TechStuff Classic: The Rise and Fall of Atari: Part Three

Published Feb 4, 2022, 7:06 PM

In our final part in our Atari series, Chuck and Jonathan talk about the sad decline of Atari and what's left of the company today.

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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. It is time for us to conclude our tech Stuff classic series where we were looking at the Rise and Fall of Atari. So two weeks ago we did part one. Last week we did Part two. This week we did part three. This is all assuming that I don't change the actual order of classic episodes, which I have been known to do. I record these way in advance, so who knows. But anyway, this particular episode was originally published on March nine, two thousand fifteen, The Rise and Fall of Atari, Part three, hope you enjoy. There could be seven eight episodes where we talk about all the things that we're going on. There were incredible political moves going on behind the scenes. There were some amazing technological development. We haven't really touched on the major competitors with Atari that we're causing extra problems for them, like, uh, you know, the early on the in television and Coliko, but then later on we're talking Nintendo and Sega and then Sony with the PlayStation I mean by that time, ATRII is pretty much out of the picture anyway. But I mean, it's just so much to talk about. I found some some websites that even broke it down into when Atari hired people. And I'm not talking about the big names we've mentioned talking about like Marty and Accounting exactly. I mean, it was phenomenal. The documentation that's out there. So we're going to now pick up in that tells you how detailed we've been. If you haven't heard the first two episodes in this series, go back listen to those first. It's an amazing story. So is when something happens to Atari that redefines everything, and some people consider this yet another death of the company. That's when Warner, which had purchased Attari from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Warner splits Atari into two entities one of it one of them is a home computing division, which is called the Atari Corporation, and the other is the arcade division, which is called Atari Games. And it sells off the home computing division. So Atari Corporation gets sold to a man named Jack Tramiel. Yeah, he was the original founder of Commodore uh in the famous Commodore sixty four computer, which was great for its time. Oh yeah, fantastic. There's a full tech Stuff episode about Commodore published on Ferbruary first, two thousand twelve. It's good, it was. It was fun to talk about that too, to talk about the development of the Commodore system. So Tramiel was another another pioneer in personal computing and home electronics, and he saw some promise in that home computing division of Atari, something that after the video game Crash of three a lot of people thought had no value whatsoever. Yeah, he renamed it, uh, I think he renamed it the Atari Corporation. Yeah. Yeah, he decided to call it that because obviously, you know, now you have two separate entities that both have the Atari name in them, Yeah, which is always confusing in the marketplace, and it's going to be confusing in this episode because we're gonna be talking about the fate of both of them, right, So we're gonna follow both the fate of the Atari Corporation and the fate of Atari Games. So Atari Games At in nineteen eighty four was still with Warner, not for long. Not for long in fact, would be when that changes. So some big stuff happens in home video games. That's when the Fama com also known as Nintendo Entertainment System is released in the United States, which was a body blow like Tyson's punch out right there. Um. Yeah, So that was something that convinced people maybe home video games aren't as dead as we thought they were. Because the video game crash, we pretty much thought that's it. Personal computers are going to take over. There won't be any home consoles dedicated video games anymore. Because that idea played itself out with Apples on the scene at this point, Yeah, making a stink. Yeah. In fact, by they're selling the Macintosh because that came out four so they Yeah. But the brilliant thing Nintendo did was they learned from Attari's mistakes. They said, all right, well we are going to license games like they have to be certified by US. You can't develop for Nintendo independently without submitting the game for US for certification. That way we still have some control over what and Warners wanted. But they didn't get out ahead of it in time like Nintendo did. No Activision pretty much doomed Atari because Activisions set that that precedent that a third party developer can can create uh cartridges for another platform that they don't own. Once that insident was set and that policy wasn't in place, it was it was game on, literally for everybody who wanted to develop for Atari. Yeah, and pardon my ignorance because I'm not a current gamer. I'm still stuck in the eighties. Activision still around, right, uh huh, Well it's part of something bigger, but ya, but they survived everything and did well for them. Well, I mean I could do a full episode on what happened to Activision too. It's kind of like it's kind of like a tari you know how, Atari technically still exists today, so at any rate. Um uh. Also in five, that's when Warner Communications sells the arcade division of Atari Games to a competitor, Namco. Yes, so that's the company that that developed pac Man. Yeah. Namco only owned it for about a year, and then some employees bought Atari Games from Namco and then uh made a few more pretty good arcade games, paper Boy, it was a big one. Gauntlet, Yeah, Gauntlet was a big one. Wizard needs food, good games, so they pumped a little more lifeblood into the car Atari Games division. Yeah, they also started to develop home games. But here's the thing. When Warner split it up between Atari Corporation in Atari