This post is going to be short and sweet. I last wrote about the history of and my personal collection for the Emerson Arcadia-2001 just over three years ago, and my summary of the system’s pros and cons can be found here.
Looking back at my posts on the console and games I own for this system, I was not kind. I had no reason to be then, nor do I now. The Arcadia-2001 remains one of the least exciting consoles of the era and hasn’t really been hit by the retro collecting craze that plagues everything from the NES onward. Just as a lark, I typed in “Arcadia 2001” into my Twitter search engine, and three out of the top five posts generated were my own posts from when I wrote about the system for my blog back in 2018. That’s seriously unpopular!
In my 2018 series of posts, I suggested I might have to dig a little deeper into the shallow Arcadia catalog of games to see if something else besides Cat Trax or Tanks-a-Lot piqued my interest. With another dozen or so U.S. released games to own for the system, there’s potential. However, I never picked up a single additional title for the library in the past three years.
The problem is that the system and games sold so poorly that they are hard to find online and almost impossible in the wild. Checking eBay (August 2021), there are a decent amount of games for sale, but many are the more common games I already own or are quite expensive (>$50 for CIB) for what is undoubtedly a crummy clone of a game I already own for a better console. One has to be really dedicated and somewhat obsessive to collect for this system. We’ll see what I can find, and maybe I’ll add another game or two to my collection when I inevitably write about the Arcadia-2001 again in three more years.
Cartridge Corner 