I got my 2600 in the Summer of '82.

So by that time there was a big library and a healthy set of regular releases. It was very easy to get one's head turned by newer games. By that time many new games were arcade ports and being a lover of the arcade it was very easy to be attracted to a port of an arcade game I liked. So it was very easy to overlook those earlier games.

However I was also very suspicious of licenced games (an attitude that has served me well to this day).

I was 16 in 1982 and had already written some computer programs on an Apple IIe in school and was in the middle of writing a version of Monopoly for that computer as part of my school project. This was in Apple BASIC so I had an appreciation of what computers could do. I was also aware of assembler and how much superior games written in that were to BASIC games.

Atari games still had an air of mystery to them but already I could see their limitations. I hated having too much flicker in a game and I was already figuring out that flicker tended to be associated with games that had to display multiple sprites at the same vertical height on screen...

Anyhow. Basically this meant me overlooking some of the older games in the catalogue for various reasons. Either I saw them as variations on games I already had or thought them just too simplistic and imagined I wouldn't get full value out of them. At that time these games were EXPENSIVE!!!!

I knew that some arcade ports would never match the originals. But sometimes I was too cautious and I avoided some of those ports and I probably would have enjoyed them in retrospect.

A triple A game then cost £30. In 1983 that equates to over £100 in today's money taking inflation into account. Being a teenager I had to maximise my opportunities for games that arose from gifted money or from amassing money from part time jobs and/or benefits I was able to claim while going to technical college to further my education while paying money into the house. I'm comfortable now but I come from a modest background. I still retain an attitude to spending money I learned from that time. I wouldn't pay £100 for a game nowadays. I just couldn't justify it unless it was funded from selling other games in my collection.

So I'll post here about games I avoided that I probably should have got. This is based on trying them out on Stella or by loading them onto my Harmony cart and playing them on actual hardware.