Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, EMIT executive producer with iHeart Radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech. One of these days, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna make that one unintelligible rant. I mean it's pretty
Speaker 1: close already. Right. Anyway, it is time for a tech
Speaker 1: Stuff Classic episode. We are going to continue the story
Speaker 1: that we started last week with the last classic episode.
Speaker 1: So this week's episode is titled The Rise and Fall
Speaker 1: of Atari, Part two. Part one was last week. This
Speaker 1: episode originally published on March fourth, two thousand and fifteen.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoy so nineteen seven this we were teasing
Speaker 1: it at the end of the last episode. This is
Speaker 1: when Atari releases The Revolutionary And I mean that sincerely.
Speaker 1: I am not being Archy Revolutionary Atari Video Computer System
Speaker 1: a k A. The Atari VCS a k A. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and where I didn't even know, but I saw that
Speaker 1: you research where the name from. Yeah. So all right,
Speaker 1: when you're a company and you make stuff, you give
Speaker 1: units part names. Right, So like in a hardware store,
Speaker 1: you might have a typical, like a type of screw
Speaker 1: of a certain length that's a Phillip's head screw, and
Speaker 1: to describe the whole thing would take you like five
Speaker 1: lines of text because you're talking about the length, the
Speaker 1: type of screw head, you know, how how close the
Speaker 1: treads are, or you could just give it a part
Speaker 1: name and then you say, I need fifteen of hc
Speaker 1: X blah blah blah blah blah. Well, the part name
Speaker 1: for the this unit, this this system was the c
Speaker 1: X to six hundred. So they just said, all right,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna call it the AY because it sounds,
Speaker 1: you know, futuristic. Yeah, whereas the rest of us are thinking,
Speaker 1: like where we're atari is one? I always thought that, yeah,
Speaker 1: so this this is just an identifier that that makes
Speaker 1: it 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. Sure it chipped with two joysticks,
Speaker 1: I guess the two nine version came with the paddles.
Speaker 1: I guess. So I had that. I had the paddles, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had the paddles to there's no other way to
Speaker 1: play breakout properly without paddles. Um and uh. It came
Speaker 1: with Combat. Yeah, it came with one game, which was
Speaker 1: really I can't remember actually how many variations there were, right,
Speaker 1: because they had the tanks, they had the airplane jets.
Speaker 1: I told you in the last episode. My brother and
Speaker 1: I were playing Combat last week at his house on
Speaker 1: and we 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 bounced 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 could actually hit yourself and that
Speaker 1: was really fun. Yeah. And then of course they had
Speaker 1: the air combat games of you know, you could be
Speaker 1: fighter pilots, or you could be biplanes, you could be
Speaker 1: that giant whatever that was. And there were clouds in
Speaker 1: some versions you fly behind clouds, not in other versions.
Speaker 1: So they managed to really Milk Combat for many, many
Speaker 1: different versions of essentially the same game. Yeah, And as
Speaker 1: I recall, the way you would play that is there
Speaker 1: were physical switches on the Atari itself that you you
Speaker 1: could manipulate and get different versions as well. It was
Speaker 1: there one 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 video screen with the menu where it's like start,
Speaker 1: load game, save game didn't exist. And and once that game,
Speaker 1: like we mentioned in the previous episode, once you turn
Speaker 1: that console off, all that information disappears because it's only
Speaker 1: in read only memory. That's right. And I think any
Speaker 1: of us that got three quarters of the way through
Speaker 1: Raiders of the Lost Art and someone accidentally flicked the
Speaker 1: reset switch, bad. Yeah, oh man, And that and that
Speaker 1: game was one of the most complicated Atari games that
Speaker 1: I can recall. And what we're talking about it Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll save that, we'll save it. We'll we'll talk on
Speaker 1: our reflections of some of our favorite games later on.
Speaker 1: But technically the system was ready for shipping a year
Speaker 1: before it came out, but Atari sat on it. And
Speaker 1: the reason they sat on it was because of something
Speaker 1: we mentioned in the last episode that that big agreement
Speaker 1: they had with Magnavox. Part of that agreement was they
Speaker 1: would give Magnavox the rights to anything Attari produced within
Speaker 1: that year, and so they thought, well, if we wait
Speaker 1: a little longer, we don't, Yeah, we won't give them
Speaker 1: the rights to the all will retain them ourselves. So
Speaker 1: 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 arcades,
Speaker 1: that that could be totally new, groundbreaking. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more potential with this hardware. Like here's where the money is. Yea,
Speaker 1: how about two hundred titles right that you can sell
Speaker 1: for thirty dollars a piece. Yeah, and so they said
Speaker 1: this sounds like a good idea. Well, yeah, but Uhtar
Speaker 1: was not was not a smash hit right out of
Speaker 1: the gate. No. It actually there's a couple of years
Speaker 1: were sort of lackluster because people didn't really get that
Speaker 1: it was more than pong right at first, and one
Speaker 1: of 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 nine dollars that that doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: it's expensive today, but keep in mind we're talking nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies money. You know, that's like more than seven hundred
Speaker 1: bucks for this thing that, at least at first was
Speaker 1: only going to play ten titles. That's not that's not
Speaker 1: a big selling point for someone who's I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna shell out the better part of a grand to
Speaker 1: get a machine that can play ten games. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember my brother and I how, um, you know how
Speaker 1: you would submit the Christmas list to the to the parents. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: here's what Scott wants, here's what Chuck wants. We had
Speaker 1: to share. Um, we had to both go in all
Speaker 1: in on Atari this Christmas. All both of us went
Speaker 1: together is this one item of my parents are like,
Speaker 1: all right, well, you better play it. It's funny because
Speaker 1: I actually got may Atari fairly close to the um
Speaker 1: not not too long before the Great video game Crash,
Speaker 1: which we will get to, which meant that the price
Speaker 1: had actually come down because there was a lot of
Speaker 1: competition in that space pretty early on. Yeah. I wish
Speaker 1: I could remember what year, but um, I don't think
Speaker 1: it was seventy eight, but I bet I bet it
Speaker 1: was eight. Yeah, my I was probably closer for me.
