7: The Swordsman

The trail to find the missing SwordQuest treasures leads back to one of the most controversial figures in Atari history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
No one knows about the coffee pot. In nineteen eighty,
a man named Jack Tremmel is boarding a company plane.
Jack is in his fifties and has the look of
a character actor from noir films of the nineteen forties,
or maybe a little Telly savalis Ko Jack. One employee
thought he was patent esque, as in general George s.

(00:25):
He's traveling with his wife, Helen, three employees, and a
couple of salespeople for Commodore, going from Chicago back to
Commodore's home base of California. It's a jet, but a
small jet, and so there are only two crew members,
the pilot and co pilot, and things are okay at first,
But what no one knows is that every time the
plane is in the air, the coffee pot tends to

(00:48):
slide around on the burn just a little, not really
enough to notice, but over time the pot has been
chipping away at the insulation surrounding an electrical component. One
of Jack's employed starts to brew a pot of coffee,
and this pod is the last straw for the plane's
main power bus. There's a short The worn insulation prompts

(01:10):
an electrical fire. Pretty soon flames start to lick out
from the ceiling and smoke begins to fill the cabin.
One of the pilots attempts to put the fire out
with an extinguisher, but it's not working. The melting metal
drips like the coffee from the ceiling and Singe's skin.

(01:31):
The flames are creeping closer and closer to the fuel
tank As the pilots scramble looking for a place to land.
Smoke begins to fill the lungs of Jack and his
fellow passengers. His eyes begin to grow distant. Those on
board begin to think this is it the end. The

(01:54):
air is running out, the smoke is taking over, and
there could be an explosion at any moment. Finally they
get the word that they're clear to land in Iowa.
It's hard to believe, but no one is seriously hurt.
But it's not the most harrowing thing Jack Tremmel has experienced.
Jack has stared death in the face before, and did

(02:15):
it on a scale most of us could never imagine.
Those who knew him knew he was, in every way possible,
a survivor. That's important to know because in this story,
all roads lead to Jack. Four years after this near
fatal incident, he acquires Atari, and many years after that,

(02:36):
one of gaming's biggest urban legends starts to unfold. In
first grabbing and then selling Atari, Jack Tremmel will inadvertently
launch the biggest and most intriguing sword quest chapter of
them all. Here's former Atari game designer Howard Scott Warshaw
The Sword.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
What I heard was, you know, Jack Trammel, who was
part of the Trammels who ultimate took over Atari, bought
it from Warner. I heard that part of that acquisition
was he got a hold of the sword, which hadn't
been given out yet, And I heard that he kept
it in his home. He had it up on a
plaque on a wall in his home, and that was
kind of cool, although I never verified that because Jack

(03:16):
never invited me over for dinner.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
The sword there, it rests so close, and yet.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
Yet it's well guarded. Tour To reach out and seize
it then attempt to get away, we'd have to be stark,
raving mad.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
But how did it wind up here in the first place,
in this house gate known as California. The journey it
must have undergone. It belongs in our hands.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
For we have suffered the trials and danger necessary to
wield it. Not this this Trammel.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
Perhaps someone can tell us more of this man to
better understand the foe we face.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
For iHeartRadio. This is the Legend of sword Quest. I'm
your host, Jamie Loftus, And this this is episode seven.
The Swordsmen.

Speaker 5 (04:05):
The Faithful Art of eleven has struck and Britain's final
warning to Hitler having been.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
Ignored, a state of war once more exists between Great
Britain and Germany.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
Having Jack Tremmel was born in Wog, Poland, in nineteen
twenty eight. By the time he turned ten, he was
watching from his window as Nazis began marching into town.
To a kid, it was exciting at first he was
unable to understand what was really happening, But soon Jack

(04:36):
and his family found themselves living in a single room
in a Woge ghetto. People he knew there one day
and gone the next. Jewish members of the community were
being transported out by the Germans. By the time Jack
was sixteen in nineteen forty four, it was his turn.
He and his father were bound for Auschwitz. Jack would

(04:58):
later recall getting a physical by Joseph Mangela one of
the most notorious and cruel members of the Nazi Party.
Mangele dubbed him fit for work, and he and his
father were sent to labor camps. He had already been
separated from his mother. With no way of contacting her,
Jack and his dad assumed she was dead. For months,

(05:21):
Jack toiled in the work camp. Liberation was coming, and
so was the end of the war, but his father
wouldn't make it. Typhus was the reported cause, but Jack
felt differently. His father died, he later said, from having
gasoline injected into his veins in some deranged experiment. Jack survived.

