4: Descent Into Darkness

Atari’s financial problems force the company to issue an ultimatum to SwordQuest players—one that may involve a top-secret gaming tournament closed to the public.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
In August nineteen eighty six, Stephen Bell decides to check
his mailbox. He walks over, opens it and begins sorting
through pizzaflyers, bills and letters, junk, junk, and more junk.
One envelope, though, catches his eye. It has a return
address from Atari Holdings Incorporated, out of New York. Stephen

(00:24):
thinks this is a little strange for one. Atari's headquarters
are in Sunnyvale, California. That's where he'd become the first
ever winner in their sword Quest contest. The prize for
racing through the first game in record time was a
talisman worth twenty five thousand dollars. He hadn't won the
second game, but had kept busy trying to solve the

(00:47):
third water World. The second strange thing was that he
hadn't heard anything about the contest in the past two years.
Nothing official anyway. Stephen opens the envelope, think, King, he's
going to get word on whether he qualified for the
water World contest, which has been delayed over and over again. Instead,

(01:09):
the letter informs him of something else. It's not an invitation,
but an offer. Here's Stephen, they.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Just wanted to end it, and here's some money. They
offered Mike and I fifteen thousand.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
It's a kind of settlement offer. Atari is canceling the contest,
all of it, and they're offering Stephen and fellow winner
Michael rideout fifteen thousand dollars to not compete, to give
up any legal claim to having been denied a chance
at winning the sword Quest contest and the Sword of
Ultimate Sorcery, which is worth fifty thousand dollars. The talisman

(01:49):
was already gone, having been sold by Stephen to buy
a defective Pontiac Fieriro, a model that had the annoying
habit of catching fire. Now he could take a guaranteed
fifty thousand dollars or take a one in four chance
of getting the fifty thousand dollars sword, and maybe even
one or both of the other prizes, which are valued

(02:09):
at twenty five thousand dollars each. This was like one
of the puzzles in the game, objects constantly being shifted
and sorted from room to room. Stephen stands outside his
apartment on the outskirts of Detroit, a dwindling hub of
jobs lost to a sagging American automotive market. The money

(02:30):
was more than he'd make in a year, but the
sword and its bejeweled handle is calling to him. Stephen
isn't sure what to do, and then the letter mentions
something else.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
The letter stated it had to be unanimous or they
would actually continue the contest.

Speaker 1 (02:52):
Two sword Quest games had been played and there were
two winners, Stephen and Michael, the winner of Firewars World.
Both would have to agree in order to get the money.
The problem. This was nineteen eighty six, and neither one
had the other's phone number for iHeartRadio. This is the

(03:13):
Legend of sword Quest. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus and
this is episode four, Descent into Darkness. Water World, the
third game in the sword Quest saga, was released in
October nineteen eighty three. The winner was due the Crown
of Life, a headpiece made of solid gold and adorned

(03:35):
with diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. It came with a cash
value of twenty five thousand dollars, assuming the victor would
ever want to part with it. The in person contest
for the crown was planned for nineteen eighty four, but
early on there were signs that something was well off
about the promotion. Unlike the other games in the sword

(03:58):
Quest series. Water World War wasn't sold in stores. You
couldn't just go into a J. C. Penny or Toys
r Us and grab the game from a cashier with
your hot little hands. You had to be a member
of the Atari Age Fan Club and send away for
the game. It was weird.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
I think at the time it never even occurred to me.
We saw it in the newsletter and ended up again
being able to get our hands on it, but we
didn't really stop to think that it wasn't in the stores.
At the time. We were living in a small town
that I don't think there were any video game sales,
like any stores that sold them, so at the time

(04:38):
it meant going into the bigger town, which wasn't far away,
mind you. But we didn't do it a lot, so
I think we weren't keeping track of what was on
the store shelves as well, especially once we realized we
could mail order some of these things. So yeah, for
water World, we ended up getting it through the game club.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
That's Russ Perry Junior. Back in nineteen eighty two, US
was about fourteen years old, living in Illinois and a
devout sword Quest player, A quester a sword head, whatever
you want to call it. He was obsessed with winning
actual prizes.