Speaker 1: Uh so in eight that's when Nolan Bushnell leaves Atari. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we talked a little bit in the last episode
Speaker 1: about the corporate structure at Warners and um, how it
Speaker 1: just did not jib at all with these creative, sort
Speaker 1: of pot smoking hippie the game designers, and um, he
Speaker 1: just got more and more upset and discontented and or
Speaker 1: discontent discontent. He felt discontentment to where he basically tried
Speaker 1: to get himself fired to and he had a huge
Speaker 1: fight with a Warner executive in front of the board
Speaker 1: of directors and that was that. He was told to
Speaker 1: pack his things and go. So he leaves. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: it was a big bummer after that. I mean he
Speaker 1: was already sort of a bummer, but him leaving was
Speaker 1: a very symbolic deal for Atari's sort of the downfall
Speaker 1: of Yeah, some people refer to the sale of Atari
Speaker 1: to Warner as the first quote unquote death of Atari.
Speaker 1: Some people refer to Nolan's departure as the first death.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, they're kind of tired. I think
Speaker 1: it was. It's a big change. I mean, they did
Speaker 1: happen fairly close to one another in time. He didn't
Speaker 1: last long there. Uh, there was a c E. The
Speaker 1: new CEO of Attari is Ray cassaw Are. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was not well liked, but no developers. No. In fact,
Speaker 1: at least his name would be used for a famous
Speaker 1: Autori title later on. What was it? Yards Revenge? It's
Speaker 1: just Ray backwards, It's pretty yards Revenge. And then apparently, uh,
Speaker 1: Cassar said that's clever. So it must have been a
Speaker 1: few moments where at any rate, al Al Corn, 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 haven't 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 was fairly extensive, but
Speaker 1: not exhaustive. We didn't can't cover everything. There's just there's
Speaker 1: a lot of no name ones that sort of came
Speaker 1: and went. Yeah ones that or or they had like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a very limited release in South America, and
Speaker 1: they're like three people in the United States who have
Speaker 1: one that kind of thing. Yeah, I can't. I think
Speaker 1: I want to say that they were both named after cats,
Speaker 1: and one of our one of our listeners drew me
Speaker 1: as one of the two cat uh characters you sing this,
Speaker 1: and Lauren was the other one. So I've I've got
Speaker 1: I've got that picture somewhere. Uh. Nineteen seventy nine, one
Speaker 1: of the great arcade games of all time comes out
Speaker 1: from Atari Asteroids. That's right, that's you know, fantastic game,
Speaker 1: addictive gameplay, the one that still holds up. Very challenging still.
Speaker 1: Once you start flying that spaceship around, right because because
Speaker 1: it actually used inertia and momentum, right, you you had
Speaker 1: to actually turn your ship and thrust in the opposite
Speaker 1: direction to stop yourself at the plan ahead. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: asteroids when you would when you shoot them, would break
Speaker 1: apart into different directions, and if you were flying around
Speaker 1: and if you've got going too fast and those asteroids
Speaker 1: you start shooting them, you broke apart into little sticks.
Speaker 1: For they have that little teleport button that you could
Speaker 1: use like once a game and yeah, but that would
Speaker 1: often drop you right in the path of a big asteroid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't necessarily a way to to save yourself. We'll
Speaker 1: be back to talk about more of the amazing, amazing
Speaker 1: story of Atari after these brief messages. This is also
Speaker 1: when Atari would release a game for the home game
Speaker 1: market that that Chuck. I think you have a few
Speaker 1: things to say about. It's a little game called Adventure.
Speaker 1: Oh talk about my favorite thing every please do. Let's
Speaker 1: do that. Yes, Adventure was was created by Warren Robinette
Speaker 1: and it I played it yesterday online. Um, had a
Speaker 1: great time. Still holds up, well, maybe it's nostalgia. Playing
Speaker 1: a little little is definitely paying a role. It does
Speaker 1: hold up in a way, though. But when you look
Speaker 1: at it now, and if you're younger, you will scoff
Speaker 1: at the square that represents the night, and the arrow
Speaker 1: that represents a sword, and the ducks that represent the dragons. Um.
Speaker 1: But at the time it was, there was nothing like
Speaker 1: it there. It was the first game that put you. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was the first first person adventure game. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the It's considered the first action adventure game ever. It
Speaker 1: spawned a genre of games. Yeah, and but I don't
Speaker 1: think we can get across like when we were kids
Speaker 1: playing 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. Uh. For example, if
Speaker 1: you want a game that looks like it was made
Speaker 1: back in the early this would be more like in
Speaker 1: the computer game era. Papers Please. Now let me tell
Speaker 1: you what Papers pleases, and you're not going to believe
Speaker 1: that this is a game. In Papers Please. You play
Speaker 1: the part of a border patrol agent who reviews documentation
Speaker 1: of people passing from one Soviet style nation to a
Speaker 1: different Soviet style nation. But it's fantastic and it's done
Speaker 1: in this style, and like I said, it's more of
Speaker 1: a computer game style than the video game, like the
Speaker 1: home video games 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: is like a drawback. You know, this idea that the
Speaker 1: graphics are not realistic or or or you know, they
Speaker 1: they're very abstract. These days, I'm seeing more 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, uh, there are three big
Speaker 1: things that Adventure brought to the table um. There was
Speaker 1: a large space for the first time, I think thirty
Speaker 1: rooms and eight regions. Yeah, you move from screen to
Speaker 1: screen and it would take you into a new region
Speaker 1: with new new things that you had to maneuver around.
