Greetings, VSE listeners! Dana, Zaron, and Jason will be back in October with another season. In the meantime, we wanted to share a new podcast from several members of the Very Special team. Introducing, The Legend of SwordQuest!
Episode One: The Sword and the Stoned.
In the early 1980s, Atari is one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world and seeks to promote the biggest video game contest to date, promising $150,000 in prizes. But what starts out as a promising adventure quickly devolves into chaos.
Then head over to the SwordQuest feed wherever you get your podcasts and follow along: https://landing.podtrac.com/thelegendofswordquest
This is an iHeart original.
Hey, what's up, everybody? This is Jason English, Dana Zaron and I are hard at work on season two of very special episodes. Look for that next month. In the meantime, I wanted to highlight another show that some of our very special team has been working on. It's called The Legend of sword Quest. It's about the fall of Atari. If you're into video games, or pop culture mysteries or corporate malfeasance, I think you're gonna like this. It's eight episodes. The first one we're gonna play for you right now. If you want to listen to the rest, go subscribe to the Legend of sword Quest feed be a link in the show notes. Sword Quest is hosted by Jamie Loftus. You might remember her from some of her very successful podcasts My Year and Mensa. The Act Cast, which is about the Kathy comics Ghost Church the sixteenth minute. The show's written and reported by Jake Rawson. Jake's worked on a bunch of our very special episodes from season one, got many more in the works for season two. Producer Josh Josh Fisher has been integral as always, along with Miranda and Virginia Jesse and the School of Humans Gang. So check it out and go and listen to episode two and the rest over in the Legend of sword Quest feed and We're excited to see you back here next month with more very special episodes.
In nineteen eighty two, thirteen year old Bert Wardahl is looking through an Atari catalog. At the time, Atari was the cutting edge in video games, promising an arcade experience in your shag carpeted living room.
The Atari video computer system is twenty contridges with thirteen hundred game variations you play on your own TV scent.
Bert sees something intriguing an add for Earthworld, the first title in Atari's sword Quest series of games, epic and ambitious sword Quest, promises one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in prizes split up among five finalists, with the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery going to the grand prize winner. Usually the prize for winning a game was getting yelled at by your parents for staying at the arcade for too long.
I remember there was a photo like a game image. The sword Quest Earthwall game is about the zodiac signs, and this particular picture of the screen grab was the Leo sign. It was like a colorful waterfall that you have to kind of run through. That was my first image of seeing sword quests from that, And as I recall, they did say, you know, there was a contest, you know, win one hundred and fifty dollars dollars, you know, something like that, and they didn't give a ton of details about it. But it was exciting.
Of course, it was exciting. It was the most exciting thing a thirteen year old could possibly hear. Real prizes for playing a video game. Weren't games supposed to be brain rotting wastes of time. The problem was that video games didn't have drop dates yet. He knew it was supposed to come out in October, but he didn't know the day. So Bert has to try to find the game the old fashioned way by calling every store within driving distance.
Hello, kmart, Hey, do you have an Earth World? Do we have what Earth World?
From Atari?
Earthworm?
Earth World?
Let me put you through the long care.
Bert calls every store he can think of, and then finally J. C.
Penny was the biggest store in our area that carried Atari games, at least the closest to my house, And I do remember calling them and asking them, and they said they were going to be carrying it, so I knew when to go and it would be there.
This was Bert's big Christmas story moment, except it's October and he has to pay for it with his own allowance. But still he convinces his parents to drive him to J. C. Penny. He leaps out of the car and runs toward the entrance. Inside, past the clothing and the jewelry and the small appliances, is the store's video game department, a tiny glass encased oasis of excitement and a store full of socks.
There was a big kiosk that had electronics. There was electronic stuff surrounding the kiosk too, but it was in the kiosk where the games where they were behind the counter, but it was a glass count so you could see the games lined up in there.
Bert scans the shelves, past Asteroids, past Night Driver, past Breakout until he sees it Earth World. The cover has a muscular man and woman wielding swords, a hovering head with an eye patch, and a minotaur. It was very van mural Rock and Roll, an image to the conjured up everything and adventure games should be Bert fishes the money out of his pocket, it grabs the game, and dashes back out to the car. On the drive home, he tears into the plastic wrap, scanning the manual.
