There’s not much more to say, other than the fact that I need one of these. It’s probably not practical to whip this thing out of your pocket, what with that erect joystick poking it’s way out of the face of the controller. But I’d like to leave a couple of these sitting around the game room and hand them out to my buddies when we’re ready to have a retro gaming session and see how long it takes them to figure out that they’re not real controllers.

Want one? You’ll have to wait until late October to get one. For now, you can pre-order singles sticks over at NCSX for $3.89 (USD) each, or you can get a case of 12 over at Westfield Comics for$28.05.

This hacked-together Atari 2600 Portable goes by the name “Stella-Tubby” – which does a good job summing up its less than svelte form-factor as a handheld gaming console. Retro-modder Nonogadi built out this portable 2600 with an integrated 5″ LCD screen, as well as built-in joystick and paddle controllers. Plus, it’ll run on a pair of 9-volt batteries if you don’t feel like lugging around an A/C power brick.

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The Stella-Tubby has found its way all the way from Singapore over to eBay auction block, but is priced at the somewhat astronomical starting bid of $400 bucks – a bit irrational for what amounts to a 30 year old gaming system with a $25 LCD screen embedded into it. Still, you’ve got to give it up to Nongadi for the time and effort it probably took to build this oddity.

Apparently, this Rambo TV Game console came out at some point back in the 1990s. It’s a serious doppelganger for the Atari 2600, and actually claims to have had 208 built-in games. Despite the “2600 compatible” labeling, the photos on the box make me think this was one of those cheap NES/Famicom clone systems from China. And check out those joysticks…

While I certainly don’t remember this system, I did manage to find a brief mention of the Rambo TV console over on the Ultimate Console Database – and the version they show has 2,001 built-in games.

And the one in this YouTube video claims to have a whopping 11,555 built-in games! Of course, they neglected to mention that 11,554 of them suck, and the final one is a knock-off of  E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

There’s not much more to say about this rarity, except that anything that combines an Atari 2600 and Sly Stallone is okay in my book.

[photos via Flickr]

Robotic Evil, Inc. is currently selling both an Atari 2600 cartridge and a Nintendo NES controller flash drive over on their Etsy shop for $29.99 (USD) each. Sure, they’re way more bulky than your average flash drives, but I don’t care – I’d much rather plug one of these into my computer than a plain old flash drive.

While the included 2GB of storage may seem paltry by today’s standards, I’m thinking that you’d have a tough time filling that if you tried to load one up with every Atari 2600 and NES game ROM you could find. As a matter of fact, you could probably store every 8-bit game ever made in less than 2GB — not that I’d condone that sort of thing

For some reason I can’t any find these in my closet between my copies of Pitfall and Adventure. I swear I nearly wore out my paddle controllers playing Zardoz. There’s nothing quite like Sean Connery in a tiny pixelated red Speedo – an image now burned into my memory forever.

The mod master took an Xbox 360 controller, added a lot of buttons to an Atari 2600 joystick, and thus the Atari 3600 was born. But it wasn’t just any Xbox 360 controller he used. Oh no, it was a controller from Guitar Hero 3. You might wonder how he managed to fit all of that into this. Here’s a hint: it helps if you’re a magician. Also, he only really needed one circuitboard, which made things much easier.

The final product won’t work with regular 360 games–there’s a few things missing–but you can use it with some downloadable Xbox Live Arcade titles, where it will feel right at home.

[Ben Heck via Hack-A-Day]

Graphic designer Marshall Alexander’s cutout characters includes a veritable menagerie fantastical creatures and critters all made from boxy paper cutouts, but his latest series, Foldskool Heroes 3, has got to be my favorite. These fun papercraft creations are anthropomorphic renditions of classic systems of our childhood. Heroes 3 includes the C64, an Atari 2600 and a loving tribute to Nolan Bushnell, Pong.

The best part is that Marshall offers up precise PDF templates for each of his paper toy designs, letting you make your own with those office supplies you stole from work. Head on over to Marshall’s site and print some out now!

[via NOTCOT via theawesomer]

Modder Chris Koopa (with a name like that, I’m shocked he hasn’t done any Nintendo mods) melded the shell of old SEGA Game Gear portable with the guts of an Atari 2600 to create this Frankenstein’s Monster of a gaming system, dubbed the Atari Gear 2600. The handheld has a 2.5″ backlit LCD display, and can run for an impressive 7-8 hours on a set of AA batteries.

By using the lightweight innards of an Atari Flashback 2, Chris was able to cram in a system loaded with 40 built-in Atari 2600 games. And thanks to a clever 2600 cart slot mod, the system can play original cartridges from the 2600 too.

Pitfall portable, here I come!

[via Ben Heck Forums]

Just plug your old Atari 2600 cartridges into the body of this heavily customized Guitar Hero Gibson Les Paul, and you can play all of your favorite 8-bit classics.

The console is wrapped up in a custom cut circuite board motif, and in place of the strum bar, there’s a tiny LCD screen. And so he could actually play the games while holding it like a guitar, Conner embedded the fire button into the neck of the guitar and a small joystick and paddle controller right into the body of the guitar. And since it runs on AA batteries, it’s totally portable.

I’m pretty sure just about any 2600 game out there would be more fun on this thing than E.T., but that’s the only screenshot that I managed to get. Maybe some Pitfall or Kaboom would be better?

It took Conner about 2 months to put together this Frankenstein’s monster of gaming goodness, and it was certainly worth the wait from the look of things. Now all he needs to do is figure out a way get a version of Guitar Hero to run on the Atari 2600.

[via SlipperyBrick]

This imaginative t-shirt by Akron, Ohio illustrator psychoreindeer reimagines that fateful monkey moment with a gigantic Atari joystick in place of the big black slab. According to reindeer, in addition to the schmancy silkscreened artwork, the t-shirt “comes with two sleeves and a even a hole to stick your head through”. Bonus!

While the apes in the film might not have understood the meaning of the monolith (not to mention most of us who sat through the nearly 3-hour long movie either), the primates on this t-shirt probably spent the rest of the day debating between a round of Pitfall or River Raid once they found the joystick.

I guess we now know why apes have opposable thumbs.