Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and joining
Speaker 1: me again is Chuck Bryant from Stuff You Should Know?
Speaker 1: How do you do? How do you do? To you, Chuck.
Speaker 1: If you tuned into our last episode, you heard the
Speaker 1: beginning of the epic tale of the rise and fall
Speaker 1: of Atari. We talked about Atari's founding up to the
Speaker 1: point where it's founder, Nolan Bushnell, sells the company to
Speaker 1: Warner Communications, and now we're going to talk about where
Speaker 1: things went from that point forward. Yeah, I should say
Speaker 1: I almost said hello by doing my impression of the
Speaker 1: home version of pac Man, but I didn't do it.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. I'll do that when we talk about
Speaker 1: it in ten minutes. Yea, we will get there. So
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, this we were teasing it at the
Speaker 1: end of the last episode. This is when Atari release
Speaker 1: is the revolutionary and I mean that sincerely. I am
Speaker 1: not being snarky. Revolutionary Atari Video Computer System a k
Speaker 1: A the Atari vcs a k A. Yeah, and where
Speaker 1: I didn't even know, but I saw that you research
Speaker 1: where the name came from. Yeah, So all right, when
Speaker 1: you're a company and you make stuff, you give units
Speaker 1: part names, right, So like in a hardware store, you
Speaker 1: might have a typical like a type of screw of
Speaker 1: a certain length, that's a Phillip's head screw, and to
Speaker 1: describe the whole thing would take you like five lines
Speaker 1: of text because you're talking about the length, the type
Speaker 1: of screw head, you know, how how close the treads are.
Speaker 1: Or you could just give it a part name and
Speaker 1: then you say, I need fifteen of hc X blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah. Well, the part name for the
Speaker 1: this unit, this this system was the c X to
Speaker 1: six hundred. So they just said, all right, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna call it the AY because it sounds, you know, futuristic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: whereas the rest of us are thinking, like where we're
Speaker 1: atari's one or two. I always thought that, yeah, so
Speaker 1: this this is just an identifier that that makes it
Speaker 1: easy to refer to a part. Now in this case,
Speaker 1: it just made a really compelling sounding device. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it goes on sale in the United States for a
Speaker 1: hundred ninety nine on the low end. The high end
Speaker 1: was to twenty nine. It chipped with two joysticks. I
Speaker 1: guess the two nine version came with the paddles. I guess,
Speaker 1: so I had that. I had the paddles. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: had the paddles. There's no other way to play Breakout
Speaker 1: properly without paddles. Um, and uh, it came with Combat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it came with one game, which was really I can't
Speaker 1: remember actually how many variations there were, right, because they
Speaker 1: had the tanks, they had the airplane jets. I told
Speaker 1: you in the last episode. My brother and I were
Speaker 1: playing Combat last week at his house on and we
Speaker 1: were kind of cracking up at um. You know, like
Speaker 1: here's one version where it's the two tanks, and then
Speaker 1: the next version is it's the same thing, but they're invisible,
Speaker 1: and the next version is it's the same thing, but
Speaker 1: the bullets bounce off the wall. So that was my
Speaker 1: favorite one. Yeah, where you could bank shots into each
Speaker 1: other and or you could hit yourself. Oh I didn't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you bake it, if you bank it
Speaker 1: so that it it bounces back and hit goes through
Speaker 1: your tank and it actually hit yourself, And that was
Speaker 1: really yeah. And then of course they had the air
Speaker 1: combat games of you know, you could be fighter pilots
Speaker 1: or you could be biplanes, you could be that giant
Speaker 1: whatever that was. And there were clouds in some versions
Speaker 1: you fly behind clouds, not in other versions. So they
Speaker 1: managed to really milk combat for many, many different versions
Speaker 1: of essentially the same game. Yeah, And as I recall,
Speaker 1: the way you would play that is there were physical
Speaker 1: switches on the atari itself that you you could manipulate
Speaker 1: and get different versions as well. It was there one
Speaker 1: that was it Like, it wasn't a menu system, right,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a menu. It was a toggle
Speaker 1: on the front of the game, just toggle through the
Speaker 1: different versions, which is kind of interesting. Like it was
Speaker 1: the actual console itself that had physical switches in the
Speaker 1: upper down position and that's how you could determine which
Speaker 1: version you were playing. And um, yeah, so those days
Speaker 1: of having that video screen with the menu where it's
Speaker 1: like start, load game, save game didn't exist. And and
Speaker 1: once that game, like we mentioned in the previous episode,
Speaker 1: once you turn that console off, all that information disappears
Speaker 1: because it's only in read only memory. That's right. And
Speaker 1: I think any of us that got three quarters of
Speaker 1: the way through Raiders of the Lost Art and someone
Speaker 1: accidentally flicked the reset switch, bad Yeah, oh man, And
Speaker 1: that and that game was one of the most complicated
Speaker 1: Atari games that I can recall. And what we're talking
Speaker 1: about it, Yeah, we'll save that, we'll save it. We'll
Speaker 1: we'll talk on our reflections of some of our favorite
Speaker 1: games later on. But technically the system was ready for
Speaker 1: shipping a year before it came out, but Atari sat
Speaker 1: on it. And the reason they saund it was causes.
Speaker 1: Something we mentioned in the last episode that that big
Speaker 1: agreement they had with Magnavox. Part of that agreement was
Speaker 1: they would give Magnavox the rights to anything Atari produced
Speaker 1: within that year, and so they thought, well, if we
Speaker 1: wait a little longer, we don't. Yeah, we won't give
Speaker 1: them the rights to the all will retain them ourselves.
Speaker 1: So they sat on it and released it a year late.
Speaker 1: And originally they were only going to create ten titles
Speaker 1: for this thing. They thought that the market for it
Speaker 1: would be something that would last two or three years,
Speaker 1: and they would just produce it for that before moving
Speaker 1: on to something else, and therefore you would have more
Speaker 1: flexibility because you could switch out titles. But they thought, well,
Speaker 1: there's there's no real market here. We're not gonna go
Speaker 1: beyond that. But some of the programmers started playing around
Speaker 1: with and said, wait a minute, we have the opportunity
Speaker 1: here to make stuff that has never been in the
Speaker 1: arcades that that could be totally new, groundbreaking. There's a
Speaker 1: lot more potent chill with this hardware. Like here's where
Speaker 1: the money is. Yeah, fellas, how about two hundred titles
Speaker 1: right that you can sell for thirty dollars a piece. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so they said this sounds like a good idea. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but Uhara was not was not a smash hit right
Speaker 1: out of the gate. No. It actually there's a couple
Speaker 1: of years were sort of lackluster because people didn't really
Speaker 1: get that it was more than Pong at first, and
Speaker 1: One Communications didn't really market it well either, So there
Speaker 1: was there was some some downfalls in the market. They
Speaker 1: weren't a video game company, they didn't really know what
Speaker 1: to do with it. And it was expensive. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, hundred dollars that that doesn't sound like it's
Speaker 1: expensive today, but keep in mind we're talking nineteen seventies money.
Speaker 1: You know, that's like more than seven hundred bucks for
Speaker 1: this thing that at least at first was only going
Speaker 1: to play ten titles. That's not that's not a big
Speaker 1: selling point for someone who's I'm gonna I'm gonna shell
Speaker 1: out the better part of a grand to get a
Speaker 1: machine that can play ten games. Yeah. Remember my brother
Speaker 1: and I how, um, you know how you would submit
Speaker 1: the Christmas list to the to the parents. Yes, here's
Speaker 1: what Scott wants, here's what Chuck wants. We had to share. Um,
Speaker 1: we had to both go in all in on Atari.
