Does anyone find it funny to me that from about 1998 on backward, the consumer base and the government was interested in exposing and punishing corporate corruption? Doesn't anyone find it weird that it seems our laws in our human societies are becoming more and more slanted toward corporations and rich people in power, like celebrities and politicians. YOu can be a serious drug addict and roam around Hollywood cracked out on Bath Salts and Meth Amphetamines if you had a star TV Series or a best selling album, but if you're a victim of your own way of euthanising yourself through whatever you could scrape up off the street you're forced into a "rehab" system that treats you like you are in jail, all the while some sanctimonious paper pusher tells you it's "your fault" that you "Suffer" like some kind of self-righteous preschool teacher! Isn't it insane how we live in a country where Doller General, Dollar Tree, and the $.99 cent Store can all be bought by ONE company, and rather than calling it a Monopoly we call it a good business decision? Isn't it additionally weird that almost NONE of these stores sell anything a buck or under anymore either? Strange how in 1998 Microsoft forced everyone to use Internet Explorer, and the DOJ had a huge "Monopoly" case against Microsoft like they did Ma Bell back in the day with the phone system, but now in 2024 Microsoft could probably buy Apple and Amazon and be considered the greatest Tech Giant on the face of the planet - not a Monopoly. We only have 3 broadband ISPs, you can't afford to make a new car company anymore from scratch, and then we have this - all that legacy entertainment you had as a child, all those old video games you saw for $3, $5, $10 in the thrift shop, are now being ripped off by places like Wata Auctions, and of course, Nintendo - the "Big N" I'm referring to - is trying to cover up their legacy by hoarding a vault of legacy entertainment that was dear to many of us growing up. Yeah, let's tackle a less important part of the arguement. That's why things like Lido Music (The Cars) or Paul Dean still get my money.

Now, this shit is nothing new, I as a fan of music, video games, and other forms of entertainment, as well as a creator in some of those avenues myself, have already witnessed all the hells the 1990's internet unleashed upon business and business unleashed upon the late 1990's internet: Napster & MP3 file sharing inciting the enmity of the music industry, and Nintendo has been suing and shutting down ROM Sites and downloaders since the late 1990's when Emulation started and everyone was using NESticle and A26 to play old video games!

My current stance on the CURRENT video game industry, personally, is this. You'll never see me buy a new console, because there's nothing NEW I'm interested in. I'm 41 years old, I don't feel like learning one of these newfangled, highly complex video games for entertainment. The shit I play on AdItUp on my phone to save on my phone bill can be confusing enough at times! And I'm a tech guy! I'm quite happy kicking back with a copy of Pitfall! with some old school 80's New Wave and AOR on the turntable, and a headstocked guitar with monophonic pickups on it and a mechanical whammy bar.

What inspired this quasi-rant, quasi-opinion-piece, and quasi-attempt to just talk about my thoughs of logic and reason, was coming home from work and seeing THIS video....

You know what, I'm not totally anti making a profit, which some guys - typically republicans - would want you to believe. It's just I'm actually smart enough to understand what sells, and what does not, and one thing I can say, is the only reason Nintendo even has a place in the current video game landscape, is because they have about 50% of the market - which is young kids, playing their stuff. But the thing Nintendo forgets - which ATARI seems to friggin remember despite being dead for about 2 1/2 decades - is that these kids are going to grow up to be nostalgic adults someday, and they are missing out on a market!

Where IT All Began (1995-1999) - The "Retro Gaming" thing started in the mid 1990's, I was there, I grew up as a teenager during that time. 1995 was the true "rise" of the internet, because of a "perfect storm" of technologies and products turning up at the same time. First off, Intel corrected and fixed their buggy INtel Pentium CPUs and made them less expensive, allowing Pentium Powered IBM Compatibles to be just affordable enough for people wanting to use a computer. Windows 95 made getting on the internet easier so your average lamestreamer did not have to call their uncle geek as many times to help them "get connected". It also provided "Direct X" which made gaming more accessible because prior to that, to run the lastest, most high tech games like Doom or Ultima VII, you had to spend hours tweaking your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS Files to get the game to so much as start up let alone work with full sound and video at a proper speed on your old 80486. Microsoft started using Mosaic's codebase (also the beginning of Mozilla FIrefox) to leverage into Internet Explorer - their main browser until 2022, and Netscape took another part of it and made their own browser, Netscape Navigator. All these GUI Powered Windows 95 apps paired with easier internet connectivity, and the rise of mainstream ISPs like Knowlogy, CompuServe, and AOL sending out free CD's and Floppies in the mail even fi you did not even own a computer, helped get the lame....er....MAINstream on the internet!

