Retro video games enable gamers to once again navigate long-forgotten landscapes such as this one from Atari's "Battlezone."

Today's video gamers can spend hours immersed in the fastest, most high-tech, most hyper-realistic video games ever created through the union of technology and human creativity.

Still, there are times when nothing beats the thrill of whacking a speck of light back and forth on a cathode-ray tennis court.

It's true: For legions of veteran video game fans, it's still the old-school, retro classics -- "Pong," "Pacman," "Missile Command," "Centipede" -- that keep the competitive cyberfires stoked.

Just visit your local retailer, where consumers scarf up inexpensive, updated plug-and-play versions of classic '70s-era Atari home game consoles the way Pacman scarfs down power pellets.

Check the shelves of your local video game store, where PlayStation- and XBox-ready versions of 30-year-old arcade games share space with "Halo," "King Kong," "Grand Theft Auto" and other, more hectic modern-day cousins.

Or go online and check out the numerous Web sites that offer downloadable versions of classic arcade games that have been rejiggered to run on your home PC, and then visit eBay to see retro game fans buying, selling games, arcade game consoles and home gaming systems that date back to video gaming's childhood.

In a world of ultra-sophisticated, fast-paced, almost absurdly realistic video games, who's still fiddling with these ancient relics of the digital past? A wider range of people than you'd expect, said Ryan Barr, spokesman for Atari Inc., the company that created many of the industry's most-beloved old-school video games.

They include hard-core gamers -- the people who'll still make it a point to pick up the latest and greatest as soon as it comes out -- who still love the classics because "it's what they grew up with and what got them into video gaming to begin with," Barr says.

And, Barr continues, they're popular among "mass consumers" who aren't, and maybe never were, hard-core gamers, but who simply enjoy the nostalgic kick of playing games they played in their own youth.

Bill Loguidice is a great fan of today's video games, but he also keeps a warm spot in his heart for the old-school games he discovered when he was about 4.

"My parents had the Atari (home) system, and I remember it was like a special thrill when I got them to plug it in," says Loguidice, now 33, who writes about video games past and present for the Web site ArmchairArcade.com and is working on a book about the history of video games.

Another fan of retro games is Mike McGehee, design director and co-founder of Pixel Shift Studios in Las Vegas, who discovered the Atari 2600 home gaming system when he was just 3 years old.

"I love classic games, without a doubt," says McGehee, now 22, who also serves as coordinator of the Las Vegas chapter of the International Game Developers Association.

Retro games never actually disappeared over the past 25 or 30 years, McGehee says. Rather, they've been kept alive by amateur computer programmers who rewrote games for use on personal computers, collected and traded everything from old game cartridges to old video game systems, and who, through the Internet, have created an avid community of retro game aficionados.

But many casual gamers -- people who played video games in their youth but who drifted away in recent years -- began to rediscover the pleasures of old-school gaming around Christmas 2003. That, Barr says, is when Atari licensed several of its games for use in an affordably priced, battery-powered joystick player sold thought such mass retailers as Target.

That unit contained a built-in nine games -- no cartridges to change or lose -- plugged directly and simply into a TV, ran on batteries and sold for about $20. It was such a success, Barr says, that Atari last Christmas created its own "Atari Flashback" console, which offered 20 games in one plug-and-play console that retailed for about $30.

And, he says, this year Atari created "Atari Flashback 2," which contains 40 classic Atari games -- including "Pong," "Missile Command," "Centipede" and "Asteroids"-- sells for about $30 and is modeled to look like the Atari 2600 home system many first-generation gamers remember.

Meanwhile, gamers who already own Xboxes and PlayStation systems can enjoy classic games through compilations designed for those systems, as well as for PCs.

Cheryl Beck, an executive team leader at Target, 605 Stephanie St., Henderson, said the Atari Flashback 2 is selling well this year, just as the original Flashback and joystick units sold well during previous holiday shopping seasons.

"A lot of people just like the old-school Atari," she says.

Sure, younger players may be less than impressed by the classics' primitive graphics and straightforward gameplay.

"Almost on a daily basis, we'll get kids under 12 years old (who say), 'What is this?' " says Casey Reed, assistant manager at Game Crazy, 4995 S. Fort Apache Road, which stocks a variety of classic games and game systems. "And the parents just kind of laugh about it: 'That was the hottest thing when we were growing up.' "

But, Loguidice says, that simplicity probably is part of the appeal.

Today's video games have become so complex that "you don't really have these kind of pick-up-and-play games," he explains.

"Once you press 'start,' you immediately know how to play. There's usually one button and one joystick and that's it.

"Now, today, with modern controllers with a dozen buttons and two sticks, it all gets very complex.

"And even though the graphics are primitive on a lot of classic games, you'll also have these very abstract visuals that, actually, are still appealing today."