The side effects of the novel coronavirus pandemic are starting to read like the side effects of a new medication. It’s difficult not to view every event in the world through the lens of its relation to the new reality caused by COVID-19. Yet, we still have to keep moving forward, keep pressing on and eventually, if we are lucky — we’ll all get a Nintendo Switch.
One of the side effects, way down the list, is the shortage of Nintendo Switch consoles. With national lock-downs coinciding with the release of Animal Crossing, the console was snapped up from online retailers as quick as they could be restocked. This led to price gouging on the secondary market (right next to those Yeezys you’ve been trying to sell). Nintendo had to pause shipments to Japan to mitigate the global supply issue.
To make matters worse, Motherboard discovered that resellers are using checkout bots to immediately purchase Nintendo Switch consoles the millisecond that they are back in stock. So if you think they are in stock, they are not. They’ll likely be back in stock by the time Sony and Microsoft release their new consoles, which could be not as soon as you think.
But you can get an Atari 2600 on eBay right now for around $60 – $140. You can get piles of games for as cheap as $12 for 60 games. You can get classic joystick controllers, paddle controllers and games like Joust, Donkey Kong, Q-bert, Pitfall, Space Invaders and so on for less than you’d spend on a Joy-Con cover. Instead of trying to spend several hundred on a Nintendo Switch, pull the Atari down from the attic and give the kids and yourself a history lesson.
Because this country sure needs one. But that’s besides the point.
While there are certain people whose lives have become little more than vessels for their Animal Crossing farms, and others who have dropped way too hard into Call of Duty: Warzone — many of us are just looking for a simple, nostalgic escape in gaming with at twinge of harsh reality. We’re broke. We’re unemployed. We just want to soak our mental feet in the warm sauna of something familiar while still being reminded that there are better things to come.
Maybe that’s the Nintendo Switch for some younger people, but only because they don’t have an Atari 2600 in front of them. They don’t have the simple, yet difficult precision of Pitfall or Defender in front of them. They have the beautiful world of Zelda, which is a great escape sure, but it’s no River Raid. We need a hard reset and that means going back to the beginning. Well, as close to the beginning without it being Pong or ColecoVision.
Between the Atari 2600, the boombox and box of cassette tapes from the 1990s I found in the closet and my vinyl collection of mostly 1970s dirt rock, I’m either have a severe breakdown and sinking into nostalgia or I’m keenly aware that not only will I never get a Nintendo Switch (I was planning on buying one before all this went down) but perhaps I don’t need one. Perhaps all I need is the constant pain of playing E.T. to remind me I’m alive and healthy.
It’s a luxury to buy a new gaming console right now, but there shouldn’t be too much applied guilt in doing so. We can only control our own lives after all. But perhaps instead of fighting to bring a new distraction into your home during this period of shifting realities, you could bring an old distraction into your home that offers more than colorful worlds and complex characters in the way of painfully simple characters and 8-bit worlds.
The Atari 2600 is available, is a building block of gaming history, and is ripe for rediscovery now that we’re figuring out how to adapt to a life in which our homes are our workplaces, schools, social outlets and arcades. Complimenting the massive changes in our lives with a console that offers deceptively difficult games that are the epitome of patient gaming could be exactly what we need to spark innovation and distract us from this constantly-shifting reality.
