Dream Machines


Dreams that the collectors of classic games and computer have had. Collected from the rec.games.video.classic newsgroup + in the depths of our subconsciousness  + received some in e-mail.

1. Okyr III - from Ville
A very futuristic and WEIRD thing.. other details can't be remembered anymore..
2. Aquaria - from Manu
I was walking on a field when I noticed little boxes full of junk, there were TurboGrafx controllers and all kinds of stuff. I asked who owns them and they took me to this attic and there was a computer called Aquaria. It was a weird mixture of Commodore 64 and Mattel Aquarius.. it looked really nice! I woke up before I bought it.
3. Intelligent - from Ville
Went to this fleamarket and at the door there was a boy who begged me to give him a Salora Fellow. I stepped inside and found a Salora Fellow for $20 and a system called "Intelligent" which also accepted  Philips Videopac carts. Didn't have enough money to buy them both so I thought I would come back later.
4. Vintivision - from Joe
I had a weird dream a month or two ago. I was in a present day store and they had a new cartridge system made by Activision. I think the name of the system was "Vintivision" or something like that with "vision" on the end. The cartridges had the same type screenshot labels as the 2600 Activision games. The cartridges were wider than high like Vic-20 games, but smaller.

The three games they had running in the store were Pitfall (of course), River Raid, and Keystone Kapers. They also had remakes of every other 2600 game made by Activision as well as some new ones. The graphics were 3D, but not as good as Playstation games.

The River Raid game was pretty cool. It was a 3/4 chase plane view, and you could slam into the valley walls if you weren't careful. Wasn't Activision planning to make a River Raid remake when they made the new Pitfall? I wonder if there are any playable prototypes around.

The best part of the dream was that all of the games cost $5.00 each and
the system was only like $25.00 or so. I only had enough on me to get the system and 5 games, and it was tough deciding which games to get. Pretty similar to my life awake. Too many games and not enough money.
5. A mahogany Intellivision - from Jaysun
I once dreamed that I went to a thrift store in a small town I used to live near. I found a cool intellivision there. Instead of the usual woodgrain plastic, it had mahogany! It was cheap too, then I woke up.
6. A holographic rendering machine - from John
Well, about 10 years ago, I had a dream that a new kind of console came out that had very realistic holographic rendering. The strangest thing, though, was that the objects in the games became *real*. In the dream, I was test playing the game at some kind of store. Just then, a man in a mask came in to rob the store, so I used the "real" spaceship from the game to shoot him...

Unfortunately, my "dream machine" didn't have a name.

Enough "true confessions". I'm just glad that I'm not the only person around that is into this hobby so much that I actually have dreams about video games and systems!
7. 2600 games embedded in blacktop - from ?
I had one just last night. It was weird. (Aren't they all?) There were boxed 2600 games embedded in blacktop somewhere. Someone else and I were chipping away at the blacktop to free them. Being covered in blacktop hadn't damaged them. Then we found the original art for some comics (could have been Atari Force, but I don't remember now) embedded in another spot. Unfortunately, it had a tendency to break as we extracted the pages. (Like it was made of pottery, not paper. )Of course, this "original art" was in full-color, unlike the real thing. (For those that don't know, when comic books are colored, they use a copy of the original art in most cases. So the original art is still in black and white when the artist(s) get it back and/or it is sold. And yes, I always dream in color.)
8. A white Vectrex - from Mikko
Found a white Vectrex using 110 V with a burned fuse. Paid 200 FIM (about $33) for it because it had a game (that doesn't exist, can't remember the name) and a carrying case. Then we were supposed to go to get a fuse for it, but two of my friends had disassembled my car so we couldn't. Duh.
9. Woodgrain Vectrex - from Cadimus
I've had lots I gave up keeping track. The last one was Vectrex, about a month ago. Interesting looking woodgrain Vectrex... went nicely with
my woodgrain Atari 2600 and woodgrain Intellivision on my old woodgrain TV on top of woodgrain Entertainment center.

