They weren’t found underneath boxes of old Halloween decorations in a storage unit like another recent video game variant find. But maybe some grading company will still want to highlight these with a media blitz — after all, these could fetch MILLIONS!!!!!1!
Honestly, though, there are some similarities between what I’ve recently acquired and that highly publicized (for some reason) box of late run Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt carts that was recently unearthed, slabbed, and sold to the highest bidders. Both those NES carts and these newfound Atari items seem to have escaped notice for decades. Both are variants with respect to the packaging only — the games themselves are identical. And both will probably only be of interest to the dedicated collector (or perhaps the bored, hopeful speculator).
So, what did I find? Look:
Okay, well, those look like regular Atari boxes. Let’s flip them over…
Ah, wow, French! Wild! All these years later and nobody's found more of these? Or if they have, they've been kept under wraps. But... wait, where’s the usual back-of-the-box info? You know, the Atari company info and all that?
You weren’t looking at boxes, you were looking at dual-language cardboard sleeves! With boxes inside!
The fact that they're cardboard sleeves might help account for why these haven’t turned up before — in all likelihood, relatively few were made, and the majority were likely discarded right after purchase. While there are a number of 2600 games (both distributed by Atari and otherwise) known to have French translations as part of their packaging, these are AFAIK the first to use cardboard sleeves to inform Francophone consumers of the otherwise surely confounding inner contents.
The boxes also contain “tête-bêche” bound instruction manuals; they can be flipped over and around by the consumer for access to both English and French game instructions.
At left, English-language instruction manual covers for Basketball and Blackjack. At right, the French-language covers on the flipped-over-and-around sides. Huh, why is Black Jack two words on the French cover?
Manuals of this same style were previously included with the earliest Atari-produced games for the French-Canadian market; I'm pretty sure they exist for each of nine gatefold-boxed launch titles (distributed in Canada by the Montréal-headquartered company Paragon Entertainment Products).
Getting back to the cardboard sleeves, it's difficult to say much else definitively about them. They don't have unique part numbers, and I didn't see anything that describes them in the Atari Engineering Information System "Item Master List". The dual-language Basketball manual's part number appears in the Item Master List, while Blackjack's doesn't.
We know that Basketball was released by Atari in October of 1978 (while Blackjack, of course, was one of the original nine launch titles). It’s also known that Irwin Electronics, a division of Canada’s oldest toy company, Irwin Toy Limited, became the official Canadian licensee for Atari in September of 1980. As far as I'm aware, Irwin‘s name appears on all of their materials, and Paragon's name appears on theirs. According to one of Michael Current's Atari timelines pages, Paragon ceased to be Atari's distributor in Canada sometime in early (Q1?) 1978. So I think the best we can do for now is to say that these were likely produced sometime between Q2 in 1978 and Q3 in 1980.
The sleeved Blackjack box was an online acquisition, but my endless thanks go out to good friend Nate of Lockhart Electronics for helping me acquire the sleeved Basketball — dude drove into Canada from NY to pick it up in person for me. Collecting from all corners of the world has meant making friends and acquaintances in more places than I might have ever guessed, and it really is an intangible benefit to the hobby that people often don’t ever consider!
Sorry for the lack of posts recently -- life has been a lot. I do have another two that are just about ready to go live, though, and you won't need to wait weeks and weeks for them... so stay tuned!