Games, Atari Corporation had the sole right to sell home games under the Atari brand, Yeah, which they had already proved the struggle post without a really great, solid follow up that didn't didn't jump over. Yeah. And then you've got Atari Games that was making these these arcade games, and they wanted to make home video games, but they couldn't do it under the Atari brand because that belonged to Atari Corporation. So they created a new brand called Tension t E N G E N, which also comes from a h an aspect of the old board game Go. Intension the game, the board game, the Japanese board game Go, or It's great, Yeah, it's um. In fact, there's a great story that uh going way back to the first episode we talked about the the founders of Atari, they used to play Go in their office, which was an office that was originally meant for one person, but two people had to share it, so they would play games of Go in between actually getting any work done, although according to uh Ted, Mr Nolan never really actually did any work as far as he could tell, but then remember he had a lot of sour grapes for legitimate reasons. So if you notice what's going on now is Atari Um the corporation is getting really fractured. Um their home computer business with the hundred, we're doing okay, but they were behind the curve, so to speak, and they were playing catch up. They were announcing a new computer system, the Atar E S T. They did that at the Winter c E S. I did an episode about c E S once where I explained this. But once upon a time there were two big c S events. One happened in the winter and one happened in the summer, and now there's only the winter version. But so this this was back when there were still two and at Winter c E S they announced a R S T. The ST stands for sixteen slash thirty two, which refers to the microprocessor and its internal and external bus connections. But anyway, it had five kilobytes of RAM yeah, smoking fast. Yeah, and uh it could be expanded up to four megabytes. So there's that had a graphical user interface, so jewey, uh or gooey if you prefer. Once the whole Jeff gift thing came out, Yeah, it messes everything up. I always say gooey because jewey does not sound like it's appropriate to me at any rate. It We'll go with gooey. I think that's the more than more than overwhelming choice. It also had a floppy disk drive, and it would be the cartridge drive. Yes, so I had both. Yeah, And it would be produced up until the early nineteen nineties. Yeah, and it was the cheapest sixteen bit computer. Um. And like like you said, if it was around to the nineteen nineties, it did okay. Yeah. In fact, in Europe it did pretty well. Here in the United States did okay, and in Europe it did it did better. Um. And then we've got uh, the Atari Corporation releasing the Atari hundred Pro system in six soft dred had come out, and then the seventy eight hundred comes out. It had digital joysticks rather than the older analog type, and the seventy hundred had a weird little story and that it was manufactured and then shelves in a warehouse basically for um, I'm not really sure how long. Two years. Yeah, two years. They basically were just going to sit on it, and then finally they said, well, the decision was really is arbitrary, is like, let's just sell these things. Yeah. Yeah, they released like a couple of early models uh in that two year period, but they, like you were saying, they didn't sell it like it. People talk about it being uh uh re debuted or reintroduced, but it never was fully introduced in the first place. But one cool thing about it was it was backwards compatible with almost all games. Uh. Yeah, so that's kind of neat, you know, it's better than the fifty UM and yeah, it ended up uh not really competing very well against the Nintendo Entertainment System. It would only be produced until or supported until that's when Atari announced that they would no longer UM produce games or consoles. There was also JR companion model to basically the the public. At this point, uh, Nintendo Fever had struck and Sega started to come out with their systems, and Atari was just kind of sadly lost in the shuffle there as far as the home systems go. Yeah, if you're if your mascot wasn't a little Italian plumber, yeah you were out of luck. We'll be back with more about Attari after this quick break. So Attari would release the Atari x E video Game System a k a. The Atari x E g S, which was based off the eight bit computers Attari had previously created. Um so think of like the fifty two hundred was kind of the video game console of the four eight hundred bit or four eight hundred Atari computers. This one was the next general it was based off the next generation of those same home computers. Yeah, those confusion in the marketplace, and I think confusion within Atari. I don't think they even knew what kind of company they were at this point. No, I don't think so. In this one actually had one game hard coded into it. So the Atari you could play other games, like you could get the disks for other games and play them, but it had one game that was hard coded into it, and that was Missile Command. So it's not a bad choice. But yeah, it was again one of those things where you might feel that Atari didn't have a clear vision for what its place was. Things just in kind of money and in they would release the five twenty st E and the ten forty STE models of its home computer, which had an increased color palette and a graphics processor, right, a dedicated co processor for the graphics which is something that's common now, but at the time was pretty new. Yeah. So, I mean they were, they were doing some of the right things on the home computer front, but there was just so much more competition now. You had you had Apple, you had the IBM compatibles, and you had IBM Plus. The Amigo was still out there. Um you can't forget about the Amiga. No. I had a friend who was a die hard Amiga fan, and I gotta admit the Amiga. The thing that I loved about the Amiga was