The history of rare tournament cartridges from Atari to the SNES
Rare tournament cartridges from the '80s and '90s had unique hardware, exclusive content, and incredible backstories.
For a brief period in gaming history, video game companies created special limited-edition cartridges specifically for competitions. While many point to the Nintendo World Championship (NWC) cartridge for NES as the first example, I came across another tournament cart that predates it by eight years while sorting through a large lot of Atari games: Atlantis II. I knew it was extremely unlikely that I had a copy, but it gave me an excuse to research something fun—and fix up an old Atari to test out the copies I had.