Speaker 1: Like this Christmas all both of us went together is
Speaker 1: this one item. And my parents are like, all right,
Speaker 1: well you better play it. It's funny because I actually
Speaker 1: got may Atari fairly close to the um not not
Speaker 1: too long before the Great video game Crash, which we
Speaker 1: will get to, which meant that the price had actually
Speaker 1: come down because there was a lot of competition in
Speaker 1: that space pretty early on. Yeah, I could remember what year,
Speaker 1: but um, I don't think it was seventy eight, but
Speaker 1: I bet I bet it was eight. Yeah, my I
Speaker 1: was probably closer for me. Uh so in that's when
Speaker 1: Nolan Bushnell leaves Atari. Yeah, and we talked a little
Speaker 1: bit in the last episode about the corporate structure at
Speaker 1: Warners and um, how it just did not jib at
Speaker 1: all with these creative sort of pot smoking hippie the
Speaker 1: game designers, and um, he just got more and more
Speaker 1: upset and discontented and or discontent discontent. He felt discontentment
Speaker 1: to where he basically tried to get himself fired to
Speaker 1: and he had a huge fight with a Warner executive
Speaker 1: in front of the board of directors. And that was
Speaker 1: that he was told to pack his things and go.
Speaker 1: So he leaves. Um, and uh, it was a big
Speaker 1: bummer after that. I mean it was already sort of
Speaker 1: a bummer, but him leaving was a very symbolic deal
Speaker 1: for Atari's sort of the downfall of Yeah, some people
Speaker 1: refer to the sale of Atari to Warner as the
Speaker 1: first quote unquote death of Atari. Yeah, some people refer
Speaker 1: to Nolan's departure as the first death. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: they were kind of tied. I think it was. It's
Speaker 1: a big change. I mean, they did happen fairly close
Speaker 1: one another in time. He didn't last. There was a
Speaker 1: c E. The new CEO of Attari is Ray Kassar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was not well liked, but now developers no. In fact,
Speaker 1: at least his name would be used for a famous
Speaker 1: Attori title later on. What was it yards Revenge? It's
Speaker 1: just ray backwards. It's pretty yards revenge. And then apparently,
Speaker 1: uh Cassar said that's clever. So it must have been
Speaker 1: a few moments where at any rate, al Alcorn, Harry Jenkins,
Speaker 1: and Roger Hector at this time begin to work on
Speaker 1: a handheld electronic game system that used holography as its display,
Speaker 1: so so a holographic display, and it was called the Cosmos.
Speaker 1: I heard of that. Yeah, it was a handheld thing.
Speaker 1: It was supposed to have nine games with all the
Speaker 1: game information actually on the device itself, but you would
Speaker 1: switch cartridges out because the cartridges had the information for
Speaker 1: the holographic display. Yeah. I had a Merlin, remember that.
Speaker 1: I do remember the Merlin, a little red. It looked
Speaker 1: like a telephone. Yeah, and then I can't remember the
Speaker 1: name of it again. If someone knows this, I know
Speaker 1: you'll right in. It was a really great handheld um
Speaker 1: that had a dial on the bottom and it was
Speaker 1: about nine inches tall about three inches wide, and I
Speaker 1: had a screen and it had cartridges you load had
Speaker 1: like Breakout. I can't remember the name of it, but
Speaker 1: it was really advanced for the time. Yeah. I did
Speaker 1: a tech Stuff episode, a series of them. Actually about
Speaker 1: a lot of the consoles and handheld consoles that came
Speaker 1: out during this time, um, which fairly extensive but not exhaustive.
Speaker 1: We didn't can't cover everything. There's just there's a lot
Speaker 1: of no name ones that sort of came and went,
Speaker 1: Yeah ones that or or they had like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a very limited release in South America, and they're like
Speaker 1: three people in the United States who have one. That
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Yeah, I can't. I think I want
Speaker 1: to say that they were both named after cats, and
Speaker 1: one of our one of our listeners through me as
Speaker 1: one of the two cat uh characters using this and
Speaker 1: Lauren was the other one. So I've I've got I've
Speaker 1: got that picture somewhere. Uh. Nineteen seventy nine, one of
Speaker 1: the great arcade games of all time comes out from
Speaker 1: Atari Asteroids. That's right, that's you know, fantastic game, addictive gameplay,
Speaker 1: the one that still holds up. Very challenging still once
Speaker 1: you start flying that spaceship around, right because because it
Speaker 1: actually used inertia and momentum, right, you you had to
Speaker 1: actually turn your ship and thrust in the opposite direction
Speaker 1: to stop yourself at the plan ahead. Yeah, the Asteroids
Speaker 1: when you would when you shoot them would break apart
Speaker 1: into different directions. And if you were flying around and
Speaker 1: if you've got going too fast and those asteroids you
Speaker 1: start shooting them, you broke apart into little sticks. They
Speaker 1: have that little teleport button that you could use like
Speaker 1: once a game and yeah, but that would often drop
Speaker 1: you right in the path of a big asteroid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't necessarily a way to to save yourself. This
Speaker 1: is also when Atari would release a game for the
Speaker 1: home game market that that chuck, I think you have
Speaker 1: a few things to say about. It's a little game
Speaker 1: called Adventure. Oh talk about my favorite thing ever? Yes,
Speaker 1: please do, let's do that. Yes, Adventure was was created
Speaker 1: by Warren Robinette and it I played it yesterday online. Um,
Speaker 1: had a great time. Still holds up, Well, maybe it's nostalgia.
Speaker 1: Playing a little is definite role. It does hold up
Speaker 1: in a way though. But when you look at it now,
Speaker 1: and if you're younger, you will scoff at the square
Speaker 1: that represents the night, and the arrow that represents a sword,
Speaker 1: and the ducks that represent the dragons. Um. But at
Speaker 1: the time it was, there was nothing like it there.
Speaker 1: It was the first game that put you. Uh. It
Speaker 1: was the first first person adventure game. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: It's considered the first action adventure game ever. It spawned
Speaker 1: a genre of games. Yeah, and but I don't think
Speaker 1: we can get across like when we were kids playing
Speaker 1: this game, we didn't see a square in an arrow.
Speaker 1: We had imagination to go along with it. And it
Speaker 1: sounds corny, but you really did, in your mind's eye
Speaker 1: see the dragon, the red dragon, coming at you, and
Speaker 1: you felt like you were the night and you had
Speaker 1: this great big sword. So it really played on kids imagination, which, um,
Speaker 1: I mean, I love the games. Now, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying you should go back and do things
Speaker 1: like this anymore, although there are some games that have
Speaker 1: come out recently that have more of this old school
Speaker 1: feel to it and they're phenomenal. For example, if you
Speaker 1: want a game that looks like it was made back
Speaker 1: in the early this would be more like in the
Speaker 1: early computer game era. Papers Please, Now, let me tell
Speaker 1: you what Papers pleases, and you're not gonna believe that
Speaker 1: this is a game. In Papers Please, you play the
Speaker 1: part of a border patrol agent who reviews documentation of
Speaker 1: people passing from one Soviet style nation to a different
Speaker 1: Soviet style nation. But it's fantastic and it's done in
Speaker 1: this style. And like I said, it's more of a
Speaker 1: computer game style than the video game like the home
Speaker 1: video games is very retro. But the gameplay is phenomenal.
