Along with 'legitimate' means of preservation, there's the whole specter of abandonware, which Les Chapelle takes a look at over at the Escapist.

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Is there a pool hall, milk bar, caravan park or corner shop near you that still has some classic arcade action hidden away in the back corner like it's 1985? If so, we're hoping you can share the joy with the hordes of Kotaku Australia readers who want to find out where to relive the days when home consoles were a real luxury, the best games were paid for 20c at a time, and the cabinet art was far superior to the graphics on screen.

We want photos, descriptions, addresses, Google Streetviews, whatever you can do to help others find these precious nuggets of classic gaming and gather to put down their favourite three letters on the top of the list.

If you can start the ball rolling, send your pics, links and write ups to the tips *AT* kotaku *DOT* com *DOT* au address. Hopefully there are enough of these locations out there to keep the gems flowing for the weeks and months to come. Any predictions on which state will turn up the most gems?

It's a bit of a nostalgic day today at Kotaku (or maybe I've just done a poor job of getting out of the historian mindset this weekend), but a post over at Educational Games Research brought back memories of childhood and elementary school — Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego (I vaguely remember a PBS television show that we were required to watch once a week), typing teachers (though we used PAWS in the 3rd grade, not the Mavis Beacon mentioned). Ah, memories:

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I've mentioned the unfortunately named Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection blog a couple of times, but I really do love it — I'm always curious to see what gems will be dredged up from the archives. Following on the heels of a post from Owen on five games to play during a stock market crash comes a post showing what (some) people were playing during the financial downturn of 1987. In addition to some less stimulating titles from 'Blue Chip Software,' we get the fantastic box art of Wall$treet and the dismal sounding Black Monday, among others:

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The classic sound of a room full of arcade games all going at once started to vanish before the coin-op arcade started its slide to extinction. Game audio and speech got more sophisticated and music evolved into soundtracks, creating a blend different from the early to middle 1980s. But the Arcade Ambience Project has created more than eight hours of mp3s, sorted by year that depict arcades at their height, buzzing, chirping and whirring like a field of crickets on a summer evening.

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Watercooler Games saw this earlier in the week and gave a detailed deconstruction of how a Free the Falklands! concept would be graphically impossible on the Atari 2600. I took one look and knew it was satire because one of the writers for this site, Jason Torchinsky, is a comedian and a name I remember as the editorial cartoonist of The Daily Tar Heel back when I was at N.C. State's Technician in the early 1990s.

But play along, because it's funny. Why look, his site, the Van Gogh-Goghs, have unearthed from some New Mexico landfill documented evidence of 11 scrapped projects for the Atari 2600! The casualties included such licensing/adaptations as Bosom Buddies (a cross between Kaboom! and Donkey Kong, and Kramer vs. Kramer (like Pong with children). My favourite, because I like poop jokes, is Gunther Gebel-Williams' Cage Cleaner. The bogus rationale for the bogus game sounds like pure pre-video-game-crash self-b.s.ing: "You can't blow up asteroids in real life, but you sure as [expletive deleted] can clean up [expletive deleted]".

The Best Atari 2600 Games You Never Heard Of [The Van Gogh-Goghs, via Water Cooler Games]

If I had this lunchbox, right after I made my PB&J I would hold it up, edge-on, and blow along it hard before putting it inside. I'd also punch the Konami code into my cheese & crackers to get unlimited Capri Sun.

Here's a mod that guts a perfectly good (or bad) NES and repurposes it for food storage and transport. No putting Chiquita banana stickers all over this one, gang. In 20 years it'll totally pwn Josie and the Pussycats for collectible lunchbox supremacy. Creator fluctifragus shows how he made it, with helpful handmodelling from Sasquatch of Alpha Flight.

Nintendo Lunchbox [Instructables]

Back when I was your age, we played games that sucked and were no fun and we liked it, because it built character, and building character was fun (it was an early form of achievement farming). In fact, we used a slide projector to create finger-shadow combatants for Mortal Kombat, and it was a hoot when granddad had to roll the dice correctly in the correct order to get a fatality.

So that's a big brown blip on the bullshit radar, isn't it. Yeah, thought so. Instead for you, GamesRadar has a comprehensive timeline of all of the video game consoles of the 1970s and I was surprised to learn just how many there were besides the 2600 and the Pong console. Oh, some family friends had the Fairchild (above), that made visiting their home like going to a foreign country where the toilets flushed backward. Except for the Odyssey (actually, we only saw the Odyssey II) I don't think anything other than the Atari retailed in my hometown. Then again, we didn't get a McDonald's until 1980. We had to have our birthday parties at a typewriter repair shop. And we liked it!

Consoles of the 70s [GamesRadar]

Our disturbed friends at Retro Sabotage are all suspender-popping about their 20th sabotage since the site launched shortly before New Year's Eve. Remember, these are flash games that play normally (or close to it) before something goes horribly, comically wrong and beyond your control.

The latest is the "Missile Command Docudrama" although its message is, surprisingly, kind of serious. Tof from Retro Sabotage explained to me in an e-mail: "We wanted an "anti-sabotage" to celebrate the 20th release, and it's kind of a mirror to Mockumentary (though we got mails of people who somehow believed in that one)".

In the past I know we've linked to some of their other clever redos of classic arcade games. The Xevious Autopsy in particular is worth a look, and I think it's new since RetroSabotage last got a mention here.

Missile Command Docudrama [Retro Sabotage]

OK, OK, kinda misleading headline -- his production company is producing "Atari" a biopic about Nolan Bushnell, Pong's developer and Atari's founder. Paramount bought the rights yesterday. Indications are that he will star, but not knowing the story yet, I don't know if that means he would play Bushnell or, perhaps, another character through whom the story of Bushnell and Atari is presented.

The Hollywood Reporter describes "Atari" as drawing on themes of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", and "Tucker: The Man and His Dream." I was hoping it'd be a movie adaptation of "Space War" -- just two ships drifting to the centre of the screen, shooting each other. Maybe a love interest. Somewhere. Maybe not.

Wherever the story ends up, it sounds like it's getting very serious treatment, and the outlook sounds favourable for a well made biography. Plus I love period pieces, even if I've lived in the period described.

Leonardo Di Caprio to Star in 'Atari' [The Hollywood Reporter, via ComingSoon.net, thanks reader D Elfman]