Speaker 3 (05:13):
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean there's always things like just
you know, solving the game and having bragging rights, but like, yeah,
actually winning something like that, Oh yeah, that would have
been awesome.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
When the first sword Quest game, Earth World came out,
Russ and his brother grabbed it.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
We loved that game when these sort of seemed on
the surface like they were going to be sort of
a continuation of that. So yeah, we got the game
as soon as we could, and then immediately started pressing
on it.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
Russ tried to solve the first two games, but they
were both difficult.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
So well, we didn't win the first one, Let's go
see if we can do the second one. And the
second one seemed like it was a little bit easier,
but it was still as eech and we still couldn't
find an obvious pattern. And I think we ended up
finding like maybe six of the clues legitimately, but again

(06:09):
it was mostly coming down to the comic book that
we found the words in the comic books and were
able to enter, and I think again we only got
three or four or maybe we got all five, but
the order was wrong or something. But so once again, yeah,
we were just that close and didn't quite make it.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
But like a lot of gamers, Russ wasn't discouraged. Gaming
is a hobby of getting your reps in, and so
Russ dutifully sent in his thirty one dollars and ninety
five cents for a copy of water World. Four to
six weeks later, he got the game, and this time
there was something of a surprise. The game was accompanied

(06:46):
by a hint book, which guided players on strategies to
find clues in the game. Water World was based on
the chakra, the ancient spiritual theory of energy points in
the body. Knowing how that was laid out would help
you navigate the different rooms. Russ, however, was not versed
in Hinduism or Buddhism, so he just kept his eyes

(07:08):
glued to the screen and hoped for the best.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
It was definitely easier, and I don't remember if we
ended up finding all the clues or just the majority
of them, but it was clearly easier. We found more
clues and it didn't take us as long. If I remember,
the map was a little bit smaller too. I'm trying
to remember that was based on was it And it

(07:32):
was like eight rooms total, I guess, and I don't
remember exactly how they were connected, if it was a
ring or a grid. But it didn't seem as hard
even I think some of the challenges that you have
to go through in certain rooms, I don't think they
were necessarily as hard.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
The comic was also of some help. Included in the package.
It told the continuing story of Tor and Tara, the
twins opposing King Tyrannus and searching for the objects that
will help lead them to the sword that can bring
Tyrannus down. In the third issue, they're forced to brave
the open seas.

Speaker 4 (08:08):
He didn't come up. That means, even though it's cold
enough up here to make icicles out of a dragon's breadth,
I've got to go back after him. Wait, something ascending
from below. No, oh god, he's dead dead.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Actually, Tour's fine, he's fine. He found a mask that
allows him to breathe underwater, and the twins are successful
in capturing the crown, which brings them one step closer
to the sword, just like the people playing the game. Finally,
Russ thought he had the solution. He wrote it down,
sent it in and waited. In May nineteen eighty four,

(08:53):
he got a response, and it was good news. The
solution he provided had been correct, but just as before,
there were too many winners, way too many. For the
last game, Atari had seventy three people with the right answer,
but only wanted to have fifty playing in the finals.
This time, the company needed to narrow it down even further,

(09:15):
from forty five contestants to just ten, so they asked
Russ to write an essay about why he liked the game.
Russ did. He wrote it down, sent it in, and waited.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yeah, it's always that combination of excited, but oh god,
there's more. You know, we might not make this, even
though we did all the work and I got it
right this time. I think in our heads we knew
that it was it was a little bit easier than
the other ones, so I think we kind of assumed
there'd be more entrants that got it right. And again,

(09:51):
I don't think we had figured out yet that it
was only available to a smaller group of people.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Russ kept waiting. He turned fifth, and then sixteen. He
had gotten his learner's permit, and the time Atari was
taking to address the contest his voice was getting deeper
in the time Atari was taking to address the contest.
Maybe Russ would get married and have children before Atari
wrote him back about this contest.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
And it did seem like with water World, things got
really quiet, and it was Earth's World and Fireworld. We
knew we hadn't won, we weren't going to make the
final playoff, but then when the playoffs occurred, there'd be
coverage in Atari page and other things, so at least
we got closure on those water World it did kind
of feel like, well, there's no closure here.

Speaker 5 (10:39):
What happened?

