You know what keeps me up at night?

The horrifying bone-chilling realization that the Atari 5200 and the Atari XEGS were basically the same… console.

The same console. The SAME. Console.

They were both just Atari 8-bit computers running a 6502C CPU at one point seven nine megahertz. ANTIC. GTIA. POKEY. It’s all there. Right there. Like a crime scene where the killer left the fingerprints on the doorknob… and we all just ignored it.

So what did Atari do?

They made the same thing—twice.

They slapped on different shells, sprinkled a little RAM confetti, and whispered, “Shh… it’s new. Don’t think too hard.”

But it wasn’t new. It was never new. It was the same silicon pancake, flipped and refried, served on a different plate. And we—we just ate it up.

Sixteen kilobytes on the 5200. Sixty-four on the XEGS. That’s not progress. That’s not innovation. That’s Atari saying: “You didn’t see what you saw.” That’s not an upgrade—it’s a cover-up.

And nobody questioned it! Nobody stormed Sunnyvale! Nobody marched into Atari HQ with pitchforks and CRT televisions! The magazines? Silent. The retailers? Smiling. The players? Hypnotized.

The 5200 wasn’t replaced. No. They were siblings. Twins. Clones. Atari just kept dragging the same body back on stage, slapping a new mask over its cold dead face, and we applauded.

It wasn’t a console. It wasn’t a system. It was a shell game. They didn’t want you to own progress. They wanted you to believe in progress. They wanted you to dream of progress.

And once you see it—once it drills into your skull like a buzzing CRT—you can’t unsee it. You start to wonder. You start to spiral.

How many times? How many times have we fallen for the exact same…trick?

So here I am outside at 1 AM, shirtless in my driveway, SCREAMING at the stars:

“WHY DID NOBODY STORM SUNNYVALE?!”