Speaker 1: The style is perfect, the oppressive Soviet music and and
Speaker 1: uh and game. The writing in the game is fine.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing some people who are kind of going
Speaker 1: back to it, maybe a little later in the development
Speaker 1: cycle and adventure, but they're going back to those basics
Speaker 1: of gameplay is really important, and imagination can make up
Speaker 1: for a lot of of what other people would see
Speaker 1: as like a drawback. You know, this idea that the
Speaker 1: graphics are not uh realistic or or or you know,
Speaker 1: they they're very abstract. These days, I'm seeing developers say
Speaker 1: that's not a problem. You know, that's something you can
Speaker 1: embrace if the game is good. Yeah, exactly. And an
Speaker 1: Adventure was that. I mean, there are three big things
Speaker 1: that Adventure brought to the table um. There was a
Speaker 1: large space for the first time, UHL, thirty rooms and
Speaker 1: eight regions. Yeah, you moved from screen to screen and
Speaker 1: it would take you into a new region with new
Speaker 1: new things that you had to maneuver around. You could
Speaker 1: pick up objects and drop them and move them around
Speaker 1: and use them and manipulate them. That was a new
Speaker 1: thing one of the time, as I recall well, which
Speaker 1: turned out to be brilliant because it's us of the
Speaker 1: lost Ark made things very convoluted, right. Yeah. It meant
Speaker 1: that you didn't have to have an inventory screen. All
Speaker 1: the action could take place within that game, like you
Speaker 1: had to plan out what you needed, like are you
Speaker 1: going to need the sword on that next screen? If
Speaker 1: you don't, do you want to move? The whole point
Speaker 1: of the game was getting the chalice exactly so you
Speaker 1: might not need your sword, so dropping the sword, moving
Speaker 1: the chalice further along might be the best thing to do.
Speaker 1: But there was also another element that could really mess
Speaker 1: with you if you yes. The bat. Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: a bat that would fly around and there were several
Speaker 1: levels of difficult from three I think, and I think
Speaker 1: the bat came out of number two. UM, but either
Speaker 1: on level two or three, the bat would just fly
Speaker 1: around and you would be so close to getting what
Speaker 1: you needed, and it took work. This game time. There
Speaker 1: was no timer, which was another genius move UM and
Speaker 1: it would take a lot of figuring out to to
Speaker 1: find your way through these mazes and catacombs, and sometimes
Speaker 1: you would have to use this bridge to get through
Speaker 1: a wall, and it was really pretty genius. And then
Speaker 1: the bat would come and steal the things and steal
Speaker 1: the thing you wanted, or occasionally it would fly away
Speaker 1: with like a dragon, which was funny. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: basically then you had to go on a quest to
Speaker 1: find this bat because the bat had the key to
Speaker 1: the Black Castle. Black Castle had you know, the chalice exactly,
Speaker 1: so it was it was levels of complexity. Also, another
Speaker 1: really cool thing about Adventure, it's the first video game
Speaker 1: that I know of to have an Easter Egg in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is the first game. I'm reading Ready Player one
Speaker 1: right now. Fantastic. They talk a little bit about that. Um,
Speaker 1: there's actually a game inside Ready Player one. Oh really, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was this game within the book itself that if
Speaker 1: you figured it out, you could win a prize. I
Speaker 1: can't remember the details. Yeah, that's it's actually one of
Speaker 1: those things where they released the information that that there
Speaker 1: was stuff hidden in the book that if you figured
Speaker 1: it out, would lead you down a pathway where you
Speaker 1: could want a prize at the end. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It was a neat idea. Yeah, the Easter eggon Adventure
Speaker 1: though at the time, and we'll talk about this in
Speaker 1: a minute. With UM developers not getting credit, they didn't
Speaker 1: get credit at the time, and so he hid a
Speaker 1: he hit his name. Basically, there was this little invisible
Speaker 1: dot that you can only find in certain rooms, hidden away,
Speaker 1: and you could pick up this dot and bring it
Speaker 1: to a certain place and it would basically take you.
Speaker 1: It would it would show his name on the screen
Speaker 1: as the creator of the game. And it was the
Speaker 1: very very first Easter Egg. Pretty neat story, really cool,
Speaker 1: really cool. I could talk about Adventure for the next hour,
Speaker 1: so we'll have to move on, but we need to
Speaker 1: go back in time to Space Invaders and an instrumentally
Speaker 1: important video game, one of the most UM popular arcade
Speaker 1: games to ever come out, in fact, Asteroids in a
Speaker 1: way was Atari saying how can we capitalize on that
Speaker 1: same kind of level of of of obsession and it
Speaker 1: was a Tito Tito game in the arcade And I
Speaker 1: think the last we left off with the home unit
Speaker 1: was it wasn't selling super well UM and everything changed
Speaker 1: when they brought licensed and it was the first licensed
Speaker 1: game when they licensed Space Invaders, it was a huge hit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and also it was a very faithful port of the game,
Speaker 1: Like it was a good representation of what the Arcade
Speaker 1: game was. You know, it wasn't as as uh, if
Speaker 1: you look at a space and very game game, you're
Speaker 1: not going to think of it as being slick or sophisticated.
Speaker 1: But the Atari version was you know, a little a
Speaker 1: little slower, a little block here, But it was pretty
Speaker 1: good version though. Yeah, it was very The gameplay was there,
Speaker 1: the important elements were there, and so while it might
Speaker 1: not have been quite the same experience as the ArKade,
Speaker 1: it was a good representation of it. So it was
Speaker 1: a great move on Atari's part, very savvy and ended
Speaker 1: up really turning things around. Started helping with the push
Speaker 1: to market this. And also we should point out another
Speaker 1: interesting thing was in the early days, Atari strategy was
Speaker 1: really to just market around the holidays. This was like
Speaker 1: a Christmas line. Because it was such an expensive thing,
Speaker 1: they thought, well, this is big ticket, this is when
Speaker 1: people are going to be buying something for their kids.
Speaker 1: That was when I got my cartridges. I didn't like
Speaker 1: buy one in June Yeah, it would only be later
Speaker 1: on when they said why don't we promote this all
Speaker 1: year round? And that start had to really boost the
Speaker 1: sales to Also, around this time, they were debuting home
Speaker 1: computer systems, the Atari four hundred and the Atari eight hundred.
Speaker 1: Now these were both eight bit home computers, so you know,
Speaker 1: keep in mind they were based around that same microprocessor
Speaker 1: technology that there used, although the version that they years
Speaker 1: was technically the six five oh seven, which had fewer
Speaker 1: pins than the six five oh two microprocessor. Um they
Speaker 1: could only address or the vcs rather, the twice center
Speaker 1: could only address eight kilobytes of memory. So we're talking
Speaker 1: really really simple stuff here. Now between the four hundred
Speaker 1: and the hundred, you might wonder, what's the difference. Is
Speaker 1: the eight hundred twice as good as it twice as powerful? No?
Speaker 1: Maybe a little more expensive, yeah, but it was this
Speaker 1: was these were two of the units that had code
Speaker 1: names that were named after women in the office. We
Speaker 1: mentioned that previously. So the four hundred was marketed more
Speaker 1: as a gaming console and the eight hundred was marketed
Speaker 1: more as a home computer. So the four hundred had
Speaker 1: essentially the same stuff as the eight hundred, but a
Speaker 1: lot of it was inaccessible to the users. So for example,
Speaker 1: your memory slots are closed off the four hundred, so
Speaker 1: what you buy, all the boxes, what you get, whereas
Speaker 1: the eight hundred had things where you could swap stuff out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember seeing that, but only to a certain degree.
