AVC Online started out as local club in IL back in 1988 known as the Atari Traders Association(because we exchanged games) and later known as Atari Team Association, We officially changed it to Atari Video Club in 1992.
We went national with the ATA Newsletter which was the original name of the fanzine in 1990 with an small ad in The A Exchange with 30 members and turn over for every 1 we lost we gain 2.
The first newsletter was know as ATA Newsletter which was a one pager for the local club only which came out on May 1989. After few months we later changed it to The Atari Zone and it was Monthly then switched to bimonthly fanzine. The first official Atari Zone Fanzine debuted on October 1998 and the last issue was February 28th,2007. We are planning a relaunch soon under the name of Atari Gamer.
Our Online presence started on Prodigy Online service up till they changed their pricing plan and we moved to GEnie Online service, after a while we moved to net with our website on Angelfire and Geocities(we had a framed page on Geocitites). We dropped the frames site and kept Angelfire up till July 2002 when we moved to Atari-users.net until July 2017 when that site closed.
This website was down for past 3 months after that, until 12/16/17 we moved to new location on GoDaddy under our new domain (Atar-Video.Club)
Atari Jaguar Festival(JagFest) was huge portion of the club as for each show we dedicated one issue for event that celebrates Atari Jaguar and other Atari Systems from 1997 to 2002 when it was stand alone show.
In 2003, the event went on tour piggy backing on shows like Midwest Gaming Classic,Video Game Summit and CGE. In 2004, we released the 7th and final Jagfest issue which recapped every Jagfest including over seas. (in 2007 we were working on re-releasing the final issue covering every Jagfest from 1997 to 2007,but that has been pushed back, we are still working on it). We are still doing Jagfest section at MGC and VGS,when possible.
In 2003,we started holding our own show, Video Game Summit, it started small and grew to big show.
On Dec 15th,2020 All Yahoo Groups closed, we have migrated our 3 main list to
Mailchimp (the 3 main list is AVC News and both VGS main, and vendors list) Discussions groups can use either the Atari video club (public club) at Atari Age, AVC Online f(public group) at Facebook or either VGS or Jagfest Facebook pages.
For more on the migration click here.
Our future plans include:
- to bring more awareness to chats and planning to add more
- relaunch our fanzine (postponed looking for more writers)
- Start programming games for 2600,7800 and Jaguar(replacing Atari I/O build team which never got off the ground) (maybe 2025)
- Starting in August AVC Live will be doing interviews during the 3pm broadcast
Updates:
07/07/2024- AVC Online Shop added to site
07/01/2024- Jagfest Shop page opens to the public
11/12/2022- Reformatted website (using block theme, kept same feel as old but updated)
11/12/2022- Website Relaunched, Mailing list changes