Now I'm sick of faux wood! I'm glad I recently dug out a jet black Atari 2600 (not jr version). Now they go nicely with Colecovision.
10. Barbarian 2 - from Petteri H.
Sometime in 1989 or so I dreamt of a beat 'em up game, and I actually was told that the name of it was Barbarian 2. The machine I played it on was hooked up to a 30inch tv, and looked somewhat like NES, but was quite small, and the game was on flat square disk. (Not a floppy, though, there was a open square slot for it on top of the machine.) Controllers were analog joysticks. Or at least felt that way.

In the game you were this hunk, that was actually half-a-screen tall. Game had a forced scrolling to the right, and there came some slim humanoids until the came a different colored character looking otherwise your own. Those could be killed on the first two screens simply stabbing your sword in his body and leaving it there. Only other move I could do was to kick with left leg. Third big opponent however just takes the sword in, and then starts moving with incredible speed, and hacks your characters arms and legs off - and at the game over the bloody mass formerly known as the hero of the game is washed away to a sewer.
12. Miscellanious - from Kirk I.
I've had a couple of video dream games over the last few years (when I started writing dreams down in my PalmPilot journal):

March 29 1997 - I'm in some DOOM-like game, complete with the red chaingun soldiers from DOOM II. Somehow I get doubled in height and my shotgun gets replaced with a "magic" weapon- I'm a little ticked because now ammo is hard to find.

June 26 1997 - there are atari games with extra levels that were jokes or some kind of fraud- I woke myself up to remember this dream, but I guess it didn't help much.

July 11 1997 - there was some kind of flight sim on an oversized tv screen- except I think you were flying Super Grover from sesame street.

June 22 1999- I'm playing an arcade game called "Mario & Luigi"- they were the badguys chasing my characters on these jung looking levels, kind of like what an SNES version of Pitfall II would look like. I knew I was in trouble when one of them came out riding on the neck of a large (5 or 6 character high) firebreathing dinosaur (Yoshi meets T-rex by way of Bowser?)