Speaker 1: It had like five available slots. Yeah, it wasn't It
Speaker 1: wasn't like you could just continuously upgrade this. Obviously the
Speaker 1: hardware itself had a limitation too, but it did mean
Speaker 1: that you could uh customize they hundred more than you
Speaker 1: could the four hundred, which is a big deal at
Speaker 1: the time. Yeah, so, uh, seventy nine is a big
Speaker 1: year for them. They make twenty million dollars in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine. Yeah, the hundred units started basically, you know,
Speaker 1: they sold three hundred thousand, then five hundred, then a
Speaker 1: million and two million, and they basically started doubling every
Speaker 1: year upon year until they hit ten million in UH
Speaker 1: units sold. And for Warners, they made up seventy of
Speaker 1: their income of a company that also oversees music and movies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just crazy. Yeah, the rest of their business was
Speaker 1: only thirty percent of their revenue. It is hard for
Speaker 1: me to wrap my mind around that we talked about
Speaker 1: the video game industry being big today. It was enormous
Speaker 1: back then, relatively speaking. I mean, the pie size is differently,
Speaker 1: but the portion of the pie was huge, unbelievable. And
Speaker 1: it was that time that the CEO Casar started to
Speaker 1: do some really dumb things with the company, namely, hey,
Speaker 1: let's um, let's lay off some of these developers, let's
Speaker 1: shut down the R and D department, and let's think
Speaker 1: all our money into marketing this stuff. And this was
Speaker 1: bad timing because just before he started messing around with
Speaker 1: the internal structure of the company, there were already defections
Speaker 1: from Atari. Right you had you had four engineers from
Speaker 1: Attari who left the company and they formed their own
Speaker 1: company to create games. Sure please do, David Crane, Bob Whitehead,
Speaker 1: Alan Miller, and Larry Kaplan. And The Crane, by the way,
Speaker 1: one one of the best games from But they formed
Speaker 1: you said, Activision, Huge, huge, So that there were two
Speaker 1: big reasons why they left. One is just that the
Speaker 1: developers weren't getting a share in the profits made from
Speaker 1: the games. Yeah, no money. They were being paid. They
Speaker 1: were being paid on a make this game basis. But
Speaker 1: if a game was selling really well. They didn't get royalties, no,
Speaker 1: and they started to see these sales. They're like, I
Speaker 1: make twenty grand year. Yeah, I'm the one. I'm the
Speaker 1: guy that made the thing, that invented it that that
Speaker 1: that you're selling, and I'm not getting any of that
Speaker 1: the proceeds. They yeah, sort of in a vacuum like
Speaker 1: they were from what I read, sort of singular creators.
Speaker 1: Think there wasn't a team of people. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: like a dude being up with an idea and then
Speaker 1: seeing it through. Pretty much every game in these days,
Speaker 1: you're talking about one person or maybe two people working
Speaker 1: on a game, but more often than I was a
Speaker 1: single person per game. The other reason was the one
Speaker 1: that you had mentioned earlier. They weren't getting any credit
Speaker 1: for it, so they weren't getting paid, and they weren't
Speaker 1: their names weren't appearing on the packaging, it wasn't appearing
Speaker 1: in the game, and they just wanted to have these
Speaker 1: two elements things they thought that they were over and
Speaker 1: so they went off and formed Activision with that, and
Speaker 1: they decided they were going to continue to make games
Speaker 1: for the Atari, but they obviously wouldn't be Atari games
Speaker 1: like they they'd be Activision games for the AD, and
Speaker 1: this caused some friction. Atari resisted this. Atari did not
Speaker 1: want other companies making games for really p oed about
Speaker 1: the defection to begin with. Um I saw an interview
Speaker 1: with Crane where he said that he at one point
Speaker 1: when they were at first they went to ask like,
Speaker 1: maybe we should get some of this revenue, maybe we
Speaker 1: can get credit as developers, and he said, you guys
Speaker 1: aren't any more important than the guy on the assembly
Speaker 1: line putting these things together. And they were like, screw you.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I guess what have fun having that guy
Speaker 1: on the assembly line putting together empty cartridges? So yeah,
Speaker 1: they all leave. Uh. Some of the games they create
Speaker 1: sell better than first party Atari games, Pitfall being a
Speaker 1: great example of that, and Atari would sue Activision trying
Speaker 1: to prevent them from producing six D games. But all
Speaker 1: of that, by two all that had been decided third
Speaker 1: party games would be completely allowed, and that was both
Speaker 1: a good thing and a bad thing for the video
Speaker 1: game industry. It was a good thing because companies like
Speaker 1: Activision we're making some really good games. It was a
Speaker 1: bad thing because anybody else could make whatever crap they
Speaker 1: wanted to. There were some bad, bad, bad games out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get to them. The Uh. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: games arcade games was released in nine eight. Two of
Speaker 1: them actually, Um. One of them was Missile Command. Loved it,
Speaker 1: which brilliant. Also one of the things I love about
Speaker 1: Missile Command is when Atari went to the developers to
Speaker 1: make Missile Command, they had one demand. They said, this
Speaker 1: game can only be a defensive game. That's right, because
Speaker 1: it was about essentially the Cold War and the Nuclear war.
Speaker 1: And they said, yeah, we don't want to We don't
Speaker 1: want to have this be a game where you drop
Speaker 1: in nukes on people. Know, it can be about we're
Speaker 1: shooting down missiles to stave off a nuclear attack, but
Speaker 1: we're not going to have anything in the game where
Speaker 1: we launch a counter attack. Yeah, it was kind of cool.
Speaker 1: Missile Come In to Me still holds up because version
Speaker 1: was really good. Uh. It moved it from a track
Speaker 1: ball in the arcade to the joystick. Um, but it
Speaker 1: didn't matter. No, it still worked really well. And as
Speaker 1: as anyone who played Missile Command knows, as you progress
Speaker 1: through those screens, it gets really really hard because stuff
Speaker 1: starts coming down pretty fast. So the other big game
Speaker 1: that came out in the one that I also loved
Speaker 1: the arcades, battle Zone. Man mind blowing the dual joystick
Speaker 1: controllers to control the movement of a tank and you know,
Speaker 1: push both controllers forward to go forward, pull one back
Speaker 1: to start turning in that direction. Three d uh. What
Speaker 1: do you call that? Vector graphics? Graphic? Yeah, so what
Speaker 1: they would do is for vector graphics, you plot two
Speaker 1: points and it draws a line between those two points,
Speaker 1: and then you draw another point. It draws a line
Speaker 1: between those and that's how you could create basic shapes
Speaker 1: and they'd be you know, kind of at least wire
Speaker 1: frame look that you would you know, that was famous
Speaker 1: for battle Zone and also my favorite Atari arcade game
Speaker 1: of all time, which comes out I'm gonna save it,
Speaker 1: but battle Zone. It also had a scope view for
Speaker 1: some versions of the game. Not all of them had
Speaker 1: the scope view. Some of them were just the basic
Speaker 1: monitor and then you had the control post, so did
Speaker 1: I because that you had to put your face up
Speaker 1: to like a binocular type thing, man, And and it
Speaker 1: cuts away all of the traction. Yeah anything. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: this is a good lesson too. We talk about immersion
Speaker 1: and things like virtual reality and talk about how people
Speaker 1: say over and over, graphics matters, but it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: as much as you think it does. That you can
Speaker 1: feel immersed in something has very simple graphics if it's
Speaker 1: a convincing experience. These were green lines, and uh it
Speaker 1: was totally immersive. Great, great game. Loved that game. Always
Speaker 1: very disruptive, as someone would tap on your shoulder while
Speaker 1: you're in that game, like what's going on? How did
Speaker 1: you get in my tank? Uh? So nine one they
Speaker 1: would come out with another phenomenal arcade game, one of
Speaker 1: the best in the world. I know I keep saying that,
Speaker 1: but it's absolutely true. Tempest. Yeah, that was my favorite game.
