Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Micropainter and my Atari 800

Ahh, my good old Atari 800. How I loved it. Enough that I took a few pics to remember, probably sometime in 1981 or 1982. I loved the artwork and design of the video game boxes. Most of the packaging was totally unneccesary, as the cartridge the game came on, was a fraction of the size of the box. Other than that, just a booklet and the rest was empty space. But they looked great! The last I saw of my system was when it was given away to my Uncle Jack in Mississippi, dozens of games included. Not exactly sure what I was thinking then, but I surely wasn't expecting it to be a collectors item. Strange, even if it was sometime in the early 90's. I normally would have had a collectors mentality about it, and I'm sure I had a bit of feeling of sadness giving it up, but it was a gift for my cousins, who didn't have a video game system. I wonder if my Uncle still has it, considering he's a pack rack to an even greater extent than myself.

Micropainter was the first true computer graphics drawing program I ever used. Released in 1982, you could draw on the screen, in 21 colors, using the joystick. Over on my Drawing On My Youth blog, you can see a couple of the drawings I created with it. I still own the box and contents, aside from the actual game, though! I just took these pics of it for the blog.

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