It seemed to take forever to drive home because I was so excited to play a new game, But I had that time to look at everything I could look at the catalog, I could read the instructions. That's what I did. I spent that time looking at everything I could. And this game was also different because it came with a comic book, which was unusual.
Yeah, a comic book, which would become important later. At home, he pushes the cartridge into his Atari twenty six hundred. A shimmering sword appears on screen.
Well, I was definitely super excited. By this time. The Atari had been moved to my bedroom. Unfortunately, I had a black and white TV at the time, not color, so I couldn't see it. But when you plug the game in for the first time, there's this magical, colorful sword that comes on the screen, which in color looks pretty impressive, even for Atari twenty six hundred. And then you press the button to get started, and there you are.
Bert became immersed in a world of sorcery and magic, wizards and demons, and if he could navigate it successfully. There was a prize at the end for this first game. It was a talisman, a solid gold pendant valued at twenty five thousand dollars or the equivalent of about eighty thousand dollars today. That was more than a lot of people made in an entire year. For the first time, a home video game could pay off with a real, tangible reward, a prize that held enough value to pay for college or a new car. But what started as a video game promotion would quickly become one of the most controversial moments in eighties pop culture, with a lot of broken promises, urban myths, payoffs, and a central mystery that's consumed fans for decades, a mystery that involves real, not imagined, lost treasure. Atari promised tens of thousands of players the chance to have a massive sword to be crowned the king of video games. That wasn't exactly what happened. Bert, of course, didn't know any of this, not yet. Right now, there's no conspiracy theories, no accusations, no crestfallen kids. He wraps his hand around the Joystick keeps his thumb hovering over the red button and hits start. The sword Quest competition is about to begin, and video games will never be the same. For iHeartRadio, this is the legend of sword Quest. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus and this is episode one, The Sword and the Stone. In nineteen eighty two, Et was the film everyone wanted to see. Spider Man was one of the most popular comic book characters. Journey was a big concert act. All three of these things had something in common. They were also available as game. You could play on the Atari video computer system. Yes, you could play as a member of Journey, although the very limited sound chips of the time didn't really do their music justice. Atari wasn't just the biggest thing in gaming. It really was the only thing in gaming. Sure there were rival home game consoles, but none could approach Atari's market dominance or its cultural cachet. Atari was like Kleenex. People didn't play video games. They played Atari. Walk into a McDonald and you could grab a special Atari scratch off ticket to win free games. When politicians advocated for high tech business development to create jobs, the press dubbed them Atari democrats. When Harrison Ford runs through the rainy Neon Alleys. In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, audiences catch a glimpse of a massive Atari logo, that three line graphic that promised a trip into a world of unlimited imagination. That film took place in twenty nineteen, meaning Atari was set to rule the gaming realm for a long time to come. The logo being in Scott's movie was no accident. Blade Runner was released by Giant Movie Studio Warner Brothers, and Warner Brothers was owned by Warner Communications, a massive media conglomerate that also owned, among other things, Atari. But Atari wasn't some up and coming division. In the first nine months of nineteen eighty two, it was responsible for nearly fifty percent of Warner's overall revenue. It was making more money than their films were, with cash registers ringing up over a billion dollars in systems and games. That was the first Golden Age of video games. Though it wasn't the first home console, Atari was for many people the only way to play, and.
That was exciting. When I was at Atari, we were literally creating and defining the medium of interactive television entertainment that had never happened before. Until that point, television was a passive entertainment form one hundred percent, and we turned it into an active entertainment form, and that was revolutionary in ways they're still rippling through society.
That's Howard Scott Warshaw. Howard was a game engineer for Atari who was responsible for some of their biggest hits, like a tie in game for Raiders of the Lost Dark and Yar's Revenge. The jar of the title was just the first name of the Atari CEO, Ray Kassar, spelled backwards. That's Howard's humor. When you programmed Raiders, he got his hand on a bullwhip to crack around the offices. It also meant meaning Steven Spielberg to get the director's approval. When Spielberg was nowhere to be seen, Howard gave himself a tour of the studio.
I walked everywhere. I walked in and out as sets. I saw my favorite shows. I stole things off of sets. I hope the statute has run on that, but I actually stole little pieces on a memorabilia from some of the sets. It was just an amazing day to be It was like a dream tour of the studio and at the end I get to talk to Steven.