that well before anyone else, it was doing amazing sound and graphics, like years before anyone else had managed to do that in an affordable way. And uh so, I remember my friend had several games for the Amiga that I found to be like light years beyond anything I could play on my Apple two E or my two eighties six at home. Um So, but the the CPU on these devices had a blistering speed of eight Mega hurts. We're talking about the multiple Giga hurts now, and it's a little a little slow on that and in fact, my phone is way faster than that. Um But that's also when Atari Corporation acquired the right to manufacture and sell a handheld gaming console that had been developed by a different company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, The Links was really cool. It had been developed by a company called Epics e p y X, but Epics had entered financial difficulty and it owed a lot of money to various companies. The largest that it owed money too was Atari. Actually, the largest amount it owed was to Atari. Yeah, and so they had this kind of settlement to say, like, well, how are we going to make good on this because Epics is on the verge of just disappearing, and as part of the deal, essentially they signed over this this handheld gaming system they had been developing, and that became the Atari Links. And the Links was great. I remember I had a couple of friends it had it. It um It was released around the same time as the Game Boy, but it had full color graphics. It looked better, it sounded better. You could link them together, you could link them together. It was it was sort of large. Um. It was had a horizontal UM I guess body UM. So it was big, which wasn't great. It was a little ungainly. The battery life would only last four to five hours, so that was kind of frustrating because this is this is not era of rechargeable batteries. For most people, you were popping out old ones and replacing them with new ones, so that could get really frustrating. But the one thing Links did not have was a game called Tetris. Yeah, and that is what basically was the death blow to the Links. Tetris was just such a huge deal. It was the killer app. Yeah, it was the killer app and it's what made game Boy what it was. And I got the game Boy. Yeah, and then and then like you would think that, well, maybe if they can stick it out, then the Links will have a chance because the Nintendo game Boy, once everyone's got that, they'll see that the Lynx has got uh better stats, and maybe I'll go with that. But then in Sega came out with the game Gear, and Sega was already doing really good business too, and that just that just meant that the Links had no place in that competition. I feel bad for a Tary at this point because they're coming up with superior products in certain case, it still can't get market. It's either bad timing or it's a combination of bad timing and a lack of a compelling library to these games. It really shows how you need to have strong launch titles to move a console. Yeah, there's a lot more to it than just like this has the best graphics. In fact, you know, going into personal account here, I don't own a current generation game. I love gaming. I consider myself to be a gamer. I'm not a hardcore gamer, and certainly I'm sure any of my listeners listening could beat me at any game of their choice. So I don't want to I don't want to put that out there, but but I will say that I love gaming, but I haven't purchased an Xbox One or a PS four because we're finally at a point now where it's different. But for the longest time, the libraries weren't compelling enough for me to make that investment, right, So I would think, yes, it's clearly superior to the system I have now, but the games aren't games that I want to play yet. I want to wait until they're enough games that I want to play to justify that expense, and now we're at that point. I just haven't Well, for one thing, I'm not allowed to have a present for another year and a half. I have a two year, two year period where I can't get presence, or at least my wife won't buy me presence for a good reason, and it's not a bad one. It's that I made a substantial donation to a nonprofit and in return, the agreement was two years no presence. You're a good man. Here's my deal with gaming now is I uh played Nintendo and stuff through the through the sixty in college, was way into it, and then sort of dropped out for a long time until my stepfather, I'm sorry, my father in law gave me his PS three a couple of years ago because he just didn't want it. And since then, I buy like I just look up once a year and buy like the two best reviewed games of the year, and I'll play those for about a month and then that's it. We don't have the time to doe to gaming three years old. You know, I fix up my house. I know I've got a house, I got a puppy, I got four animals. Yeah, we've gotten to a point. We're obviously getting a little off topic, but it's true, like we we just have reached a point in our lives where no, you just can't game like that anymore. About about the last of us, Oh, fantastic game. Fantastic game. But see, I still have that gamer in me because I was addicted to this game. Um. And then I bought one of the bio BioShock BioShock, but the steampunk one, right, so BioShock Infinite, Yeah, that one, and I played that one through and that was really great. The music in that game is amazing. Yeah, and that's the extent of my gaming. Now I hear two years, I'll buy the best two games. Although after the last of us, I don't. I mean, I don't see how you can get any better. It was a very emotionally impactful game. I mean right at my amories. Uh so, yeah, back to the get back to the Tari. No, I love doing this. I would just totally continue on that conversation otherwise. But no, there's only one thing I have to mention, which is that Atari Corporation released the Atari t T zero three zero or zero thirty. It's a workstations thirty two Mega Hurts process or workstation. So they were still staying in