Yesterday's out-of-town thrifting turned up a very interesting curiosity: a store demonstration cartridge for the Atari 2600 game Journey Escape, which I think we were just talking about.
Near as I can figure, these were sent out to stores for them to put inside their Atari 2600 displays. I'm not sure if it's just a copy of the game itself, or a non-interactive attract demo, or what.
"Please return to Data Age no later than January 5, 1983," it reads under the stamped serial number. No thanks: I think I'll hold on to it.
But I can't find more than a few vague references to these carts on the Internet. Anybody want to fill me in on how rare and/or in demand these are? There can't be many left.
Here's the rest of the day's acquisitions. Funnily enough, had I not stumbled onto the Journey Escape demo cart, Stargunner would have been the Find Of The Day. It's an Atari 2600 game by Telesys that Digital Press gives a rarity rating of 7/10.
This little pile of 2600 games were marked $2 each, by the way. I also grabbed Coconuts and Airlock and Hangman, passing on some common-as-heck first-party games that I can't even remember the names of.
I did end up with a whole pile of junk Genesis games, though. The store had nine games, which they taped together into bundles of three. Which meant I couldn't open them up to see if they had instruction manuals or, shit, even if the right game was in there. But they were priced at $2.50 for each bundle, and they were having some kind of Christmas sale besides which made them only $1.88 each, and at that price I figured, buy now, inspect later.
Disappointmenton. Alisia Dragoon had a pretty banged-up manual, but at least it's complete. *Space Harrier II *had no instructions. Ghouls 'N Ghosts not only had no instructions, the wrong game was in there. I now own a loose copy of Chakan: The Forever Man, though.
All the other games are in the boxes, not that anyone would want to play any of them. Oh well. You have to take risks, with this hobby.
