I dunno how old you are (if you were 16 in '91, we're about the same age) but at age 31, I consider myself part of the Atari generation (as opposed to those who grew up on the NES, or SNES, etc) and I remember around 1980 or 81, before I finally got a 2600 in '82, going to Sears with my dad and playing the Atari VCS and the Intellivision (or rather, the Sears Video Arcade and Sears Super Video Arcade). I think Combat was on the 26 and I know Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack was on the INTV. I also remember almost literally drooling over the old Sears and JC Penney xmas catalogs, with their pages upon pages upon pages of Atari and Intellivision games...screenshots for every single game!
I'm creeping up on 31 (a few more months). And yes, I consider myself part of the Atari generation rather than the NES. I well remember the real golden age of the arcades (not the fighting game craze of the 90s, but the good stuff from the early 80s), Pac-Man Fever, video game cartoons on Saturday morning TV and all that jazz. I scratch my head whenever people complain about the "mainstreaming" of video games as if that was a recent trend. Video games were HUGE in the early 80s, I think they may have penetrated the mass market even more than today. I mean c'mon you had a silly song about Pac-Man breaking into the top 10, Pac-Man cereal, and everyone I knew (even adults) were crazy about arcades and home consoles.
However, I don't really remember anything other than Atari when it came to home consoles. I didn't "discover" Intellivision until around 1988 when a buddy bought one at a flea market, and we played Sea Battle just for laughs between bouts of Simon's Quest and Double Dragon on the NES. The 2600 was huge though, all my friends had one. My parents wouldn't relent on buying me a "game machine" though, so I had to make do with an antiquated Pong machine that was a hand-me-down from my cousins. Then home computers came along and my parents finally gave up and bought me an Atari 800 in 1983. Of course, the 800 was really a souped up 5200 (or rather, the 5200 was a cut-down 800
) and I had many good times playing games on it. I actually used that computer for games, programming, and word processing all the way up to 1990 when the keyboard finally failed and I made the switch to a PC-compatible. I don't remember the 5200 being all that popular either; I only knew one kid that had one, but I recall being really impressed by the 5200 version of Pac-Man (partly because the 2600 port was so bad). One of my cousins had a Colecovision, but the only game he ever had was Donkey Kong Jr. And I vividly remember "the crash" if only for the huge bins packed with 25 cent cartridges that sat outside of KB Toys until literally 1985 or 86! The funny thing is that KB never sold all those carts, and in the late 80s when video games picked up again they started selling the old 2600 and 5200 carts again. The crazy thing is that they marked them back up to like $8-10. I remember peeling off a price sticker and seeing the old marked down 25 cent sticker underneath
.
Sears rocked for video games, I'm surprised your store wasn't the same steve666. The one we used to go to had a huge video game section during the Atari era, then it switched over to home computers (mainly the Commodore 64) in the mid-80s before going back to video games with the NES in the late 80s. Montgomery Wards also used to sell lots of video games; that's actually where I got my Atari 800 computer, and I have distinct memories of playing Ghouls N Ghosts on their demo Genesis, plus buying a few Turbo games like Sidearms there. So add Montgomery Wards to the list of retailers that used to sell Turbo stuff, they had a special electronics/video game section with its own name (like a store-within-a-store) but I can't remember what they were called.
