In the 80s I had the Tamiya Grasshopper [1], which was the greatest remote control car ever (opinion).

I remember attaching three battery packs (instead of the standard one)—to make it drive at roughly 8 billion miles per hour, in the process ripping the tyres to shreds and pretty much ruining the car—because it couldn’t turn without flipping several thousand times.

Still, for those initial few seconds, it was glorious.

RIP Grasshopper and RIP Shunsaku Tamiya

[1] https://cdn.thingiverse.com/assets/8b/e7/0c/d6/a0/IMG_6201.j...

In that regard, I almost feel like a new Atari 800-series would be better.

The C64 had good graphics and excellent sound but so much of it was behind a brick-wall learning curve of poking. Atari's native BASIC at least provided some rudimentary access. You want something where the user can get a win on day 1, or it's getting buried in the closet with the rock tumbler.

Or maybe if they packed in a super-extended BASIC ROM. But pretty quickly you end up wanting something with more modern flow control and structures, maybe closer to "Qbasic with sprite commands" and then you're probably demanding more than what can be reasonably asked of a 6510-class CPU.