March 9, 2015 • 51 mins
In our final part in our Atari series, Chuck and Jonathan talk about the sad decline of Atari and what's left of the company today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in Touch with Technology textuffm Hey there and welcome
to text UFF. I'm Jonathan Strickland. With me in the
studio is Chuck Bryant. We have been here for hours.
It feels like it. Literally it has been two hours.
But it's funny but that we were just talking though
(00:25):
off Mike about how this is a three parter and
were we could do a whole season on this if
you really wanted to get into all the details. Yeah.
In fact, I came across some websites and by all this,
we're of course talking about the rise and fall of
Atari things. This was a request from Jeff on Facebook.
He wanted to know about this. We could go there
(00:46):
could be seven eight episodes where we talk about all
the things we're going on. There were incredible political moves
going on behind the scenes. There were some amazing technological development.
We haven't really touched on the major competitors with Atari
that we're causing extra problems for them, like uh, you
know the early on the in television and Cliko, but
then later on we're talking Nintendo and Sega and then
(01:08):
Sony with the PlayStation. I mean by that time Atari
is pretty much out of the picture. Anyway. But I mean,
it's just so much to talk about. I found some
some websites that even broke it down into when Atari
hired people. And I'm not talking about the big names
we've mentioned talking about like Marty Accounting exactly. I mean,
(01:28):
it was phenomenal. The documentation that's out there. So we're
going to now pick up in UH that tells you
how detailed we've been. If you haven't heard the first
two episodes in this series, go back listen to those first.
It's an amazing story. So is when something happens to
Atari that redefines everything, and some people consider this yet
(01:52):
another death of the company. That's when Warner, which had
purchased Attari from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Warner
splits Atari into two entities one of it one of
them is a home computing division, which is called the
Atari Corporation, and the other is the arcade division, which
(02:14):
is called Atari Games. And it sells off the home
computing division. So Atari Corporation gets sold to a man
named Jack Tramiel. Yeah, he was the original founder of
Commodore UH in the famous Commodore sixty four computer, which
was great for its time. Oh, Yeah, fantastic. There's a
full Tech Stuff episode about Commodore published on February first,
(02:37):
two thousand twelve. It's good, it was. It was fun
to talk about that too, to talk about the development
of the Commodore system. So Tramiel was another another pioneer
in personal computing and home electronics, and he saw some
promise in that home computing division of Atari, something that
after the video game crash of a lot people thought
(03:00):
had no value whatsoever. Yeah, he renamed it, uh I
think he renamed it the Atari Corporation. Yeah, Yeah, he
decided to call it that because obviously, you know, now
you have two separate entities that both have the Atari
name in them, Yeah, which is always confusing in the marketplace,
and it's going to be confusing in this episode because
we're gonna be talking about the fate of both of them, right,
So we're gonna follow both the fate of the Atari
(03:22):
Corporation and the fate of Atari Games. So Atari Games
at in nineteen eighty four was still with Warner, not
not for long, in fact, would be when that changes.
So some big stuff happens in home video games. That's
when the Fama com also known as Nintendo Entertainment System
is released in the United States, which was Tyson's punch
(03:47):
out right there. Um. Yeah, so that was something that
convinced people maybe home video games aren't as dead as
we thought they were. Because the video game crash, we
pretty much thought that's it. Personal computers are going to
take over. There won't be any home consoles dedicated video
games anymore. Because that idea played itself out. Apples on
(04:08):
the scene at this point, Yeah, making a stink. Yeah.
In fact, by they're selling the Macintosh because that came
out four so they Yeah. But the brilliant thing Nintendo
did was they learned from Attari's mistakes. They said, all right, well,
we are going to license games like they have to
be certified by US. You can't develop for Nintendo independently
(04:30):
without submitting the game for US for certification. That way
we still have some control over warners wanted, but they
didn't get out ahead of it in time like Nintendo did.
No Act Activision pretty much doomed Atari because Activisions set
that that precedent that a third party developer can can
create uh cartridges for another platform that they don't own.
(04:53):
Once that precedent was set and that policy wasn't in place.
It was. It was game on literally for everybody wanted
to develop for Atari. Yeah, and pardon my ignorance because
I'm not a current gamer. I'm still stuck in the eighties.
Activision still around, right, uh huh, Well it's part of
something bigger. But yes, but they survived everything and did
(05:14):
well for them. Well, I mean I could do a
full episode on what happened Activision too. It's kind of
like it's kind of like a Tari you know how
Atari technically still exists today, so at any rate. Um uh.
Also in that's when Warner Communications sells the arcade division
(05:34):
of Atari Games to a competitor, Namco. Yes, so that's
the company that that developed pac Man. Yeah. Namco only
owned it for about a year, and then some employees
bought Atari Games from Namco and then uh made a
few more pretty good arcade games, Paper one, it was
a big one. Gauntlet, Yeah, Gauntlet was a big one.
(05:56):
Wizard needs food, good games, so they pumped a little
more lifeblood into the car Atari Games division. Yeah, they
also started to develop home games. But here's the thing.
