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