Inside The Vault #6-July 2025

 

 WELCOME TO INSIDE THE VAULT!

Vault fans, summer is in full swing, and with that has come the usual increase in great inventory in our store, where we continue to do our best to serve our community with prices that don't insult you or your wallet!

We have already had a number of adventures in search of great items as well as gracious offerings from the people that make this community so great as well as keep the engine that is Nick D's Video Game Vault running smooth!

 Continue to look for great items on our Facebook page as they come in!

In today's newsletter, we look at the very first video game our owner ever played at the tender age of 5, and how it started a love that turned into a dream that became this business!

Staff Picks, and a look at one of the more mysteriously unique consoles in history, are also to be found inside!

Aaaand the debut of Nick D's Top 5, where this issue we look at 5 cartoons that either never got a video game, or deserve better than what they got!

We're inside The Vault, people, so let's head on through!

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 JUST LISTEN TO THAT ROLL! 

The year was 1986, summer time. I was only 5. Still, I can recall it vividly, me in my Osh Kosh shirt and suspenders, sitting on my father's knee, watching what would become a vital part of my life. 

Obviously as a kid, I didn't buy my own video games. That job belonged to my father, who was a successful traveling businessman for Stanley, selling door systems up and down the eastern seaboard. My father was an avid bowler in high school, and as I'm sure was the case for many at the time, smitten by that wood paneling look of the Atari 2600.

5 year old me didn't bowl. In fact, I don't think I bowled until I reached double digits, and well, let's just say I'm pretty awful at it. My magical "moving my hands to somehow magically Jedi power the ball into place" doesn't work. Bummer, I know.

What did work however, was Bowling on the Atari 2600. That's right, just bowling. No licensing, no brand name or sports figure attached to it, just bowling. In my kid Nick mind I often envisioned those greasy, smoky, deliciously 80s bowling alleys that I spent more time at the arcades in them as the setting for the title.

 I mean, maybe there was a bright orange bowling alley out there, complete with a peculiar baby pink fleshed blue clothes wearing bowler who had just the most awesome strike victory dance, complete with overly digitized bloops and bleeps, right?

I mean, this was late 70s Atari, and not only did developers have to find inspiration somewhere, they knew how to party!

While I did go on to play other Atari games, Kangaroo, KABOOM!, Congo Bongo, and Keystone Kapers, to name a few, I always came back to Bowling. Mainly because I just enjoyed it so much, but also because I believed I was a Jedi Master of sorts with it, even if it appeared as it does now, as blind luck.

With Bowling, like other Atari games, obviously, relying on just a simple joystick and one button, there's not a whole lot of precision that goes into playing it, or so it would seem. I think getting a strike in this game, still, 45 years since it was first released in 1979, is more about luck than it is skill. 

I remember the first time I achieved this as a 6 year old. I was pumped! Today, at 44, whenever my wife or anyone else who watches me play it asks me how I do it, I don't really have an explanation. "I just move the joystick at the last minute to send the ball dead center," is all I can say with a shrug, mainly because its not a full proof plan!

Bowling was the first video game I ever played, and it opened my mind, and later, yes, my heart, to the endless possibilities and emotions video games can elicit in a person, thus making them, to me, perhaps much younger than most, a work of art. They also became the vessel of which a lot of my storytelling is attached to.

Whenever I wonder what my life would have been like, had my father not purchased an Atari 2600, and put me on his knee for some frames of bowling, I'm immediately glad I don't have to.

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JUNE STAFF PICKS 

NICK D

Excitebike 

Wii Sports

Test Drive Unlimited 

JOEY 

Tomb Raider (Survivor Trilogy)

Bomberman 64 

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End 

KATHY

Super Mario Bros 3

Cooking Mama

New Super Mario Bros

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 WEIRD  SOUNDS:THE JVC X'EYE

 Video game history is littered with some weird and unusual as well as fascinating pieces, systems, handhelds, controllers, you name it, but we're shining light on something that was, in the most 90s gaming sense, kind of ahead of its time, while still having a quirkiness about it that is both endearing and somewhat intimidating.

 

In March 1994, a console from the joint partnership between JVC and Sega was born, called the JVC X'Eye was released. Combining the forces of the Sega Genesis and Sega CD into a single console, it was a daunting task, made further dismal by the astounding price tag for the time of $500!

 

Additionally, a 32X modification to the console was available all the way up until 2014, so the possibility (and enormous price tag!) of having an all in one Sega console did exist.

 

But it isn't the price tag, or the capability of playing three different kinds of Sega games that makes this both a weird and totally 90s console.

 

It's the fact that the system has a full size microphone port and the capability of playing karaoke discs so that you can sing and follow along on your television! Some of you younger readers of our newsletter might find this not interesting at all, but it was a pretty cool thing for the time!

 

The name leaves a bit to be desired, but in a way, that's another reason it stands out, if nothing else, as a beacon to a time when companies were trying anything, and I mean anything, to get gamers (and karaoke party masters?) to buy their product!

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NICK D'S TOP 5!

 It's here and for our debut we're taking a look at cartoon shows of yesteryear that either a)never got a video game, or b)got one and it just didn't capture the essence of the show! 

 

In no particular order..

You mean to tell me no one could figure out how to make a game about Bluffington's most famous and totally neurotic citizen? Think about it, a Metroidvania style, quest fetch game roaming the streets of Bluffington and interacting with all its quirky residents? Mr. Dink as a shopkeeper where whenever you buy the most expensive thing in his ever changing stash prompts a "Very expensive"? Whenever you save the game and quit Skeeter Valentine says "See ya later, Doug!" *honk honk*

Ugh, such a missed opportunity, and no that atrocity of a Gameboy Color Disney Doug game doesn't count. Blech.

 

 This may be the toughest one on this list to conceptualize in that The Angry Beavers and the team behind it broke the fourth wall and made Nickelodeon's parent company Viacom, very, very angry on their way out of their lineup with their final episode that never aired because of all the fourth wall breaking. It more than shed a little light on how poorly Nickelodeon and Viacom were treating their properties at the time, especially when it came time for the shows to go into syndication. 

 

Yes, my personal favorite cartoon show did see involvement in the Nicktoons Racing game, as well as recently in the Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl, but to be fair to the developers of both of those games, neither showcased the brothers Beaver in the truest least spootastic way. 

 

Truthfully you could put them in any genre of game with just them and the elements of their show and it would be absolutely hilarious. 

 

Yes, we got a SNES game, and it was pointless, and not in a fun ha-ha kind of way either. Why a standard platformer wasn't made is still an unsolved mystery all these years later. At this point I'd settle for a party game or even a beat em' up, as odd as that might be. Still, so disappointing. 

People may be quick to tell me about the Intellivision and Atari 2600 game, and I'd be quicker to tell them that was terrible. Seemingly anything else either was released only in Europe, or on PC and smart devices. My hope is someone gets a hold of this license and gives it the same treatment as G.I. Joe or Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the classic beat em up style, but for now, I can't accept what is as good. 

I think, more so than any other cartoon mentioned on this list, I am shocked, thoroughly, that this show didn't get the same treatment on the NES that so many other Disney cartoons of the time did. To my knowledge this show NEVER got a video game. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I don't believe it did. And man, what a great cartoon to make a game from, right? Simple enough. This cartoon screams the Ducktales treatment as far as gameplay is concerned. Will it happen? I don't know. Fingers crossed.

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THANK YOU!! 

 Thank you for joining us for this newsletter. Look for our next issue very, very soon!

GAME ON!!!