When Warner split it up between uh Atari Corporation and
Atari games, Atari Corporation had the sole right to sell
(06:19):
home games under the Atari brand, yeah, which they had
already proved the struggle post without a really great, solid
follow up that didn't didn't jump over. Yeah. And then
you've got Atari Games that was making these these arcade games,
and they wanted to make home video games, but they
couldn't do it under the Atari brand because that belonged
(06:41):
to Atari Corporation. So they created a new brand called
Tension t E N G E N, which also comes
from a uh an aspect of the old board game
Go Atari in Tension the game the board game the
Japanese for a game Go, or it's great, Yeah, it's um.
(07:03):
In fact, there's a great story that uh going way
back to the first episode we talked about the the
founders of Atari, they used to play Go in their office,
which was an office that was originally meant for one person,
but two people had to share it, so they would
play games of Go in between actually getting any work done,
although according to uh Ted, Mr Nolan never really actually
(07:26):
did any work as far as he could tell. But
then I remember he had a lot of sour grapes
for legitimate reasons. So if you notice what's going on
now is Atari UM the corporation is getting really fractured.
Um their home computer business with the eight hundred, we're
doing okay, but they were behind the curve, so to speak,
(07:51):
and they were playing catch up. They were announcing a
new computer system, the Atari ST. They did that at
the Winter SES. I did an episode about CS once
where I explained this. But once upon a time there
were two big c S events. One happened in the
winter and one happened in the summer, and now there's
(08:11):
only the winter version. But so this this was back
when there were still two and at Winter c S
they announced a r S T. The ST stands for
sixteen slash thirty two, which refers to the microprocessor and
its internal and external bus connections. But anyway, it had
five kilobytes of RAM yeah, smoking fast yeah, and uh
(08:33):
it could be expanded up to four megabytes. So there's that.
Had a graphical user interface. So jewey uh or gooey
if you prefer. Once the whole Jeff gift thing came out,
it messes everything up. I always say gooey because jewey
does not sound like it's appropriate to me at any rate.
It we'll go with gooey. I think that's the more
(08:56):
than more than overwhelming choice. It also had a floppy
disk drive, and it would be the cartridge drive. Yes,
so I had both. Yeah, and it would be produced
up until the early nineteen nineties. Yeah, and it was
the cheapest sixteen bit computer. Um. And like like you said,
if it was around to the nine nineties, it did okay. Yeah.
In fact, in Europe it did pretty well. Here in
(09:18):
the United States did okay, and in Europe it did
it did better. Um. And then we've got, uh, the
Atari Corporation releasing the Atari seventy eight hundred Pro system
In nine six soft dred had come out, and then
the seventy eight hundred comes out. It had digital joysticks
rather than the older analog type, and the seventy hundred
had a weird little story and that it was manufactured
(09:41):
and then shelves in a warehouse basically for um, I'm
not really sure how long. Two years. Yeah, two years.
They basically were just going to sit on it, and
then finally they said, well, the decision was really as
arbitrary as let's just sell these things. Yeah. They released
like a couple of early models U but in that
two year period. But they, like you were saying, they
(10:02):
didn't sell it like it. People talk about it being
uh uh re debuted or reintroduced, but it never was
fully introduced in the first place. But one cool thing
about it was it was backwards compatible with almost all games. Uh. Yeah,
so that's kind of neat, you know, it's better than
theft UM and yeah, it ended up uh not really
(10:29):
competing very well against the Nintendo Entertainment System. It would
only be produced until or supported until that's when Atari
announced they would no longer UM produced games or consoles.
There was also JR companion model to basically that the public.
(10:50):
At this point, uh, Nintendo Fever had struck and Sega
started to come out with their systems, and Atari was
just kind of sadly lost in a shuffle there as
far as the home systems go. Yeah, if you're if
your mascot wasn't a little Italian plumber, yeah, you were
out of luck. So Attari would release the Atari x
(11:14):
E Video Game System a k a. The Atari x
E g S, which was based off the eight bit
computers Attari had previously created. UM. So think of like
the fifty two hundred was kind of the video game
console of the four eight hundred bit or four D
eight hundred Atari computers. This one was the next general
(11:34):
it was based off the next generation of those same
home computers. Yeah, those confusion in the marketplace, and I
think confusion within Atari. I don't think they even knew
what kind of company they were at this point. No,
I don't think so. And this one actually had one
game hard coded into it. So the Atari you could
play other games, like you could get the disks for
other games and play them, but it had one game
(11:56):
that was hard coded into it, and that was Missile Command.
So it's not a bad choice. But yeah, it was
again one of those things where you might feel that
Atari didn't have a clear vision for what its place was.
Things just some kind of money. And in nine they
would release the five twenty st E and the ten
(12:17):
forty STE models of its home computer, which had an
increased color palette and a graphics processor, right, a dedicated
coprocessor for the graphics, which is something that's common now
but at the time was pretty new. Yeah. So, I
mean they were they were doing some of the right
things on the home computer front, but there was just
so much more competition. Now, Yeah, you had you had Apple,
(12:38):
you had the IBM compatibles, and you had IBM plus.