But here's the thing, who were the people who were actually USING the internet. Initially, it was just Scientists, College Professors, Doctors, and other STEM field people. It was a dry place of KNOWLEDGE, REAL knowledge. Few pictures, rarely any pretty fancy interfaces. IT was all about INFORMATION. That's why we called it hte INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY!

So where do the video games - ie console games - come in?

Well, you know who else hangs around a University and needs to get knowledge - that's right, COLLEGE STUDENTS! And of course, their baby boomer parents, if they were technologically supportive, bought their college GEn X kid a brand new Pentium computer with WIndows 95 in 1995 to use for school. Some Pentium 90 somesuch with 16MB of 72 pin SIMM RAM and a 1.2GB HDD, and Windows 95. Some of these college students were gamers, programmers, and maybe they even bought the computer themselves working hours upon hours at the local McDonalds to afford it.

Emulation was not invented to "preserve" the past initially. Most of the early emulators I remember, like Paul Slocum's A26 or Mott's original LInux based version of Stella for the ATari 2600. There was BloodLust Software's NESticle which was the first REALLY GOOD NES Emulator. These were pet projects of electronics/programming/retro-gaming enthusiasts meant for fun, not profit, and meant to allow people to play video games on their computer for free. Games which, at the time, not a single games company was interested in continuing in it's original format!

In 1995, if you wanted an ATari 2600, all you had to do was walk into your local Thrift Shop with a $20 bill and you could have an Atari 2600 VCS with 24 games, 12 controllers, 3 RF Switches, hell, you might even get an old CRT TV with knobs and rabbit ears thrown into the deal, may even have been the TV that Atari was hooked up to in 1982! You could buy NESes and Cartridges galore at Garage Sales for $5-10-15.00! Nobody in middle school or high school in 1995 wanted that "old ass shit" - no, the teenagers wanted NEW stuff: N64, Sony Playstation, maybe the SNES at the oldest, and those you could wander into any local KB Toys, Funcoland, or Toys R' Us and buy one brand new at retail price, and all the games you want for around $45 apiece - sometimes less if it was a less popular or lesser known title.

And the games companies knew this, if they even still existed. In 1995, Atari was mothballed and sold to a part of Hasbro or some company that made floppy drives as a brand, and sold NOTHING video game related if anything at all. They did not care, an entire catalog of over 400+ games sold from 1977-1990 were ripe for the taking online in the now infamous "ROM" Format. And nobody involved, not even Nolan Bushnell - gave a shit! If anything, they were very appreciative that they were being remembered in a world where nobody cared about your old 286 PC or your old ATari 2600 - at least, nobody in the mainstream. For as supportive as the people of Atari, and ATari itself more recently, have been of their legacy fanbase, the more respect they have gained that they never had in the beginning due to all the wild stories about the late 70's/early 80's Atari when Tramiel tried to shift to computers, Warner Bros did not compensate develoers right, and Nolan sold it to the W.B. who ruined the company's unique atmosphere. Atari is kind of like the Anti-Nintendo, a young business upstart with a lax corporate culture early on, that turned into a big business juggernaught that bothered everyone including the big 100+ year old Hanafuda game card maker Nintendo with their 1980's shennanigans that ultimatley lead to their company's demise by the time the 1990's came around. If Atari had carried on like Nintendo, we never would have gotten cool things like HOward Scott Warshaw's "Once Upon Atari". And what's funny is When Atari did start selling their old I.P.'s, their recreations were accurate, and I never saw Atari suing the pants off AtariAge or any other site that hosted ROMs of their no-longer-available software - a stark contrast to what Nintendo was doing.

The NES I Feel officially became retro in 1997, when Nintendo fully discontinued the "Top Loader" NES. I Remember seeing it on a field trip with the school band in Myrtle Beach and makign the hard resistance NOT to pick a brand new top loader up in the box for $35 brand new. Once this was discontinued, that's when Nintendo needed to make their choice, on whether to be a leader and create an avenue for their long time fans who like the originals as they are - unmodified from the original 8/16/64-bit format - or let us freely distribute those legacy franchises as they became "obsolete" on the internet for our own consumption.