the home computer business at that point. It's yeah, they're they're trying to hang in there. And I don't have any notes for ninety one, but into Yeah. In ninety two, Atari Corporation would release the Falcon, which would be the last of its computer systems. The Falcon was the last time they tried to do a home computer, and then they made the decision to switch back to trying to do video game consoles again. So that's why we see the release of the Atari jag jagua if you want to go with the British pronunciation jack one again. Atari is doing the right thing there ahead of the curve. It's the first sixty four bit system. Yeah, so it's so it is graphically and as far as the processor goes, more powerful than any of the competitors on the market at that Yeah, and had had a couple of success successful titles. I think the Alien versus Predator that's one that's considered to be one of the best titles for that system. Tempest two thousand that was the other one was really good. Um, but the controller on it was terrible. Yeah. It was huge and it was unwieldy, um, and didn't have a lot of software support. Right to the titles that we just mentioned are pretty much I was like, well, beyond that, I can't really justify buying this. It says there were sixty seven games ever released, and that's it. I don't think more than ten of them registered on the radar. You read over the them and you're just like, well, I never heard of this there. That's gonna be one of the reasons why this Jaguar never took off. Yeah, well, in the sixty four was just awesome and they had good games, and then you had the PlayStation coming on. Like when Sony starts really throwing down then it really this was at last like a star in just reaching for that rope at the end of the rope, trying to grab ahold of it and Nintendo and Sonny was just pulling the rope higher. So we haven't talked about Atari Games for a little bit. That's the that's the branch that did the arcade versions not and also produced some home video under home video games under tension, uh, Time Warner Communications. Just in case you didn't know, Warner and Time merged in nine. Just a little bit of a merger. Yeah, Time Warner Communications purchased controlling interest in Atari Games, so Atari Games would get consolidated with other properties in nine and become known as Time Warner Interactive. So Atari Games was part of Time Warner Interactive. But this means that part of Atari is back with Warner. Remember Warner was the one that so off. So yeah, Warner had sold it off to Namco, then employees bought it back from Namco, and then Time Warner Communications buys it. And it's just this is why it gets really hard to talk about the end of Atari. Um And another confusing thing, uh JT Storage, which was a hard disc manufacturer. Yeah, JTS merges with Atari Corporation. So this is the home computer one, not the Atari games one. So JTS merges with Atari Corporation. But JTS was in a tough spot because it was already had a cash flow problem and so it was looking for a way to avoid going into bankruptcy and thought that by acquiring Atari, which had lots of cash, but not a whole lot of market share because most of the cash from Atari was actually coming from lawsuits like they were going after other companies. Yeah, so they weren't making money off their products as much as they were off some of the lawsuits. So JTS comes in, acquires Atari, then fires almost all of the former Atari employees and inquidates the remaining Atari inventory as a means of helping stave off this impending disaster, which it did not do. Two years after that, Hasbro Interactive um buys JTS for five million bucks. Yeah, essentially it bought the Atari Corporation from JTS for five million. JTS actually went bankrupt that year. It essentially bought the Atari name for five million. But yeah, because at that point there really was nothing left, right because and at this point in the name, it's like your your drunk uncle who was he was a big shot in high school. That's what Atari is at this point. Yeah, it's like, you know, stumbling around in the alley, you know, don't you know who I am? And around the same time, to make matters worse. Okay, So that that's Atari Corporation, right, getting acquired for five million by Hasbro Interactive. Meanwhile, around that same time, Atari Games was split off from Time Warner Interactive. So it didn't stay at Time Warner very long either, like three years it was gone. It splits off and is purchased by w MS Industries, which was the parent company or Williams and Bally Midway. So now we're seeing a consolidation of the big names that you know, twenty years earlier, have been the defining names in in arcade entertainments. So they purchase Atari Games. Uh, and meanwhile, you've got Hasbro Interactive that's acquired the Atari Corporation. So at that point, yeah, that's true, but don't get ahead of me. So at that point, when when Hasbro gets hold of Atari Corporation, w MS Industries doesn't want confusion. You know, they just purchased Atari Games earlier. Yeah. Yeah, we're already confused. So what they do is they renamed Atari Games. Atari Games gets renamed into Midway Games West. So now when I talk about Atari Games, I'm actually talking Midway Games West. Don't worry, we'll come back around to make things more confusing later. So yeah, so now we get to two thousand, that's when the dot com bubble bursts. Poor Atari because through two bubble bursts, right, the video game bubble and then the dot com bubble. Man So they probably had were affected by the real estate bubble in some way to Probably I was affected by the dot com bubble. I worked for a human resources management consulting firm at the time, and most of our clients were dot com companies. Yeah, suddenly our client lists got a lot smaller, but look where you are now. Yeah, it was a long road, but I'm glad I'm here. Uh So Hasbro because Hasbro Interactive was hit hard by this dot com verse. Everyone was right, you mean you just had this. It