(05:41):
After the war, he met and married a woman named Helen,
herself a Holocaust survivor. And if anything good could come
of any of this, it was that Jack discovered his
mother was still alive. Back in which Jack meanwhile wanted
to come to the United States.

Speaker 5 (06:00):
Journey right, and I went to the council there. I
told him that I would like to go to the States.
I was a person to go to the States, so
I'm looking at we can do that. I am a
the splice person.

Speaker 1 (06:11):
That's Jack Tremmel. In nineteen ninety he gave an interview
to author William B. Helmreich for a book Against All Odds.
That audio was later preserved by the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.

Speaker 5 (06:26):
He said to me, when would you like to go
as as soon as possible? Next week?

Speaker 1 (06:33):
In nineteen forty seven, Jack and Helen received assistance from
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and took an opportunity to
board an ocean liner headed to America. Jack arrived first,
Helen later, but America wasn't the country he imagined.

Speaker 5 (06:49):
It was extremely disappointed when I arrived.

Speaker 6 (06:51):
But I got off the.

Speaker 5 (06:52):
Boat seeing that the smell that they're everything else that
was prepared to wait till the book returns to.

Speaker 6 (06:58):
Go back to Earth.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
No money in my pocket, I think, you know.

Speaker 5 (07:01):
I just went along with the crowd, and I got
hit by a car right. I was crossing when I
got hit by a car, and without opened my eyes
up right, and I've seen all the people sitting around me.
I right away, Yeah, I think I'm going to be
arrested at in the car.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
There was no lasting damage. You couldn't really hurt Jack Tremmel,
not by car, by plane or in war. Jack enlisted
in the United States Army, where he did two tours.
He eventually found himself repairing office equipment, like typewriters. After
the war, he continued preparing them. He opened a repair
shop in the Bronx. In nineteen fifty five, he moved

(07:39):
to Toronto and soon started a typewriter company. He called
it Commodore. It felt official, military like. Commodore made typewriters
and later calculators. He took on a partner, a man
named Irving Gold, in nineteen sixty six, but Jack remained
on as the visionary, the leader. Before Apple and IBM,

(08:03):
Jack's Commodore was offering affordable computing power. He called his
philosophy hardware for the masses, not the classes. Jack knew
before a lot of people did, that technology shouldn't be
relegated to a small number of people. Commodore made computers
a democracy. But soon a rift developed between Jack, who

(08:24):
was determined to do things his way, and Irvin Gold,
who had other plans. In nineteen eighty four, the two
men had a meeting, things were said, and before long
Jack decided he no longer had a role in Commodore.
Most people might be content retiring. Jack was in his fifties, wealthy,
and though he might not have considered it a pioneer

(08:47):
in computing, but that wasn't Jack's nature. Commodore had in
some way antagonized him. His new mission was to obliterate it.
In what better way than to take charge of the
competition Atari, which it made its mark in home computing
as well as video games. On his first official day

(09:11):
at Atari, Jack Tremmel allegedly parked his car in a
handicapped spot, stormed in and began a radical reinvention of
the company. Too many rushed games had flooded toy isles,
costing Warner profits. Executives huddled with Jack, and after one
all night meeting, they agreed to sell him the company.