Speaker 1: Well that in Galica, but those are both great games. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Tempests was just it didn't look like any other
Speaker 1: game that had come out before it. Um if the
Speaker 1: gameplay was different, full color vector graphics, so it is
Speaker 1: just green or white lines. Actually yeah, and uh it
Speaker 1: had a feature too. I remember where you could at
Speaker 1: the very beginning of the game you could skip forward.
Speaker 1: Um because when you completed different levels in Timpots, he
Speaker 1: would get a certain amount of bonus points. But you
Speaker 1: could opt to start later in the game and higher
Speaker 1: up on a higher level and uh, immediately if you
Speaker 1: finished that when you had immediately like fifty points. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you were you were you were jumping ahead, jumping
Speaker 1: to a level that mirror mortals such as myself could
Speaker 1: not hope to complete. It was tough, though, Man, it's
Speaker 1: still tough. Well yeah, because I mean, you know you
Speaker 1: you're doing like that's task management right there, you know,
Speaker 1: figuring out Okay, well, this is the one that moves
Speaker 1: around in a circle as it climbs up, so I
Speaker 1: gotta keep an eye on that one. But this other
Speaker 1: one is one that chimmy's up super fast, so I
Speaker 1: gotta get that one first. And you can only fire
Speaker 1: and bursts. I remember, it wasn't like a continuous fire game,
Speaker 1: and uh man, you would just see people just spinning
Speaker 1: that disc like crazy to get the tempest to you know,
Speaker 1: the ship to go around to the right part of
Speaker 1: the the board in order to show Yeah, or when
Speaker 1: you warp to the next um, when you work to
Speaker 1: the next one. I remember that was where you had
Speaker 1: to avoid the spikes to the next level, and sometimes
Speaker 1: that was just luck of the draw. The other big
Speaker 1: game that came out in the Arcades Centipede. Yeah, Centipede
Speaker 1: was huge because it appealed to women and girls, and
Speaker 1: it was very colorful, very fun. It had a great
Speaker 1: game play with the roller ball really maximized that. And
Speaker 1: I think it was the first game actually written and
Speaker 1: developed by a woman. Oh wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: That's cool. That's super cool. Well. Nine one was also
Speaker 1: when Atari would show off The Cosmos. That was that
Speaker 1: handheld game that used holography and we talked about previously.
Speaker 1: They showed it at the New York Toy Fair. They
Speaker 1: ended up accepting eight thousand pre orders, but by the
Speaker 1: end of Attari would reverse its decision to release the
Speaker 1: game console. The project is canceled, so we never get
Speaker 1: to see what the Cosmos actually looks like. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm very curious how this holographic type stuff was supposed
Speaker 1: to work from what I understand, Like the description I
Speaker 1: read was that you would only get two different images
Speaker 1: and it wasn't it wasn't um important for gameplay, And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, what is important for gameplay? That maybe
Speaker 1: there's like a permanent type screen and and whatever you're
Speaker 1: looking at is interacting with the quote unquote holographic image,
Speaker 1: which would be kind of like some of the overlays
Speaker 1: that that existed for other game systems, where you would
Speaker 1: have to put overlay either on the controller or sometimes
Speaker 1: on your TV. Yeah, it's very bizarre. Attari would launch
Speaker 1: Dig Doug in the arcades, big fan yep, and it
Speaker 1: also distributed one of Namco's games, a very popular game
Speaker 1: pool position. Yeah. So Atari is basically kicking butt on
Speaker 1: two levels. Here they're owning UM while they're sharing ownership
Speaker 1: in the arcade along with the big boys UM, and
Speaker 1: they're uh, kind of owning the home system at this point. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: They have, you know, some competition with Clico Vision and Intelltelevision,
Speaker 1: which we're both i think more advanced with the controls
Speaker 1: and some of the graphics. But Tari had such a
Speaker 1: strangle hold on people at that point it was tough
Speaker 1: to kind of put a chink in their arms. I mean,
Speaker 1: they just they defined the market right in television was
Speaker 1: interesting because it was this was one that had overlays,
Speaker 1: like I was talking about, not necessarily for the screen,
Speaker 1: but for your controller. The controller it kind of like
Speaker 1: a remote control with a little joystick at the base. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a wheel that you could snap a joystick onto.
Speaker 1: So the joystick would move the wheel around, which in
Speaker 1: turn operated whatever you know, sent the commands to the
Speaker 1: game system. And then you had a number pad, but
Speaker 1: you had a little overlays. You would slide into the
Speaker 1: number pad depending upon what game you're playing, so that
Speaker 1: would tell you, you know, which number of corresponds to
Speaker 1: what command. Yeah, I remember in television was for me
Speaker 1: the Rich Kid game because they were the only ones
Speaker 1: that whose parents would let them get a new one.
Speaker 1: Everyone else's pants were like, you've got the atari. I
Speaker 1: think that's you're not going to get a different game now.
Speaker 1: I inherited it in television from my cousin sometime around
Speaker 1: like the late eighties. So well after the well after,
Speaker 1: there's nothing else coming out for it, right, this is
Speaker 1: that that game system whe had been dead. So the
Speaker 1: things I had, and it was funny because the collection
Speaker 1: I games of games I had and the collection of
Speaker 1: overlays I had, it was kind of like a Venn
Speaker 1: diagram with about coverage and then there was overlap, and
Speaker 1: then for everything else. I either had an overlay for
Speaker 1: a game that sounded awesome but I didn't have it,
Speaker 1: or a game where I'm like, I have no idea
Speaker 1: what these buttons are supposed to do, but at any rate.
Speaker 1: Getting back to Atari two was also when some some
Speaker 1: things happened that would end up hurting the company in
Speaker 1: the near future. One is that they rushed a home
Speaker 1: video game port of a smash hit in the arcades
Speaker 1: pac Man can do my impression now, please don't go?
Speaker 1: Got got gone? That it really sounded about that bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't look like pac Man. It didn't sound like
Speaker 1: pac Man. It barely played like pac Man. I mean,
Speaker 1: you had a maze and you ate dashes instead of dots,
Speaker 1: and ghosts would chase after you. They wouldn't turn blue
Speaker 1: if you ate a power pellet, they would just start
Speaker 1: flashing um. And it didn't sound like it. The colors
Speaker 1: weren't even the same it was. They botched it on
Speaker 1: almost every single level. But I was one of those
Speaker 1: kids who bought it on Christmas Day that year because
Speaker 1: it was the most exciting thing to come out. Well,
Speaker 1: pac Man was groundbreaking in that He's like, yeah, we
Speaker 1: had a whole song about it, legit there was a
Speaker 1: dance and everything. Yeah, yeah, it Uh. The worst thing
Speaker 1: to me is that they could have done it right,
Speaker 1: because later on released a miss pac Man, which actually
Speaker 1: wasn't bad. Yeah, that's one of the one of the
Speaker 1: better games. Actually. Yeah, it's kind of crazy that Miss
Speaker 1: pac Man was. You know, it just showed that they
Speaker 1: could have done it better, but they rushed it through
Speaker 1: and uh that ended up being a big, big downside.