Speaker 1 (10:40):
And then finally he got a response. It came in
nineteen eighty five. It was from Atari's marketing firm, Amern
Marketing Associates, and it began, dear mister Perry, Atari was
sold to new owners last summer. Russ must have gotten
a kick out of that, mister Perry. It went on

(11:01):
to say, a very conscientious and industrious attorney for Atari
has the matter in hand now, and I wish there
was more we could tell you. For us, it amounted
to the same thing. The chances of a water World
contest were looking grim when sword Quest began. Atari had
been on top of the entertainment world. But in nineteen

(11:25):
eighty four things had changed considerably. Sales had slowed, the
stock of parent company Warner had dropped like a rock,
and the company had gone from a Silicon Valley sensation
too well something else.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
I kept up with the video game magazines as much
as possible, and it was clear between some of the
articles we were seeing and just the times you do
get to the store, there's a lot more cartridges unclearance.
You realized there's definitely something going on.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
Russ didn't know what that something was, but he was
about to find out. In the summer of twenty twenty two,
the parent company of Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers Discovery, made
headlines when they wound up shelving an entire movie, Batgirl,

(12:18):
which was already done filming. They figured it saved them
more to keep it tucked away than to distribute it.
It's not often major movies with Michael Keaton and Brendan
Fraser are just locked up, but Warner did it, and
then they did it again in twenty twenty three, and
it wasn't the first time they had made a drastic
move to please shareholders. In nineteen eighty four, it's safe

(12:41):
to say Atari was no longer the star of Warner Communications.
Instead of posting record profits, the company was losing tens
of millions of dollars a quarter. Atari went from expecting
to see revenue rise by fifty percent to seeing it
expected to increase only ten to fifty teen percent. One

(13:02):
of the bigger problems is that there were more systems available,
like Kaliko Vision, which had gotten off to a slow
start but exploded once Nintendo's arcade hit Donkey Kong arrived
on the system. It was the killer app before there
was such a term as killer app. Everyone loved Donkey
Kong from playing it in the arcades, but if they

(13:23):
wanted to play it at home, they had to buy
a Kaliko Vision, which had an exclusive on the game.
Early on.

Speaker 6 (13:30):
Kaliko Vision, I'll never forget I was sitting at a
meeting at Atari when the first colcos hit the street.
So they went out and bought one, and they walked
into the conference room and they took it out of
the box, and they opened it up and they looked
at it, and the engineers looked at it and said,

(13:51):
it hit clearing a piece of shit.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
That's many Gerard Manny was a top executive at Warner
who led the charge to buy Atari in nineteen seventy six.
Manny is ninety now and he sees Atari's downfall as
one built partially from arrogance. Atari had the opportunity to
get Donkey Kong all to themselves, but they didn't.

Speaker 7 (14:13):
It was there.

Speaker 6 (14:15):
Having another competitor is not good, but it never had
me reallyver. What it had was Donkey kar And when
I went into Kazar, who ran the company, I said,
we knew how good Donkey car. We had the most
arrogant programmers in the world in the coin oup division,
and they were telling us this is one of the
great games of all time. Why did you let the

(14:35):
game go? And he spaid to me, well, they wanted
two dollars a cartridge for a royalty. We aren't going
to pay that. He couldn't. May what do you say, stupid,
He said to growth margins or eighty eight percent on
the cartridges, And that was going to be one of
the best games anybody ever saw. And forgetting that, Calico.

Speaker 1 (14:59):
Got Donkey Kong was lost to some bad math at Atari.
The other problem the Atari system simply had too many
games and not all of them were coming from Atari.
A growing number of third parties were able to produce
games for the system without Atari's permission.

Speaker 6 (15:19):
We could not legally prevent it, and it had I
forget the technicalities of it, but it had a lot
to do with what they had done well done at
the very beginning, and the way the twenties eacheter was
designed and nobody thought it was a great prominent business.
This is how Atari's out in trouble. The flood of software. Now,

(15:39):
remember that every subsequent successful piece of video game hardware,
having learned from our experience, you couldn't play out of
cartridges unless you got a license from the parents.

Speaker 1 (15:54):
That's true. Video game companies got way more strict about
these games after Atari messuck. So how could that happen?
How can a company literally just crumble financially overnight. That's
a twisty knot. But here's someone else that can give
you a picture.

Speaker 5 (16:12):
ET had just come out and Atari made this, you
know Howard Warshaws gave ET. So they had a press conference,
they showed the game, and I was the only person
from Atari there. Nobody else wanted to go.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
That's Larry Kaplan Larry was a programmer with Atari who
left the company and then came back in time to
see it well implode. Part of that was poor quality control.
One of the most enduring stories of the Atari age
is the debacle that was Et, a game based on
the hit movie of the same name. Atari wanted, No

(16:47):
needed it in time for the Christmas nineteen eighty two
holiday season. That meant game designer Howard Scott Warsaw had
just six weeks to program it. Spoiler, it's really hard
to make a good game in six weeks. And to
add insult to injury, reporters at the press conference thought
Larry was Steven Spielberg. Both men wore glasses and had beards.