(09:33):
Jack's deal to acquire Atari was complex. Warner agreed to
sell most of it on the basis of debt notes,
essentially a deferred payment plan. Jack still had to spend
his own money, by some reports, as much as thirty
million dollars, but essentially he got a very good deal.
Jack Tremmel, as hardened a businessman as there had ever been,

(09:57):
was now in charge of Atari, but his the focus
was on saving money, not spending it. One of the
first acts of his new corporate regime was to scrap
sword Quest, a contest that was costing Atari a lot
of money without getting much in the way of a return.
Tor and Tara were essentially served their termination notices. Other

(10:18):
employees fit that bill as well. It's not that Jack
fired them exactly, it's just that he didn't hire them.
But the personnel departures hundreds and hundreds were so large
that he earned nicknames Jack the Ripper, Jack the Knife.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
As things started to get later on into late eighty
three and starting to move into eighty four, it became
clear that things were not going as well for Atari.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
That's Howard Scott Warshaw. Again, Howard was among those who
were still with ATARI when it experienced a dramatic paradigm
shift in nineteen eighty four. When Jack Tremmel stepped in.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
It got so bad. He got so dire at Atari
it even started to overcome our denial about things going bad.
That's how bad it was, because our denial was really powerful.
I never wanted anyone to rain on my parade, because
this was an amazing parade I got to be in.
But it did, and things were starting to die and

(11:17):
fall down, and my interview with Jack Tremmel was amazing
because Jack Tremmel himself is a remarkable guy. This is
a guy who survived Auschwitz concentration camp, then left Poland
to come to the United States, opened a typewriter store,
turned it into Commodore Computers, which built up into a
billion dollar company, which he then left. And now we're

(11:40):
the first acquisition that he makes after Commodore. So he's
reputed to be an extremely hard nosed businessman. So I'm
kind of interested to talk to this guy. I mean,
this sounds like a very interesting person. So I go
in and we talk, and we start talking and he's
has he He has nothing to say about the technology

(12:01):
or what they're going to do. He's just asking me,
you know what I do, and you know, what do
I like? And you know, am I married? You know,
which is a question I don't usually get in interviews.
And I told him, yeah, in fact, you know, my
wife works, and he actually says to me, he goes,
what she works? You got that all wrong. You know,
she should be at home waiting for you with the

(12:23):
slippers when you get home. So it was a very
interesting interview, and at the end of it, it was
clear that what they were looking for was not really
game programmers.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
For Howard, the new Atari wasn't a better Atari, not
for him anyway.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
So basically, after the round of interviews, they offered a
bunch of layoff packes. People could decide what they wanted
to do, and I opted out. But I did have
the interview with Jack, and I wore my slippers on
the last day.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Atari under Jack Tremmel was let's call it unique. His
whole philosophy probably stemmed from his childhood or a lack
of a childhood. Jack summed it up this way, business
is war and Atari was his new battlefield.

Speaker 5 (13:14):
I don't know those days, and I had to approved
it myself, but if I am.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Equal with other people, but there was one thing that
would forever alter the course of Atari. At its heart,
it was a gaming company, and Jack Tremmel didn't play games.
Jack recruited his three sons to work for him. There
was Leonard Trammel, who had a degree in physics and

(13:44):
was assigned to oversea software, Gary Trimmel, who was responsible
for collecting on outstanding invoices money owed Atari, and Sam Tremail,
who became Atari's president. When Jack moved up to chairman,
Atari became a family business, the Tremmel family business. According

(14:05):
to those who worked for him, Jack could be tyrannical, belligerent, tough, difficult.
Screw up and you'd face a Jack attack, a tirade
of epic proportions. It was not unheard of for Jack
to remove his shoe and begin pounding it on the
table during a meeting. In fact, at Commodore, someone had

(14:26):
named one of the computer game's Jack attack as an
inside joke. One Atari employee remembers that one of the
Tremmel's would walk into Atari's offices a stack of pink
slips stuffed in his pocket. Losing your job was something
that could happen suddenly. Some gamers have even declared Jack
the man who destroyed a Tari. But that's a pretty

(14:49):
superficial understanding of Jack.

Speaker 6 (14:51):
Aggressive, smart, very cost conscious, tight with his money. A
table pounder likened him to a Who is the Russian
dictator who hit the table with his shoe? Was it
Khrushchev or Gorbachev? He wouldn't take any crap.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
That's Michael Katz. Michael came from Mattel and Kaliko. At
Mattel he had headed up design of their electronic football
handheld game. That's a very retro reference, but if you're
of a certain age, you'll remember it. Jack wanted Michael
to come on board the new Atari. His Atari and

(15:29):
Michael agreed, but under certain conditions.

