“The Music Machine” was based on a line of other products, including albums — back when they were, in fact, albums. The seller indicated his elderly mother owned a Christian bookstore, and while going through her things, came across the game. It puts a real twist on the cliché of your mum chucking out a rare baseball card or comic book you later find out is worth thousands.

If the guy is taking care of his mum, and it sounds like it, then it sounds like the dough will be put to good use. Or he could be spending it all on hookers and cocaine… who am I to make judgements of people I’ve never met? C’mon, I’m trying to be a nice guy here.

Sealed Atari Game Sells for Over $US5,000 [Hot Blooded Gaming]

Yes, the Toys R Us trade-in program differs from many of their competition in that there is no cut-off point when a game is too old to be traded in. As long as the customer supplies the original game in the original packaging, they can exchange their games for store credit good at Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores, along with the corresponding online outlets.

“The video game trade-in program is another way we’re providing customers with additional value when they visit our stores,” said Bill Lee, Vice President, Divisional Merchandise Manager, Toys R Us, US. “This program is designed to make the exchange process completely hassle-free for customers by accepting games from even the oldest systems, including the original Atari 2600 and 32-bit Sega Genesis.”

Outside of the odd vintage video game shop and online outlets like eBay, there really aren’t many places you can take your old Intellivision, NES, or Sega Genesis games for store credit. Depending on the reaction to the program, this could make the Toys R Us used video game section a very interesting place to shop, with games we’ve not seen in ages popping up on store shelves.

As if I needed more of an excuse to visit Toys R Us.

Giant Bomb community member buzz_clik threw theses screens together in lieu of an actual game after reading a story about the Rutgers University robot that conquered the Atari 2600 classic game. It would have been cooler to have an actual flash game, of course, but what buzz_clik lacks in programing know-how, he (or she) makes up for in Photoshop skills.

And I can’t argue with buzz_clik’s logic on this — the games do seem to be a match made in heaven. Or, post apocalyptic brown heaven as the case may be.

Why not make a game that combines Pitfall! and Fallout ? They’re both open-world games, with our hero braving a harsh landscape looking for stuff to pocket. They both have portions that take place underground. Both games have scorpions, as any good game should. Hell, there’s even an expansion for Fallout 3 called The Pitt!

PitFallout! [Giant Bomb]

It is $US55, however, the maker of this fine conversation piece says all of an Atari 2600 cartridge’s parts, except for one screw, are repurposed to help make it into a wallet.

The maker, Nilesz, is running a win-a-wallet contest over on his site, which of course gives you the info on how to order one. From his blog, it sounds like he does take mail-in requests, but you need to make sure you’re sending him something usable first. It’d be bitchin’ if he could do the old Imagic cases, but the 14 he does offer – including Haunted House, Circus Atari and everyone’s favourite, E.T. – are slick enough.

The Atari Wallet [Nilesz, via Boing Boing]

Full-time thinking man and part-time Kotaku Guest Editor Ian Bogost has asked some kids at Georgia Tech to come up with an emulator that can not only recreate an old game on a new platform, but recreate how it actually looked back in its day.

For example, the Atari 2600 was designed to run on 1970s TV sets. Big, clunky, cathode ray TV sets, on which a pixel looked a lot different than it does a crystal-clear monitor or HD TV set. So the GT computer science students have created some tweaks for the popular Stella emulator, which are able to recreate the way a game would have looked on a dusty, wood-panelled television set.

The results are, for this misty-eyed nostalgic, wonderful. Bogost says talks are currently underway to have these tweaks incorporated into Stella’s release builds, so hopefully they’ll be made available to the public soon.

A Television Simulator [Ian Bogost]

It’s become something of a tradition ’round the Tower to observe Easter with, what else, lists of Easter eggs. So here is my dirty half-dozen, from well before the 8-bit days.

I’m getting married later this year. Need a wedding ring. Funny, then, that at this precise time in history, I come upon this gold ring, made out of the heart of an Atari.

As it’s called a “1981 Atari Ring”, I’m guessing it’s from an Atari 2600. Regardless, it looks great, especially since – if weddings aren’t your thing – it’ll leave one hell of an Atari-shaped dent in the faces of your enemies.

1981 Atari Ring [Boing-Boing]

A book by two professors of media studies examines the challenges of designing games on the Atari 2600, and posits that the infamous port of Pac-Man wasn’t a half-assed effort after all.

Racing the Beam sets up the Atari Video Computer System (later 2600) as a console that profoundly shaped game design because its limitations forced programmers to come up with new efficiencies and tricks to deliver more complex games. The book also points out that it was an unusually long-lived platform – going into 1992 - despite its lightweight computing power.

The VCS’ big setback, according to the book, is that the console had a tiny 128 bytes (yes bytes) of RAM, which could not accommodate a frame buffer – in other words the portion of RAM that stores the image data for each successive screen displayed by the game. So VCS programmers had to generate graphics purely in real time. For those who complain about how difficult it is to program for the PlayStation 3, this is the equivalent of “In my day, I walked six miles to school in the snow, uphill both ways.”

By “racing the beam,” programmers came up with a few tricks. The information space inside three blank spots that the electron gun didn’t have to render was rededicated to things like joystick inputs, scoring and other processes. In some cases they shrank the playing screen more to give themselves more programming space. Pitfall!, one of the deepest games of its generation, made use of this.

Further, the VCS could only display two sprites on the screen at any given moment. How they compensated for that is a technical challenge that I can’t intelligently describe. But suffice to say, in Pac-Man – a disappointing port partially blamed for the early 1980s video game crash – every time you ate a dot, the game redrew the screen. This manic redrawing accounted for the ghosts’ flicker, which, of course, was justified because THEY GHOSTS after all.

The book’s authors, Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost, say that arcade ports to the 2600 lay the foundation for future practices in bringing arcade games home. Says Bogost:

“The porting of arcade games to home systems was first really worked through on the VCS. It was because of this VCS development that developers were able to figure out what to try to carry over and what to leave behind, and how to adapt the arcade experience for more limited consoles that would be played at home.”

The authors say Racing the Beam is the first in a series of “platform studies” that will probe how gaming platforms affect how games are created.

Racing the Beam: How Atari 2600’s Crazy Hardware Changed Game Design [Wired]

Fake ports of modern games? Yeah, it’s been done before. Same with cart labels. But someone stuck them on actual carts, which will be hilarious once the next yard sale rolls around.

Redbeard Math Pirate on Flickr created 15, spanning the range of cart art on the Atari 2600 – original VCS, second generation, third generation, early Activision, and original Imagic. More of his offerings below:

Yo dawg, I herd you like memes …

Yeah, and 33-69 is PORN.

I’ve played this game. It’s like Outlaw with multiplayer.

Fake Atari Games [flickr]

Huh. I vaguely remember that library of games. Tooling around teh Google, lo and behold, there’s video (below) of pre-mushmouth Madden calling the epic Tony Sarkis vs. Ray Johnson showdown — yeah I don’t remember it either — in Wizard of Wor on the 2600. Madden’s commentary lacks the signature boom, bam, here’s-a-guy, and telestrator pee-pees. But still, you always leave him feeling you learned something about the game, you know? For the record, Ray wins.

Hey I got one: What does Ostia have in common with Wizard of Wor? Both are ancient ports! Get it? Get it?!

Don’t like the pun? Suck it! But remember, that money back offer on Wizard of Wor expires in two weeks … from 26 years ago.

20 Awesome Vintage Video Game Ads [Unreality]