Speaker 5 (17:12):
Clearly mean way. I looked at reporters interviewing me, you know,
for TV and local stations and newspaper, and they all
kept figuring out I said no, and of course then
nobody wanted to talk to me. It was fine, Yeah,
I didn't know what to say. Anyway, I was there
because nobody else wanted to be And yeah, I thought

(17:32):
was somebody could be there double gay, So it was
probably a bad idea.

Speaker 6 (17:36):
Anyway.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
To be clear, e T didn't kill Atari no one
game can do that. Not really, it's a tidy way
to summarize the story. But there was more going on.

Speaker 5 (17:50):
So a lot of it was that they done been successful,
made a lot of money, and so they went out
and sent it and they had people doing all kinds
of crazy things, paying money for all kinds of stuff,
and especially on the computer side, and you know, just
wasting money. The huge buildings.

Speaker 8 (18:08):
So we had all these buildings, huge rents, and all
these defences in these grouping all kinds of crazy wild
you know, weird stuff, you know, titles that never sell
by the day, hardware, they were working on a video phone.

Speaker 5 (18:22):
All kinds of stuff, and you know, they spent a
lot of money. But pac Man did not sell well
and they got returned and EP did not sell well,
and so Christmas came and retailers didn't have a good
Christmas because things weren't going well. So here it is
December and the retailers are trying to return the games

(18:42):
already for Christmas didn't even come because they have inventory,
you know, all over the place, and you know, famously
they buried some one of them buried with the landfill.
They couldn't sell them at a Tariet didn't want to
take them back.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Thanks to a glut of games and a lot of
bad games, revenues began falling. This wasn't an abrupt thing.
The so called video game crash took time to unravel,
but eventually Warner Communications wanted out, and that part happened.

Speaker 5 (19:16):
Fast Ober night. Retail January said hey, we're not interested.
We'll not buy any more titles. We will return everything
we have, all the units and everything else, and that
was it. It's clear the company is going down to.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
The company entered into a complex deal to hand it
off to another party, with options for the new owner
to buy Warner stock and Warner able to acquire a
minority interest in the new Atari if they chose. Some
business experts characterized it as Warner practically giving Atari away.
Warner didn't sell all of Atari. They kept the arcade

(19:55):
division and Atari Tell the telecommunications arm of the company,
but home consumer products were no longer under their banner.
Gaming was also undergoing a radical transformation culturally, like Rock
and Roll before it, Parents and child advocates were worried
about gaming's effect on kids, and while sword Quest was

(20:16):
offering real prizes, other games were offering real life consequences
of a different sort. In nineteen eighty two, a man
named Glenn Matta was playing pac Man at a bar
in Riverhead, New York, when a woman began insisting it
was her turn at the machine. Matta began fighting with
the bar's bouncer before getting kicked out. He went home,

(20:38):
retrieved a rifle, and headed back to the bar, opening fire,
striking and killing a patron. Naturally, every story detailing the
killing made sure to mention the dispute had been over
a pac Man game. That same year, an eighteen year
old Indiana man named Peter Bukowski was playing an arcade

(20:59):
game called Brazil in pursuit of a high score. When
he finally achieved it, he stumbled and fell over. People
rushed to his aid and an ambulance was summoned, but
it was too late. Peter was dead. The deputy coroner
later determined he had died of a heart attack. There
was some inflammation of his heart, but investigators couldn't determine

(21:20):
whether the excitement of playing the game was or wasn't
a contributing factor. The deputy coroner did add that Plukowski
could have died from any kind of exertion, but he
was playing a video game, so people jumped to that conclusion.
Some towns even took the extraordinary step of banning miners
from playing games. In Marlborough, Massachusetts, kids under eighteen were

(21:44):
banned from arcades before three thirty in the afternoon on
school days and after ten at night. Marlborough even mandated
that arcades couldn't be opened within fifteen hundred feet of schools.
The town of Bradley, Illinois, introduced similar policies, banning kids
under sixteen from all arcids. It was turning into footloose

(22:05):
for video games.

Speaker 8 (22:07):
Jerry.

