The Rise and Fall of Atari: Part Two

In Part Two of this series, Chuck and Jonathan talk about how Atari dominated video games until the crash of 1983.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and joining
me again is Chuck Bryant from Stuff You Should Know?
How do you do? How do you do? To you, Chuck.
If you tuned into our last episode, you heard the
beginning of the epic tale of the rise and fall

(00:27):
of Atari. We talked about Atari's founding up to the
point where it's founder, Nolan Bushnell, sells the company to
Warner Communications, and now we're going to talk about where
things went from that point forward. Yeah, I should say
I almost said hello by doing my impression of the
home version of pac Man, but I didn't do it.

(00:48):
I appreciate that. I'll do that when we talk about
it in ten minutes. Yea, we will get there. So
nineteen seventy seven, this we were teasing it at the
end of the last episode. This is when Atari release
is the revolutionary and I mean that sincerely. I am
not being snarky. Revolutionary Atari Video Computer System a k

(01:09):
A the Atari vcs a k A. Yeah, and where
I didn't even know, but I saw that you research
where the name came 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

(01:31):
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

(01:53):
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's one or two. 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

(02:17):
it goes on sale in the United States for a
hundred ninety nine on the low end. The high end
was to twenty nine. 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. There's no other way to play Breakout
properly without paddles. Um, and uh, it came with Combat. Yeah,

(02:37):
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

(02:58):
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 bounce 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 actually hit yourself, And that was

(03:19):
really 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,

(03:40):
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

(04:01):
version you were playing. And um, yeah, so those days
of having that 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

(04:23):
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

(04:43):
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 saund it was causes.
Something we mentioned in the last episode that that big

(05:04):
agreement they had with Magnavox. Part of that agreement was
they would give Magnavox the rights to anything Atari 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.

(05:26):
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

(05:46):
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 potent chill with this hardware. Like here's where
the money is. Yeah, fellas, how about two hundred titles
right that you can sell for thirty dollars a piece. Yeah,

(06:09):
And so they said this sounds like a good idea. Well, yeah,
but Uhara 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 at first, and
One Communications didn't really market it well either, So there

(06:30):
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 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

(06:52):
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. Remember my brother
and I how, um, you know how you would submit
the Christmas list to the to the parents. Yes, 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.

(07:13):
Like this Christmas all both of us went together is
this one item. And 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

(07:33):
come down because there was a lot of competition in
that space pretty early on. Yeah, 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 that's when
Nolan Bushnell leaves Atari. Yeah, and we talked a little

(07:54):
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

(08:15):
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 it was already sort of

(08:36):
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. Yeah, some people refer
to Nolan's departure as the first death. But at any rate,
they were kind of tied. I think it was. It's

(08:57):
a big change. I mean, they did happen fairly close
one another in time. He didn't last. There was a
c E. The new CEO of Attari is Ray Kassar. Yeah,
he was not well liked, but now developers no. In fact,
at least his name would be used for a famous
Attori title later on. What was it yards Revenge? It's

(09:17):
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 Alcorn, Harry Jenkins,
and Roger Hector at this time begin to work on
a handheld electronic game system that used holography as its display,

(09:41):
so so a holographic display, and it was called the Cosmos.
I 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.

(10:02):
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

(10:22):
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 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,

(10:43):
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 through me as
one of the two cat uh characters using this and

(11:06):
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

(11:26):
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. They

(11:49):
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. 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 ever? Yes,

(12:13):
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 is definite role. It does hold up

(12:34):
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

(12:57):
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

(13:18):
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

(13:41):
feel to it and they're phenomenal. For example, if you
want a game that looks like it was made back
in the early this would be more like in the
early computer game era. Papers Please, Now, let me tell
you what Papers pleases, and you're not gonna believe that
this is a game. In Papers Please, you play the
part of a border patrol agent who reviews documentation of

(14:03):
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 is very retro. But the gameplay is phenomenal.
The style is perfect, the oppressive Soviet music and and

(14:28):
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

(14:49):
as like a drawback. You know, this idea that the
graphics are not uh realistic or or or you know,
they they're very abstract. These days, I'm seeing 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, there are three big things

(15:11):
that Adventure brought to the table um. There was a
large space for the first time, UHL, thirty rooms and
eight regions. Yeah, you moved 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

(15:32):
turned out to be brilliant because it's us 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 exactly so you

(15:55):
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

(16:17):
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

(16:38):
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 quest to
find this bat because the bat had the key to
the Black Castle. Black Castle had you know, the chalice exactly,
so it was it was levels of complexity. Also, another

(17:00):
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

(17:21):
can't remember the details. Yeah, that's 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 eggon Adventure
though at the time, and we'll talk about this in

(17:42):
a minute. With UM developers not getting credit, they didn't
get credit at the time, and so he hid a
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

(18:04):
as the creator of the game. And it was the
very very first Easter Egg. Pretty neat story, really cool,
really cool. I could 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

(18:25):
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 licensed

(18:47):
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, 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

(19:09):
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 ArKade,
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

(19:30):
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 big ticket, this is when
people are going to be buying something for their kids.
That was when I got my cartridges. I didn't like