Speaker 6 (15:33):
I told them I would be willing to become head
of marketing for the computer division. I would be happy
to become president of the video game division. I would
do those first two things only if Jack created a
new division and a new position called President of Entertainment Electronics,

(15:54):
which meant toys and games that were electronic being introduced
under the Atari banner. Utari name to compete directly with
Worlds of Wonder.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
Worlds of Wonder was the company that had hit it
big thanks to Teddy Ruxpin, a talking teddy bear that
told bedtime stories. It was sort of like having a
chuck e Cheese in your living room. Michael wanted Atari
to become more of an all encompassing entertainment company with
products outside of gaming and computers. For example, he thought

(16:27):
Atari might be able to market laser tag, but there
were a couple of problems. One. Jack wanted Atari to
become the biggest name in home computers. If video games
could do anything for him at all, it would be
to subsidize his PC projects. At the time, the market

(16:47):
was dominated by companies like IBM, COMPAC, Apple, and his
own former company, Commodore. To Jack, the competition's machines were,
in his words, like cigarettes. They're bad for you, but
an awful lot of people are hooked on using them. Two,
he didn't want to spend a lot of money. When
Michael brought a laser tag, Jack initially said sure, let's

(17:11):
do that. Then when it was time to close the deal,
he waffled the laser tag. People were upset it was
too late to pair with anyone else for the holiday season.
That was Jack not here to make friends. That was
the reason the sword Quest contest came to an end
in nineteen eighty six. With tens of thousands left to

(17:33):
spend in a crashing video game market, it simply made
no financial sense to allow it to continue. The contest
started under Warner, it wasn't a part of the new Atari,
which was really the unfinished business he had left a
Commodore total domination of the personal computing market. Not only

(17:53):
did Jack scrap sword Quest, he barely wanted anything to
do with video games at all. One of the first
things Jack did was try to return six million dollars
in advertising. Atari, while still owned by Warner, had pre
purchased for the nineteen eighty four Olympic Games, and Michael
remembers one of the tremel's denying a request for fifty

(18:14):
four dollars to mail an item overnight fifty four dollars.
Michael paid it himself, though he did get reimbursed later on.

Speaker 6 (18:24):
We cut corners wherever we could, just to be good
business people. Jack had a reputation for being very tough
at Commodore, very tough at Atari. I respected that in him.
I didn't look down upon it, but it meant that
we had to do a lot of stuff differently from
what the industry was used to.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
At Commodore, Jack had gotten press attention without even trying.
He had a cool product, a novel product, an affordable
computer that you didn't need to be an MIT graduate
to use. Maybe Jack expected that same kind of attention Atari,
but this was a time Atari probably should have been
out courting to press. But pretty soon Atari had another problem,

(19:09):
and his name was Mario. A Japanese company named Nintendo
had released the Family Computer or Famicom in Japan in
nineteen eighty three, it was leagues beyond any gaming system
of the era Atari included. In nineteen eighty five, Nintendo

(19:30):
entered the North American market. The Famicom was retooled as
the Nintendo Entertainment System or NYS, and although retailers were
still feeling burned by Atari, they were lured in by
lots of promises, like the fact Nintendo would accept any
unsold inventory. Thanks to Super Mario Brothers, The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania,

(19:54):
and dozens of other titles, Nintendo became the biggest brand
in home gaming, a role that had previously belonged to Atari.
Atari couldn't compete head to head with Nintendo. What they
could do was position themselves as an affordable alternative. Families
who had kids crying for an Nes but were on

(20:15):
a tight budget could opt for the less expensive ATARI system.

Speaker 6 (20:19):
So my mission was to bring back the twenty six
hundred under fifty dollars as a low price spread that
became positioned as the game system for those who couldn't
afford one hundred and forty nine or one hundred ninety
nine dollars for an Atari or a Mattel.

