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Hey, Gen X: You Can Now Preorder the Atari 7800 Plus, and It Plays Atari 2600 Games

For $130, you get the console, a gamepad and Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, a sequel to the 1983 game Crystal Castles.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, and generational studies Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
2 min read
Atari 7800 console is shown

You can game like it's 1986 -- if only you could pay house prices and rent like it was 1986.

 Atari

Have you played Atari today? That was the game company's slogan, and though this Gen Xer hasn't played Atari in a long time, I will proclaim till my dying day that the Atari 2600 was the best console of the 1980s. On Tuesday, Atari and Plaion, a video game publisher, announced they're re-creating a different Atari console. 

The Atari 7800 Plus, an updated version of the Atari 7800, is now available for preorder for $130. It includes a wireless gamepad and a new game, Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest, a sequel to the 1983 game Crystal Castles.

The new console connects to modern TVs via HDMI, so you don't need to have a honking big CRT TV like we did in the 1980s.

The 7800 was always backward compatible, meaning it could play games for the Atari 2600 even back in the day, and the new console can do the same. So if I ever dig through the hayloft at my parents' Minnesota farm, I can pluck out Pitfall, Journey Escape and Frogger, blow the hay out of the cartridges, and give them a try. (Though if my goal was to relive my 2600 days, Atari released the Atari 2600 Plus in 2023.)

"Expanding the Atari+ platform with new games, new wireless controllers, and the 7800+ console is a perfect follow-up to last year's successful launch of the Atari 2600+," Wade Rosen, chairman and CEO of Atari, said in a statement.

One wireless gamepad comes with the console, and you can buy additional ones for $35. You can also buy a wireless joystick for $35. There are additional 7800 and 2600 games, including Asteroids Deluxe, Bounty Bob Strikes Back (a sequel to Miner 2049er), Frenzy, Space Duel and the iconic Berzerk.

The original Atari 7800 was introduced in 1986 as the successor to the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200. Atari dropped support for it in 1992.