Speaker 1: You could pick up objects and drop them and move
Speaker 1: them around and use them and manipulate them. That was
Speaker 1: a new thing one of the time, as I recall well,
Speaker 1: which turned out to be brilliant because it's because of
Speaker 1: the lost ark made things very convoluted, right. Yeah, It
Speaker 1: meant that you didn't have to have an inventory screen.
Speaker 1: All the action could take place within that game, like
Speaker 1: you had to plan out what you needed, like are
Speaker 1: you going to need the sword on that next screen?
Speaker 1: If you don't, do you want to move? The whole
Speaker 1: point of the game was getting the chalice to the
Speaker 1: exactly so you might not need your sword, so dropping
Speaker 1: the sword, moving the chalice further along might be the
Speaker 1: best thing to do. But there was also another element
Speaker 1: that could really mess with you if you yes. The bat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a bat that would fly around and there
Speaker 1: were several levels of difficult from three I think, and
Speaker 1: I think the bat came out of number two. Um,
Speaker 1: but either on level two or three, the bat would
Speaker 1: just fly around and you would be so close to
Speaker 1: getting what you needed, and it took work. This game time,
Speaker 1: there was no timer, which was another genius move. Um,
Speaker 1: And it would take a lot of figuring out to
Speaker 1: to find your way through these mazes and catacombs, and
Speaker 1: sometimes you would have to use this bridge to get
Speaker 1: through a wall, and it was really pretty genius. And
Speaker 1: then the bat would come and steal the things and
Speaker 1: steal the thing you wanted, or occasionally it would fly
Speaker 1: away with like a dragon, which was funny. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then basically then you had to go on a us
Speaker 1: to find this bat because the bat had the key
Speaker 1: to the Black Castle. Black Castle had you know, Alice exactly,
Speaker 1: So it's it was. It was levels of complexity. Also,
Speaker 1: another really cool thing about Adventure, it's the first video
Speaker 1: game that I know of to have an Easter Egg
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, it is the first game. I'm reading
Speaker 1: Ready Player one right now. Fantastic. They talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about that. Um, there's actually a game inside Ready
Speaker 1: Player one. Oh really, Yeah, there was this game within
Speaker 1: the book itself that if you figured it out, you
Speaker 1: could win a prize. I can't remember the details. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. It's actually one of those things where
Speaker 1: they released the information that that there was stuff hidden
Speaker 1: in the book that if you figured it out would
Speaker 1: lead you down a pathway where you could want a
Speaker 1: prize at the end. That's pretty cool. It was a
Speaker 1: neat idea. Yeah, the easter reggon Adventure though at the time,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk about this in a minute, with um
Speaker 1: developers not getting credit, they didn't get credit at the time,
Speaker 1: and so he hid a uh he hit his name. Basically,
Speaker 1: there was this little invisible dot that you can only
Speaker 1: find in certain rooms, hidden away, and you could pick
Speaker 1: up this dot and bring it to a certain place
Speaker 1: and it would basically take you. It would it would
Speaker 1: show his name on the screen as the creator of
Speaker 1: the game. And it was the very very first Easter Egg.
Speaker 1: Pretty neat story, really cool, really cool. I can talk
Speaker 1: about Adventure for the next hour, so we'll have to
Speaker 1: move on, but we need to go back in time
Speaker 1: to Space Invaders and an instrumentally important video game, one
Speaker 1: of the most um popular arcade games to ever come out,
Speaker 1: in fact, Asteroids in a way was Atari saying how
Speaker 1: can we capitalize on that same kind of level of
Speaker 1: of of obsession and it was a Tito Tito game
Speaker 1: in the arcade And I think the last we left
Speaker 1: off with the home unit was it wasn't selling super well. Um,
Speaker 1: and everything changed when they brought licensed and it was
Speaker 1: the first license game. When they licensed Space Invaders, it
Speaker 1: was a huge hit. Yeah. And also it was a
Speaker 1: very faithful port of the game, Like it was a
Speaker 1: good representation of what the Arcade game was. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't as as uh. I mean, if you look
Speaker 1: at a space and very game game, you're not going
Speaker 1: to think of it as being slick or sophisticated. But
Speaker 1: the Atari version was you know, a little a little slower,
Speaker 1: a little block here. But it was pretty good version though. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was very The gameplay was there, the important elements
Speaker 1: were there, and so while it might not have been
Speaker 1: quite the same experience as the Arcade, it was a
Speaker 1: good representation of it. So it was a great move
Speaker 1: on Atari's part, very savvy and ended up really turning
Speaker 1: things around. Started helping with the push to market this.
Speaker 1: And also we should point out another interesting thing was
Speaker 1: in the early days, Atari strategy was really to just
Speaker 1: market around the holidays. This was like a Christmas line.
Speaker 1: Because it was such an expensive thing. They thought, well,
Speaker 1: this is a big ticket, this is when people are
Speaker 1: going to be buying something for their kids, really was.
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 started to really boost the sales
Speaker 1: to Also around this time, they were debuting home computer systems,
Speaker 1: the Atari four hundred and the Atari eight hundred. Now
Speaker 1: these were both eight bit home computers, so you know,
Speaker 1: they were based around that same microprocessor technology that there used,
Speaker 1: although the version that they us was technically the six
Speaker 1: five oh seven, which had fewer pins than the six
Speaker 1: five oh two microprocessor. Um they could only address or
Speaker 1: the vcs rather, the twicet center could only address eight
Speaker 1: kilobytes of memory. So we're talking really really simple stuff here.
