468)

The photos in this set were likely all taken in the 1960s or possibly 1970s in Michigan.

The first photo is labeled 'Jon Grad 64'. I started off asking ChatGPT about the uniform and the conversation eventually led to a probably identity of 'Jon J. Kipke, Central Michigan University, Class of 1964, Army ROTC'. If you are curious, see the ChatGPT conversation here: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6abfdc42892c8191b3dc4104b5e6f98a Vintage Photos - Lot 6 (465-468)