Spielberg to put Atari's status in perspective. Remember that video rental stores weren't on every corner just yet. Many homes didn't have cable television. Electronic home entertainment was limited to what was on TV and whatever was playing on your stereo or walkman. Having an Atari system was major.
Atari wasn't the first video game system. The Atari VCS was not the first home video game system, but it was the first home video game system to hit the stratosphere. It was ubiquitous, It was everywhere. It was millions and millions and millions and millions of units out in homes, which no one had ever done before with a video game system. Because Atari was a wholly owned subsidiary of Warner Communications, which is a huge conglomerate, Warner was able to roll their Atari money into their overall corporate picture. People knew Warner was doing really well. Nobody knew just what an amazing cash fountain Atari had turned into.
The Atari Video Computer System, later renamed the Atari twenty six hundred, was released in nineteen seventy seven. The system originally retailed for about two hundred dollars or almost one thousand dollars today. While it sold well initially, it didn't really take off until the nineteen eighty release of Space Invaders, which had players shooting an endless armada of aliens. You can't really say enough about the arcade version of Space Invaders as a phenomenon. It grossed nearly four billion dollars by nineteen eighty three, which makes it one of the most successful entertainment properties in history, not just games, any entertainment property. When Atari released a home version, it established them as the company to beat. No longer did Space Invaders fans have to brave senior arcades or pay a cover charge at the bar to get their hands on the game. Thanks in part to Space Invaders, by nineteen eighty two, fifteen million Atari VCS systems had been sold. Players would flip a toggle style switch on their system, which resembled a station wagon thanks to the faux wood grain design. There was a switch to select whether you had a black and white or color television, and another switch to select the difficulty setting. It was like being in a cockpit. Why did then you'd select a cartridge from your collection and jam it into the center of the console. Space Invaders, Raiders, Centipede asteroids, all of them with amazing painted art from Atari's in house illustrators, some of whom went on to careers in fine art. The art promised danger, excitement, the chance to become someone else, someone who didn't have to go to school or work, someone who slayed dragons. The graphics, well, they didn't exactly move up to the box. Think of it this way. When one Atari graphics artist applied for a job, she submitted an art sample in needle point. It was a pretty close approximation of the boxy visuals of the games. Kids, of course, did not care. They grabbed the eight direction joystick with one red button and played for hours. Most games didn't have a pause option, so you'd have to wait for a break in the action to go pee and hope your little brother or sister wouldn't run into the living room to mess up your progress. But by nineteen eighty two, and in spite of Atari's massive success, there were signs that things could be heading in a different direction. Some competing systems, like Mattel's in television were gaining ground with better graphics. The VCS was now five years old, a fairly long time for a gaming system. The Space Invader's phenomenon was winding down. Pac Man Fever would soon cool off. There was a sense that Atari needed to shake things up. For one thing, adventure games were growing in popularity. One title, which had the very on the nose name of Adventure, had been a big seller. Something that sent players on a quest was appealing, as opposed to fast twitch games like Space Invaders, which required little more than hand eye coordination and rapid fire alien destruction. For another, Warner Communications had a number of companies in its portfolio. One of them was DC Comics, home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and thousands of others. Another was The Franklin Mint, which Warner bought in nineteen eighty one with money earned from Atari's success. The Franklin Mint struck limited edition collectibles like coins honoring great Americans, which was sort of cool, and novelty thimbles, which absolutely were not. There was an opportunity for all three companies to work in tandem to keep Atari on top of the gaming world, and when you owned a collectibles company, you could come up with something special.
The prizes they actually did come up with for the sword Quest series were pretty awesome. As I recall, there was a talisman for however you want to take that, and that had enough jewels and gems in it to be worth twenty five thousand dollars. Then there was a chalice that also was bitjeweled and valued at twenty five thousand dollars, which is pretty impressive. Then there was a crown, although anybody who won that I don't know if their head would fit in it. But the crown was also had enough jewels and came in and I think a cool twenty five thousand dollars. And then there was the Philosopher's Stone, which I don't think anybody knew what that was before Harry Potter introduced that concept everybody, and that also had enough jewels and gems to be where twenty five thousand dollars. Those prizes were for each of the four games, and then you had the grand prize that after all four games had been won and those prizes had been distributed, the grand prize was, of course a sword, was the magic sword, the ultimate sword, because this is sword Quest, so this was the quest for the sword, and that sword had enough action going on that it was actually valued at fifty thousand dollars at the time.
