Atari Video Games Contest 2019

This is for a chance to win 2 Atari cartridges and a heat change Pac-Man Mug!

To Enter the Contest:

Email  your video game related story to briansmancave@gmail.com , this can be your earliest memory, your favorite memory or a fun story that you remember. Please try to keep it within a paragraph or two at the most. All entries will be posted below to be shared with others who have the same passion for video games. The contest closes on September 22, 2019 and I will draw a name on September 23, 2019.  The winner to be revealed on a video that week. Thank you and good luck to all who enter!

*note:  To ship outside of North America we will need to discuss any shipping costs if necessary. I can not guarantee free shipping outside North America.

Contestants Stories

1)  Joe Roop

My fondest memory of video games, was waking up on Christmas morning 1983 and my dad had hooked up the Atari with Pac-man ready to go. Little did I know he had stayed up all night playing it.

2) William Lohnes

My first memory of retro gaming was in the 1980s. My father was a truck driver one year he made it home for Christmas. He was late that morning we already opened presents I was a little disappointed. We got a Nintendo for the house but it was really my sister’s. In walks my father through the front door not knowing about us getting the Nintendo also not being technically up to date he has an Atari 2600 under his arm. That feeling right there is one I’ll never forget the excitement and happiness I felt opening it hooking it up to an old dual knob no remote your the remote color TV. I played Pac-man, pole position, and chopper command all day that Christmas. So now I play my Atari with my son and my wife.

3) Aaron Disomma

The most fondest video game memory is of my father and me. You see my father was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis but he had a very bad case of it which crippled him all of his life until his death in 1990. However this didn’t stop him from taking me to the local arcade to play one of my favorite games of all time Donkey Kong. Even though he would be in pain from swell joints as he could hardly walk we would still go together and play all sorts of wonderful games. He would sit me up on one of the local high chairs and throwing a quarter for me to play some games. But perhaps the best is the day I found out about a video game console the 2600. In the local arcade they was selling a carnival machine which I adored. However living in an apartment building at the time it was against rules and regulations to have such a machine as it was considered gambling. My father is so badly wanted to get me this machine one day my brother told my father that there was a way to play these games on something called a Home console. I was about six at the time. It would take to 1988 for me to get my first Home console however which was the NES. I’m very grateful I had these memories with my father.

4) Danny

My fondest memory is from 1990 ior 91 getting a NES, Playing Super Mario Bros. for the 1st time.

5) Blitzkrieg

My indoctrination into video games began with the Atari 2600 back in the mid 1980’s. The year must have been 85′ or 86′ but I remember watching my mom play this game on TV and I had no idea what and the hell it was but I was intrigued. Come to find out later the game she was playing was Demon Attack. After my mom passed the controller to me I was hooked. Back then I was playing games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Demon Attack, Combat, Frogger, Qbert, Space Invaders, and Pitfall. Those were games that I loved and grew up playing, I still play those games to this day. The Atari 2600 was my favorite console until a close friend showed me his NES console in 1987 or 1988.

By 1990 I began accustomed to playing the NES console and I heard that they were having a big video game competition in North America. It was the Nintendo World Championships 1990! I don’t know how I talked my father into taking me and my sisters to the Oklahoma City event but I succeeded and by June 7th 1990 we were heading on a 6 hour drive to the NWC. The timing was perfect because schools were out for summer and by this time I was 12 years old. Even though I had never played Rad Racer or Tetris before going to Oklahoma City I didn’t care, I just wanted to be a part of the excitement that was the NWC 1990. I did poorly in the competition but I still had a kick ass time as a young brat. In my mind it was the greatest video gaming event in the world and I still think that way about it after all these years. It was at the height of Nintendo’s Power throughout the land and Super Mario Brothers 3 was flying off the shelves faster than a speeding bullet. The NWC 1990 is still the only video game competition or video game expo that I’ve ever been to.

6) Ryan J. Navarro Cote

My favorite retro video game memories are from the Atari 2600. I was raised by a single Dad so he was busy a lot working. The one thing we’d do together a lot is play Atari 2600. I have many fond memories of playing Fishing Derby, Boxing and Dragster against each other. We’d also take turns playing Barnstorming and Stampede to see who could get a higher score. These memories have stuck with me and kindled my love for retro gaming to this day.

