HN
login
Strange Parodies of Atari 2600 Video Game Box Cover Art (2008)mightygodking.com

So I hit up a garage sale over the weekend and bought a genuine, working-condition Atari 2600, with a huge stack of games nearly mint in their boxes, for a

54 points•peter_d_sherman•1 day ago•31 comments•
#atari#art#video#box#cover#strange#game#parodies

31 comments

gorgoiler1 day ago
“Rainbow Tennis” was actually pretty good, if it’s a reference to International 3D Tennis! The games back then gave a frisson of the glamorous international world of the professional tour by changing the court ambience as follows:

Solid lime green: Wimbledon!

Hard brick red: Roland Garros!

Deep blue: the hard court ones!

Here’s an example of the, at the time in the mid 1980s, some pretty innovative 3D wire rendering in the game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1JorNBSs4Q

JdeBPabout 13 hours ago
It's Breakout and Super Breakout according to a list that gives the real titles in the comments section.
vunderbaabout 23 hours ago
These are great.

Salvador Dalí’s Pinball Thrills could also have been the title of the pinball segment on Sesame Street back in the day.

Every sport ever in pong form was completely true. Magnavox Odyssey Pong + a crappy blue cellophane transparency overlay == ice hockey!.

Anyone remember Slalom for the NES?

https://imgpb.com/hvszd

tobadzistsiniabout 8 hours ago
That's a pisser. Thank you xoxo
Panzerschrekabout 24 hours ago
Was it allowed to use such cover art having nothing to do with in-game (pretty-limited) graphics?
krappabout 24 hours ago
Yes. And it's actually part of the reason the video game market crashed in the 80s, because of how misleading the artwork was.

This is why the first Nintendo games released in the US had explicit images of the game graphics on the cartridges.

Lercabout 23 hours ago
It's strange, I learned Forth on the Atari and found that the cover was a surprisingly accurate depiction of how I turned out.
vunderbaabout 23 hours ago
Yeah I think the first-party early titles (Excitebike, etc) were definitely more representative of the game play.

But third parties definitely didn't respect this. I'm sure everyone who grew up in this era remembers the infamous Megaman cart by Capcom [1].

One of the things that Nintendo learned from Atari was that massive amounts of shovelware did not help their cause.

As a third party company, you were actually limited to a certain number of games you were allowed to release per year in North America (five I believe). There were ways around that, like Konami forming the subsidiary Ultra.

Additionally they locked the system behind the 10NES chip that made unauthorized game production difficult (unless you pulled the classic Taiwan voltage snap trick or just blatantly copied the source from the US Copyright Office like Tengen).

[1] - https://imgur.com/a/5hUUDnM

musicaleabout 23 hours ago
> the first Nintendo games released in the US had explicit images of the game graphics on the cartridges

This is why the ESRB was created.

smcinabout 21 hours ago
"Buzz Aldrin’s Space Rainbow Tennis" just needs a four-fingered sentient alien opponent. The great man would have approved...

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

Related stories