This year marks the 15th anniversary of Ghostbusters, the 1984 hit comedy starring Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson. Directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Akroyd and Ramis, the movie grossed almost $240 million in the U.S., spawning a sequel,...

Being a fan of horror and sci-fi, I remember being rather excited to see a video game version of the claustrophobic cinematic masterpiece, Alien. It must be a fantastic and frenetic shoot-em-up, I thought. Probably one of those three-dimensional type games like CBS'...

What happens when you take elements of the arcade classics Joust, Defender, and Kickman, toss in some Disney magic, a clever control scheme, and engaging game play? You get a delightful cocktail known as Dumbo's Flying Circus for the Atari 2600. This was intended to...

Odds are, if you consider yourself a “Classic Gamer,” you’ve seen the movie “Tron” 112.4 times. That number comes from the fact that we know you scan the movie to the “Space Paranoids” scene and then straight to when Flynn gets digitized and brought into the computer...

When I was growing up, there was a quaint little country store about a mile from home called Maloney's. In addition to candy, milk, cigarettes, and trinkets, they featured two arcade games for their patrons to play. Most of the biggest hits cycled through this little...

When I was in high school, the only friend of mine who had an Atari videogame was Rosalind Goldberg. Roz, as we called her, was from a family that not only owned the most ultimate high tech video game player available—the Atari 2600—but also had a home computer! They...

As collectors of classic video games we know how frustrating it can be when we hit upon a dry period of finding classic cartridges and game systems. We know the feeling of wanting to spit nails when seeing the mother lode of rare cartridges walk off with somebody else...

An underdog in the arcade became a winner in the living room. Based on Universal’s sleeper arcade game, Cosmic Avenger became a huge hit for the Colecovision. As with many of their arcade ports, Coleco took a chance in bringing this game to the home market. However,...

Midnight Magic - The game that brought it all back for me. I remember when I first saw this game for the Atari 2600. It was on clearance at a video store in one of our local malls. Having played the game of the same name for the Apple back in the early 80’s, I thought...

What defines a rare cartridge? All collectors have different interpretations of the word, but to me it has a simple meaning: “A cartridge that is harder to find than most carts.” Here we’ll examine the many factors that can make a cartridge rare. (Examples cited are...

Welcome to the first CVG 101 column. My name is Lee K. Seitz, and I've been actively collecting classic video games since the late 1980s. The purpose of this column is to help educate newcomers to the hobby of collecting classic video games. Each issue I'll choose a...

Back in the day when arcades and corner markets were after school hangouts, one could expect to hear the “whacka-whacka” sounds of Pac-Man, the lasers firing up in Defender and the crackling, shooting sound of Centipede. There weren’t any life-like PCM samples or 3D...