It’s only October, but I’ve already racked up my first Christmas Miracle.
Look what we spotted at Toys R Us yesterday. (Go ahead and get your pens out. You’re gonna need to start writing to Santa for this pronto…)
This thing of beauty can be yours (again) for $40 at Toys R Us. I am still marveling.
Yes, Virginia. It is an Atari. With JOYSTICKS. And (count ’em) NINETY-TWO built-in games.
(And yes, one of them is Space Invaders.)
Tell XBox 360 (or whatever the cool kids are playing this week) to step off. There’s a new, really old, game in town.
92 games. That means some of them are weird useless stuff like Yars’ Revenge. But that also means there’s Centipede. And PONG.
I wish I had some heart-warming Tiny Tim-esque story of my favorite Christmas past. But I don’t. My favorite Christmas EVER was the year Santa cracked under societal pressure and placed an Atari beneath our tree.
Consider my world ROCKED.
I cannot tell you (or dare admit to my children) the number of lost hours of my youth that were spent fighting intergalactic battles with digitized blobs called “asteroids.”
Too many. So so many.
But eventually I perfected how to swing from a “Pitfall” vine like a tiny pixillated Indiana Jones, landing on that crocodile’s eyeball with razor-sharp accuracy time after time after time. Oh, it took hours of commitment, but I saw it through, people. I saw it through.
Atari taught me that.
This is the stuff ’80s-era childhood memories are made of — and that family game nights should now have to endure.
So on Day 20 of my 31 Days of Fun/Funny/Funtastic Stuff for Families, might I suggest stuffing those stockings a little early? Just get ’em all chock full of ’80s joy and rapture.
Your kids will rise up and call you LAME.
But listen. We fought too hard to rid the world of marauding super-sized caterpillars. And now they’re back. It’s our duty as children of the ’80s to grab a joystick and equip a new generation for the battle.
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Tales from the Crib 