(19:52):
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 start had 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,

(20:12):
keep in mind they were based around that same microprocessor
technology that there used, although the version that they years
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 twice center
could only address eight kilobytes of memory. So we're talking

(20:34):
really really simple stuff here. Now between the four hundred
and the hundred, you might wonder, what's the difference. Is
the eight 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

(20:56):
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. Yeah,

(21:17):
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 is a big deal at
the time. Yeah, so, uh, seventy nine is a big

(21:39):
year for them. They make twenty million dollars in nineteen
seventy nine. Yeah, the hundred units started basically, you know,
they sold three hundred thousand, then five hundred, then a
million and two million, and they basically started doubling every
year upon year until they hit ten million in UH

(21:59):
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 percent of their revenue. It is hard for
me to wrap my mind around that we talked about
the video game industry being big today. It was enormous

(22:22):
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 Casar 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

(22:44):
shut down the R and D department, and let's think
all our money into marketing this stuff. And this was
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

(23:05):
company to create games. Sure please do, David Crane, Bob Whitehead,
Alan Miller, and Larry Kaplan. And The Crane, by the way,
one one of the best games from But they formed
you said, Activision, Huge, huge, So that there were two
big reasons why they left. One is just that the

(23:29):
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, no,
and they started to see these sales. They're like, I
make twenty grand year. Yeah, I'm the one. I'm the
guy that made the thing, that invented it that that
that you're selling, and I'm not getting any of that

(23:51):
the proceeds. They yeah, 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 being 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

(24:11):
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

(24:33):
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 really p oed about
the defection to begin with. Um I saw an interview

(24:55):
with Crane where he said that he at one point
when they were at first they went to ask like,
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,

(25:17):
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 six D 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

(25:38):
game industry. It was a good thing because companies like
Activision we're making some really good games. It was a
bad thing because anybody else could make whatever crap they
wanted to. There were some bad, bad, bad games out. Yeah,
we'll get to them. The Uh. One of my favorite
games arcade games was released in nine eight. Two of

(25:59):
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 and the Nuclear war.

(26:20):
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, it was kind of cool.
Missile Come In to Me still holds up because version
was really good. Uh. It moved it from a track
ball in the arcade to the joystick. Um, but it

(26:43):
didn't matter. No, it still worked really well. And as
as anyone who played Missile Command knows, as you progress
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
the arcades, battle Zone. Man mind blowing the dual joystick

(27:05):
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. Three d uh. What
do you call that? Vector graphics? Graphic? Yeah, 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

(27:29):
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 I'm gonna save it,
but battle Zone. 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 control post, so did

(27:51):
I because that you had to put your face up
to like a binocular type thing, man, And and it
cuts away all of the traction. Yeah 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

(28:13):
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 game. Loved that game. Always
very disruptive, as someone would tap on your shoulder while
you're in that game, like what's going on? How did
you get in my tank? Uh? So nine one they

(28:37):
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 great games. Yeah,
and Tempests was just it didn't look like any other
game that had come out before it. Um if the

(28:57):
gameplay was different, full color vector graphics, so it is
just green or white lines. 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 Timpots, he
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

(29:20):
finished that when 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. 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

(29:41):
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

(30:02):
you warp 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

(30:23):
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. Nine 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

(30:46):
ended up accepting eight thousand pre orders, but by the
end of Attari 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

(31:07):
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

(31:28):
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 Doug in the arcades, big fan yep, and it
also distributed one of Namco's games, a very popular game
pool position. Yeah. So Atari is basically kicking butt on

(31:51):
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 Intelltelevision,
which we're both i think more advanced with the controls

(32:12):
and some of the graphics. But Tari had such a
strangle hold on people at that point it was tough
to kind of put a chink in their arms. I mean,
they just they defined the market right in 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 kind of like
a remote control with a little joystick at the base. Yeah. Yeah,

(32:33):
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 a little overlays. You would slide into the
number pad depending upon what game you're playing, so that
would tell you, you know, which number of corresponds to
what command. Yeah, I remember in television was for me

(32:55):
the Rich Kid game because they were the only ones
that whose parents would let them get a new one.
Everyone else's pants were like, you've got the atari. I
think 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 the well after,
there's nothing else coming out for it, right, this is

(33:16):
that that game system whe 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

(33:38):
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 the company in
the near future. One is that they rushed a home
video game port of a smash hit in the arcades

(33:58):
pac Man can do my impression now, please don't go?
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

(34:21):
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,

(34:42):
pac Man was groundbreaking in that He's like, yeah, we
had a whole song about it, legit there was a
dance and everything. Yeah, 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

(35:02):
better games. Actually. Yeah, it's kind of crazy that Miss
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

(35:24):
and they said every single person is going to buy one,
and then two million more people will go out and
buy to play pac Man. That is some hubris. Yeah,
and then when backfired in a big way, word comes
round that the game is not so good. People started
to put the brakes on that. But they also in
two released Yars Revenge. That was the one that took

(35:44):
a good game. Yeah, it was a good game, and
they took Ray Kassar's name and reversed the first three
the reverse Ray to Yar. They eventually would ship I
remember um with pac Man instead of Combat. That's how
low it, right. I'm glad I got but I got
mine in the combat day. Uh So the game Yards

(36:06):
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 raised
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

(36:27):
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

(36:47):
that a good idea? Should I? Should? I whip the
snake did 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

(37:08):
watched the playthrough, 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. I really stuck with that game. Warshaw

(37:36):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:25):
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, misogynistic
game that uses awful graphics to depict um violating Indian ladies. Yeah. No,

(38:46):
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 convinced people

(39:07):
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 just to play crappy. 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.
Yea for for Spielberg to give that up, it was

(39:27):
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.

