Game on: Classic video-game enthusiasts converge on Las Vegas

Kirk Baird

Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2001 | 8:30 a.m.

Game time

It was around 1983 when Atari, the now-semi-defunct pioneering video-game company, introduced the catchy ad slogan "Have you played Atari today?" for its home video-game systems.

In the early '80s there weren't many children/teenagers who didn't or, at the very least, they played rival home video-game systems by Mattel, Coleco and even Magnavox.

Then the great video-game crash of 1984 happened, and everything changed.

Personal computers approached affordable prices for average families. What was the point of buying a video game when, for a few dollars more, you could have a computer? Consequently, once-dominant home video-game systems, such as the Atari 2600 and 5200, Intellivision and ColecoVision, no longer sold as they once had.

Making matters worse was that many third-party software companies watched their revenue plummet and bailed out of the video-game market. Their software was marked down to ridiculously low prices sometimes as little as $5 per game.

With fewer and fewer new titles available and scant good ones sales for the systems sunk even lower. The industry began to cannibalize itself, halting development of new systems, cutting back on production and laying off employees. It wasn't long before there wasn't much left.

For John Hardie, Valley Stream, N.Y., the death of the early video-game systems would later feel similar to the passing of an old friend.

But at that time Hardie joined the consumer flight to computers as well, abandoning his Atari 5200 "Super System," as it was called, in the process.

Hardie became enthused by the new line of Atari personal computers, and several years later was working in San Antonio for an Atari computer dealership as a technician/salesman. An avid collector of Atari computer products, he enjoyed the challenge of hunting down especially hard-to-find prototypes and discontinued items.

Running out of Atari computer merchandise to collect, he turned to the games and systems of his youth. And at age 35 he's amassed quite an assortment, some of which can be seen at the fourth annual Classic Gaming Expo Saturday and Sunday at the Plaza.

Hardie said his garage is filled to the ceiling with boxes of old video-game systems he purchased in bulk from warehouses.

The upstairs of his home has shelves upon shelves full of classic games, and many of his old systems, from the popular Atari 2600 to the more obscure Vectrex, are set up to be played.

"My wife doesn't come up here anymore," he joked.

Although he does sell and trade some of his collection, most of it he chooses to keep. For Hardie, the purpose of gathering the old systems and games is not to make money, but in the nostalgic joy of playing a game that would otherwise be forgotten and sharing that experience with others.

That's why he joined a New Jersey classic video-game club that meets monthly in a game store, spending hours into the night playing and talking about the games from "the good-ol' days."

Classic meeting

Along with two other partners, Hardie began the Classic Gaming Expo -- or the World of Atari, as it was originally called -- in 1988 at the Boardwalk.

Although the focus was on Atari products, the expo covered all classic games -- including arcade games -- from the early days of Pong to the last Atari home system, Jaguar, released in 1993. The only stipulation was that the video game must be a "classic," meaning it was all-but-dead or, in the case of the Jaguar, all-but-abandoned.

The first expo was small, with about 200 attendees -- including the traders at booths -- and took up about 3,000 square feet. The event also featured a hands-on display, or "museum," of classic-game systems, rare prototype models and hand-held units, which has grown in size each year since.

Despite the initial expo's overall success, there was a disagreement concerning finances, so Hardie and one of the partners decided to venture out on their own.

The following year they changed the name of the event to Classic Gaming Expo, or CGE, and moved it to much larger quarters at the Plaza: 21,000 square feet, or seven times the space of the Boardwalk expo.

The move paid off, Hardie said, and the event has grown each year.

"Last year we had 700 people attend. This year we're expecting to break a thousand," he said.

That's 1,000 classic-game enthusiasts flying in from all over the world to buy and swap old video games, while discussing systems whose graphics are as antiquated as black-and-white television.

"The thing with classic games is that they're fun to play," Hardie said. "Look at Adventure for the (Atari) 2600. So what if your guy's a block and the dragon looks like a duck. You didn't care. The graphics didn't matter because the game-play was so good."

The poor graphics of Adventure were typical of early video games. Back then video-game programmers didn't have much to work with, especially when it came to a system's memory. In 1981, for example, the Atari 2600 contained 128 bytes of memory; today it takes 22,000 bytes just to write a one-page letter in Microsoft Word.

This limitation meant programmers had to be more creative, said David Crane, one of the founders of Activision, the industry's first third-party software publishing group, and the programmer behind such Atari 2600 games as Kaboom!, the classic Pitfall!, Freeway and Grand Prix.

"There is something to be said for letting the machine's limitations lead you to a game idea, said Crane, who is one of several scheduled guest speakers at CGE. "One of the reasons the Activision games seemed better had to do with just that. By designing a game that fits well within the machine's quirks, we could get the (Atari) 2600 to perform better for us than the other guys. Then we would spend as much as half of our time in the design lab developing ways to expand the capability of the machine.

"We were never without cutting-edge game-play ideas that operated smoothly on the limited game system."

Which is not the case for state-of-the-art machines such as Sega Dreamcast, Sony PS2 and Nintendo 64, Hardie contends.

Compare, contrast

As video-game systems became more powerful, with more memory and better graphic capabilities, something got lost in the process, Hardie said. Programmers began using the improving technology as a way to mask the lack of game-play -- which meant the games looked great, but weren't particularly enjoyable.

"A majority of us at the shows have new systems, (but) for many of us the games just aren't fun," he said. "Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good games out there for the newer systems. But it's almost like they lost track of the game play and became too obsessed with graphics and making the game look good.

"They do all these fancy things that would help sell a game, whereas the most important part -- the game play -- gets ignored."

Wade Howard, 31, agreed. He grew up with the old systems and still has most of them at his home.

Howard fondly recalls the classic games, especially the Atari 2600 version of Pitfall! which is his all-favorite game -- regardless of system.

That love of the pioneer days of the video-game world is one of the reasons his store, Wade's World, 3430 E. Tropicana Ave., sells classic video-game systems; from the popular -- Atari 2600 and 5200 and ColecoVision -- to the lesser-known -- Odyssey 2 and Bally Astrocade.

Howard said through his connections with various warehouses, distributors and even the Internet, he's been able to special order just about any system or game.

"Since I've been open, there hasn't been a game I haven't been able to find," he said.

Although the newer systems remain more popular with his customers, Howard said the classic games sell fairly well, with the typical system running about $30, and the games about a sixth of that price. (There are some exceptions, however, such as a rare adult game for the Atari 2600 that can be up to $90.)

As to why the classic systems are still popular today, and why grown men and women would attend a video-game expo celebrating them, Howard said it's all about nostalgia.

"I think we all started out on those systems," Howard said. "It's like your first car ... there's something about it that brings us back to the age when we were young."

And the days spent playing Atari.

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