Speaker 1: Now between the four D and hundred. You might wonder,
Speaker 1: what's the difference. Is the hundred twice as good as
Speaker 1: it twice as powerful? No? Maybe a little more expensive, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it was this was these were two of the
Speaker 1: units that had code names that were named after women
Speaker 1: in the office. We mentioned that previously. So the four
Speaker 1: hundred was marketed more as a gaming console and the
Speaker 1: eight hundred was marketed more as a home computer. So
Speaker 1: the four hundred had essentially the same stuff as the
Speaker 1: eight hundred, but a lot of it was inaccessible to
Speaker 1: the users. So, for example, your memory slots are closed
Speaker 1: off the four hundred, So what you buy all the boxes,
Speaker 1: what you get, whereas the eight hundred had things where
Speaker 1: you could swap stuff out. I remember seeing that, but
Speaker 1: only to a certain degree. It had like five available slots. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't It wasn't like you could just continuously upgrade this.
Speaker 1: Obviously the hardware itself had a limitation too, but it
Speaker 1: did mean that you could uh customize they hundred more
Speaker 1: than you could the four hundred, which was a big
Speaker 1: deal at the time. Yeah, so, uh, seventy nine is
Speaker 1: a big year for them. They make twenty million dollars
Speaker 1: in nineteen nine. Yeah, undred units started basically, you know,
Speaker 1: they sold three hundred thousand, then five hundred and a million,
Speaker 1: than two million, and they basically started doubling every year
Speaker 1: upon year until they hit ten million and uh units sold.
Speaker 1: And for Warners, they made up seventy of their income
Speaker 1: 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 of their revenue. It's hard for me to
Speaker 1: wrap my mind around that. We talked about the video
Speaker 1: game industry being big today, Yeah, it was enormous back then,
Speaker 1: relatively speaking. I mean the pie size is differently, but
Speaker 1: the portion of the pie was huge, unbelievable. And it
Speaker 1: was that time that the CEO Cassar, started to do
Speaker 1: some really dumb things with the company, namely, hey, let's um,
Speaker 1: let's lay off some of these developers, let's shut down
Speaker 1: the R and D department, and let's think all our
Speaker 1: money into marketing this stuff. And this is bad timing
Speaker 1: because just before he started messing around with the internal
Speaker 1: structure of the company, there were already defections from Atari.
Speaker 1: Right you had you had four engineers from Attari who
Speaker 1: left the company and they formed their own company to
Speaker 1: create games. Sure please do. David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Alan Miller,
Speaker 1: and Larry Kaplan and they formed Crane, by the way,
Speaker 1: one of the best games from Atari. 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,
Speaker 1: and they started to see these sales, They're like, I
Speaker 1: make twenty grand a year. Yeah, I'm the one. I'm
Speaker 1: the guy that made the thing that invented it that
Speaker 1: that that you're so ling, and I'm not getting any
Speaker 1: of that. The proceeds there's sort of in a vacuum
Speaker 1: like 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 wing 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 was really p oed
Speaker 1: about the defection to begin with. Um I saw an
Speaker 1: interview with Crane where he said that he at one
Speaker 1: point when they were at first they went to ask like, hey,
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 games. But all of that,
Speaker 1: by two all that had been decided third party games
Speaker 1: would be completely allowed, and that was both a good
Speaker 1: thing and a bad thing for the video game industry.
Speaker 1: It was a good thing because companies like Activision we're
Speaker 1: making some really good games. It's a bad thing because
Speaker 1: anybody else could make whatever crap they wanted to. Man,
Speaker 1: there were some bad had bad bad games. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: get to them of them. One of my favorite games
Speaker 1: arcade games was released in two of them actually, um.
Speaker 1: One of them was Missile Command. Loved it, which brilliant. Also,
Speaker 1: one of the things I love about Missile Command is
Speaker 1: when Atari went to the developers to make Missile Command,
Speaker 1: they had one demand. They said, this game can only
Speaker 1: be a defensive game. That's right, because it was about
Speaker 1: essentially the Cold War, in nuclear war. And they said, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't want to We don't want to have this
Speaker 1: be a game where you drop in nukes on people. Know.
Speaker 1: It can be about we're shooting down missiles to stave
Speaker 1: off a nuclear attack, but we're not going to have
Speaker 1: anything in the game where we launch a counter attack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which was kind of cool. Missile Command to me still
Speaker 1: holds up because version was really good. It moved it
Speaker 1: from a trackball in the arcade to the joystick. Um,
Speaker 1: but it didn't matter. No, it still worked really well.
Speaker 1: And as as anyone who played Missile Command knows, as
Speaker 1: you agress through those screens, it gets really really hard
Speaker 1: because stuff starts coming down pretty fast. So the other
Speaker 1: big game that came out in the one that I
Speaker 1: also loved in the arcades, battle Zone man mind blowing
Speaker 1: the dual joystick controllers to control the movement of a
Speaker 1: tank and you know, push both controllers forward to go forward,
Speaker 1: pull one back to start turning in that direction to
Speaker 1: three d uh. What do you call that? Vector graphics?
Speaker 1: Vector graphic? Yea, So what they would do is for
Speaker 1: vector graphics, you plot two points and it draws a
Speaker 1: line between those two points, and then you draw another point.
Speaker 1: It draws a line between those and that's how you
Speaker 1: could create basic shapes and they'd be you know, kind
Speaker 1: of at least wire frame look that you would you know,
Speaker 1: that was famous for battle Zone and also my favorite
Speaker 1: Atari arcade game of all time, which comes out so
Speaker 1: I'm gonna save it, but battle Zone about it also
Speaker 1: had a scope view for some versions of the game.
Speaker 1: Not all of them had the scope view. Some of
Speaker 1: them were just the basic monitor and then you had
Speaker 1: the controls only played the scope. So did I because
Speaker 1: that you had to put your face up to like
Speaker 1: a binocular type thing, and and it cuts away all
Speaker 1: other distractions. You don't anything. Yeah, and this is a
Speaker 1: good lesson too. We talk about immersion and things like
Speaker 1: virtual reality and talk about how people say over and
Speaker 1: over graphics matters, but it doesn't matter as much as
Speaker 1: you think it does. That you can feel immersed in
Speaker 1: something has very simple graphics if it's a convincing experience.