A game series in which real prizes could be won, prizes that were worth a lot of money. That was the idea. But what would it actually look like, feel like, sound like. What they needed was someone who could bring all these elements together. What this ambitious multimedia idea needed was the Steven Spielberg of Atari. If Steven Spielberg got really high on the job. In Atari's Sunnyvale, California campus, the corporate powers that be were largely kept away from the creative people, the programmers, writers, artists, and others who made Atari's games come to life despite the systems, needle point like graphics and limited processing power. One of Atari's secret weapons was Todd Frye.
Of all the characters at Atari, Todd Frye is the king. He is the character among characters. I met Todd Frye on January twelfth of nineteen eighty one, and we are still friends today. We are actually very good friends. Todd is an amazing person. But the first time I met Todd Frye, that's quite a story, because what it was was, on my first day, Howard.
Walked into the Atari offices full of enthusiasm. What he found were Atari offices full of marijuana smook. In nineteen eighty Silicon Valley counterculture office environments were common, and Atari was at the forefront. But at this way, no one was submitting a yearine sample.
I was running around doing first day kind of stuff. But towards the end of the day I finally settled down and was just reading some man rules in the office waiting, and then for the first time I encountered Todd Fry. And what happens is Todd comes in. I'm alone in the office. Todd comes in, slams the door behind him, pulls out a little plastic bag, looks at me, and says, I'm going to get high in here right now. So if you don't want to be around this, you need to leave.
Todd did exactly that, lighting up on the campus of a multi billion dollar corporate enterprise.
So, but I like to I really want to add some context to that.
That's Todd.
We were not getting high and sitting around playing video games. We were hammering down on really really hard work. Some of us. There was a culture of marijuana. Later on, there was a culture of cocaine, cocaine blew through our part of Silicon Valley like a snowstorm when the money hit. And that's real. I have no idea what was going on in the other companies. I have no idea that Atari was typical atypical. I'm pretty sure that smoking right in the office and getting people offices and other buildings when they complain was not typical. Yeah, there was a bizarre culture of drug relaxed, intense work.
Todd is from Berkeley, California, and got bit by the computer bug early on, early enough to have used punch cards.
I fell into computers the way some people fall into rock guitar. Right, it's for me. Computers are God, that's going to sound so weird. Computers are to me what double neck guitars are to Jimmy Page. Computers are to me what a stratocaster left handed stratus right hand is to Jimmy Hendrix. And yes, that is grandiose, is all. But computers grabbed me by the back of my neck and said we own you.
Todd loved computers, but wasn't exactly as passionate about school. He dropped out of Berkeley High and was well without a home for a bit. After spending some time as a carpenter, Tod came to Atari in nineteen seventy nine and quickly established himself as somewhat of an eccentric. He got the nickname Arfman.
Arfman has to do with how I would just occasionally make noises. I would bark, okay, so there we are. We'd move to another building, and I late at night and the day I might be working walking from one office to another and go perf.
But Tod's legend, it doesn't end there. His greatest legacy, apart from game design, may have been his seeming rejection of gravity. Todd had a pair of Nike running shoes with some pretty good grip on the soles, and he found that in one particular hallway, which was very narrow, he could touch both walls with his feet. Then he figured out he could actually get off the ground about eight inches and himmy his way forward.
And then I could jump. I could hop and go forward. I could hop forward by manipulating my center of gravity. I could hop forward, pop my feet back on the wall.
Bare.
It was hilarious. I'm running down the hallways, hop in the floor bare bare, you know, jumping about two feet each time, and then I can hop upwards. So I'm sitting there, my feet are four feet above the ground, and I'm like curled up next to the ceiling. So that's, you know, just right in the middle of the hallway.
But like Acorus, Todd flew too close to the sun or ceiling. One day while he was walking the walls, he ran into the overhead sprinkler.
One day, I was doing it in the hallway. Don't usually do it in and in that hallway the modulo of where sprinklers were laid out as there was a sprinkler right around the middle of the ceiling. And when I went to Dismount, I went up and forward and right into a spring with my forehead cut a inch and a half gash in Mike temple and bleeding all over the way Headmon's bleed. And that's the sprinkler lobotomy. That was the end of the wallwalk. I do not remember doing it ever since.
