Agreed, Johan!

I was a huge Atari fan back in the ’80s, and still am today—although I do remember when they hit the skids in ’83. There were a few contributing factors aside from the E.T. flop, most of which they outlined in the podcast. I do have to say though, right around that time, Colecovision came in and blew every one out of the water. I mean, BIGtime. Atari may have been the one to bring the arcade experience home, but Colecovision *really* brought the real arcade experience home, down to the pixel. Their games looked *EXACTLY* like the arcade! Donkey Kong, Zaxxon…you name it!

Anyone who was lucky enough to get a Colecovision for their birthday or Christmas (they were like $300 from what I remember) that year was suddenly everyone’s best friend, lol.

And yes, also in ’83 and ’84, Atari and Commodore 64 were head-to-head as far as home computing was concerned. Since I was already a diehard Atari fan, I got an Atari 800XL and started checking out Compute! magazines from my local library to get some coding on. Although it was intriguing to me to be able to code games at home, I just didn’t have the patience nor hunger to really delve in to the world of coding/programming, and I eventually fell off altogether. There were quite a few fun titles back then which I played a lot… Archon, Lode Runner, Rescue On Fractalus, Beta Lyrae, Conan the Barbarian, Jumpman… the list goes on and on!