The argument that Nintendo made back then, and a strong one, was that a lot of those IP were still for sale new in the stores. A particular argument would be Super Mario All Stars for the Super Nintendo - a game I got on the day it was released with my SNES with proof of purchase for a whopping $241 total for the console plus that privledge. But the thing people need to realize, is Super Mario All-STars, and Super Mario Bros 1/2/3 for the regular 8-bit Nintendo were NOT the same game. It's the same reason I don't play the mobile, Game Boy, or other ports of Dragon Warrior, because I"m not looking for an "improvement" or a "rehash" - the originals are great as they are! Because to me, that's what was interesting. Not some new remake that makes the game easier, adds a ton of QOL enhancements - when I pick up a game like Super Mario Bros. Castlevania, or Dragon Warrior, I 'm looking to re-live the experience I had as a kid or a teenager on an old beat to hell grey NES munching on a Papa Johns large pepperoni pizza and kicking back in my beat old dinner room chair in my poster clad bedroom at 15! Not a new retread of an old concept that does not look, feel, or sound the same as what I remember because "Technological Advancement". To me, those advances can ruin the franchise for me if it changes the feel and look too much.

But of course, starting about 1999-2000 or so, Nintendo, probably inspired by the same panic in the Music Industry over people sharing music over Napster, decided to go after the ROM Sites. But they did not go just after the ROM sites offering currently available games that ran on their current hardware - which at the time would have been the N64 and the GameCube, but rather, ALL sites hosting ANY Nintendo product, beit Arcade Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros. for the NES, or some weird old Japanese Famicom release like "Bird Week". And this same old trope has come back every 5-10 years where the Big N goes after anyone hosting their legacy material.

Now, there WERE Some times where it indeed WAS warranted. Such as the NES re-release of the Game Boy Advance that had the NES Theme, and they re-released several classic NES Games for it in the original 8-bit format. I can see that, now Super Mario Bros. is back on the shelves, but they should only be going after those 4-5 titles they released, not every single game in the entire 480 cartridge or more catalog.

Another time was the Nintendo Wii, I feel, this is when Nintendo really hit their stride in the 2000's-2010's, with the Wii and WiiU consoles. Offering your old IPs on those platforms via the virtual console lead me to have a different view. Because now you COULD buy those games, new, for the Wii, with a decent enough approximation to enjoy them like you remembered them, on your modern TV, with a modern console. Honestly, I see the WIi and WiiU as Nitnendo's last masterpieces. But along with those consoles birth being a great reason to NOT support free emulation because you could buy the games readily on a modern platform without them being watered down, modified, or ruined via "enhancement", the obsolescence of those consoles are just giving all the more reason for white-hat-hacking and reverse engineering Nintendo's more recent older hardware for preservation of history and the continued enjoyment of their legacy content.

It seems, starting with the switch, Nintendo became somewhat adversarial towards "retro" again. I'm not sure why this is, becuase now it's a HUGE market, they have two whole generations of people who grew up on their 8-bit consoles, hell, maybe even three, since some of Gen Z started with them too. They have two generations of 16, 64, and the GameCube - not to mention the 10 something odd iterations of "Game Boy" they released. And not all of us want a first person 3D remake of a once 2D side scroller, top-down 8-bit shooter, or old JRPG localized for America.

Meanwhile, ATARI has been making STRIDES! Everyone, including me, laughed at them when they talked about that glorified RetroPie box called the "Atari VCS" in 2019. Because that's not exactly what people are looking for for almost all of Atari's user base. 99.9% of the "Atarians" around right now, including myself, are older people - 40+, who were introduced to video games through the Atari 2600 - maybe some outliers with the 5200, 7800, or 8-bit computers (400/800/1200/2000). So Atari took what they made from that, and put it into something I've been talking about for DECADES - a friggin REISSUE 2600 basically - though technically an emulation box that also runs 7800 games.

Back in high school in the late 1990's - being as I'm a big Guitar guy, I always saw huge potential in video game manufacturers reproducing their old products as "Reissues". I always thought a cool idea would be an Atari 2600 VCS 77' "HEavy Sixer" Reissue - like the old 1977 console, just with modern, more reliable parts! Maybe even the extra space inside used for better video circuitry or some on-board games. Heck, they could just use the same basic electronics and make multiple reissues for whichever version of the console you were most nostalgic for, like the 1980 Woody 4-switcher to the right!

But what's nuts is my "pipe dream" actually became somewhat true (below) - when ATari released the 2600+ in 2023! Seriously, I have to wonder if some Atari executive or engineer got on the wayback machine and found one of my old postings from age 15 about a friggin "Reissue" Atari console! Seriously Nintendo - take a look at these pictures - THIS is how it should be done! What we get, even though emulation, it's still an accurate enough item to tick all the boxes, you're sitting in front of your television, playing the actual ATari games, on an actual cartridge, on an actual console, with a actual CX-40 joystick (or any other controller you wish), and let's just say, this new run of Atari has opened the FLOODGATES for monetization of their old items....

