Collection essentials #28: Starpath Supercharger (2600)

 

Today’s essential is not a game, but rather, an accessory. This is the first of several expansion add-ons you’re going to see in this series. Basically, accessories like these have their own games made for them that are bought at retail, but the accessory itself is not a stand-alone console and requires a certain other console to function.

So what is the Starpath Supercharger and how does it work? It’s a cartridge that plugs into an Atari 2600. It has a cord sticking out of it that plugs into a headphone jack of an audio cassette player. Games for the Supercharger come on cassette tapes! I’ll bet you never knew that tapes were ever used to store video games. You insert the game tape into a cassette player, and with the Supercharger plugged into the headphone jack, you press “play” on the player and the game’s data is then loaded. Once the initial loading is complete, you hit stop on the cassette player and proceed to start playing your game.

So why do accessories like this exist? Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, consoles weren’t especially powerful and slowly became obsolete as technology developed. Things like this helped old machines to keep up a little better. Games for the Starpath Supercharger were able to hold more data than a typical Atari 2600 cartridge, and the graphics for the games could be made a little better, too.

The Supercharger is a neat little device, but it didn’t do especially well. The video game crash of 1983 in particular really hurt its chances at long-term success, and the company went bankrupt soon after. And thus, the Supercharger is pretty obscure and not very well-remembered. I actually had no idea it existed until I obtained three Supercharger cassettes several years ago, and I was instantly intrigued. I actually still haven’t properly gone through the Supercharger’s small library to see if there are any more games I want to get for it, but I should do that at some point. It’s a cool piece of technology that I think belongs in my collection.

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