What I wanted for Christmas #5: Sears Tele-games (Atari)

Who didn’t own an Atari in the 70′s or 80′s? We didn’t!

We had Sears “Tele-games”, which was the Sears Toughskin version of the Atari VCS (later called the 2600). It was effectively identical, but we had only ever seen the Sears version

Youtube has tons of Atari ads out there. But here’s one from Sears.

Note how the word “Atari” was never mentioned….and it was “sold only at Sears”. Just goes to show you at Sears was a retail mafia back then. “Yeah we’ll sell your stuff, but we have to call it our own name. You’re getting paid, so just hope we don’t alter the deal!”

I shudder to think of the suits and facial hair of the Sears execs who brokered that deal.

So why did we want Tele-Games for Christmas instead of “Atari” ? Well, Before 24 hour news, it was perfectly acceptable for kids to chill at the Tele-Games demo booth while mom went to shop for polyester and dad went to wander the Craftsman section. OK maybe it wasn’t acceptable, but we got to do it! I’m wondering now exactly what that meant…..

So we logged many hours at the Sears tele-games demo. It was a great place to meet the other aficionados and try out the latest/greatest.

It was there at that booth that we’d decide on the next target for our allowance and yard-work cash. This was an important phase, and one I use to this day. There was technology available but limited resources…which direction would we go?

A big score was Pitfall. That one was awesome. I remember it took awhile for the Activision games to show up since they weren’t official Atari games.

The two worst? Pac-man and E.T.

E.T. took the epic story of a boy befriending a stranded alien and replaced it with the pixelated storyline of stepping in gum on the way to the library. Yee-haw. We’re lucky things like “V” came along to restore proper perspective.

Pac-man was even worse because we labored for a couple weeks digging gravel out of our yard to earn the money to buy it. Our rural road was made of gravel and tar, and that year the snow plows got a bit aggressive and deposited a few cubic yards of the gravel in the front lawn. Dad paid us something like 50 cents a bucket.

Remember all those kids working for Mola Ram in Indiana Jones 2? Just like that. Except those kids got an ancient Sankara Stone and we were stuck with an awful reminder that you weren’t in an arcade.

Somehow we had convinced ourselves that Pac-Man was going to be good even when we saw for ourselves that it wasn’t. I mean, it was pac-man right? Another early lesson in tech.

Back to Tele-games….Just to show you how random my memory is, the record section was right across from this area in Sears, and occasionally when waiting my turn I’d wander over to look at album covers. I always ended up at this one, which I found fascinating:

I could just tell nobody messed with this guy while he was walking home from the school bus. Years later my social studies teacher was a Mrs. Nugent, and we always asked her to say hi to her son Ted for us. I’m not sure she got it but I bet she did.

Then along came Intellivision, which split the neighborhood and turned friend against friend in the struggle of public opinion of which is best. Which means this one is to be continued….