Playing Asteroid on Christmas Day, 1981. A new book, “Racing the Beam”, by two professors of media studies, Nick Montfort of MIT and Ian Bogost of Georgia Tech, discusses what it was like to program for the Atari 2600 – the first video game console. Michael Agger discusses the book in Slate: “Speak Atari – How the 2600 forged the video game future.”
A commenter on the Flickr page with this photo noted that the Atari console I am playing in the photo is a “Heavy Sixer” — only produced for one year in Sunnyvale, California before Atari switched to lighter, thinner plastics and moved production to Asia. It is apparently very rare; wish I had saved it.
photo: © j.r.mchale 2008