Speaker 1: These were green lines, and uh, it was totally immersive. Great,
Speaker 1: great love that game. Always very disruptive, as someone would
Speaker 1: tap on your shoulder when you're in that game, right,
Speaker 1: what's going on? How did you get in my tank? Uh?
Speaker 1: So nine one they would come out with another phenomenal
Speaker 1: arcade game, one of the best in the world. I
Speaker 1: know I keep saying that, but it's absolutely true. Tempest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was my favorite game. Well that in Galica, but
Speaker 1: those are both grade games. Yeah, and Tempests was just
Speaker 1: it didn't look like any other game that had come
Speaker 1: out before it. Um if the gameplay was different, full
Speaker 1: color vector graphics, so it wasn't just green or white lines.
Speaker 1: Who actually yeah, and uh it had a feature too.
Speaker 1: I remember where you could at the very beginning of
Speaker 1: the game you could skip forward. Um because when you
Speaker 1: completed different levels in tempos, you would get a certain
Speaker 1: amount of bonus points, but you could opt to start
Speaker 1: later in the game and higher up on a higher level,
Speaker 1: and uh immediately if you finished that one, you had
Speaker 1: immediately like fifty points. Yeah, because you were you were
Speaker 1: you were jumping ahead, jumping to a level that mirror
Speaker 1: mortals such as myself could not hope to complete. It
Speaker 1: was tough, though, Man, it's still tough, buddy. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you know you you're doing like that's
Speaker 1: task management right there, you know, figuring out Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this is the one that moves around in a circle
Speaker 1: as it climbs up, so I gotta keep an eye
Speaker 1: on that one. But this other one is one that
Speaker 1: chimmy's up super fast, so I gotta get that one first.
Speaker 1: And you can only fire and bursts. I remember, it
Speaker 1: wasn't like a continuous fire game. And uh man, you
Speaker 1: would just see people just spinning that disc like crazy
Speaker 1: to get the tempest to you know, the ship to
Speaker 1: go around to the right part of the the board
Speaker 1: in order to show yeah, or when you work to
Speaker 1: the next um, when you work to the next one.
Speaker 1: I remember that was where you had to avoid the
Speaker 1: spikes to the next level, and sometimes that was just
Speaker 1: luck of the draw. The other big game that came
Speaker 1: out in the arcades, Centipede. Yeah, Centipede was huge because
Speaker 1: it appealed to women and girls, and it was very colorful,
Speaker 1: very fun. It had a great game play with the
Speaker 1: roller ball really maximized that. And I think it was
Speaker 1: the first game actually written and developed by a woman.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I didn't know that. That's cool. That's super cool. Well.
Speaker 1: N one was also when Atari would show off the Cosmos.
Speaker 1: That was that handheld game that used holography and we
Speaker 1: talked about previously. They showed it at the New York
Speaker 1: Toy Fair. They ended up accepting eight thousand pre orders,
Speaker 1: but by the end of nine Atari would reverse its
Speaker 1: decision to release the game console. The project is canceled,
Speaker 1: so we never get to see what the Cosmos actually
Speaker 1: looks like. Um. Yeah, I'm very curious how this holographic
Speaker 1: type stuff was supposed to work from what I understand,
Speaker 1: Like the description I read was that you would only
Speaker 1: get two different images and it wasn't it wasn't um
Speaker 1: important for gameplay, And I thought, well, what is important
Speaker 1: for gameplay? That maybe there's like a permanent type screen
Speaker 1: and and whatever you're looking at is interacting with the
Speaker 1: quote unquote holographic image, which would be kind of like
Speaker 1: some of the overlays that that existed for other game systems,
Speaker 1: where you would have to put overlay either on the
Speaker 1: controller or sometimes on your TV. Yeah, it's very bizarre.
Speaker 1: Attari would launch Dig Dug in the arcades yea, and
Speaker 1: it also distributed one of Namco's games, a very popular
Speaker 1: game pole position. Yeah. So Atari is basically kicking butt
Speaker 1: on two levels. Here they're owning um, while they're sharing
Speaker 1: ownership in the arcade along with the big boys UM,
Speaker 1: and they're uh kind of owning the home system at
Speaker 1: this point. Yeah. Um, they have, you know, some competition
Speaker 1: with Clico Vision and Inteltelevision, which we're both i think
Speaker 1: more advanced with the controls and some of the graphics.
Speaker 1: But Tari had such a strangle hold on people at
Speaker 1: that point. Yeah, it was tough to kind of put
Speaker 1: a chink in their own I mean, they just they
Speaker 1: define the market. And Television was interesting because it was
Speaker 1: this was one that had overlays like I was talking about,
Speaker 1: not necessarily for the screen, but for your controller. The
Speaker 1: controller it look kind of like a remote control with
Speaker 1: a little joystick at the base. Yeah. Yeah, I had
Speaker 1: a wheel that you could snap a joystick onto, so
Speaker 1: the joystick would move the wheel around, which in turn
Speaker 1: operated whatever you know, sent the commands to the game system.
Speaker 1: And then you had a number pad, but you had
Speaker 1: little overlays. You would slide into the number pad depending
Speaker 1: upon what game you're playing, so that tell you you know,
Speaker 1: which number of corresponds to what command. Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: in television was for me the Rich Kid game, because
Speaker 1: they were the only ones that whose parents would let
Speaker 1: them get a new one. Everyone else's parents were like,
Speaker 1: you've got the Atari. I think that's that's You're not
Speaker 1: going to get a different game now. I inherited it
Speaker 1: in television from my cousin sometime around like the late eighties.
