Gear LEGO’s Atari 2600 Replica is A Super Stylish Dust CollectorThe old-school gaming console paved the way for the future of gaming — and now you can recreate it piece by piece.

Words Iron & Air Staff
Illustrations LEGO

Asteroids, Pong, Outlaw, Breakout — these were all Atari games that helped put Atari on the map in the arcade in the 1970s. Then Atari brought the arcade into peoples’ living rooms with its Atari 2600 video game console in 1977.

Otherwise known as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS), the Atari 2600 sold well enough at first, but would eventually skyrocket in profits once titles such Space-Invaders, Centipede, and Star Wars arrived in the early 1980s.

But, of course, nothing lasts forever. In ’82, Atari teamed with a movie studio to release a video game based on a hugely popular major motion picture: E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. Seems like an easy task, right? Come up with a game that’s not totally awful and that uses the characters that were in a film that spent 16 weeks in the No. 1 spot at the box office.

Trouble was, there were only five-week for creative and production to create something in time to get the game on store shelves in time for the Christmas season.

The end result of a rushed product was a trio of terrible: gameplay, visuals, and plot — consumers returned copies they purchased and the game was a total flop and embarrassment for Atari. This led into the video game crash of 1983, where an industry oversaturated too many consoles and low quality games lost billions in revenue.

So, what does this have to do with the Lego Atari 2600?

Not a thing.

We just thought providing some background was better than just listing the stats from what you’d get for shelling out cash for a LEGO Atari 2600 console:

Price: $239
Pieces: 2,532 pieces
What do you get: an Atari joystick and three classic cartridges with the original art for Asteroids, Adventure, and Centipede.