was another market correction that was the devastated a lot of companies and lives. So Hasbro decides to sell off Hasbro Interactive, including the intellectual property from a Hary corporation. Remember that's the home computing one. They sell it to a French company that I always misspelled because I always think that the name is a typo. Yeah, info Grams in not info Games. Yeah, I keep thinking it's info games. It's info Grams because it's spelled like info games but with an extra are there right after the G? Yeah? The French that was in two thousand Yeah, and uh so Hasbro Interactive becomes info Grams Interactive and in two thousand three, unless you have anything between two thousand and two thousand three, thank goodness. So in two thousand three, Info Grams Interactive is renamed Atari Interactive and Infograms creates a subsidiary called Atari Incorporated, which has its own listing on NASDAC. Yeah, they still saw value in that Atari name, despite the pummeling it took over the years. And keep in mind that by this point there's nothing left of the original Atari attached to the Satari name. The Atari name is a name and an idea, but it's no longer associated with the original company at all. Yeah. So the European branch of Infograms became known as Atari Europe and Infograms Australia became Atari Australia, Infograms UK became a UK. Yeah, and there were re releases of some of the classic games. There were some newer games. One called Alone in the Dark in two thousand and eight was supposed to be pretty good. I never played it. Fantastic, So they had some successes. But again that was just confusing because they were, you know, a publisher and a distributor, and they really didn't really know what they were doing completely with the Autari name. Right. Infograms in particular was into this like acquisition mania, like they were they were buying up properties left and right, Yeah, which is always a little dangerous, yeah, because it can lead to a lack of focus, which is exactly what happened in this case. I mean, obviously, hindsight tells us that right. We wouldn't necessarily know that otherwise, but it is the case Midway Game In two thousand three, Midway Games West, I should say, remember that what used to be Atari Games now Midway Games West disbands, So now Atari Games is just a name. In fact, there was a holding company that was still called Midway Games West, but it was just a holding company. There was no nothing else to it. It was not an office, no secretary, no games coming out of it, nothing, So it only exists as a name literally at this point. Two thousand four, the Atari Flashback launches. Now the Flashback is a dedicated console with games that are hard baked into it, so it doesn't use cartridges as a selection of games. It looked like except for some added buttons here and there. Um. I bought. I don't know who made it, but I bought. At one point someone was selling the joystick just plugs directly into the Yeah, that had like games or something on it. Um, and that was I played the heck out of that thing. Oh yeah, I did too. I have one of those at home. But that I have one of those at home right next to my TV. So not trying to bragg or anything. I mean I realized that almost everyone out there probably has a larger TV, So please don't make me feel badly about myself. But the flashback did. Okay. They came out with different versions of that exactly like the first one did not have river Ate and it, so that just did not fly with me. Yeah, but it's all for the nostalgia crowd. Yeah. So that came out with models in two thousand four, two thousand five, two two thousand eleven, and two thousand twelve. Different companies would produce it over the years, um, but they were all licensed by Atari. And by Atari I mean Atari Home Computing, which means uh infograms as opposed to Midway Games West, which is I know, really two thousand five. Okay, seriously, has Bro, what the heck are you doing? Has Bro buys back some intellectual property from Atari s A. Which is the info Grams version, the home computer version also known as Atari Inc. As the subsidiary of Ataria, say, for sixty five million in dollars. See that's what's confusing. Yeah, that's that Hasbro got out of the game and then literally got back into it, you know. For that. Yeah, clearly that dot com bubble scared everybody, and then once we started seeing recovery, people wanted to get back into it, the ones that were still around anyway. Now now Atri is not your drunk uncle, it's just the abused, like confused, I don't even know which which way is up at this point. This is this is the This is the person who's just wandering the street and talking about how you know, the trees are convincing them to buy Dorito's. That is what this is that now we're at that point. Yeah. So in two eight, Infograms offers to buy out Atari Incorporated shares to make Infograms the sole owner of Atari Incorporated again because they had listed to Tori Incorporated on NASDAC, so they sold shares to other parties, making it a publicly traded company. But now they're saying, well, we need to fix Atari like this, this brand is not doing what we needed to do. We think that this brand, Yeah, we think this brand could save us because Infograms as a whole was having a lot of issues. We want to be able to rebrand ourselves, but in order to do that, we first need to get all of Atari back belonging to us. So they offered to buy it out. It's accepted, and Infograms reacquires Atari uh completely, so now it totally belongs to Infograms uh. Atari meanwhile had acquired another company called Cryptic Studios, which developed a game called City of Heroes. It's an online multiplayer game where you create a superhero um and you an original superhero that you can play. It's one that I always wanted to get into it, but I never I never had the time to dedicate to those massive online games and their monthly subscription base. For well, now they're mostly free to play, but back then they were all monthly subscriptions