Videogames Of The Past Come Back
By Arik Hesseldahl, 12.19.02, 10:00 AM ET

When all the Christmas festivities are over with and all the gifts are opened, there's always a moment of sadness: The materialistic anticipation and excitement we feel--but don't want to admit to--that comes from looking forward to a stack of gifts under the tree is over until next year.

That's the moment some of us take to go out and buy one more present, this one for ourselves. Something that no one really knew we wanted or one that simply failed to materialize under the tree.

A good candidate for that gift this year, at least among those of a certain age, is the Atari 10-in-1 TV Games from toymaker Jakks Pacific (nasdaq: JAKK - news - people ). If 20 Christmases ago you were among those kids longing for an Atari 2600 videogame system--but never got it--here's your chance to do right by yourself.

In 20 years, videogames have come a long way. The games that used to fit into a square-shaped cartridge can now fit onto a chip or two inside a game controller, which is exactly what the 10-In-1 system is. The system has ten classic Atari 2600 games nestled snugly into an old joystick, a faithful reproduction of the ubiquitous controller that had only one button. All you need to play it is a TV with A/V input jacks.

Here's the lineup of games: Asteroids, the one with the triangular spaceship shooting at big rocks in space; Adventure, in which you control a simple square-shaped character through a series of mazes and castles, battling dragons and a thieving bat to rescue a magic chalice; Missile Command, in which you control an anti-missile defense system that protects six nameless cities from a furious barrage of nuclear missiles; the other games are Yar's Revenge, Gravitar, Breakout, Pong, Circus Atari, Centipede and Real Sports Volleyball.

The game is the latest in a series from Jakks that have sought to tap into a nostalgic tendency that strikes those in their late 20s or mid-30s for the games they spent countless hours playing in front of the living room TV. These games represent an era just a few steps above the Stone Age for today's gamers used to graphics that emulate Japanese Anime cartoons and plots with a complexity to rival the Nordic sagas.

The 10-In-1, we're told, has been a huge hit since it was first released in September, and has largely sold out in stores such as Bed Bath and Beyond, Electronics Boutique and Toysrus.com among others. However we're also hearing that a new shipment of them should hit stores right after Christmas. They're selling for about $20.

Explaining to the kids how these primitive games represented the very height of home entertainment technology circa 1982 will be a chore that will give you a new appreciation for those times when your own parents tried to explain a past that to you only existed in black-and-white photos. Any child's reaction is likely to be little more than a disinterested grunt of acknowledgement before they turn back to their Playstation 2 or X-Box for another round of Mechassault or Grand Theft Auto.