Which Atari system was out in the US at that time?

I think it was the Atari 5200. The Commodore 64 had superior graphics at the time though. Believe it or not, once most of those tape games loaded, they were a lot of fun.

good thing i grew up in the age of the SNES. i think my gaming desires would have been crushed if i was introduced to gaming through that...thing

There were some great games for the Commodore 64. Most of them were in cartidge form fortunately.

I actually had a Commodore VIC-20, which also had a tape drive and cartridges, but I only got cartridge games for obvious reasons. Graphics on the thing were shite but it had some fun games. I'm not actually that old, I got it used from a friend of my Dad's when they got a NES. Had that and my 286 for all my gaming as a kid. Good times.

I played almost all my C64 games from floppies, which were much faster. But towards the back end of the C64 era, Zzap magazine and the tapes that came with it were the best way to get new games. Thank you, Europe.

There were some really good games on tape.

As annoying as 15 minute load times were, waiting 15 minutes for the game NOT to load was goddam unbearable.

Luckily, The Last Ninja rarely failed.

I had another game called simply "Ninja" that was great too.

Good thing i played Sega Genesis back then instead of this.