Speaker 1: Now it's sold well. They I think they produced twelve
Speaker 1: million copies and they sold seven million of them or something. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They at the time there were ten million hundred units
Speaker 1: and they said every single person is going to buy one,
Speaker 1: and then two million more people will go out and
Speaker 1: buy to play pac Man. That is some hubris. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then when backfired in a big way, word comes
Speaker 1: round that the game is not so good. People started
Speaker 1: to put the brakes on that. But they also in
Speaker 1: two released Yars Revenge. That was the one that took
Speaker 1: a good game. Yeah, it was a good game, and
Speaker 1: they took Ray Kassar's name and reversed the first three
Speaker 1: the reverse Ray to Yar. They eventually would ship I
Speaker 1: remember um with pac Man instead of Combat. That's how
Speaker 1: low it, right. I'm glad I got but I got
Speaker 1: mine in the combat day. Uh So the game Yards
Speaker 1: Revenge was developed by a guy named Howard Scott Warshaw,
Speaker 1: who also developed two other games that are notable. One
Speaker 1: is one we talked about before the Indiana Jones raised
Speaker 1: lost Our game was developed by him, which was fun
Speaker 1: but yeah, totally uh confounding. Yeah, it was hard game
Speaker 1: to play. It was I I was talking to Chuck
Speaker 1: before we recorded. In fact, I was talking to you
Speaker 1: earlier this week about how Um. I played that game
Speaker 1: a lot, and I remember being stuck on the first
Speaker 1: couple of screens for really like how snake would come
Speaker 1: out of behind a rock and bite me and I die,
Speaker 1: and and I think, well, I've got this gun, but
Speaker 1: I'm almost certain this gun is going to be important
Speaker 1: for something else. So if I shoot the snake, is
Speaker 1: that a good idea? Should I? Should? I whip the
Speaker 1: snake did well. And it was the first game where
Speaker 1: you use both joysticks to play, and um, the first
Speaker 1: game I think where you could pick up multiple things
Speaker 1: and had like an inventory. Uh. It was just really confusing,
Speaker 1: um and and challenging, but confusing. Yeah. When I finally
Speaker 1: watched the playthrough, it was maybe a year ago. I
Speaker 1: watched the playthrough of it. Yeah, I kept thinking, well,
Speaker 1: now as I was watching, was like, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: got that far because I kept forgetting how far I got.
Speaker 1: I just remembered the frustration of not knowing what was
Speaker 1: going on. Well, I realized later on that I actually
Speaker 1: played that game, if not to completion, nearly to completion,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I really stuck with that game. Warshaw
Speaker 1: is probably most famous poor Guy, for a game that
Speaker 1: is often talked about as being the worst video game
Speaker 1: ever made. In fact, Tech Stuff we did an episode
Speaker 1: about the worst games ever made, and this was number
Speaker 1: one on our list because it was voted on by
Speaker 1: the listeners e T. The Extraterrestrial. Yeah, I saw a
Speaker 1: list that UM did not even listen in the top
Speaker 1: ten worst because they're saying it gets unnecessarily ribbed even
Speaker 1: though it is bad. People don't know about the worst
Speaker 1: of the worst games. They were produced by these third
Speaker 1: party companies. Et was produced by Atari, right, this was
Speaker 1: not one of those little third party Probably the worst
Speaker 1: Atari game for sure. I could tell you what the
Speaker 1: worst what I think, at least from a concept point
Speaker 1: of view, what the worst game that was made for
Speaker 1: the Atari No Custers Revenge. I don't think any of
Speaker 1: that one. You you need to look that up later
Speaker 1: and for all my listeners who are furiously looking up
Speaker 1: Custers Revenge at I'm sorry it is a racist, misogynistic
Speaker 1: game that uses awful graphics to depict um violating Indian ladies. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: there was a third party that made and because Atari
Speaker 1: didn't have a process to uh to approve or deny
Speaker 1: games on its system, people could make stuff like that,
Speaker 1: or companies, like I said, kool Aid could say, hey,
Speaker 1: let's make a game that's sort of a TV commercial. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: we can make a commercial that's interactive and convinced people
Speaker 1: to buy our stuff more. And we can even make
Speaker 1: it so that the only way you can get this
Speaker 1: game is by buying our stuff and sending proof of
Speaker 1: purchase in to get the game just to play crappy. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: at any rate, et was a huge setback for the company.
Speaker 1: They had spent an enormous amount of money to get
Speaker 1: the license, like between twenty and twenty five million dollars.
Speaker 1: Yea for for Spielberg to give that up, it was
Speaker 1: a big deal. Yeah. They produced four million copies of
Speaker 1: the game, and about three and a half million were
Speaker 1: returned to Atari, either unsold or people had returned their
Speaker 1: copy to the game store. Yeah, and the legend, and
Speaker 1: I should say I've never ever played it. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: don't know why it got by me because I was
Speaker 1: so into all that and I love DT. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe I heard it was crappy and I just don't remember,
Speaker 1: but I never played it. Um. But then the story
Speaker 1: gets kind of interesting because for many many years that was, uh,
Speaker 1: what was thought to be an urban legend, and that
Speaker 1: Atari took those in other games and buried them in
Speaker 1: a landfill in New Mexico and covered it with concrete. Um.
Speaker 1: And for many years that was like, now, that's just
Speaker 1: an urban legend. But wasn't it last year that they
Speaker 1: finally dug them up? It was actually April April. It
Speaker 1: was true. Yeah, they found in fact part of the legend.
Speaker 1: At one point was saying, all right, yes they did it,
Speaker 1: but first they crushed all the games, so all they're
Speaker 1: gonna end up finding is black plastic and pieces of circuitry.
Speaker 1: Not true though. No, they found full intact cartridges. Whether
Speaker 1: or not they still play is another question. The yeah
Speaker 1: and the truest irony. Those things were fetching some good
Speaker 1: money on eBay. Man, it makes me wish I had
Speaker 1: held onto my copy and just put a little dirt
Speaker 1: on it and then said, like straight from New Mexico.
Speaker 1: They still play. Um yeah, but uh because granted, psychological
Speaker 1: scars never healed, but the money would have helped, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so that was not the death knell for Atari.
Speaker 1: Some people like to say, but um, I saw one
Speaker 1: writer put it, it may have been the final straw. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think. I think it's a great thing to point
Speaker 1: out as a symbol of the issues that were that
Speaker 1: came about with the video game crash. But that's way
Speaker 1: more complex. Also, this is two we're talking about. The
Speaker 1: video game crash happened in eight three. Yes, two big
Speaker 1: flops though with pac Man and et and a lot
Speaker 1: of money. You know, if Atari hadn't a squandered money elsewhere,
Speaker 1: they could have survived the financial impact of both of
Speaker 1: these flops, and they didn't themselves kill it off. On
Speaker 1: top of that, we have the added problem that Atari
Speaker 1: was trying to push a news system onto the market,
Speaker 1: the Atari fifty two hundred super system coming out two.