Speaker 1: So well after that, well after there's nothing else coming
Speaker 1: out for it, right, this is that that game system
Speaker 1: had been dead. So the things I had, and it
Speaker 1: was funny because the collection I games of games I
Speaker 1: had and the collection of overlays I had, it was
Speaker 1: kind of like a Venn diagram with about coverage and
Speaker 1: then there was overlap, and then for everything else. I
Speaker 1: either had an overlay for a game that sounded awesome,
Speaker 1: but I didn't have it or a game where I'm like,
Speaker 1: I have no idea what these buttons are supposed to do.
Speaker 1: But at any rate. Getting back to Atari two was
Speaker 1: also when some some things happened that would end up
Speaker 1: hurting a company in the near future. One is that
Speaker 1: they rushed a home video game port of a smash
Speaker 1: hit in the arcades pac Man, Can I do my
Speaker 1: impression now? Please? Don't got got gone? That it really
Speaker 1: sounded about that bad. Yeah, it didn't look like pac Man.
Speaker 1: It didn't sound like pac Man. It barely played like
Speaker 1: pac Man. I mean you had a maze and you
Speaker 1: ate dashes instead of dots, and ghosts would chase after you.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't turn blue if you ate a power pellet,
Speaker 1: they would just start flashing um. And it didn't sound
Speaker 1: like it. The colors weren't even the same it was.
Speaker 1: They botched it on almost every single level. But I
Speaker 1: was one of those kids who bought it on Christmas
Speaker 1: Day that year because it was the most exciting thing
Speaker 1: to come out. Well, pac Man was groundbreaking in that
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, we had a whole song about it
Speaker 1: was legit. There was a dance and everything. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it uh. The worst thing to me is that they
Speaker 1: could have done it right, because later on released a
Speaker 1: MISS pac Man, which actually wasn't bad. Yeah, that's one
Speaker 1: of the one of the better games. Actually. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of crazy that MS pac Man was. You know,
Speaker 1: it just showed that they could have done it better,
Speaker 1: but they rushed it through and uh, that ended up
Speaker 1: being a big, big downside. Now it's sold well. They
Speaker 1: I think they produced twelve million copies and they sold
Speaker 1: seven million of them or something. Yeah. They at the
Speaker 1: time there were ten million hundred units and they said
Speaker 1: every single person is going to buy one, and then
Speaker 1: two million more people will go out and buy it
Speaker 1: to play pac Man. That is some hubris. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then when backfired in a big way, word comes around
Speaker 1: that the game is not so good. People started to
Speaker 1: put the brakes on that. But they also two released
Speaker 1: Yars Revenge. That was the one that took a good game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a good game, and it took great Kassar's
Speaker 1: name and reversed the first the reverse ray to Yar.
Speaker 1: They eventually would ship I remember, um pac Man instead
Speaker 1: of Combat. That's how low it fell, right. I'm glad
Speaker 1: I got but I got mine in the combat day. Uh,
Speaker 1: So the game Yards Revenge was developed by a guy
Speaker 1: named Howard Scott Warshaw, who also developed two other games
Speaker 1: that are notable. One is one we talked about before
Speaker 1: the Indiana Jones Raiders Lost. Our game was developed by him,
Speaker 1: which was fun but yeah, totally uh confounding. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was hard game to play. It was I. I was
Speaker 1: talking to Chuck before we recorded. In fact, I was
Speaker 1: talking to you earlier this week about how Um. I
Speaker 1: played that game a lot, and I remember being stuck
Speaker 1: on the first couple of screens for really like how
Speaker 1: snake would come out of behind a rock and bite
Speaker 1: me and I die, and and I think, well, I've
Speaker 1: got this gun, but I'm almost certain this gun is
Speaker 1: going to be important for something else. So if I
Speaker 1: shoot the snake, is that a good idea? Should I?
Speaker 1: Should I with the snake? That? Yeah? Well, And it
Speaker 1: was the first game where you use both joysticks to play,
Speaker 1: and um, the first game I think where you could
Speaker 1: pick up multiple things and had like an inventory. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was just really confusing, um and and challenging, but confusing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I finally watched the play through, it was maybe
Speaker 1: a year ago. I watched the playthrough of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kept thinking, well, now as I was watching, was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got that far. Because I kept forgetting how far
Speaker 1: I got. I just remembered the frustration of not knowing
Speaker 1: what was going on. Well, I realized later on that
Speaker 1: I actually played that game, if not to completion, nearly
Speaker 1: to completion, I don't know, really stuck with that game.
Speaker 1: We've got a bit more to say about Atari. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a whole part three coming up after this one,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be
Speaker 1: right back. Warshaw is probably most famous poor guy for
Speaker 1: a game that is often talked about as being the
Speaker 1: worst video game ever made. In fact, Tech Stuff we
Speaker 1: did an episode about the worst games ever made, and
Speaker 1: this was number one on our list because it was
Speaker 1: voted on by the listeners. E T. The Extraterrestrial. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I saw a list that UM did not even listen
Speaker 1: in the top ten worst because they're saying it gets
Speaker 1: unnecessarily ribbed even though it is bad. People don't know
Speaker 1: about the worst of the worst games. They were produced
Speaker 1: by these third party companies. Et was produced by Atari, right,
Speaker 1: this was not one of those little third party Probably
Speaker 1: the worst Atari game. For sure. I could tell you
Speaker 1: what the worst what I think, at least from a
Speaker 1: concept point of view, what the worst game that was
Speaker 1: made for the Atari. No Custers Revenge. I don't think
Speaker 1: any of that one. You you need to look that
Speaker 1: up later. And for all my listeners who are furiously
Speaker 1: looking up Custers Revenge at I'm sorry. It is a racist,
Speaker 1: misogynist game that uses awful graphics to depict um violating
Speaker 1: Indian ladies. Yeah. No, there was a third party that
Speaker 1: made and because Atari didn't have a process to uh
Speaker 1: to approve or deny games on its system, people could
Speaker 1: make stuff like that, or companies, like I said, kool
Speaker 1: Aid could say, hey, let's make a game that's sort
Speaker 1: of a TV commercial. Yeah, exactly. We can make a
Speaker 1: commercial that's interactive and convince people to buy our stuff more.