Speaker 1 (20:38):
While this strategy worked, Atari blew another opportunity when game
manufacturer Sega approached the company with an offer to distribute
their new system, the Sega Genesis.

Speaker 6 (20:50):
And I thought that was wonderful that they came to us,
came to me. We met with Jack and Sam and
once again, and Jack seemed to be interested and excited.
Jack said, it sounds great, but when it came to
working out the royalty part of it and advance and

(21:12):
guarantee part of it, Jack walked away because he didn't
want to make a deal and had no interest in
the next great video game system.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Jack was focused on Atari's home computer projects. There was
the Atari ST, which was nicknamed the Jack in Toosh,
and it was Jack's obsession. It sold for around eight
hundred dollars, cheaper than Apple's Macintosh. Some people considered it
one of the best computers ever released, and it became
really popular with musicians thanks to Midi ports. For the

(21:46):
first time, amateurs could arrange and compose music at home
on a PC without spending a small fortune, and professionals
used it too. Tangerine Dream made several albums using the
Atari st pop music, and Jack Tremmel. That's an interesting combination,
but Jack still had a hard time getting retailers to

(22:08):
support it. Remember that Atari Games had sat on their
shelves collecting dust during the video game meltdown of nineteen
eighty three. That wasn't Jack's doing, but the brand was damaged,
and the thing Jack did have control over, soothing retailer
fears wasn't something he really cared to pursue.

Speaker 6 (22:27):
On the negative side, he wasn't a schmoozer, he wasn't
a massager. He ignored that ten key retailers controlled retail
distribution in the whole United States and Canada, and he
wasn't willing to pay them the traditional merchandising fees to

(22:47):
support his products at retail.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Michael eventually left Atari and wound up with Sega. A
short time later, Atari decided to jump back into video games.
The Atar ryst computer hadn't been the hit they were expecting,
but Atari still had major name recognition in the gaming market. First,
they introduced the Atari Links, a color handheld system that

(23:11):
would be compared with the Nintendo Game Boy. It was
probably a superior system with color graphics, but it was
twice as much and that color display drained batteries too quickly.
Then in nineteen ninety three, they introduced the Atari Jaguar,
a next generation system boasting of advanced sixty four bit graphics.

(23:32):
It beat systems like the Sony PlayStation to the market.

Speaker 7 (23:37):
With its importates three D graphics, real world animation, and
enlightened scy that you can only get with Jaguar.

Speaker 6 (23:45):
Repeat the question, Jaguar, Jaguar, Jagar.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
The Jaguar got support from Walmart, who promised to place
it in over four hundred of their stores, but instead
of a more conventional marketing pust Atari opted to do
an infomercial. It didn't resonate with gamers. Infomercials weren't really cool,
and the games weren't as memorable as your Marios and Sonics.

(24:12):
Atari had Trevor mcpherr and Dino Dunes. By this point,
no matter what kind of system you had or what
it could do, a company needed hundreds of millions in
advertising to get gamers interested. You needed millions more to
satisfy big retailers who want money for premium product placement
or mentions in their own advertising. Game systems don't just

(24:35):
ship to stores and get stocked there's a dance that
goes on behind the scenes that wasn't something Atari could manage.
Jack didn't dance. The jaguar floundered. Atari had a bunch
of them returned. Ultimately, they sold one hundred twenty five
thousand systems but had one hundred thousand in inventory. There

(24:58):
was more bad news. Sam tra Mmel, who had been
running Atari as president, suffered a heart attack. That meant Jack,
who had taken a step back, returned to run things. Finally,
in nineteen ninety six, Jack decided it was time. He
worked out a merger between Atari and JTS, a disk
drive manufacturer, and from what Somax employees say, the company

(25:23):
was absorbed without much of an institutional memory. The Atari archives,
such as they were, were left up to fans. In
nineteen ninety eight, Hasbro would buy Atari from JTS. Year
after year, memories of sword Quest would fade in the
minds of all but a handful of people. One era
of Atari ended, but the era of Jack Tremmel would continue.

