Well, that's the last episode of Atari A to Z Flashback recorded and edited! It's exporting now, and will be available to watch on Christmas Day. I genuinely didn't plan that, but it turned out rather nicely in the end.
This is an exciting and emotional moment, because it's a huge creative project finally coming to fruition, as I've mentioned a few times previously. Sitting and playing through 150 old Atari games might not sound super-"creative", but there's a lot of stuff that goes into making these videos — research, familiarisation with other stuff going on around the same time, getting to grips with the games and figuring out how to (hopefully) be vaguely entertaining while showing them all off to you.
I'm glad I've done this project, though, because it's meant that I've now been through absolutely everything in that whole collection, and I feel like I have a really solid understanding of what "Atari" really meant throughout the late '70s and early '80s. It's not the complete picture of what was going on in gaming, of course — for that, you also need to look at companies like Activision and Imagic, as well as the lesser known or less fondly regarded outfits — but it's a good foundation for familiarising yourself with what was going on in these early days of the medium.
The whole process has also, I feel, developed my own "tolerance" (for want of a better word) for really retro retro stuff. I mean, I already had a pretty good tolerance for stuff that looked old and crusty, but going through this lot has given me a real appreciation of how, sometimes, it's all about how you use the 2K or 4K you have available to you, rather than spreading yourself out over several gigabytes.
As I mentioned previously, after the videos going out this week I'll be taking a week's break from YouTube for Christmas and new year, then new videos will start up again in January. I don't know if I'm going to think of an immediate replacement for Atari A to Z Flashback, but as I discussed the other day, I'm open to ideas if anyone wants to see something specific. Otherwise I'll just take a little while to ponder further!
Anyway, I think I've earned a comfy sit in bed with some Intellivision games on the Evercade VS now. Hope your weekend has been suitably relaxing!
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