Keep It Real

So what’s so good about Atari, you say? Well, one of their fine products gave us Beast Busters, for one.

This zombie-shooting rail game is a vision into another world, a trip through the double vortex of the late eighties and Japan. There’s nothing in today’s video games quite like it. What game can you play today that features owls carrying undead football players, naked Smurf zombies, and cars made of human flesh that come to life and fight you? Where in popular culture today do you find bosses that transform into zombie werewolves halfway through a battle, and heroes known as ‘Johnny Justice’?

The answer is: none. It’s clear that Atari’s slow demise accompanied a decline in human creativity. The better graphics and improved gameplay just don’t make up for the fact that very few modern video games feature blue-skinned naked zombie bikers, Japlish, and the sense that sanity is slowly being stripped from your brain like flesh from a zombie’s head.

Somewhere along the line, humanity lost the simple joys of shooting up towns inhabited by about 500,000 identical gun-wielding undead, or of bouncing a ball from one side of the screen to another.

This t-shirt celebrates those old days of simplicity and baffling, baffling zombies. Wear this Atari t-shirt, and celebrate Atari and old-school video games in all their glory. For all their flaws and incoherence, they had heart.