Star Wars (1983 Atari)

Introduction

There’s something almost magical about playing a colour vector game. For people who don’t know how they work, the display isn’t like a normal television display - you can think of it as being more like a colour oscilloscope. This lends a whole new dimension to the games, they’re not just bright - they glow with a warmth and the lines are so crisp and clear. It’s never the same on an LCD, sure - the game itself is incredible, but without that vector monitor there’s something special missing.

Story

I often browse the eBay arcade pages but it’s a fairly competitive place. Sometimes, I’ll take a look at Dutch/ German/ French/ Spanish eBay too as it’s always an adventure to travel around Europe. I tend to never look for arcade machines which are listed in wrong categories! For a start, I’m not even sure how you’d do that? I don’t think you could for example, search for “arcade machine” but then exclude all the actual arcade categories. So it’s somewhat of a miracle that I managed to find this posting - I’d searched for “Atari” I think, and there it was sat in the Star Wars memorabilia section. I was the only bid so I won it at the opening price. It was listed as being faulty, so perhaps if it’d been working it may have attracted interest from that section - who knows.

It wasn’t even so far away either, I was there in an hour and a half ready to load it into the back of my estate car. I certainly felt a bit of urgency to go fetch it quickly as it went for such a low price!

Getting into my apartment wasn’t so easy - there’s a metal fire escape and the cabinet is very very heavy. Thankfully Ewan from the bike shop below the flat was available to assist.

The cabinet is in amazing condition, and a UK model too. I’m so very pleased!