(39:49):
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, and 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

(40:09):
an urban legend. But wasn't it last year that they
finally dug them up? It was actually April April. 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 pieces of circuitry.
Not true though. No, they found full intact cartridges. Whether

(40:32):
or not they still play is another question. The 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.
They still play. Um yeah, but uh because granted, psychological
scars never healed, but the money would have helped, right. Yeah.

(40:55):
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 is two we're talking about. The

(41:16):
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 onto the market,

(41:38):
the Atari fifty two hundred super system coming out two.
It was based off the four hundred slash eight hundred
line of Attari 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 Atari joystick were eight point analog joysticks UM,

(42:03):
which meant that it could only detect if the joystick
was pressing down on any of those eight points. This
one was a three D 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,

(42:25):
they they tried and reshipped like I don't know how
many versions of the joystick, like six or eight different Well,
and on top of that, it couldn't play games. So
if if you are a deal, yeah, if you had
your library of games, I mean we all we anyone
who plays video games knows about issues with backwards compatibility.

(42:45):
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 your TV. You don't want
to negate all that. So another blow against it was

(43:06):
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. Yes,
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

(43:29):
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

(43:52):
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 we're having all these issues and and meanwhile Activision

(44:13):
puts out Pitfall. Also, j Minor, who designed the Atari
eight hundred chip 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

(44:38):
crashing 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

(44:59):
coming from all the third party UH companies. Plus Atari
had already made some really bad first party games like
the Pact Making version and the et game so well,
not only that, and not just the games, but there
were um, there was console I mean, if you look
at the the list of the console games that came

(45:21):
out UH that were just barely even made a register
in the market. Uh, 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 s there were lots of other consoles that had
hit the market because everyone saw this as a way

(45:42):
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 owing to the toy store
and thinking, this is the game he wants, and it

(46:04):
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

(46:27):
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 could get this is going to be the thing
in the past, exactly. 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 them play games

(46:48):
that they want to but it also lets them do
their homework. Yeah, exactly, 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

(47:08):
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 because the game stun bucks for 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

(47:33):
dumb mistake, which I can't completely blame them for. All right,
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

(47:56):
the best moves for that company anyway. So it wasn't
like bush now 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

(48:19):
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 Famicom. We
know it as the Nintendo Entertainment System. In the nine three,

(48:42):
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 be a partnership and Nintendo was moving forward with

(49:03):
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

(49:24):
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

(49:46):
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 lunch in
the United States under our own brand name. And that's
what they did. But with just a all of changes
in history, Atari could have been Nintendo Nintendo. Yeah, it
could have been the Atari Entertainment System and uh and

(50:09):
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 game 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 won't look like some crazy

(50:31):
game and very savvy move. As it turns out, Nintendo
made all the right decisions. There so really rough times
for Atari 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

(50:51):
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

(51:14):
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 O

(51:34):
bi Wan say the Force will be with you always.
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 going to put this in the limited

(51:54):
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 no, because he's gonna
buy it foray um. Also, two other games would get

(52:15):
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 LaserDisc. Yeah,
it was. It was the graphics. It was animated cartoon. Yeah.

(52:36):
Don Bluth did all the animation. Uh. He was a
Disney animator for a long time that worked on Oliver
and Company and the 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

(52:56):
it would work is there would be a moment where
you had to put in command whether it was left, right, up,
down or sword swing whatever. Uh, and if you didn't
do it at the exact time with 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 you put my quarter in and then stand, this sucks.

(53:19):
I'm going to play gat like right, Well, you'd you'd
put your your four quarters then right, because it 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

(53:40):
one that there was I think it was a Gwynette
actually um because oh no, North Lake 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

(54:01):
three partner at the beginning. 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 four 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

(54:24):
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. Uh, the arcade
business was still going fairly well, but the home video
game market completely bottomed out. So when we pick up,

(54:46):
we'll pick up in nineteen eight four when another dramatic moment,
another death of Atari happens immediately, and then we'll just
have the sad tale of sinking lower and lower from
that point forward. So for those of you up there
who want to know how some other technological thing works

(55:07):
that's not Atari, and you're looking forward to hearing about it,
you need to let me know. First, send me an
email my addresses tech stuff at how stuff Works dot com,
drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler to
handle it. All three is tech Stuff hs W. You
can find Mr Chuck Bryant. Was Stuff you should know,
and you should because it's an awesome show. Thank you,
You are welcome, and we will tup you again really

(55:29):
soon for more on this and thousands of other topics
because it has staff works dot com