181 replies to this topic

[Schizophretard]

pangasinan, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:41 PM, said:

Schizophretard, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:24 PM, said:

nagn2,

Put it on ebay and see if you can break the Air Raid box record.

It would come nowhere near what that got.

It is worth a try.

[CPUWIZ]

pangasinan, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:41 PM, said:

Schizophretard, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:24 PM, said:

nagn2,

Put it on ebay and see if you can break the Air Raid box record.

It would come nowhere near what that got.

Nope, no box, no glory.

[Schizophretard]

CPUWIZ, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 6:02 PM, said:

pangasinan, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:41 PM, said:

Schizophretard, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:24 PM, said:

nagn2,

Put it on ebay and see if you can break the Air Raid box record.

It would come nowhere near what that got.

Nope, no box, no glory.

A Holy Grail with no box must have some glory.

[horseboy]

LS_Dracon, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:02 PM, said:

How about contact Steve Stack about the carts /source code he said probably have in his house?

Been done.

[Atari Dogs]

Mitch, on Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:54 PM, said:

the.golden.ax, on Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:28 PM, said:

Has anyone tried contacting the voice of the narrator? Maybe they gave him a copy for doing the job?

AX

She died several years ago.

Mitch

Roy had her stuffed. She is next to Trigger with a gun in one hand and the cartridge in the other.

[Cebus Capucinis]

CPUWIZ, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 6:02 PM, said:

Nope, no box, no glory.

NO BOX NO GLORY DR. JONES!

[the.golden.ax]

Cebus Capucinis, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 6:40 PM, said:

CPUWIZ, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 6:02 PM, said:

Nope, no box, no glory.

NO BOX NO GLORY DR. JONES!

Red Sea II: Glory Hole

The story about the other things Mosses did with his staff.

AX

[Pioneer4x4]

The Carnegie Library lists that they have this from 1970- and even older in microfilm. I will check it out, possibly tomorrow!

[HollowBeers]

Wow! I just got done reading the other old closed thread about this game. Never knew about it. Once I sold my Air Raid, I was done with the rarity business. This may have drawn me back in. A fascinating back story with the programmer and all. There MUST be more copies out there that were ordered. Time to start trolling the garage sales again!

[Red 5]

Dear everyone,

Please stop officially adding games to the list of games I don't have.

Thanks,
Steve


(This is why there is no "official number" of Atari games by the way. Nice find man!)

[Christophero Sly]

N/M

[nofrills100]

Exciting news!

[Pioneer4x4]

We need to add a poll to this thread.

Did you dial the numbers in this ad? (Wishing, Hoping, Praying...)
Yes (X)
No ( )

After hearing the 1-900 numbers did you try them as well?
Yes ( )
No (X)

[Crazy Climber]

nagn2, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 4:29 PM, said:

I can't thank you enough for finding this ad, I figured someone would eventually find some physical evidence even though I thought it was proven beyond a doubt. Yes, I will accept all apologies from all the members who made me feel like a scammer! Now maybe this find will be fun again. I have kept the cartridge safe, I figured I couldn't sell it until it was proven to be real. I figured the only way of that happening was for someone to find the ad that Steve talked about. I thought and accepted that it might never happen.

Yeah, I totally thought you were BS, sorry I doubted you. What an amazing find and amazing patience hanging on to it until some better proof was found. You probably could have easily sold it for a lot of money before but now you will likely get even more, well, except for the tough economy and all but that shouldn't effect the super collectors too bad

Schizophretard, on Wed Aug 24, 2011 5:24 PM, said:

nagn2,

Put it on ebay and see if you can break the Air Raid box record.

I would say this one would pull what undumped prototype games get (1k-3k) I do remember something about that Steve Stack guy having some of these in storage somewhere also? (from the other topic) Anybody still communicate with him?

[Pioneer4x4]

Zach, on Tue Aug 23, 2011 1:52 PM, said:

Hey there, look what I found at the library today:


Christianity Today. October 7, 1983. Page 51.

Found at the Sacramento State University library. Incidentally I was really surprised to have found the ad so easily. I just decided to go to the library, thinking it would be a long shot. Christianity Today was literally the first publication I searched. It seems to be a fairly prominent magazine, so I'm surprised none of us knew about this game before 2007. I thought maybe there might be a small classified ad about the game, and I certainly did not expect a full page color ad given the game's obscurity.

Now who's going to be the first to track down the coloring book and audio cassette?

I just went to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, and confirmed the ad. I don't want to say that I thought it was a fake, it was just easy to go look it up myself since I go there for audiobooks anyway.
I was wondering how many you looked through, I looked through the next issue and I think the previous issue and did not see that ad. BTW, you picture is actually pretty good, the actual page does not look much better at all, and since it was also bound in a larger hardback with that entire year, it would not lay very flat for me either.

If desired, I can go back and make a copy of the page at the library, then scan that copy at home.

Edited by Pioneer4x4, Thu Aug 25, 2011 4:55 PM.