What new items? Well, the darned thing ships with updated CX-40 joysticks, and CX-45 paddles are available for all your Breakout and Pong needs. They just re-released the one thing I've always wanted - the bloody GAMEPAD for the 7800 - which I'm for sure buying one for my vintage Sears Telegames light sixer! You got a pack-in multicart with 10 games on it (Adventure, Combat, Dodge' Em', Haunted House, Maze Craze, Missile Command, RealSports Volleyball, Surround, Video Pinball, Yar's Revenge) - and it's not just some menu driven hack with modernized graphics and sound, or inaccurate - it's the real bloody games, switchable via DIP SWITCHES in back like something from the 80's! NAILED IT!

I'm not being paid to say any of this BTW! I'm just saying, if you want to look at how to handle your legacy IP As a video game company - take a look at ATARI! Atari in 2024 is a representation of how to do things with vintage IP RIGHT.

And you know what, Atari didn't sue AtariAge for hosting every single 2600 game in their catalog, or helping people develop new games, or critiqing things that might not have been handled properly, they actually BOUGHT AtariAge (which is the one thing I DO Question of theirs a little bit for obvious reasons), and it seems, have not been antagonistic in the slightest - so NIntendo THIS Is what we're all waiting for......

The NES Classic was a step in the right direction, but the problem with this, was artificial inflation of the systems' value through hoarding by people who were looking to make a quick buck. By separating the games from the console, makes the console utterly worthless. But think about it, an NES reissue that works with your old NES games, guarantees they will work without taking the whole bloody thing apart and bending pins on an antiquated connector design designed to make the game system "look like a VCR", and know it will work with all of our original hardware and peripherals - what is there NOT to like about this? Sure, it's the "same" idea, but Atari did something right with the 2600+, I think THIS is the future of retro-gaming. Not some all-in-one micro-sized facsimilie of the original with proprietary controllers. Heck, Nintendo is out ahead because they don't need to resort to Emulation, we already have several NOAC (NES on a Chip) SoC based solutions already that are more than adequate enough to do the job.

And you know what this means, Nintendo could reproduce, or even make improved versions of the original NES Cartridges - and have an entire user-base TWICE as big, because now you have the people like myself who still have our beloved old NES-001 consoles and Top Loaders who will buy the games we don't have, or even new ones if they are willing to strike up deals with independant developers to help generate some NEW classics on the platform. They could even provide rarer, less as easy to obtain releases - such as Dragon Warrior II-IV, on larger compilation cartridges that work on the original hardware, and the current hardware, and maybe even have their own siloed flash or battery-backed savegame system for each game. Ya' know, IMPROVE the original product without LOSING what made it cool in the first place.

And what this would do is say "hey, we care about our legacy fanbase", and it does not mean they need to drop making a new console for the next generation, actually, it means if they played their engineering cards right, they could INCREASE their profit margin by offering a legacy product for those interested - which for the NES is almost double that of the 2600 - and still continue innovating in the modern field. In a way, Atari is innovating right now by taking the approach they have, a ball that Atari and many others have missed. Heck, I even feel this way about vintage computers - but we already are getting our hardware issues fixed in the form of things like the Hand 386, Palm 8088, and Laptop 386 - if they made a good Vortexx86 SATA based megabeast 486 system, they'd have probably the best option out of antyhing you could find on e-bay to run old DOS games on actual hardware!

But as long as Nintendo, and even some other game companies, continue to act antagonistic towards their fanbases, I won't be surprised if we see a return and a move to things similar to P2P file sharing, and even possibly sharing ROMS between each other on flash media. Because it just seems to me, the problem with this old stuff, is when these companies start getting greedy, or wanting to bury the hearitage that put them where they are now in the first place, in the name of "Technological Advancement". Videogames have transceneded their "Wow factor" quite a bit, nobody really gives a shit about 3D, photorealistic graphics anymore - unless you're playing some kind of hyper-realistic simulation game or want something that actually FEELS real, but some of us really like the look, sound, and aesthetic of older bit-depths of digital entertainment and would be wholly willing to spend money on new stuff if it were available. The ball is in the company's court.

Worst case scenario, I could see Nintendo alienating their fanbase on the vintage side, leading to one of two things - either yearsa of litigation before a change of guard where nobody cares and all they do is make new stuff based on old IP and start leaving people on the internet alone, or seek a financially lucrative solution. Choice is theirs. If it got bad enough, Nintendo could go the way of Atari - as much as 20 years of silence while the company gets sold from company to company until some nostalgic old person with some investors brings it back as a retro-only company - like Atari seems to be doing.