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Rare Atari CES 1982 Engineering Trak-Ball T-Shirt

A pretty nifty T-Shirt sold on AtariAge recently.

I’m doing a bit more house cleaning and have decided to part with my very rare Atari Consumer Electronics Division t-shirt and custom frame…

I bought this shirt many moons ago from Dan Kramer (ex-Atari) who, when part of Atari’s Consumer Electronic Division, designed the 2600 and 5200 Trak-Ball. According to Dan, he designed the shirt (his initials are on the lower right corner of the text on the back of the shirt) and it was made for a handful of “booth babes” that wandered the show floor at CES 1982 (or 1983?) to help promote the new Trak-Ball.

There are VERY FEW of these shirts in existence and I believe they were all hand screened. It’s hard to know if these were officially sanctioned by Atari, but somehow I don’t think so. Maybe Dan (or someone else from Atari) can shed more light on the details of this shirt, since there doesn’t seem to be anything online about it. I’ve attached a picture I took of Dan from CGE 2001 where you can see the shirt in the upper left corner.

The shirt is in excellent condition. It’s a women’s size L and the label is still intact. Instead of just keeping it folded up in a closet, a few years ago I decided to order a custom frame for it. The frame was professionally built by FastFrame in San Diego and is full glass on the front and the back with a nice thick black box frame. There are hinges on the top and bottom to allow you to (carefully!) open the frame if you need to. Two mounting hooks are screwed into the top section of the frame. It measures approximately 34″ wide x 31″ high x 3″ deep. The shirt appears to be floating in the center of the frame – it is hanging by two small lengths of fishing wire. A fitted insert acts as a hanger and gives the shirt its shape.

I thought it would be fun to skip eBay/CTCW and offer this directly to AA members. I haven’t fully thought this through, but figured I would just sell to whoever has the best offer in the next week or so. Feel free to publicly respond to the post with a price or send me a PM. I’ll post updates every day or so as I receive offers. The offer should *not* include shipping costs, as this piece is *big* and I am going to have it professionally packed for UPS Ground shipping. The highest bidder will pay the actual packing and shipping costs (I’m not going to mark it up or add “handling fees”) which I’ll know once it’s packed and ready to go. You are more than welcome to come pick it up at my house in San Francisco to avoid shipping hassles.

Anyway, if you have any questions, let me know. I hope this can go to a good home where someone will really enjoy it (show it off in a game room, perhaps?)

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Sold on AtariAge for $100.00.

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