7) Antoine mourad

Back in 2004 there was an arcade near my house that me and my friends went almost everyday. One night i was alone and bored so i decided to go the arcades by myself, as i entered the place i noticed that it had a new game and that game was outrun 2. I got hooked after 1 race. Everything that I love was in that machine : fast cars, drifting, cool music and Sega!

First thing that i did when i got back home was call my friend and told him about outrun 2. Since nobody was working the next day we decided to go the arcades at 8 am. The thing is that my friend got hooked on outrun 2 just as much as me and that day we spent $150 each playing outrun 2. Our addiction kept growing and growing, spending a load ton of money everywhere we saw an outrun 2 cabinet cause one race was never enough. We bought the game on pc and psp the same day so we can race each other everywhere we went. I remember bringing my laptop and we would play that games for hours and hours, even with the home release we kept feeding the arcades a load ton of quarters. It’s 2019 and we didn’t change a bit ,like me and my friend says : we need to keep the tradition alive! Every time I see something about outrun 2, could be a picture, an ad, a ferrari on the street, what ever it may be, it reminds me all the super amazing good time that i spent playing outrun 2 !

8) Green Lantern HG

I remember back when I had Atari and Nintendo, like every family back then I’m pretty sure most of us went through this similarities where you had siblings, cousins or friends over to play. But! my real story comes from arcade games, when I was a little older I met I guy at school that at the time rarely spoke to him, one day out of the blue he asked if I had an NES which of course I did, he told he got a game as a gift and since he didn’t have one he asked if we could play it on my NES, I said sure…what the hell, at my house we got to talking and finding out we had very similar tastes, even on Airwolf.

The next following days I found an Airwolf arcade game on a little shop near school that only had that game and nothing else to do with games, that was always odd to me, anyway, I told my friend without knowing it would start a rivalry that to this day would continue if we had the game available to us, he became my best friend, he has been there for every bad thing that has happened to me since I’ve met him and for all the good things that I’ve had in my life he has been part of them, we’ve fought like brothers often do, we been friends for thirty years now this September…and if we find that Airwolf arcade game again…we’ll probably settle that rivalry once and for all…maybe?

But it doesn’t end there, on our escapades, while at another arcade we frequented at the time we met this guy who at first we hated because he would beat us at every fighting game we played against him, but as it happened we started talking to him and the duo became a trio… lol! He became a very good friend who I’ve known for twenty six years now if memory doesn’t fail me, every now and then we get together and play some games, life is weird because it lets you have great friends and then makes you work your butt off enough that you don’t have time for those little things like playing video games… that some how do more for you that you could’ve imagined… video games and great friends, through video games I’ve met my best friends, I’ve met other great people with similar taste in games and I can only hope it keeps going this way… video games and friends

9) Dallas Eli

My fondest memory was when I got an Intellivision for Christmas in 82 I think.

I opened one of the cartridges first thinking I’d open the smaller gifts to save the large ones for last figuring they were the best. The first one I unwrapped was Football and my parents said “You opened the wrong one first” so I then unwrapped the larger present that was the Intellivision and called my friends a few doors down the street all excited and told them “I got an Intellivision”, they had Atari.

The other games were SNAFU, Horse Racing, Space Battle,Sea Battle and Baseball.
Intellivision is my favorite system of all time and I still play it from time to time and have even gotten new games for it in ROM Format that I play on my LTO Flash Cart.

10) Steven Duncan

Well, my earliest childhood memory of video games is when I played pong. I was 5 yrs old, and the year was 1977. I remember the television it was played on. It was a huge Zenith television on a wooden frame. I call these electrical nightmares mammoth boxes. Anyways, I was sitting on a hardwood floor, wearing Superman underoos, watching a show called MASH. Then , in walks a friend of my mother’s holding a peculiar looking contraption with 2 knobs. The guy was tall, long hair and a beard. I’d swear to this day it was Jesus. Anyways I recall him and my mother sliding the “mammoth box” away from the wall. The man takes a flathead screwdriver, and hooks up the pong game to the television, and I begin playing it on a black and white screen. The rest is history…

11) Justin Kepner

My first Memory was some time around 1983 or 1984. My parents took me to a babysitter’s house during the day, and honestly, she was not a nice woman. The one thing I looked forward to though was when her son would come home from school. He would play Q-Bert on his Atari, and I would watch him play. I would ask him if I could try it, but he would not let me try to play the game. I knew I wanted to play them someday. A few years later my first system ended up being an Atari 2600.