When Club Med Met Atari

Club Med always sounded like a place for relaxation and adult activity (certainly that’s what commercials hinted at). Sunny, relaxed, a little European, and just far enough outside my world that I had to imagine most of it. The name made me think of beaches, drinks, people with good tans, and long afternoons where nobody seemed to be looking at a clock. It did not make me think of an Atari 800 sitting under a palm tree. But for a strange and interesting stretch in the early 1980s, that was part of the story too, and before getting to the computers, it helps to talk a little about what Club Med actually was. It all started in 1950 with a Belgian water polo champion named Gérard Blitz, who was fresh out of the WWII French Resistance and looking for a way to help people shake off the weight of postwar Europe. His idea was simple. Let’s gather people together in a beautiful place, take away the usual pressures of money and status, and let them rediscover the pleasure of being alive. Blitz…