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This Atari 2600 XANTE Cart May Be The Holy Grail of 2nd Gen Console Games

Happy labor day, everyone! Today I found out about this an awesome item from the ‘bay. Huge thank you to T Sal for giving us a heads up on this one! It is an Atari 2600 XANTE cart for Worm War 1. Click here to check out the listing.

In case you don’t know the story behind Xante, I’ll give you a quick rundown. So back in 1983, this super smart programmer, Roger Collins (Princeton and Wharton alum) had an idea to create on demand games for the Atari 2600. The idea was that you could walk up to an attended kiosk and buy a game. The game would be downloaded via phone line and burned to your cart’s EPROM while you wait.

It was piloted in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Alas, the program failed and was not meant to be. While this concept was promising (considering the response from retailers who would be able to significantly lower inventory costs and overhead), the videogame crash of ’84 left Xante in bankruptcy sadly. But during their time at gas stations and grocery stores, some games were burned and played.

Fast forward to 2016 and we find one of the absolute rarest atari game (one of them anyway), Worm War 1.

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While these games may be hard to find, they are easy to recognize. The bright blue casing (it’s difficult to see in this photo) and embossed logo are kind of their trademark. I took a look at other listings for Worm War 1, this listing is the only Xante version I came across. This one shows a little wear (it is over 30 years old—not that 30 is old, trust me) but it has been tested and is in working condition. These Xante games are true collectors’ items and only make rare appearances, so you might want to take a look, at least, if not place a bid on this one.

Feeling nostalgic? I decided to look for more retro treasures

I also came up with a few items that don’t go back quite that far:

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