Todd suffered no last incognitive damage that we know of. And if you find Todd eccentric, well that's a part of being on the cutting edge. Perhaps only Todd could have conceived a sword quest, and it was a bold idea. Instead of buying one game, consumers would feel compelled to buy four. Each would have a comic book created by DC Comics, and like the elaborate box art, it would help sell the fantasy.
DC Comics was owned by Warrant Communications and we started doing comic books. We were DC.
Comics, and instead of playing for bragging rights, gamers would be playing for real, tangible prizes made by the Franklin Mint. Each one would be appropriately regal. There was the Talisman, a donut sized dial, the chalice which the winner could sip from, the crown, the Philosopher's Stone made of white jade, and finally, the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery, which would be the grand prize on the line for the four winners. Understand, these weren't toys or trinkets. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money then and now, and the Franklin Mint specialized in handcrafting items that wouldn't have looked out of place in a museum.
The other thing that was all me was the contest and prizes from Franklin Mint. Franklin was another cousin company and they make collectibles, and so it's like why not have contests built into the games and comic books for the games. We'll make it kind of literary, and then we'll have collectible prizes for the contest, and you know the whole. I think it starts out. I forget a lot, but it's a hero's journey and a grail quest.
There's an interest early idea that didn't quite make it off the drawing board at first. Someone and Todd isn't sure who had the idea to offer not just treasure, but buried treasure, sending gamers off to far flung coordinates where they could dig up the prizes. It felt appropriately epic and kind of insane, actually, but Atari did issue press material early on in which they promised the winners would do just that unearth buried loot. You can imagine what Atari's lawyers thought of people, including kids, digging up property or property they thought held a big prize. So that idea was abandoned, but the objective of awarding actual prizes stained. This wasn't totally unheard of at the time. Many Atari games promised players a cool clothing patch if they submitted proof of a high score, and there had been arcade tournaments in which modest prize money was offered. Atari sponsored a few of those, and even recognized players who set records for blasting away at asteroids. The longest the record holder Dennis Hernandez, who played for fifty hours and twelve minutes. He was so dazed after he finished that he lost consciousness and tumbled down a flight of stairs. But sword Quest wouldn't be a physical endurance test. It was a home game. That's really the only way it could have worked. Because of the way the games were designed, players would need to spend hours playing and studying them. You can't do that at a pizza hunt. That the sword Quest series would be mythic in nature was easy, But what kind of story would the games tell? Atari and Todd were both slightly ahead of their time here too. In May nineteen eighty two, just before the first game was to be released, Conan the Barbarian hit theaters. It was a massive and sincere sword and sorcery epics, durring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the pulp hero. That same year, Mattel debuted the Masters of the Universe toy line, featuring massively muscled heroes and villains like he Man Skeletor and beast Man. Dungeons and Dragons meanwhile, had been going strong for years on the dining room tables of role playing enthusiasts. The timing seemed perfect for a high fantasy game from Atari, and it was also good timing for Warner Communications, which was depending on Atari to keep their overall business thriving. Warner was and is a powerhouse entertainment company, but their movies of the era weren't doing all that well. They had just had a big flop with Under the Rainbow and espionage comedy starring Chevy Chase and set against the backdrop of actors auditioning to play Munchkins and the Wizard of Oz and no, it wasn't based on a true story. Because of how important Atari was to the company, there was no problem getting approval for their big multimedia gamble. In fact, Warner saw the advantages of cross promoting their products, and they had faith in Todd, who had just poured it over the arcade Megahit pac Man, which was a huge success. At least that's probably what happened. Remember that Todd hit his head really hard on that sprinkler.
There was a proposal, there was a let's get the comic book people, and you know, to a certain extent, I was riding the way for a sword Quest of having just had pac Man released, right, so I may have had some cred I don't really know, but I do not remember the specifics of that. I really do not. I don't think I ever went over to corporate HQ and said, here's my grab scheme for the future of adventure games. I think I wrote some docs and they went up one level and just kind of got a green light.