Speaker 7 (22:08):
Video games are the latest craze to sweep the country.
In most of the world, too, millions of people are
addicted to hours of gazing at electronic images on game screens,
in arcades and in their own homes. What makes video
games so popular? We search for an answer as we
begin a special series on video fever Games people play.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
Critics believed kids spending six or seven hours a day
playing games, or in what one dubbed an airtile electronic womb,
growing numb to reality. If the games didn't do it,
maybe the recreational drugs frequently bought and sold in the
CD or arcades. Did some even believed kids sold drugs
just to have the money to play video games. Between

(22:50):
video game hysteria and market saturation, every penny of Atari
going in and out was examined in detail under its
new ownership. One thing that stood out was sword Quest.
When the company was sold in the summer of nineteen
eighty four, two of the five contests had been held.

(23:10):
There was still water World and Airworld, along with the
grand finale where all four winners would vie for the sword.
That was one hundred thousand dollars just in prizes, not
to mention airfare for dozens of people, plus hotel, and
you need to feed them. A safe assumption is that
it would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred

(23:32):
fifty thousand dollars to finish sword Quest in the way
Atari well the old Atari had promised. It had seemed
like a great idea just two years prior, But then again,
everything seemed like a great idea when you were making
hundreds of millions of dollars. If Atari was compiling a

(23:52):
list of unnecessary expenses, then acting as a travel agent
for a couple dozen gamers had to be near the
top of the list. But here's the thing about contests,
you kind of have to finish them. There are legal
protections in place for contest entrants so they don't get
financially harmed or cheated by contest promoters. Hundreds of thousands

(24:14):
of people had purchased the games on the premise they
could if they solved the puzzles and got the right phrase,
be eligible for prizes. If Atari simply terminated the contest,
they might be subjecting themselves to legal action, maybe a
Federal Trade Commission investigation, maybe a state law violation. Here's

(24:35):
Stephen Bell.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
For the second game. There was another friend that we
met up with, a guy who had was really into this.
We became good friends, and he lived out there in Fresnel,
and so he was following everything that was happening real close,
and he was kind of keeping me informed that a
Tari was sold in the sky Bottom and we'll see

(24:57):
what's going to happen to contest. And I guess say
it took a year before funny, somebody convinced him that
you've got to do something here. You bought the company,
you bought this contest.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
So Atari handed it off to an attorney to figure
it out. That process was protracted, lasting about two years.
The deadline to enter water World was April nineteen eighty four.
Stephen got his letter in August nineteen eighty six. After
all that time, What that attorney came up with was this,

(25:28):
only Stephen Bell and Michael Rideout had guaranteed slots in
the finals to compete for the sword. Everybody else who
had participated in Earth World and Fireworld had their chance
to compete, but only Stephen and Michael won. That left
the two of them, plus the winning entries for water World,
as the players who had the potential to win the

(25:49):
remaining prizes. But in order to end the contest, there
needed to be a unanimous decision between the two players.
If one didn't agree, then it would have to go forward.
That created a kind of union. Maybe Stephen and Michael
could join forces and demand Atari offer a more lucrative settlement.

(26:10):
Not that Atari's solution was cheap. Because Stephen and Michael
had already won their respective games. They were each offered
fifteen thousand dollars. Neither one had submitted a correct water
World entry, but that didn't really matter. The chance to win.
The sword was already promised to both of them. They
didn't need to win the remaining two games. Michael Rideout

(26:32):
would later tell gaming journalist and historian John Hardy that
he tried to call Stephen to see what Stephen wanted
to do, but he couldn't get in touch.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
I was apartment hopping, So that's probably, unfortunately not of surprise,
because you know, back in the day to have the
Internet and everything else to track somebody down with, you know,
if a phone numbering in service no more. Yeah, so
as I didn't hear that, But I should have told them.
I should have came back with a counter offer, saying, well,
what the contest is done, then I win.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
Both men struggled with the decision. The sword was valuable,
holding it aloft would be the pinnacle of the most
spectacular contest in video games up to that point. Did
they want to cash in their chips or let it ride?

Speaker 4 (27:20):
We should have known this would happen.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Now that we've gained a third talisman on this third.