(25:46):
There would be another gathering of employees, this time not
in the air but on solid ground. When Jack walked
away from Atari, he threw a party at his home
for the amateur detectives who were following the sword Quest saga.
It would be a party that became the stuff of legend.
Jack Tremmel is bidding goodbye to a company he's controlled

(26:09):
for the past twelve years, through good times and bad,
through market changes, and many many tsunamis in both the
gaming and personal computer worlds. He's always looking toward the future,
but his past isn't forgotten. He makes a seven figure
donation to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It's around

(26:30):
this time that Jack invites a number of friends, family,
and Atari staff to his home in Moreno Valley, California.
Befitting Jack's stature as a pioneer in home computing, It's
a lavish estate with the expected trimmings of success, a pool,
a wine cellar, the square footage of a large retail store.
He toasts friends and close associates, those he calls the

(26:53):
inner family, the people he trusts implicitly, at least that's
how some people remember it. It's here at this party
that the Fireplace story begins to take root. The first
talk of it came in nineteen ninety seven, when an
Atari fan named Clay Hollowell distributed an online Atari newsletter.

(27:14):
In between video game reviews and industry news, Clay wrote.

Speaker 8 (27:18):
Useless fact of the month. Remember the fifty thousand dollars
grand prize sword for the sword Quest contestatory was running well.
That sword is hanging over the mantle of Jack Tremail's fireplace.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Then, in nineteen ninety eight, the late Atari archivist Kurt
Vin Dell posted a message to a Usenet group that
was kind of a Reddit before Reddit. In a discussion
about the unclaimed sword Quest prizes, Kurt mentioned that a
friend of his had been told the same thing. Jack
had possession of the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery. Depending on

(27:52):
the version told, the sword hung over the fireplace in
one of the homes many stately rooms, gleaming steel, proving
irresistible to party goers. Or perhaps it simply hung on
the wall, an ornamental flourish that didn't resonate with all
but a few of the Atari faithful, who saw it
for what it was, the lost treasure of sword Quest Tara.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
It's what we've been seeking for all this time.

Speaker 4 (28:18):
Let's grab it now and flee and strike down anyone
who stands in our way.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
No, sister, let us not shed any blood this day. First,
we must be sure this is the treasure we seek.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
A few years later, another former Atari employee created a
similar post on the Atari age forums. He claimed he
had been told by four separate people who had been
to Jack's house for the gathering that they too had
seen the sword above the fireplace. Now, one person mentioning this,
that could be a mistake, maybe an exaggeration, But five

(28:49):
people claiming to have seen it, that's compelling. So we
reached out to the employee some twenty years after he
created that post. Credit to him for remembering. He even
wrote that he said he had heard the fireplace story
from a few people, and he passed their names on.
Here's what they told us, And yes these are dramatizations

(29:10):
of their replies.

Speaker 8 (29:11):
I didn't see sword quest memorabilia at Jack's house.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
I have been asked about it before and have joked
that I should have looked for it.

Speaker 9 (29:22):
I'd heard from multiple people during my Atari tenure that
Jack had the mystical sword hung over his fireplace and
his home. I no longer recall who told me that,
and I never witnessed it myself. I never had the
honor to be to any of the Tremmel's homes.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Three other people alleged to have seen the sword didn't
reply to a request to comment. Doesn't mean they saw it,
doesn't mean they didn't. There's something you've probably been muttering
to yourself this entire time. Just ask the Tremmel's, for
God's sake. Jack's three sons would certainly know whether their
father had taken in possession of the sword. They worked

(30:02):
with him, Presumably they've been to their father's house. First,
we tried Leonard Tremmel. Leonard is fairly open about his
family's background in the personal computing world. He's given interviews
about it. You can find them on YouTube, many of
them relatively recent. So he's open to talking about this period,

(30:22):
but he's not open to being asked about sword Quest
or the prizes. We asked Leonard if you'd like to talk,
but got no response. Then we heard from Howard Scott
Warshaw that Leonard didn't want to be contacted for this project.
Leonard's brothers, Sam and Gary haven't really given many, if
any interviews following their family's exit from Atari in nineteen

