I spent way too much in the last month on presents. I bet you did too. But when I look at things in perspective, what I spent pales in comparison to what my parents spent close to 50 years ago.
$200 was a lot of money
For $200 in 1977 you could make a car payment on a luxury car. You could pay the better parts of a month’s rent in a lot of places. Or, you could get your kids an Atari.
This was the Atari Video Computer System. We tend to call it the Atari 2600, although it wouldn’t be known by that name for about another half-decade. By today’s standards, it’s far beyond primitive. Seriously this was what one of the hot games looked like at the time:
These were some of the most advanced graphics ever seen on a computer system at any price. Yeah, really. But regardless, it was the must-have toy in the late 1970s and you either had one or you begged for one. There’s only one problem:
It cost $200.
Yes, for $179 and tax, you could have this device with its one included game (which looked like this.)
That’s close to $1,000 in today’s money depending on how you look at it. And of course everyone wanted more than one game. So in other words, you’re talking about something that costs as much as an iPhone 15 Pro and lets you do one thing. Seriously.
The social economics of Atari
There were two big worries at the time when Atari ruled the roost. The first was that sitting that close to the television would burn your eyes out. It turns out that wasn’t true, and I can prove it since most of us (including myself right now) sit inches away from a screen for over 8 hours a day.
The other worry was that it would turn all of us into recluses with no social interactions at all. In fairness, that wouldn’t happen until 2020, and the Atari had nothing to do with it. Parents worried that video games would replace more socially acceptable forms of childhood play, like hanging out on random streetcorners, playing in junkyards, and daring each other to do things. Yes, it was a different time.
It turns out that Atari had just the opposite effect. Since the cartridges cost between $40 and $70 (upwards of $350 today for one game), most families couldn’t afford to buy more than one a year. That wasn’t enough, of course, and so enterprising kids figured out how to deal with it. We all organized highly complex social circles based on swapping out cartridges. If I had Video Pinball but I wanted to play Pitfall, I had to find someone who not only had Pitfall, but wanted to play Video Pinball. Sometimes half a dozen people were involved in swapping operations to make sure everyone had what they want.
Not only that the circles kept getting bigger as people wanted to play more games. Kids started socializing far outside their cliques just to get the latest game.
The legacy
The Atari era was, in fact, fairly short. Atari’s dominance ended during the video game crash of 1983, when a lot of poor quality content seemed to spell doom for the entire industry. By 1986, it wasn’t Atari’s 7800 that inspired drooling from kids, it was the Nintendo Entertainment System. Atari never again dominated… anything. It’s been sold and licensed over and over again, to the extent that you can now get pretty much every Atari game ever made for about $70 in a console if you want it.
But it’s worth looking back, and thinking about how much our folks all spent on this technology and how it affected the way our lives worked.
This article, by the way, was inspired by this video:
It makes me realize that if I had simply invested that money instead of buying most of the consoles shown here, I’d probably be rich.