Speaker 4 (27:25):
World, the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery appears in the air,
mocking us with its nearness for all that we cannot
touch it.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Finally, Stephen came to a decision. It was one he
had to arrive at in a kind of bubble, not
knowing which way Michael was leaning.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
And at the time, I'm like, well, we're in through
the first money I won buying a car and stuff,
and fifteen grandy come in handy. So my thought processor
as well, I can't give up fifteen grand and ended
up losing. Of course, I went, okay, I'll take the money.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
Michael wasn't sure Steven was going to agree either, but
he felt the same way. The guaranteed money was too
much to ignore. Within months, Stephen and Michael got a
check for fifteen thousand dollars each, as well as another prize.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
I've had people over the years, and what do you
think happened to it? Well, I think mister Jack Fremielle
took him in dirt somewhere in his family. I don't know,
you never know, but everything that's what happened to emerginally.

Speaker 5 (28:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
Actually I didn't hang with her until about ten years
ago because of course, you know, you got this story
to tell all your life. And one of my ex
coworkers about ten years ago, so he's all up on
Xbox and he asked me, Yeah, you got one, says no.
He said to wait a minute, you wonder how much

(28:51):
money are playing a video games that you aren't even
playing him anymore. They also, out of the blue, they
sent I don't know if they sall to Michael. I'll
sure they probably did their last video games system, the
seventy eight hundred system. They sent to me as a
little bonus prize that I didn't even know about. All
Sun just showed up one day.

Speaker 1 (29:08):
A new Atari seventy eight hundred gaming system which promised
better graphics. They also got their choice of games for
the system. Mis pac Man sent to Pete Joust, but
not Airworld, the fourth and final game in the sword
Quest series, was being shelved indefinitely. It was the bad

(29:28):
Girl of the eighties, a piece of lost media tucked
away into a vault, never to be seen by the public.
So there were no winners for air World to settle with.
That still left the ten people who submitted the correct
answer for water World and had a winning essay entry. Unfortunately,
Russ Perry wasn't one of them.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
They were sending out like little certificates with each contest,
and I think we had gotten that certificate and the
indication that hey, you got it right, but you got
a tiebreaker.

Speaker 1 (30:03):
Russ got a certificate crowning him something like a Supreme
Sage of Sorcery or another made up title as consolation.
That left one dangling thread. What was a Torri going
to do with the ten water World finalists, whose essays
they had already accepted and who had been promised a
trip to California for the contest. According to one video

(30:26):
game historian, only one solution was possible. Atari would have
to hold a water World tournament and award the winner
the crown, and they'd have to do it in secret.
There's a very nice coffee table book called The Art
of Atari, written by Tim Lapatino and released in twenty sixteen.

(30:49):
It features beautiful reproductions of all the amazing video game
box art produced by Atari artists like Warren Chang, Terry Hoff,
Steve Hendrix, Evelyn Cito, and several others. Seriously check out
some Atari box art online. It's terrific. The Art of
Atari also served as a breezy history of the company

(31:12):
on the subject of sword Quest. Lapatino writes, quote the
contest legally needed to be completed so the Crown of
Life was allegedly awarded to the winner of a semi
public competition of several entrants unquote. While that's interesting, what
does semi public mean? Do contestants have to wear masks?

(31:34):
Where they all swornto secrecy? Dig a little more and
you'll find an Atari historian named Kurt Vendel. With another
historian named Martin Goldberg, Vendell co wrote a twenty twelve
book Atari Inc. Business Is Fun. He also amassed an
incredible assortment of Atari games, consoles, papers, and other ephemera.

(31:56):
He's long been considered one of the foremost authorities on
a Tar's long storied, and sometimes pot and cocaine infused legacy.
Kurt even went exploring in dumpsters belonging to the company
to salvage the history it was too quick to discard.
He was once escorted from the property, a badge of
honor for any cultural archaeologist. His Atari History Museum, which

(32:20):
had an online presence and occasionally a physical one at
gaming conventions, was a repository for all things Atari, store displays, prototypes, schematics.
He even worked with Atari to release a retro gaming device,
the Atari Flashback. Drawing on his skills as an engineer,
and in doing so, he found that he likely had

(32:43):
more of the company's history on paper than the company itself.
In nineteen ninety nine, The Village Voice Crown Kurt king Pong,
so he had real credibility as a journalist Anatari archivist.
This wasn't a random fan spinning a tail, but someone
who was constantly researching Atari's history. Kurt repeated the claim

(33:05):
a few times on Internet message boards that Atari was
legally obligated to hold a water World contest and that
someone was awarded the crown. Here's Russ Perry.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
So I don't recall the exact timing of all that.
I think it might have been years later that I
found that they allegedly did hold the contest. So there
were a lot of people out there, and we were
all kind of connecting as best we could, and you know,
talking this stuff through, and you never knew how much
was hearsay a rumor. You'd eventually, like, hear some stories