Speaker 1: And we can even make it so that the only
Speaker 1: way you can get this game is by buying our
Speaker 1: stuff and sending proof of purchase in to get the game. 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: for Spielberg to give that up. It was a big deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They produced four million copies of the game, and about
Speaker 1: three and a half million were returned to Atari, either
Speaker 1: unsold or people had returned their copy to the game store. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the legend, and I should say, I've never ever
Speaker 1: played it. Yeah. I don't know why it got by
Speaker 1: me because I was so into all that and I
Speaker 1: love DT. I don't know. Maybe I heard it was
Speaker 1: crappy and I just don't remember, but I never played it. Um.
Speaker 1: But then the story gets kind of interesting because for
Speaker 1: many many years that was, uh, what was thought to
Speaker 1: be an urban legend that Atari took those in other
Speaker 1: games and buried them in a landfill in New Mexico
Speaker 1: and covered it with concrete. Um. And for many years
Speaker 1: that was like, now, that's just an urban legend. But
Speaker 1: wasn't it last year that they finally dug them up.
Speaker 1: It was actually April April two, and it was true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they found In fact, part of the legend. At one
Speaker 1: point was saying, all right, yes they did it, but
Speaker 1: first they crushed all the games, so all they're gonna
Speaker 1: end up finding is black plastic. And this is of
Speaker 1: of circuitry. Not true though. No, they found full intact cartridges.
Speaker 1: Whether or not they still play is another question. 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: may 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 two we're talking about the video
Speaker 1: game crash happened in eight three. Yes, two big flops
Speaker 1: though with pac Man and et and a lot of money.
Speaker 1: You know, if Atari hadn't a squandered money elsewhere, they
Speaker 1: could have survived the financial impact of both of these flops,
Speaker 1: and they didn't themselves kill it off. On top of that,
Speaker 1: we have the added problem that Atari was trying to
Speaker 1: push a news system on to the market, the Atari
Speaker 1: fifty two hundred super system coming out. It was based
Speaker 1: off the four hundred slash eight hundred line of Atari computers.
Speaker 1: The controllers had a joystick and a number pad. They
Speaker 1: were big and hard to use, and they broke pretty easily.
Speaker 1: But the joystick was interesting. Like the old uh Atari
Speaker 1: joysticks were eight point analog joysticks UM, which meant that
Speaker 1: it could only detect if the joystick was pressing down
Speaker 1: on any of those eight points. This one was a
Speaker 1: three hundred sixty degree analog joystick, giving you much more
Speaker 1: precise control. But it was also non centering. There was
Speaker 1: no spring to have it moved back to the center. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had a lot of problems with the joystick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and apparently Atari um had so many problems with the
Speaker 1: joystick while the game was released. In release, they they
Speaker 1: tried and reshipped like I don't know how many versions
Speaker 1: of the joystick, like six or eight different versions. Well,
Speaker 1: and on top of that, it couldn't play games. So
Speaker 1: if if you are a really big deal, if you
Speaker 1: had your library of games, I mean we all we
Speaker 1: anyone 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 to your TV. You don't
Speaker 1: want to negate all that. So another blow against it
Speaker 1: was that the games, in large part, we're just updates
Speaker 1: of games, So you have to buy the same game twice,
Speaker 1: you have to buy a new which people who buy
Speaker 1: who have the Xbox One are probably laughing right now
Speaker 1: because that's what's happening over there. Also the PS four.
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 you'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 chips 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: rashing 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 these third party UH companies. Plus Atari
Speaker 1: had already made some really bad first party games like
Speaker 1: the Pac Man version and the et game so well,
Speaker 1: not only that, and not just the games, but there were, um,
Speaker 1: there was console were I mean, if you look at
Speaker 1: the the list of the console games that came out
Speaker 1: that were just barely even made a register in the market.
Speaker 1: H it was just it was flooded with it. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just a glood of bad games, bad consoles. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we talked about the Intellivision, the
Speaker 1: Click of Vision, and the Atari twenty. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of other consoles that hit the market because everyone
Speaker 1: saw this as a way to make huge amounts of money.
Speaker 1: I mean, Atari had proven that this was a multimillion
Speaker 1: dollar industry and everyone wanted a piece of that. But
Speaker 1: the problem was now you had a glut of consoles
Speaker 1: and games. It was there was confusion in the marketplace.
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine Chuck for a moment, your parents going
Speaker 1: to the toy store and thinking, this is the game
Speaker 1: he wants, and it says in television across the top,
Speaker 1: not Atari, and they buy it, not knowing that this
Speaker 1: was for a totally different game console system. I mean
Speaker 1: it was and only that we had all these elements,
Speaker 1: you also had the burgeoning personal computer market. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the thing. It wasn't like the home tech was was
Speaker 1: bottoming out. Computers were more popular than ever, and they
Speaker 1: started to market. Hey, you can play games and do
Speaker 1: home computing on these things, So why just get this
Speaker 1: console that just plays games? You can this is going
Speaker 1: to be the thing of the past. Actually, you can
Speaker 1: get this thing that lets lets your kids waste hours
Speaker 1: and hours staring at the TV as they move a
Speaker 1: little dot around. Or you could get our thing which
Speaker 1: lets the play games that they want to, but it
Speaker 1: also lets them do their homework and you can do
Speaker 1: your taxes and all this kind of stuff. And I
Speaker 1: mean it was a very compelling argument. So this combination
Speaker 1: of events caused the market to just bottom out. You
Speaker 1: had stories of games discounting, or stores like toy stores
Speaker 1: discounting games putting them in bargain bins where you get, like,
Speaker 1: you know, a dollar or two bucks to pick up
Speaker 1: these cartridges. So was I quality was not an issue?