[Zach]

@nagn2: You're welcome. I hope your sale goes well.

@Pioneer4x4: Thanks, I welcome verification.

@Rom Hunter: I went back to the library and took a somewhat better picture:



I took a closer look at the coloring book, and it's not relevant to the Red Sea Crossing story. It's a cartoon lamb.

I also got the volume and issue number: Christianity Today, Volume 27, No. 15. October 7, 1983. Page 51.

And in case anyone comes across a stack of religious magazines at a garage sale, here's the cover you want:


Out of curiosity, does anyone have a clue why there would be a separate number for Arizona customers?

[Pioneer4x4]

Zach, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 6:35 PM, said:

Out of curiosity, does anyone have a clue why there would be a separate number for Arizona customers?

I initially ass-u-me-d that it was because they were in Arizona and they would handle the sale differently, or maybe the price for the 1800 line would be cheaper for in state, so they had a special number trying to get Arizona users to use. I think for small uses back then a 800 number was a lot of money.
But with the company stating their address is in CA, I really don't know. Maybe they used some 3rd party phone answering and payment processing deal that was located in AZ, that would be my guess. As much as people gripe about eBay and PayPal, it has made so much possible that didn't exist 10-15 years ago, it is hard to remember mailing out checks to ads in print and waiting a month to get your item.

[Pioneer4x4]

Pioneer4x4, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 5:07 AM, said:

We need to add a poll to this thread.

Did you dial the numbers in this ad? (Wishing, Hoping, Praying...)
Yes (X)
No ( )

After hearing the 1-900 numbers did you try them as well?
Yes ( )
No (X)

Come on, seriously, did anyone else call the numbers? I did!

[Armonigann]

Pioneer4x4, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 5:07 AM, said:

We need to add a poll to this thread.

Did you dial the numbers in this ad? (Wishing, Hoping, Praying...)
Yes (X)
No ( )

After hearing the 1-900 numbers did you try them as well?
Yes ( )
No (X)

I voted "yes" for both

[Zach]

Pioneer4x4, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 4:52 PM, said:

I was wondering how many you looked through, I looked through the next issue and I think the previous issue and did not see that ad.

I searched the latter half of 1983 and only found the one ad.

[Mxyzptlk]

Zach, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 7:52 PM, said:

Pioneer4x4, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 4:52 PM, said:

I was wondering how many you looked through, I looked through the next issue and I think the previous issue and did not see that ad.

I searched the latter half of 1983 and only found the one ad.

Were you able to read the title of the game that is inside the 2600?

[Zach]

Mxyzptlk, on Thu Aug 25, 2011 8:14 PM, said:

Were you able to read the title of the game that is inside the 2600?

No, but I'm pretty sure it's not Red Sea Crossing.

[Cebus Capucinis]

I'm betting the photo is a one-off they did as a mock-up without having the requisite items; given the 'to order' nature of the product, it may have even been created and advertised before the game was 100% completed in terms of marketing and assembly. If it was a Christian-themed mail-order type deal, the carts were likely to be assembled on a per-order basis (though didn't Steve Stack state that he had created inventory for this and had it in a storage unit?), so this would imply that the ad mock-up wouldn't have a copy. The game appears to be Combat, so they simply used what they could find and cut/pasted in a screenshot of the game they were advertising prior to ad copy prints. The child coloring a picture of a lamb would add to this one-off quite well, since that would have Biblical connotations as well. So they grabbed an Atari system, three kids, and a substitute religious coloring book, made the one-off mockup, made sure the text for the cart wasn't 100% visible, then cut/paste the screenshot in.

Makes sense to me!

EDIT: Actually if you look at the television screen in the ad, the horizontal lines are off-kilter from the set itself. This wouldn't happen in an actual game being played, obviously, so that adds credence to the cut/paste nature of the ad setup. This adds up with everything else we know nicely, because the company obviously isn't some billion-dollar-volume retailer like Atari that would have huge ad print resources to create something perfect.

EDIT 2: After a second look I'm assured that's Combat in a Vader console. Look at the black near the text -- that's a much darker matte black than the gloss black of earlier text label carts. This means the label is one of the 'electrical tape material' style labels that Atari used later on. That label type was only used on ONE game -- Combat!

Wasn't that "electrical tape" style label for Combat used as the pack-in for the Vader console, or was Pac-Man the pack-in by then? If Combat of that type was the pack-in with the Vader, there you go -- they slapped everything together from a console someone either bought then or there or had lying around!

[Mxyzptlk]

The one other thing I was wondering, what exactly is the title of the game? If someone already pointed it out, my apologies. I just can't figure it out from the ad. Thanks.

Edited by Mxyzptlk, Thu Aug 25, 2011 8:50 PM.

[Zach]

The title is known from the cartridge, shown in the original thread. Unfortunately I forgot to include a link in my first post. Perhaps a moderator can add it for those who weren't around in 2007?