My very first home video game system was the Bally Astrocade.

We got it for Christmas one year, my parents ordered it from a Montgomery Ward catalog.

There were many versions of this system, ours was labeled astrocade The Professional Arcade.

The game selection was pretty sweet, and unlike the Atari 2600’s the cartridges didn’t need blown on after repeated use to work.

Astro Battle was my favorite game on the system. It was a Space Invaders rip off, but man was it fun.

Another cool feature of the Bally Astrocade was the fact that you could try your hand at programming in BASIC. We had a BASIC cartridge and some programming books and spent hours programming. The results weren’t that stunning, maybe a red line would streak around the screen, or just dots randomly bounce, but it was still cool to say you were actually doing computer programming.

What was your favorite gaming system from the 70’s or 80’s? Comment below.

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