A bunch of rare Atari items are part of an auction which celebrates the impact of computers and video games.
"RR Auction's March 2024 sale chronicles Steve Jobs and the Apple revolution, with additional featured items from the realms of vintage computing and video games," reads the auction page.
"Highlighted by Steve Jobs autographs and memorabilia—including ultra-rare Apple Computer checks, significant signed letters, and business cards—the auction also plays host to a wide variety of original Apple hardware, including a functional Apple-1 Computer, colourful iMacs, scores of new-in-box iPods, and sealed iPhones."
However, it's the Atari items which are likely to catch the eye of gaming historians. These include Al Alcorn's Atari Cosmos prototype, the original schematics for Pong and a working Computer Space arcade machine.
The Cosmos is perhaps one of the most exciting items here; it was never released at retail, making this something of a one-off device, as the auction description explains:
From the collection of Pong creator Allan Alcorn—an extremely rare circa 1980 prototype design mock-up of the Atari Cosmos, an unreleased tabletop electronic game system designed to utilize holographic cartridges overlaid against an LED array display. The system was intended to have nine built-in games—Asteroids, Basketball, Dodge 'Em, Football, Outlaw, Road Runner, Sea Battle, Space Invaders, and Superman—which would be activated by a low-cost cartridge containing the holographic image and a notch by which the system would identify which game to load. The low-cost holography process developed by Atari for the Cosmos would go on to be adopted by the American Banknote Corporation for use in credit cards and other high-security financial applications. The Atari Cosmos project was ultimately cancelled by Atari's president, Ray Kassar, after the product was announced but before it was released—making any Cosmos hardware exceedingly rare.
The auction ends tomorrow.