(30:46):
ninety six, whether it was about sword Quest or just
Atari in general, and we didn't get a response from
them either. Among the three Trimmel siblings, there seems to
be a kind of omerita about sword quest of vow
of silence, or maybe we're just imagining it. Maybe the
mythology surrounding the prizes and the legend that Jack commandeered

(31:08):
the sword is patently uninteresting to them, to the point
they don't even want to bother to comment. That's possible.
Here's another possibility. If the rumor were true, if Jack
had taken the sword and other prizes, would the Tremmels
want to confirm it. If the family admit it to
having the prizes, they'd have to feel an entirely new

(31:29):
line of questioning from curious gaming historians, or even animosity.
There might be some disgruntlement among gamers. Canceling a contest
and then keeping the prizes is what some might call
bad optics. Less Georges Patten and more Ebonezer Scrooge. There
is one possible explanation for the fireplace story, one that

(31:52):
bridges the gap between the legend and fact. It's a
conclusion summatary historians have settled on. There's one of them,
Ken van Merzbergen.

Speaker 7 (32:03):
There is a sword that hangs there, but it is
not the sword quest sort. It's another sword entirely. They
saw a sword, but we talked to the Trammels, Leonard Sam,
and even Jack himself. It was not the sword Quest
sword sortquest. The prizes were not there when they took over,
but they did have to close out the contest because
that was.

Speaker 5 (32:22):
On their books.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
Wait, what did Ken say?

Speaker 7 (32:26):
We talked to the Trammels, Leonard Sam, and even Jack himself.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
By we Ken means he and fellow historian Kurt Vendell.
And that's interesting since there's never been an on the
record comment about the prizes from Jack himself, who passed
away in twenty twelve. But there's one hang up. Kurt
Vendell may have spoken to the Tremmels, but Ken didn't,
and Kurt passed back in twenty twenty. Here's Ken again.

Speaker 7 (32:52):
I talked to Leonard Tremmell about other things, but I
don't think I didn't talk sword quest with him about it.

Speaker 1 (32:57):
Another sword, some kind of deck sword. It's hard to imagine,
but maybe Jack Tremmeel had some other sharp object in
a place of prominence in his home and Atari employees
familiar with the legend of sword Quest simply inferred the
sword was the sword. Remember that the first known photo
of the sword wasn't discovered until a few years later

(33:20):
in nineteen ninety nine. In all likelihood, no one who
thought they saw the sword would know the sword Quest
sword from any of the thousands of other sword designs,
from antiquities to replicas, and from what we know of
the prizes, none are emblazoned with the telltale sign an
Atari logo. It would be hard, if not impossible, for

(33:41):
them to make a positive identification unless they had seen
it when the contest was still active, or unless Jack
told them what it was. And why would he do that?
Say it was the sword of ultimate sorcery? Why would
Jack Tremmel, who had virtually no interest in video games,
possess a symbol of video game supremacy.

Speaker 3 (34:06):
It's not the sword we seek after all, Tara, It's
merely ornamental. It possesses no power.

Speaker 4 (34:12):
We've gone down the wrong path, brother, This testimony cannot
be confirmed, Tara.

Speaker 3 (34:17):
I can't wait there, do you see it? Why the
gods our quest has brought us here to the one
place that might finally provide an answer.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
It's cold, so cold.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
Yes, but we must forge ahead. We must headed to
the frozen tundra known as Canada.

Speaker 5 (34:35):
Where done.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
Sorry, Canada, It's game over next time on sword Quest.

Speaker 9 (34:48):
The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart
Podcasts and School of Humans.

Speaker 8 (34:52):
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.

Speaker 9 (35:05):
Our show editor is Mary Doo.

Speaker 8 (35:08):
Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by
Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson.

Speaker 9 (35:14):
Original score by Jesse Niswanger.

Speaker 8 (35:17):
This episode was sound designed by Josh Fisher, mixing and
mastering by Miranda Hawkins. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia. Voices
in this episode are provided by Haley Ellman and Graham Parker.