and you're busy creating your own real life superhero persona. That's true, but you know that's what about. That's an alter ego thing that we need to steer away from. We're gonna take a quick break for some messages, but then we'll be back with more of the rise and fall of Atari. So two thousand nine, good grief. Could this story get more ridiculous? Warner Brothers Entertainment purchases the Midway intellectual property, including the name Atari Games, So for the third time Warner Warner owns something called Atari three times buying and selling. I don't know. So. Meanwhile, Namco Bandai acquires Atari Europe from Infograms. Infograms itself changes its name to Atari Essay to create a united company, and it also has the Atari Group, which is a collection of divisions from around the world, like Atari Italia, that kind of thing um that still have the Atari brand name. Here's a name we haven't heard for a while. Bushnell. He comes back. He actually, because of an acquisition, ends up on the board of directors or Atari So Incorporated specifically, So they brought him back for that very reason, right to sort of get some attention again, I imagine. So yeah, because this is again one of those things where you've got the name but otherwise there's no connection. But now you've got the guy who founded the company. So that's big news. And it definitely did get a lot of people writing about it at the time, although if you look at two now you realize not a whole lot has will remind you of the old golden age of Atari um so inn. Atari Incorporated sells off Cryptic Studios, the one that they had bought, the City Heroes one and in Atari Incorporated files for bankruptcy January. Oh so remember this is the this was formally Infograms Atari Incorporated was formerly part of Infograms, now part of Ataria Say. Atari Incorporated files from bankruptcy partly to escape the debt accrued by its parent company h and In. In an effort to pay off the debt, they attempt to sell off the portfolio of more than two video games, but they only received fifteen preliminary bids and none of them approach the price that Atari was hoping for, so they don't accept any of them. Instead, they decide they'll sell bits and pieces off rather than rather than sell everything off at a price too low, They're going to sell bits and pieces off and try and get themselves through it. And it works. I mean they sell some stuff, not everything, but they sell some stuff and then by the end often they emerged from bankruptcy December. So like the entire year of Atari Incorporated is in bankruptcy. This at US year. Maybe it's hard. I mean there's a lot of competition for that time. That title fourteen. Finally last year, that's when we have the documentary that we talked about previously, the one that went out to the desert to dig up to find out if et really was beneath it the cartridge, not the character and that kind of resurrected a little bit of interest in it'sar again. Yeah. Yeah, there was a lot of talk about there were a lot of people wondering whether or not they were actually gonna find anything, if they would just find scraps as opposed to entire cartridges. And as we mentioned in the previous episode, they did find cartridges. So um, yeah, the whole story behind that is they manufactured four million cartridges, they were unable to move three and a half million of those. Man So they had only a couple of choices. Do you store this and hope that you can one day sell it, because keep in mind, storing stuff costs money, right, you can't. It's not like there's just a magical space like that. It's gonna occupy space that you would otherwise use for something else. Or do you call it a loss and throw it away? And they chose option number two. Yeah, And so what's amazing to me about the whole et debacle is that, um, word got I mean this is pre internet and word still got around that fast. From Johnny telling his neighbor Billy how bad sucked, and Billy telling his neighbor and it was around so fast that there wasn't five thousand copies. There was no like Kataku forum or something for people to say, this is still in cul de sex yeah, and then scoffing over bargain bins at your local toy store. Um. And so what's going on with the Tory now, Well, it's focusing on developing games for social platforms like Facebook and for mobile devices primarily, although they're looking at some other stuff as well. Right. Yeah. A former employee name Fred Uh, I don't know how to pronounce that c h E s in a I S. I believe it is one of the French fellows from Infogram. Perhaps perhaps he's now the CEO. And he said that he is going to try and be relevant in the PC world again with a few different things, uh, notably gambling, real casino gambling and just for fun casino gambling. So I think this would be like if you walked into a casino, you know how you see all those licensed slot machines, like Lord of the Rings. That one, by the way, treats me really well. So I love the Lord of the Ring slot machine, but I can see like the Centipede slot machine, and then operate some of the gameplay. They're gonna do both. They're gonna have a licensing program and they're gonna have an actual online casino, social casino with virtual money and so the gambling thing and licensing and games. They said, the flashback they're gonna keep around. Uh, they have one idea for They're going to create some new I p s. One is for the LGBT community called pride Fest. And um he said, they're developing a new Asteroids game that is a PC game where you will actually be surviving on the asteroid itself. So turn things around a little bit. They're trying, um he thinks that they can capitalize on that Atari name and get it back to relevance again. But I don't know. Yeah, so you know, it's whether or not we see anything coming out of this division. Also, keep in mind the the Atari games that was purchased by Warner Brothers Entertainment. You know, the story is not necessarily over for Atari, although you could argue that as far