Ah, the venerable Action 52 cartridge, long the butt of video game jokes everywhere. This cartridge was probably some greedy bastard’s idea of a get-rich-quick scheme in the video game world: throw together 52 crappy, buggy, quickly developed “games” into one cartridge and sell it for $79-99 (originally $200!) a pop. Needless to say, Active Enterprises didn’t last long. These days, the NES version of the Action 52, while containing some of the worst video games of all time, is also one of the most sought-after carts by collectors due to its rarity. And the Genesis version isn’t any better, by the way.

My question to you is: did anybody actually have an Action 52 cart (NES or Genesis) back in the day? If so, what are your memories of it? Did you like The Cheetahmen?

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Sensationalist journalism in a 1984 consumer computer magazine? Nah.

This scan is from a May 1984 article in Personal Computing by Craig Zarley titled “The Pleasures and Perils of Computing at Home.” The article’s main angle focuses on the numerous computer advertisements of the day that pictured an excited, wide-eyed family huddled around a computer while collectively enthralled by whatever is happening on the screen. First-time computer buyers got a rude awakening, however, when they took their new machines home and instead found most of the family competing for personal time with the “new family member.”

Anyone who grew up with a sibling and not enough computers to go around can attest to this phenomenon, yet I find it funny that Personal Computing turned it into the cover article of a magazine. This means that either consumer-level personal computers were so new at the time (and they were) that issues like this seemed novel, or else the magazine was really desperate for material. Perhaps the correct answer lies somewhere between both extremes.

Still, I love those old “family” ads, even if they are unrealistic.

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Fresh from the Forgettable Video Game Accessories Department comes the Skywriter “Stick Station,” a $15 piece of wood for your Atari 2600 joystick. Nobody knows what it really does, but at least you’ll have a good place to put your frosty joystick so it doesn’t leave those annoying “joystick rings” all over your coffee table during the humid summer months.

A Bit of (Fictional) Trivia: The president of Skywriter, Larry Egler, was once famously quoted as saying, “There will be a Stick Station on every table in America by 1990.” Few people know that it was a misquote that has been erroneously reprinted in many books on video game history. In truth, Mr. Egler said, “There will be a table on every Stick Station in America by 1990,” a prediction that actually came true: all remaining Stick Stations in the continental United States are now being used to shore up wobbly table legs.

[ From Computer Games, June 1984. Special thanks to McPhail Hunt for donating the issue. ]

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First, the good news. Your little brother has learned to play video games with five controllers at once — an amazing feat of skill. The bad news? He’s sitting on one of your joysticks.

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So…you’d like to be a Video Games Inventor, eh? Well, sorry, but you have to look like the guy in the lower left. And to do that, you have to go back in time to 1982 and work for Magnavox. By the way, that guy is only twenty years old.

(Ok…the article says 35, but still.)

This scan came from the premiere (Winter 1982) issue of “Odyssey² Adventure Club Magazine,” Magnavox’s official monthly magazine / propaganda pamphlet for Odyssey² fans — sorta like Nintendo Power these days. Actually, “Odyssey² Adventure” is more a newsletter than a magazine, since all the issues I have are only about fifteen pages long. Nonetheless, this article is an amusing look into the world of Odyssey² game developers, straight from the horse’s mouth.

A quick compare-and-contrast of these guys with Atari’s “pot-smoking hippie” game programmer image of the late 1970s and even today’s “early twenties slacker” programmers makes the Odyssey folks look like a bunch of straight-laced leprechaun engineers. Ralph Baer, what hath thou wrought!

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Just a quick update from VCF 9.0: I had a great day yesterday at the festival. Everyone I talked to was friendly, courteous, and obviously quite passionate about vintage computers. All in all, they’re a great crowd to mull around in.

The VCF exhibits and marketplace were cool, but the Apple 30th birthday session was even cooler. Steve Wozniak, Chris Espinosa, Daniel Kottke, and Randy Wigginton were on hand to discuss Apple’s early days in front of a packed audience upstairs in the Computer History Museum. I chatted with all of them after the session and they’re all great guys. Woz, despite feeling under the weather yesterday, was kind enough to stay after, brave a long line of computer nerds like me, and sign copies of his new autobiography iWoz and anything else (t-shirts, Apple hardware, manuals) that people wanted him to sign. I told him about the Woz Halloween costume I suggested last week on VC&G and he laughed.

Great times all around!