Todd's idea was that each game would be centered on four elements, Earth, fire, water, and air. Each would also get slightly existential, focusing on a different philosophical or spiritual template. The first Earth world was built around astrological signs. Later games would take inspiration from the Kabbala or the Iching. It was actually pretty heavy stuff for the era, which was usually preoccupied with alien sports or shooting things, not the meaning of life.
One is that there is actually a lot of genuine literary contexts behind it. Very ambitious. I mean, you know, the Zodiac, the Kabbala, the Chakras. It's a grail quest, it's a hero's journey and it's all explicitly tied up with those mythopoetic Joseph Campbell kind of components. So I dragged in all of this cultural artifacts, this literacy. I mean, it is so weird to hear me say that. But I dragged in a very literate framework for sword Quest. And I dragged in the puzzle and Franklin Mint and the real things which I don't think had ever been done, and tied that to the comic book. So there are two completely separate things that I brought together. And then we took the adventure aspect of run around to do stuff and see what happens and have puzzles built into it. And the Twitch minigames include all that together. And just like listing the number of ambitious sub things that I merged into one set of dependencies, it sounds like over ambitious. It's like, jeez, what you got to lose?
Earth Roll would be unique in another way too. It was an easy rebuttal for parents and psychologists who believed video games were a waste of time maybe somewhere, but a game in which you could win a prize worth twenty five thousand dollars was a different story. And having gamers feel compelled to buy four games was good too, though technically they didn't have.
To if you liked any of them, and you should start at the beginning.
Todd didn't work alone. He had programmers like Dan Hichins to help create the games. Dan actually programmed Earth World. Thanks to his efforts, that first game was ready in time for its October nineteen eighty two release date. But this wasn't just another Atari title. This was something the company was hoping would usher in a new era, one in which Atari was going to further establish its marketplace dominance. Its games were, after all, bigger than a lot of movies. Atari needed to make sure everyone knew about the game. In order to do that, they had to go big. New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel was once the world's largest. At forty seven stories, it loomed over Manhattan. American Royalty, like Clark Gables, stayed there, so did British Royalty, Like Queen Elizabeth Waldorf, one of the Heckling puppets on The Muppet Show was named after it. There was and is a certain cultural significance to the property, which is why Atari chose the Waldorf to formally announce the arrival of sword Quest. Here's Howard again.
When sword Quest came out, there was a huge splash because they had the prizes, and that was the whole thing, was the ad campaign for sword Quest, because it's not much fun to have a contest nobody knows about, right, so you've got to hype the hell out of it. That's what you have to do with something like this. So one great thing about sword Quest was it got a tremendous marketing push because they needed to make everyone aware and it's a great hook. So the splash was big. It was really kind of a hype thing. I can remember feeling a little jealous and thinking, man, that's really cool. He's really getting a huge push for the game.
The press conference in the fall of nineteen eighty two was like nothing the video game industry had ever seen, although to be fair, the video game industry wasn't very old. The company took over the hotel's grand ballroom, decorating it with Zodiac iconography. Lights flashed and sand was tossed around, which attendees probably had to shake out of their shoes. Later on, as members of the press gathered, loud speakers began playing a pre recorded audio drama that set the stage. While we hope there was existing audio, we couldn't locate any, so you'll have to settle for this recreation.
You may call us Mentor and Mentara. We would tell you of your destiny, a destiny that will take you across four worlds. A world of earth spirits, a world of fire, a world of water sprites, and lastly a world of air. On each world you will encounter a challenge, perhaps more than one. Surmounting these challenges will make you stronger, wiser, more courageous, and in the end, will give you your heart's desire.
This was high drama worthy of he man or Conan, and it wasn't over, according to an article published and Video Gaming Illustrated. Journalists were then shown another set of screens that displayed promotional artwork that helped explain the premise. The two main characters were Tara and tor, two adventurous siblings looking to avenge the death of their parents at the hands of King Tyrannus. A number of clues would be hidden in each game. Find them, submit them to Atari, and you could be invited to a playoff for the prizes. Here's Tom, Sorry, arfman I.
Designed the prizes according to a hero's journey path. A hero's journey is a phrase you'd hear a lot about this. It's a mythological healing, growth, aspiration, development, grail quest, Here's journey. So it had to start small and get pig So you had prizes for thieves, and p for warriors, and prizes for Emperor King's price for wizards, the price for the wizards, and as the Philosopher's Stone, ultimately the ability to transmute.
