Prologue: Powering On

It’s a beautiful sunny Saturday, and you decide to take a stroll through your neighborhood. After a hard week at work, you are glad to be outside. You take a turn down a street you’ve always ignored before. There’s nothing very special about it, but you see several cars parked outside of one house there. Is it a party? No… a yard sale. There are several tables set up, and people are examining all kinds of items. An old man with tiny glasses and a white beard is tottering from table to table, answering questions about everything from toasters to Legos to antique sewing machines. You don’t normally stop at these things, but something compels you to take a look around. One table has old record albums, trading cards, and toy soldiers. Another is all crystal doorknobs, all colors, shapes and sizes. There’s a giant moose head, a lot of tools, and one table has, hey! An old Atari system! You haven’t thought about Atari in years, but back in the day, you played all the games – Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, even that weird game… what was it called? You chuckle at the fake woodgrain sticker on it… why would a videogame system pretend to be made of wood? But it looks like everything is there – two joysticks, a set of paddles, and a stack of cartridges. You see Demon Attack, Yars’ Revenge, Home Run, and even E.T., that game so famously bad that it was buried out in the desert. You start remembering how you loved these games and think, hey, should I buy this thing? Just then the old man totters over.

“You want that old Atari?”

“Maybe,” you respond. “How much?”

“Well…” he says, “I’m not sure it works, but if it does, I’d take fifteen bucks for it. If it doesn’t work, well, it’s yours!”

Fifteen bucks seems fair for such an old beat up system. There’s a dusty portable TV at the end of the table, keeping the old man informed about a baseball game. He points at it. “You can plug it in there, see if it works.”

It’s all coming back to you now. You pick up an old screwdriver on the table and use it to hook up the “TV / GAME” switch, switch it to “GAME,” and then turn the knob on the TV with a THUNK to channel 3, turning the baseball game into a blizzard of static. Everything looks hooked up, now you just need to pick a game to test out. You pass by Combat, Missile Command, and Target Fun, and find at the bottom of the stack a cartridge different from the others. It’s just a plain black box, with a piece of masking tape on the end, a makeshift label reading “AtariQuest.” AtariQuest? You remember SwordQuest, but what was AtariQuest? Curious, you blow the dust off of it, and ka-chunk it into the cartridge slot. You flick the power switch to ON and… 

Click here to continue to Chapter 1