Speaker 1: I was like, I want quantity you all right? Well
Speaker 1: you know that was I mowed the lawn for that.
Speaker 1: The lawn will regrow and I will mow it again.
Speaker 1: Um and uh. Also, Atari made another dumb mistake, which
Speaker 1: I can't completely blame them for. Alright, So there were
Speaker 1: some issues that happened, the video game crash, the ET Plan,
Speaker 1: the pac Man Plan. There was also supposedly some questionable
Speaker 1: stock dealings that led Attari to the border directions to
Speaker 1: fire the CEO, Ray Kassar. Yeah, and I don't know
Speaker 1: if Kassar was. He had not made the best moves
Speaker 1: for that company anyway, So it wasn't like Bushnell leaving,
Speaker 1: but um it was. It definitely made the company unstable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he was pushed out. A guy named James J.
Speaker 1: Morgan would take over as CEO. But here was something
Speaker 1: else that was going on behind the scenes, EDITORI that
Speaker 1: could have totally helped the company coast through the video
Speaker 1: game crash and rise to new heights. There was a
Speaker 1: company in Japan, company that started out selling playing cards.
Speaker 1: That's how it started. It made a game console in
Speaker 1: Japan referred to as the fami Com. We know it
Speaker 1: as the Nintendo Entertainment System. In a nineteen three, Nintendo
Speaker 1: and Atari were in talks for Atari to be the
Speaker 1: 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 to be a partnership and Nintendo was moving forward
Speaker 1: with our Atari and Nintendo were moving forward with this,
Speaker 1: but 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 launch in
Speaker 1: the United States under our own brand name. And that's
Speaker 1: what they did. But with just a couple 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 games. 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 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 a Torii. Um. And this is also when the
Speaker 1: arcade branch of Atari released the licensed first person space
Speaker 1: simulator game. That's my favorite arcade game of all time, Chuck,
Speaker 1: what 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 Obi
Speaker 1: Wan say the Force will be with you always, right.
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 gonna put this in the limited space
Speaker 1: in our house. I know it would have to go
Speaker 1: in my office. I just don't know how I would
Speaker 1: make room in their room. I would make room. I
Speaker 1: couldn't get the cockpit version. That would be way too big.
Speaker 1: I'd have to get the stand up version. But hey,
Speaker 1: if you've got a stand up cabinet version of Star
Speaker 1: Wars you're looking to unload and it works, let me know,
Speaker 1: or let Chuck know, because he's gonna buy it foray Um. Also,
Speaker 1: two other games would get Atari to release them in Europe,
Speaker 1: not in the United States. The United States a different distributor.
Speaker 1: But there were two other games that were really important
Speaker 1: in the history of video games, dragons Layer and Space Ace. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Dragons Layer, remember was that was the first game that
Speaker 1: used um laser disc. Yeah, it was. It was the graphics.
Speaker 1: It was animated cart Yeah. Don Bluth did all the animation.
Speaker 1: He was a Disney animator for a long time, worked
Speaker 1: on Oliver and Company and other game movies. Also did
Speaker 1: uh 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 a 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 the right move, you died,
Speaker 1: and if you did you would progress to the next
Speaker 1: scene and it was essentially play out like yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember now. I remember thinking, man, that looks amazing when
Speaker 1: me put my quarter in and then saying this sucks
Speaker 1: and going to play like right, well, you'd you'd put
Speaker 1: your your four quarters then right because that was really expensible.
Speaker 1: It was either I think it actually might have been
Speaker 1: the first game to go fifty cents. Well it was.
Speaker 1: It was tokens at the time. I remember you would
Speaker 1: go on Tuesdays to battle Zone and you would get
Speaker 1: like twenty tokens for a dollar. I remember what was it?
Speaker 1: The good deal going? Was the one the gold nuggets
Speaker 1: something like that. There was there was one that there
Speaker 1: was I think it was a Gwynette actually, um because
Speaker 1: oh oh no, Northlake Mall had the the gold Mine,
Speaker 1: gold Mine, that's it. Gold Mine. That was one of
Speaker 1: the great mall arcades. Yeah, in Atlanta, and then Fantastic. Well,
Speaker 1: you know what we is gonna be a three partner.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be a three partner. We we talked about
Speaker 1: the possibility of it being a three partner in the game.
Speaker 1: And we are now fifty five minutes in and we
Speaker 1: still have the rest of atari. We we just hit three.
Speaker 1: But here's here's the good news, folks. From to the
Speaker 1: present day, a lot of stuff happens, but we don't
Speaker 1: have a whole lot to say about each individual part.
Speaker 1: We just have to explain what goes on from a
Speaker 1: corporate level. But I think we can clearly say that
Speaker 1: the video game crash. If you don't consider Bushnell selling
Speaker 1: Atari to Warner as being its first death, this has
Speaker 1: got to be the first death because the company was
Speaker 1: absolutely devastated by this. The arcade business was still going
Speaker 1: fairly well, but the home video game market completely bottomed out.
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that continuation of the Atari story. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of parts of the story that
Speaker 1: I think I would actually amend now, But the reason
Speaker 1: why I wanted to present it is because I had
Speaker 1: a lot of fun working on these episodes back in
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen and really wanted to present them again.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you want to listen to more of
Speaker 1: this after next week's part three, then I do recommend
Speaker 1: checking out the more recent episode I did about the
Speaker 1: video game Crash, of which heavily ties into Atri's history
Speaker 1: as well. But if you have suggestions for topics I
Speaker 1: should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach
Speaker 1: out to me. You can do so on Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W.
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is
Speaker 1: an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H