March 10 2000 - I'm playing a cool game "DESTRUCTABIKE" on a Colecovision, or maybe a later model Atari (the controller was a bit shredded) It was the bikers from Excitebike playing soccer, with NES Super Dodge Ball like powershots and giant slow sumo moto-riding goalies. The 'arena' only takes about 1/3 height of the screen, but scrolls horizontally for about 2 screen lengths.
13. Original American Kitty Top Loading NES - from Ville
I was at a flea market and found two European versions of top loading NES, the other one looked like a Super Nintendo and it had been used to shovel sand and the other one had little red rings, was red and blue, assembled into oversized thin plastic shell and said "Original American Kitty Top Loading NES". The shovel version cost 30 FIM so I picked it up, because the other one was a hundred marks and I only had 70 with me.
14. Weird CD-add ons - from Manu
This one guy told me that you can find cool game stuff if you go dig at a local book store. He took me there, and after some digging, he found a Pac-Man handheld. So I started digging too,  and first thing I found was a CD-add on for Sega CD (which was weird, since that already has a CD), it was like bone shaped and white thingy, price was marked as "40", which was really cheap, and as I only had 100 FIM with me, it was good. Next I found a CD add-on for Sega Saturn (!).. it was a rectangular white thingy. I was wondering how everything I found (I found a bunch!) could be so cheap, and then some lady told me the prices were in Euros. Duh. I only could get a couple of things before I woke up. Same night my wife had a dream that she found a bunch of gaming stuff from the mall (including a Zemmix) and when she was taking them out, some guys tried to rob them from her (sumguys?). Then she took off with a skate board, which was really difficult when holding on to a bunch of games and stuff.
15. Commodore 2nd NT - from Mikko
We were at this ice hockey practice hall with some other collectors I didn't know. For no reason, there were a bunch of weird Commodore devices on a table - something that looked like a Commodore MAX, a funky-shaped 1541 disk drive, and to top it off, a computer that looked like a first-generation VIC-20 but had a label saying  "Commodore 2nd NT". At that point I realised it was all for sale, and immediately tried to pick up the weird VIC (by now, I was convinced it was a prototype). However, one of the other guys beat me to it, and the most part of my dream consisted of me trying to talk him into letting me buy it. Eventually, I did succeed, but woke up soon afterwards...
16. Cool Colecovision add-on - from Mikko
I was riding my bike around town when I hit this flea I'd never been to. It had all sorts of classic systems for sale (Intellivision, Atari and the like), but most were very badly beat up and pricey. The worst bit was a Colecovision priced at 400 FIM ($60). However, after examining it for a while, I found out it was pretty cool after all - it had an add-on that created special effects to games by cutting them out of paper! It had all these wires and mechanisms to operate a pair of scissors... I coughed up the 400 FIM, and the lady let me have an Intellivision for $1 to close the deal. I started thinking "Wow, this must be a dream!" and sadly, I soon found out it was.
17. Rare PSX and Saturn games - from Rami
I somehow ended up in a store or a department store and noticed their Playstation game stuff. They had some unbeliveable games, like the PSX version of Varth (a Capcom shooter) and after digging out at least 4 rare games, I paid them and headed out. When I got out, to my surprise I had lost the games, so with a little bit of "dream logic", I went back in. The PSX games had disappeared and had been replaced with obscure Japanese Saturn games, though they had boxes similar to PAL games. I picked up a bright yellow Pocket Fighter game, and the dream ended. Weird! Creepy!
18. Weird Atari games - from Paul
Well, I've had about 5 or 6 really weird video game dreams in the past six months, but the most recent one tops them all (strangely, they all involve the Atari 2600). Anyway, my latest dream involved a port of the Playstation 2 game "Grand Theft Auto 2" ported to the Atari 2600 -- with Amiga-quality  graphics! The game was really cool, and you could go on missions for  criminals and evade the cops in your mafia car. You drove around in a city reminiscent of San Francisco, with high hilled streets and great sunsets. As I played this game, I noticed the title on the cartridge was "Interdictor II".

Then my brother was playing a cartoonized version of RealSports
Basketball on the 2600. The game had 4 hoops (yes, 4!) one north,
south, east and west and the goal of the game was  to protect your two hoops from being scored upon. Just like normal basketball, except there were four players on either side and 4 baskets, 2 for each team.

Then this dream somehow shifted to entering snails bodies and worms as well and jumping off rocks to fly over a large muddy lake that would devour us if we didn't hop it successfully. The cool thing was that there were sentibites from Hellraiser chasing us, and if we didn't enter the snail or worms bodies in time on the jump rock, we'd be toast as well.
19. Salora smartcard & loads of Dreamcast games - from Mikko

Last night I had a dream that I was in some sort of video game oddities store (located next to a spa utilising nuclear power plant coolant water, naturally). There were so many things out there I couldn't really concentrate on anything, but I did find a Salora Manager smartcard reader (looked like a DIY job much like the Coleco adapter) which had no
price on it (I was a bit concerned because I 'only' had 300 EUR with me - clearly a dream :)

Anyways, I spent the most part of the night looking for Dreamcast games. There were lots of them in the store window, but they were much harder to find inside. I did, however, discover an NTSC-J release of "Marvin the Martian", a Warner Bros licence game which naturally does not really exist, and quite a number of generic Japanese dating simulations with generic names such as "Love Princess Forever" etc. I had real trouble
choosing what to pick up...
20. Weird Dreamcast games - from Mikko

After a while of no game-related dreams, I had one again last night. I was at a discount store that had a shelf full of unreleased Dreamcast games. Half-Life was there, together with a number of completely non-existent games - perhaps the most amusing one was a DC port of Roger Rabbit: Hare Raising Havoc, a very old Amiga/PC game :) There was also a snowboarding game of sorts, called "Sun Troopers 2" or something, and Giga Wing 2 Limited Edition which looked really nice... I tried to grab everything frantically and was worried of running out of money.

Have you had a dream similar to these?
Let us know!