Speaker 1: It was based off the four hundred slash eight hundred
Speaker 1: line of Attari computers. The controllers had a joystick and
Speaker 1: a number pad. They were big and hard to use,
Speaker 1: and they broke pretty easily. But the joystick was interesting.
Speaker 1: Like the old Atari joystick were eight point analog joysticks UM,
Speaker 1: which meant that it could only detect if the joystick
Speaker 1: was pressing down on any of those eight points. This
Speaker 1: one was a three D sixty degree analog joystick, giving
Speaker 1: you much more precise control. But it was also non centering.
Speaker 1: There was no spring to have it moved back to
Speaker 1: the center. Yeah, they had a lot of problems with
Speaker 1: the joystick. Yeah, and apparently Atari um had so many
Speaker 1: problems with the joystick while the game was released. In release,
Speaker 1: they they tried and reshipped like I don't know how
Speaker 1: many versions of the joystick, like six or eight different Well,
Speaker 1: and on top of that, it couldn't play games. So
Speaker 1: if if you are a deal, yeah, if you had
Speaker 1: your library of games, I mean we all we anyone
Speaker 1: who plays video games knows about issues with backwards compatibility.
Speaker 1: We love it when a system is backwards compatible with
Speaker 1: earlier systems, and we hate it when it's not. Because
Speaker 1: you spend all this money accruing a library of games
Speaker 1: and you don't you know, you only have so many
Speaker 1: options to hook things up your TV. You don't want
Speaker 1: to negate all that. So another blow against it was
Speaker 1: that the games, in large part, we're just updates of games,
Speaker 1: So you have to buy the same game twice. You
Speaker 1: have to buy a new which people who buy who
Speaker 1: have the Xbox One are probably laughing right now because
Speaker 1: that's what's happening over there. Also the PS four. Yes,
Speaker 1: several of the games that have come out for the
Speaker 1: PS four and the Xbox One over the last year
Speaker 1: or so have been a remasters of games that came
Speaker 1: out for the previous systems, like Grand Theft Auto five
Speaker 1: is coming out this year for the Xbox One. Um, well,
Speaker 1: they're higher quality graphics. Sometimes there's also some added gameplay elements,
Speaker 1: so it's not the exact same game. It is an enhancement.
Speaker 1: But it does mean that if you had an Xbox
Speaker 1: three sixty and a copy of Grand Theft Auto five,
Speaker 1: now are you going to go and purchase a Grand
Speaker 1: Theft Auto five for your Xbox One? Because even with
Speaker 1: the enhancements, there's something in your brain that's saying, you
Speaker 1: bought this once already, you know, like you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: I might have more stuff in it. But you still
Speaker 1: did buy it already. H. This was also the year
Speaker 1: when Pitfall came out, so insult to injury for Atari
Speaker 1: because we're having all these issues and and meanwhile Activision
Speaker 1: puts out Pitfall. Also, j Minor, who designed the Atari
Speaker 1: eight hundred chip set, left Attari to design a new
Speaker 1: computer called the Amiga, which was based off similar chip
Speaker 1: set idea UM and that was originally going to be
Speaker 1: a video game console, but was reimagined as a general
Speaker 1: purpose computer. Because now we're the video game market comes
Speaker 1: crashing down, especially the home video game market, specifically the
Speaker 1: home video game market, and tech Stuff did a full
Speaker 1: episode on the Great Video Game Crash. Uh. We're still
Speaker 1: going to talk about some because obviously it was monumentally
Speaker 1: important in the history of Atari. Part of the issue
Speaker 1: was that you had this enormous number of crappy games
Speaker 1: coming from all the third party UH companies. Plus Atari
Speaker 1: had already made some really bad first party games like
Speaker 1: the Pact Making version and the et game so well,
Speaker 1: not only that, and not just the games, but there
Speaker 1: were um, there was console I mean, if you look
Speaker 1: at the the list of the console games that came
Speaker 1: out UH that were just barely even made a register
Speaker 1: in the market. Uh, it was just it was flooded
Speaker 1: with it. You know, It's just a glood of bad games,
Speaker 1: bad consoles. Yeah yeah, I mean, you know, we talked
Speaker 1: about the Intellivision, the Click of Vision, and the Atari
Speaker 1: twenty s there were lots of other consoles that had
Speaker 1: hit the market because everyone saw this as a way
Speaker 1: to make huge amounts of money. I mean, Atari had
Speaker 1: proven that this was a multimillion dollar industry and everyone
Speaker 1: wanted a piece of that. But the problem was now
Speaker 1: you had a glut of consoles and games. It was
Speaker 1: there was confusion in the marketplace. I mean, imagine Chuck
Speaker 1: for a moment, your parents owing to the toy store
Speaker 1: and thinking, this is the game he wants, and it
Speaker 1: says in television across the top, not Atari, and they
Speaker 1: buy it, not knowing that this was for a totally
Speaker 1: different game console system. I mean it was and only
Speaker 1: that we had all these elements. You also had the
Speaker 1: burgeoning personal computer market. Yeah, that's the thing. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like the home tech was was bottoming out. Computers were
Speaker 1: more popular than ever, and they started to market. Hey
Speaker 1: you can play games and do home computing on these things.
Speaker 1: So why just get this console that just plays games.
Speaker 1: You could get this is going to be the thing
Speaker 1: in the past, exactly. You can get this thing that
Speaker 1: lets lets your kids waste hours and hours staring at
Speaker 1: the TV as they move a little dot around. Or
Speaker 1: you could get our thing which lets them play games
Speaker 1: that they want to but it also lets them do
Speaker 1: their homework. Yeah, exactly, and you can do your taxes
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. And I mean it
Speaker 1: was a very compelling argument. So this combination of events
Speaker 1: caused the market to just bottom out. You had stories
Speaker 1: of games discounting, or stores like toy stores discounting games
Speaker 1: putting them in bargain bins where you get, like, you know,
Speaker 1: a dollar or two bucks to pick up these cartridges.
Speaker 1: So was I quality was not an issue. I was like,
Speaker 1: I want quantity because the game stun bucks for you.
Speaker 1: All right, Well you know that was I mowed the
Speaker 1: lawn for that. The lawn will regrow and I will
Speaker 1: mow it again. Um and uh. Also Atari made another
Speaker 1: dumb mistake, which I can't completely blame them for. All right,
Speaker 1: So there were some issues that happened. The video game crash,
Speaker 1: the et plan, the pac Man plan. There was also
Speaker 1: supposedly some questionable stock dealings that led Attari to the
Speaker 1: border directions to fire the CEO, Ray Kassar. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I don't know if Kassar was He had not made
Speaker 1: the best moves for that company anyway. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: like bush now leaving, but um it was. It definitely
Speaker 1: made the company unstable. Yeah, so he was pushed out.
Speaker 1: A guy named James J. Morgan would take over as CEO.
Speaker 1: But here was something else that was going on behind
Speaker 1: the scenes, EDITORI that could have totally helped the company
Speaker 1: coast through the video game crash and rise to new heights.
Speaker 1: There was a company in Japan, company that started out
Speaker 1: selling playing cards. That's how it started. It made a
Speaker 1: game console in Japan referred to as the Famicom. We
Speaker 1: know it as the Nintendo Entertainment System. In the nine three,
Speaker 1: Nintendo and Atari were in talks for Atari to be
Speaker 1: the United States distributor of the Famicom Entertainment System. They said, well,
Speaker 1: we'll keep Japan. Yeah, Atari's big over there. You guys
Speaker 1: do a great job. Let's partner up. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: put your branding on it. We'll have it all planned
Speaker 1: out be a partnership and Nintendo was moving forward with
Speaker 1: our Atari and Nintendo were moving forward with this, but
Speaker 1: there are a couple of things that caused some hiccups.
