Collection essentials #4: Amidar (2600)

Here’s the first example of a game that’s here strictly for nostalgia reasons. When I was a teenager and starting to think of myself as a collector, I started a tradition where starting every New Year’s Day I would fire up and play every game in my growing collection once for at least a short bit. And since Amidar was the first game alphabetically on the oldest console I had, it was always the game that ushered in a new year for me. I’m not sure if I’ve done it every single year, but I still like to play it first thing in a new year just for tradition’s sake!

As for the game itself, it’s a maze game in a similar vein to Pac-Man, where you want to traverse as much of a maze as you can without being caught by roaming enemies. Pac-Man (the arcade version anyway) is much better, and frankly maze games as a genre never really took off because Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man pretty much perfected the genre right off the bat. Amidar is an okay game, but the only reason I consider it essential for me personally is the aforementioned nostalgia.