as the original company is concerned, that story has been over since the eighties. So Uh, it's an interesting and and sometimes upsetting story, the rise and fall of the of Atari and it Yeah, and and there's people. I remember reading things like could the video game crash happen again? And if you look, there is a large number of different providers that are all trying to clamor for attention. Now, when we think of consoles, we think Nintendo, Sony an Xbox. Some people would say just Sony an Xbox. They don't even think of Nintendo. Um. But then we have the mobile game market, we have computers. PC gaming is hitting a resurgence, so uh. And then there are people like me who hold back from buying current generation consoles because we don't necessarily see the value in them or the reason to upgrade. Where I was given one by my father in law. Yeah, they we get to that point where we think, you know, it's it is possible. You can't never say that you're too big to fail. That's a rookie mistake, comes before the fall. That that's true. So we have completed the story of Attari. But now we've got a little time to talk about some personal reflections beyond the stuff that we've talked about in the previous episodes. So, Chuck, what are some of your fond memories of Atari in general? Uh? Well, buying pac Man on Christmas day, the buying was great. Yeah, and actually, man I actually enjoyed playing it as um a twelve year old. Um, I didn't realize how bad it's stunk at the time because it was pac Man in my house. Um And you know, as a little kid, you're not like, oh, this doesn't look just like it and sound just like it. I think older kids probably were a little more like that, but um, I was young enough to where I enjoyed it adventure. Like we talked about man um the imagination playing Adventure well and the fact that they incorporated things like the bat mechanic, which meant that you could never expect the same gameplay experience two times in a row, which was pretty interesting. Like a lot of these games, like the early games, it involved memorizing patterns, and if you memorize the pattern, you could play definitely, but that didn't work for games that actually would uh introduce some sort of element that could at least be perceived as random. Yeah. River Raid fantastic, huge game to me, that holds up still today. Yeah, it's a good game. I think out of all the shooter games, that's like by shooter, I mean like you're controlling a ship that's moving around and shooting things. In this case, it's a it's a jet, it's flying over a river. Uh. That one. I didn't own river Raid, but a friend of mine from down the street owned it, and I would go over to his house all the time to play it because it was the one title on Atari that I really wanted but did not have. Well, actually no, there were two, river Rate and Pitfall. I never owned either of those, but I played the heck out of them. I think river Raid was the first top scroll game. Uh. Pitfall was huge, and that kind of introduced the platforming genre of video games. Yeah. And Warlords yeah. Uh. Man. I had a ton of Frogger. I mean, I know that was sort of a kid's game, but I still like Frogger. I think it's still challenging. I liked Frogger as well. I remember I had some games that I wish had been better, Like I had Donkey Kong Jr. That really it didn't measure up nearly as well to the arcade version. I had Popeye, which also didn't measure up very well to the arcade version. Um, but I mean it was it was like I had a lot of those those games licensed games and stuff as well. Uh yeah, I I also have really fond memories of arcades. Like you know, there were there were times where I would just go to the arcade to um, you know, spend a dollar or whatever, and you know, you always try and find the game that you figure you're gonna get the most value for your money. I can play this one for a long time. I'm gonna play this one, um. And luckily there were also a lot of them made by Atari that were really fun. I mean, Star Wars is still like I love the Star Wars trilogy game that came out that was modeled after um, closer after the movies, like with better graphics and everything. But there's still a place in my heart of that vector graphics Star Wars game. And I wasn't kidding when I said that I would actually consider purchasing one of those because that was, um such an such a fond memory. Like the two arcade games I went back to over and over, we're uh We're Star Wars and Spy Hunter. Oh yeah, No, Spy Hunter was not an Atari game, but oddly enough, I think Spy Hunter two ended up being distributed under Atari, even though Atari had nothing to do with the original Spy Hunter. But that just shows another way that the Atari story makes no sense when you look at the whole thing. Yeah, and you know, I hate to sound like the old guy, but um, I'm really thankful that we grew up in that generation. There was something really special about seeing something invented for us right in front of our very eyes, created out of nowhere, like we talked about in I think episode two, when there were three TV stations or you know, five or six TV stations and crappy handheld games, and it was just it blew my mind. And I spent a lot of time in the arcade and the games today are amazing, but the mind blow isn't there like it was back then, because it's all building on what happened before it, and this was building on out of thin air. And it also, I mean, it was an era where a single person could develop a game from beginning to finish. You know, now we have companies that have entire divisions dedicated to that. It was also an era where people were making weird games, like weird games that could be a lot of fun but had nothing to do with it, Like you look at yours Revenge, I dare you to tell me what that's supposed to be. It is bizarre, but it's awesome, And there are a lot of really fun games. Yeah, huge, huge risks, right, both in the arcade and in the home video game market, just people saying, let's create some a fun