Speaker 1: One of them was that Kaliko was shipping the Clico
Speaker 1: Vision with Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is a Nintendo game,
Speaker 1: and under this agreement, this partnership agreement, Attari was supposed
Speaker 1: to get exclusive rights to Nintendo games, and so the
Speaker 1: fact that a Nintendo game was appearing on a Collico
Speaker 1: product caused this deal to slow down. Meanwhile, Kassar, who
Speaker 1: was kind of the moving force of this deal, this
Speaker 1: could have been his redemption. He's fired. Now there's no
Speaker 1: one at the ship who was actually in charge of
Speaker 1: this deal. And yeah, and there's no one for them
Speaker 1: to talk to anymore. So they said, you know what,
Speaker 1: we're gonna try this ourselves. We're gonna work on this
Speaker 1: and in a couple of years, we're gonna lunch in
Speaker 1: the United States under our own brand name. And that's
Speaker 1: what they did. But with just a all of changes
Speaker 1: in history, Atari could have been Nintendo Nintendo. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: could have been the Atari Entertainment System and uh and
Speaker 1: by the way, the reason it's called the entertainment system
Speaker 1: is because by that point Nintendo had seen the video
Speaker 1: game market crashed and there was now this kind of
Speaker 1: stigma against video game So they said, let's call it
Speaker 1: an entertainment system. We won't call it a video game system,
Speaker 1: and we'll make it look very you know, boxy and
Speaker 1: r Yeah, and it'll sit on the shelf and your
Speaker 1: parents won't mind it. It won't look like some crazy
Speaker 1: game and very savvy move. As it turns out, Nintendo
Speaker 1: made all the right decisions. There so really rough times
Speaker 1: for Atari um And this is also when the arcade
Speaker 1: branch of Atari released the licensed first person space simulator game.
Speaker 1: That's my favorite arcade game of all time, Chuck, what
Speaker 1: do you think it is? Oh? Gee, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's a first person game, first person. It's a space setting,
Speaker 1: vector graphics, voices from a movie. Yes, my favorite arcade game,
Speaker 1: Real Time Star Wars. Yeah, you know, I didn't. Oddly enough,
Speaker 1: I didn't play that that much. I if I found
Speaker 1: an arcade that had the cockpit version where you sat
Speaker 1: down and you held onto that yoke and the music
Speaker 1: would come up, and you know, keep in mind, guys,
Speaker 1: this is not like orchestra level music, but it sounded
Speaker 1: good at the times, and it actually had the voices
Speaker 1: of the actors in there too. You would hear O
Speaker 1: bi Wan say the Force will be with you always.
Speaker 1: I loved this game without reservation, my favorite game of
Speaker 1: all time. If I could actually find a version of this,
Speaker 1: I would buy it for you. Yeah. The hardest thing
Speaker 1: would be talking to my wife and saying, you know,
Speaker 1: where are we going to put this in the limited
Speaker 1: space in our house. I know it would have to
Speaker 1: go in my office. I just don't know how I
Speaker 1: would make room in their room. I would make room.
Speaker 1: I couldn't get the cockpit version. That would be way
Speaker 1: too big. I'd have to get the stand up version.
Speaker 1: But hey, if you've got a stand up cabinet version
Speaker 1: of Star Wars you're looking to unload and it works,
Speaker 1: let me know. Or let Chuck no, because he's gonna
Speaker 1: buy it foray um. Also, two other games would get
Speaker 1: Atari to release them in Europe, not in the United States.
Speaker 1: The United States a different distributor. But there were two
Speaker 1: other games that were really important in the history of
Speaker 1: video games, dragons Layer and Space Ace. Yeah, dragons Layer,
Speaker 1: remember was that was the first game that used um LaserDisc. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. It was the graphics. It was animated cartoon. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Don Bluth did all the animation. Uh. He was a
Speaker 1: Disney animator for a long time that worked on Oliver
Speaker 1: and Company and the other game movies also did uh
Speaker 1: five Old the five Old movies like American Tale those. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The gameplay I remember wasn't great though, because you couldn't
Speaker 1: really control live wasn't didn't you make moves and then
Speaker 1: it would play it out. Yeah. The way the way
Speaker 1: it would work is there would be a moment where
Speaker 1: you had to put in command whether it was left, right, up,
Speaker 1: down or sword swing whatever. Uh, and if you didn't
Speaker 1: do it at the exact time with the right move,
Speaker 1: you died. And if you did, you would progress to
Speaker 1: the next scene. And it was essentially play out like yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember now. I remember thinking, man, that looks amazing
Speaker 1: when you put my quarter in and then stand, this sucks.
Speaker 1: I'm going to play gat like right, Well, you'd you'd
Speaker 1: put your your four quarters then right, because it was
Speaker 1: really expensible. It was either I think it actually might
Speaker 1: have been the first game to go fifty cents. Well,
Speaker 1: it was. It was tokens at the time. I remember
Speaker 1: you would go on Tuesdays to battle Zone and you
Speaker 1: would get like twenty tokens for a dollar. I remember,
Speaker 1: what was it? The good deal going? Was the one
Speaker 1: the gold nuggets something like that. There was there was
Speaker 1: one that there was I think it was a Gwynette
Speaker 1: actually um because oh no, North Lake Mall had the
Speaker 1: the gold Mine, gold Mine, that's it. Gold Mine. That
Speaker 1: was one of the great mall arcades. Yeah, in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and then Fantastic. Well, you know what we is gonna
Speaker 1: be a three partner. It's gonna be a three partner.
Speaker 1: We we talked about the possibility of it being a
Speaker 1: three partner at the beginning. And we are now fifty
Speaker 1: five minutes in and we still have the rest of Atari.
Speaker 1: We we just hit three. But here's here's the good news, folks.
Speaker 1: From four to the present day, a lot of stuff happens.
Speaker 1: But we don't have a whole lot to say about
Speaker 1: each individual part. We just have to explain what goes
Speaker 1: on from a corporate level. But I think we can
Speaker 1: clearly say that the video game crash. If you don't
Speaker 1: consider Bushnell selling Atari to Warner as being its first
Speaker 1: death this has got to be the first death because
Speaker 1: the company was absolutely devastated by this. Uh, the arcade
Speaker 1: business was still going fairly well, but the home video
Speaker 1: game market completely bottomed out. So when we pick up,
Speaker 1: we'll pick up in nineteen eight four when another dramatic moment,
Speaker 1: another death of Atari happens immediately, and then we'll just
Speaker 1: have the sad tale of sinking lower and lower from
Speaker 1: that point forward. So for those of you up there
Speaker 1: who want to know how some other technological thing works
Speaker 1: that's not Atari, and you're looking forward to hearing about it,
Speaker 1: you need to let me know. First, send me an
Speaker 1: email my addresses tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com,
Speaker 1: drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler to
Speaker 1: handle it. All three is tech Stuff hs W. You
Speaker 1: can find Mr Chuck Bryant. Was Stuff you should know,
Speaker 1: and you should because it's an awesome show. Thank you,
Speaker 1: You are welcome, and we will tup you again really
Speaker 1: soon for more on this and thousands of other topics
Speaker 1: because it has staff works dot com