(33:41):
over a few times and you'd realize there might be
a grain of truth. Because I've heard this from guys
across the country now. But it leads me to wonder
if he was speculating or had actually heard it from somebody.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
Even if Atari wanted to terminate the contest and get
out of the last game and the finals, water World
had already been released and correct entries had already been accepted.
How could Atari deny those contestants a chance? More specifically,
how could Warner than the owners of Atari, deny them
the chance? That the contest was held quietly, which for

(34:19):
the gaming industry simply meant not publicizing the results in
gaming magazines was apparently important. It allowed Atari to put
sword Quest to bed and avoid awarding the remaining two prizes,
the Philosopher's Stone and the Sword. But where did Kurt
get his information from? Almost certainly from speaking with former

(34:41):
Warner and Atari employees, But Kurt never sourced this specific information,
at least not publicly. What's more, no one has ever
come out to say they were awarded the crown or
even participated in a water World playoff. Did Atari make
them sign non disclosure agreements? If they did, would they

(35:03):
still feel bound to them four decades later? It's not likely.
While we'd like to ask Kurt, that's not possible either.
Kurt Vendel passed away at the age of fifty three
in twenty twenty from a heart ailment, which proved to
be a devastating blow to the Atari fan community. We'll
have to go with what we know, and what we

(35:25):
know is that when Michael Rideout discussed his win years later,
he said that the ten water World contestants received a
similar offer to what he and Stephen had received, just
much less of it. The ten gamers got two thousand
dollars or twenty five hundred dollars each to relinquish their
stake in the water World finals. Stephen heard the same thing.

(35:48):
Remember that Stephen had a friend in Fresno who was
in the Atari loop. In fact, Stephen is the first
person to corroborate Michael's.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
Story just it was a buyout, that it was. They
had ten people waiting to go play for the third one.
That's when it hit the wall. And so they sent
out a letter to the twelve people involved if they
just wanted to end it, and here's some money. So
they offered Michael and I fifteen thousand, and they offered

(36:19):
these other ten people twenty five hundred to give up
their shot at a twenty five thousand dollars a crown.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
Stephen has also heard the urban legend about the secret
water World tournament, but remember that he and a number
of contestants kept in touch with each other at least
for a while, and there was a chance one of
them would have been a water World finalist.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
I read that supposedly somebody won the crown. I'm not
buying it. I read that they had the ten people
that they actually went through with that contest, but I'm
not buying it because the legal ramifications of that. If
that actually happened, yeah, I don't think so. But you know,

(37:06):
unfortunately nobody in our little group was one of them,
because no, of course we were talking, so we all
had the same wrong answer.

Speaker 1 (37:14):
Nor does Steven regret taking the money, though he's since
come up with what he believed would have been a
better counter offer.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
It took me five years. About five years after that,
I realized what I should have done. I should have
asked him for the sword. I should have told him.
I should have came back with a counter office saying, well,
if the contest is done, then I win. Because I
went to two of them and won one of them.
Michael wasn't that the first one, and I was even

(37:42):
going to tell him, you can give Michael the crown
and the other prize, and we each get our fifty
thousand dollars prizes, and we're all happy because that wouldn't
have cost him any money.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
But that brings up another question. Keep in mind that
in most all of the advertising material for Sort Quest,
the prizes appeared as illustrations. There were no photos of
the Crown, Philosopher's Stone, or Sword of Ultimate Sorcery. The
game's creator, Todd Frye, never saw them. With Atari ending

(38:14):
the contest, was there even a sword to hand out?
Or had Atari been waiting until the last possible moment
to commission a jewel encrusted blade from their company siblings
at the Franklin Mint. Here's Ross Perry Junior.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
I remember back in the day, some people speculated that
they weren't actually making the prizes until like right before
the contest the championship.

Speaker 1 (38:38):
Had hundreds of thousands of people been playing for a
sword that never actually existed. The answer to that question
would come some thirteen years later and nearly three thousand
miles away, and of all places, inside a thrift store.
That's next time on sword Quest, the.

Speaker 9 (39:01):
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

(39:24):
Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed by Josh Fisher, mixing and
mastering by Jake Cook. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Voices
in this episode are provided by Hayley Ellman and Graham Parker.