experience. It doesn't matter if it quote unquote makes sense or whatever. These days, you look at video games and a lot of the companies tend to get hung up on creating franchises. They want they want to create a title that they can make essentially clones of with modifications. Yeah, and then that way they have built in a built an audience they've got all right, these are the people who are Call of Duty players. So let's put out a Call of Duty game every single year. They'll buy it. We we know they'll buy it because they are Call of Duty fans, as opposed to saying what kind of cool experience can we create, which is sort of given rise to the independent developer community. So in a way, those early Atari days are very similar to what we see with the independent game community these days, except, of course, the independent game developers are are not, as you know, not as organized in a sense, they're nonder an umbrella like Atari was. But other than that, they're they're operating in a very similar way. You look at those early days of Atari, it really did sound lot like what an internet startup sounds like today. Yeah, you were defining what you did and so there weren't rules because no one had done it before. Yeah, we're talking earlier. So my needs to get on that Atari movie. Yeah, great one. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about the possibility of you know, someone needs to do a documentary about this, like take this idea of the rise and fall, the three episodes that we have done, um, and really look into it and make it a film to document what happened and explain the processes and uh, because it does get so so convoluted and complex towards the end of its existence. And of course we could argue that by that time, it's you know, it's saying the name Attari is meaningless because again it's just a word at that point, um, which is sad. It was. It did have such an important part in my childhood. I mean, I I played so much both in the arcade and blisters on my hand. Oh no, yeah, you would get like I remember because the way I would hold the joystick. Um in the in between my thumb and forefinger where I would I would grip the thumb stick, I would have a blister right there, and um. Yeah. It also was one of those things that would frustrate me because I'm a left hander, and so I I ended up. Yeah, I coped well enough, but yeah, it was a little I guess it kind of helped with my precision of my right hand. Otherwise I probably would just be flailing around the office on fire all the time. So I thank Atari for that as well. Yeah, but yeah, it's funny because I never owned you know, when the Atari crap video game crash happened. Atari was the only video game console I owned at the time of video game consoles being being built. Right, So I got in television, but that was after in television had was no longer a thing that was. That was a hand me down. I didn't get a Nintendo. I never had. My college roommate had one, So I didn't buy one of those. You see. I what I did was I transitioned over to computers and I got I became one of those snooty computer gamers because the games on computers were deeper, more sophisticated. They didn't have the arcady kind of graphics that dedicated video game consoles could have, but they did have a richer game experience in my mind, and so I became a computer gamer. Now it's funny because now I'm a console gamer again, although I'm now transitioning back to computer gamer. And that's because of services like Steam, which allowed me to buy games and have them download directly to my computer and I don't have to go to a store. I don't have to buy a box. I get the game delivered straight to my computer and I can play it off of there. So it's funny because I keep going back and forth. I went console to PC to console. In fact, I was consoled for a long time with the uh In sixty four GameCube, the PS two, the PS three, the Xbox, the Xbox three sixty I have all of those. A Dreamcast. I've got a Dreamcast too. I'm thinking back now, I've never bought a console. You've only been given was Christmas. My college roommate had the first Nintendo had the Super Nintendo. Another college droommate had the sixty four. My friend in l A had the Xbox who lived next door to men bought me the or gave me the p S three. Not all of us can walk outside and expect consoles to rain down from the heaven. Never bought one, just just occurred to me, to be fair, Some of those were gifts to me. Actually, the Dreamcast was given to me after Dreamcast had already folded, and uh, my wife bought it like a used Dreamcast and then we just got like a folder full of games that that came out for it. By the way, I should do a full episode just on the Dreamcast at some point, because that was also an amazing system. Uh that died unnecessar sarely like it. It was. It was kind of like the Jaguar and that it came out and it was clearly superior to it's it's uh competitors in space, but because of bad timing and a bad library early on, it never took off, at least not to a point that could sustain a company. And there you have it, the classic three part series, the Rise and Fall of Atari. I hope you enjoyed that. Like I said, it was a lot of fun to look into one of those where at the time when we were looking into this, we came across lots of different conflicting stories about the history of Atari and who played what role, and there's a lot of of kind of accusations and cross accusations of people misrepresenting things. It made it a bit of a challenge. There was a lot of fun to to really talk about, and like I said in the last episode, if you want to hear more, you should check out the more recent episode I did of the video game Crash of Night teena three that tells some more of the story of Atari that kind of compliments what we have gone through with these classic episodes. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again and really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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