But it wouldn't be enough to just play the games. Players would have to read the mini comic book included in the box. Inside the comic were hidden words the game would guide you to their location in the comic. Play the game, read the comic, and you were on your way. It was marketing genius, but Atari wasn't relying solely on the press to get the word out. They launched a full fledged promotional assault. Displays went up in stores with cardboard swords promising one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in prizes. Members of the Atari fan Club got notices. Subscribers to Atari Age magazine were blasted with hype. The burgeoning video game press was inundated. The question was would gamers really care at all? Wasn't being a mindless diversion the entire point of games a way to park your brain and neutral What if people didn't want to conquer King Tyrannus, or navigate water sprites, or avenge their parents' debts? But they did. As the weeks and months rolled on, it was clear that sword Quest was paying off. Atari sold five hundred thousand copies of Earthworld, a major success by any metric. That was a half million people who were willing to pay thirty four dollars for a chance at winning twenty five thousand dollars or more. Across the country, they settled into their shag carpeting, twisting their joysticks to find the hidden virtual treasure that could be exchanged for real treasure. Homework went by the wayside, so did sleep, Journey, cartridges, collected dust, Space Invaders was cast aside. Sword Quest became a nationwide treasure hunt organized by the biggest name in gaming. This wasn't just a chance for a prize. It was a chance to validate a hobby and passion, a chance for kids to tell their parents that video games weren't a waste of time that a kid could maybe give his parents an allowance instead of the other way around. The stakes were high for Atari too. Other game consoles were heading shelves. Consumers were complaining about disappointing games like Karate, which had two crudely rendered stick people fighting, or even pac Man, which didn't compare favorably to the arcade version. If this contest struck a chord, it would cement Atari's reputation. It could make that Blade Runner future where Atari is on top a reality. It could change the course of the gaming industry forever. But the game was hard, so hard that out of those half million players, just eight people found the right solution. One by one, they began to fly out to Sunny Vale to seek fame and fortune. Burt Wardahl was hoping to be one of them, so were plenty of others. But it wouldn't be long before bard Quest began to spin out of control and introduce the biggest question of all. How did all those prizes, valued at a total of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars become something of a lost treasure. Here's Howard.
And so I had heard stories about these amazing things. I saw a picture of them here and there. I can honestly say that in my entire experience in my life so far, I have never actually been in the same room with any of these items.
And Todd Fry I never ended up seeing these prizes in person. You know, it's actually interesting to think about that there was a real abstraction where maybe Ivory Tower maybe disassociated or maybe my world was separate from the mundane. Sorry, this is so weird. That's why I'm laughing at myself. But yeah, it would have been a good story if I'd taken the sort of the sorcery used to chop out lines or yeah, not so.
Much this season on the Legend of sword Quest.
It is a mystery, just purely because so much of this has lost and the missive time that gives it a certain are of something special.
Night walk and I just put it on a kitchen table and Hey came here. I opened it up and say, what do you think? And I'm like, what's that? My sister actually said that? Or was that a replica?
I said, no, I want it. I won't.
No.
He never admits that it's fake.
You see, he's thinking if it's a fake, that he's a victim too, because he bought from somebody.
Other people have pointed out that, well, that's not really kind of legal. You have to go through with the contest.
And he didn't even know there was a contest going on. Spot The lawyers went round and around for a year before so many had told him, well, you bought the company, you got to do something about this.
He was saying, it's in legal boxes somewhere. We would have to charge you legal research fees to go through the boxes to figure out who owns what. I'm like, I'm sorry.
I don't think there was ever any pictures of the actual items themselves, besides the ones that were awarded the prize winners.
There was a letter envelope just tucked in the side of a shoebox, and I opened it and I found those photos, so I knew what this was.
How that is not the case.
What happened to the prizes.
Is The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans.
This episode was written by Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie Loftus producers are Miranda Hawkins and Josh Fisher.
Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, L. C.
Crowley, Brandon Barr, and Jason English.
Our show editor is Mary Doo.
Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson.
Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed by Josh Fisher, mixing and mastering by Miranda Hawkins.
Show logo by Lucy Quintinia.
Voices in this episode are provided by Dylan Fagan, Nick Rimes, and Isaiah Pringle.