Atari 5200 Box

Atari 5200 (4 Joystick version)

5200 Controller

5200 Trackball

pics courtesy of Atariage.com

THE RANT: This was the game system featured in that movie "Cloak and Dagger," the one with the kid who finds a video game that when you beat it shows some kind of secret plans at the end. Pretty good movie as I remember it. Still haven't gotten my hands on one of these personally but I do remember messing around with it at a friends house a few times as a kid. The graphics and sounds are comparable to the Atari 8 bit computers, albeit more colorful and solid in most cases. Most of the games are faithful arcade translations of classics like (once again) Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede. etc. There was a problem in that although the games looked more like their arcade versions, by the time this system was released (about 1982) most of those games were a few years old already and people wanted good translations of NEW arcade games, not better versions of games they'd been playing since 1979. Atari made the second mistake of not allowing it so you could play 2600 games on this machine, as well as still throwing the majority of their resources behind the 2600, so you get the "competing with yourself" quandary that so many game companies since seem to have fallen into. Which one would you buy for your kids, one game system that is cheap and has 1000 games already or another that is expensive but only has 35? Most people went with the 2600 (sadly for them.) Which is really too bad because in my opinion this system was really superior to the 2600 and Intellivision in every way. Most of the games run smooth and faster, have semi-decent graphics and capture the arcade feel rather well. Atari should've thrown it's weight behind this thing and let that aging piece of garbage 2600 go the way of the dinosaur, it might have prevented the crash in 84. Too bad. 

THE GOOD: Most of the games are pretty faithful arcade translations of classics that got the shit job treatment on the 2600. Seems like the programmers took their time and really wanted to put out some good products. Nowadays 5200 stuff is on the rare side, but not too expensive (old videogame junk usually never is.) A new system with a few games will run about $50 -75 bucks. 

THE BAD: Since Atari got bootie-ranked with the stupid stick they didn't support this system as much as the 2600. Thus while most of the games are good there's only about 50-60 of them. Some unreleased games have been found and put on cart homebrew style. The controllers were analog sticks, which really didn't work well with maze-type games. Also analog sticks tend to break so that the stick won't center properly. So don't throw them.

THE UGLY:The people on the boxes of early video game systems. How come they're always all white?