The Amiga was still out there. Um you can't forget
about the Amiga. No. I had a friend who was
a die hard Amiga fan, and I gotta admit the Amiga.
The thing I loved about the Amiga was that, well
before anyone else, it was doing amazing sound and graphics,
like years before anyone else had managed to do that
(13:02):
in an affordable way. And uh so, I remember my
friend had several games for the Amiga that I found
to be like light years beyond anything I could play
on my Apple two E or my two eight six
at home. Um so, but the the CPU on these
devices had a blistering speed of eight mega hurts. We're
(13:25):
talking about the multiple Giga hurts now, and it's a
little a little slow on that and in fact, my
phone is way faster than that. Um But that's also
when Atari Corporation acquired the right to manufacture and sell
a handheld gaming console that had been developed by a
different company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the links was really cool.
(13:45):
It had been developed by a company called Epics E
P y X but Epics had entered financial difficulty and
it owed a lot of money to various companies. The
largest that it owed money too was Atari. Actually the
largest amount it owed was to Atari, and so they
had this kind of settlement to say, like, well, how
are we going to make good on this because Epics
is on the verge of just disappearing, And as part
(14:08):
of the deal, essentially they signed over this this handheld
gaming system they had been developing, and that became the
Atari Links. And the Links was great. I remember I
had a couple of friends I had it. It um.
It was released around the same time as the Game Boy,
but it had full color graphics. It looked better, it
sounded better. You could link them together. Yeah, you could
(14:28):
link them together. It was it was sort of large. Um.
It was had a horizontal UM I guess body UM.
So it was big, which wasn't great. It was a
little ungainly. The battery life would only last four to
five hours, so that was kind of frustrating because this
is this is not the era of rechargeable batteries for
most people. You were popping out old ones and replacing
(14:50):
them with new ones, so that could get really frustrating.
But the one thing Links did not have was a
game called Tetrish, and that is what basically was the
death blow was just such a huge deal. It was
the killer app. It was the killer app, and it's
what made game Boy what it was. And I got
(15:10):
the game Boy. Yeah, and then and then like you
would think that, well, maybe if they can stick it out,
then the Links will have a chance because the Nintendo
game Boy, once everyone's got that, they'll see that the
Lynx has got uh better stats, and maybe I'll go
with that. But then in Sega came out with the
game Gear, and Sega was already doing really good business too,
(15:35):
and that just that just meant that the Links had
no place in that competition. I feel bad for a
try at this point, because they're coming up with superior products.
In certain cases, it still can't get market. It's either
bad timing or it's a combination of bad timing and
a lack of a compelling library to these games. It
really shows how you need to have strong launch titles
(15:58):
to move a console. Yeah, there's a lot more to
it than just like this has the best graphics. In fact,
you know, going into personal account here, I don't own
a current generation game. I love gaming. I consider myself
to be a gamer. I'm not a hardcore gamer, and
certainly I'm sure any of my listeners listening could beat
me at any game of their choice. So I don't
(16:20):
want to I don't want to put that out there,
but but I will say that I love gaming. But
I haven't purchased an Xbox One or a PS four
because we're finally at a point now where it's different.
But for the longest time, the libraries weren't compelling enough
for me to make that investment. Right, so I would think, yes,
it's clearly superior to the system I have now, but
(16:40):
the games aren't games that I want to play yet.
I want to wait until there are enough games that
I want to play to justify that expense, and now
we're at that point. I just haven't well. For one thing,
I'm not allowed to have a present for another year
and a half. I have a two year two year
period where I can't get presents, or at least my
wife won't buy me presence. For a good reason, and
(17:02):
it's not a bad one. It's that I made a
substantial donation to a nonprofit and in return, the agreement
was two years no presence, you're a good man. Here's
my deal with gaming now is I uh played Nintendo
and stuff through the through the sixty in college, was
way into it and then sort of dropped out for
(17:23):
a long time until my stepfather, I'm sorry, my father
in law gave me his PS three a couple of
years ago because he just didn't want it. And since then,
I buy like I just look up once a year
and buy like the two best reviewed games of the year,
and I'll play those for about a month and then
(17:44):
that's it. Well, we don't have the time to go
to gaming three years old, you know, to fix up
my house. I know, I've got a house, I got
a puppy, I got four animals. Yeah, we've gotten to
a white We're obviously getting a little off topic, but
it's true, like we we just have reached the point
in our lives where now you just can't game like
anymore about about the last of us. Fantastic game, fantastic game.
(18:08):
But see, I still have that gamer in me because
I was addicted to this game. Yeah. Um, and then
I bought one of the bio BioShock BioShock, but the
steam Punk win, right, so BioShock Infinite. Yeah, that one,
and I played that one through and that was really great.
The music in that game is amazing. Yeah, and that's
the extent of my gaming. Now I hear two years,
(18:30):
I'll buy the best two games. Although after the last
of us, I don't I mean, I don't see how
you can get any better. It was a very emotionally
impactful game. I mean, right at my stories. Uh so, yeah,
back to the get back to No, I love doing this.
I would just totally continue on that conversation otherwise. But No,
(18:51):
there's only one thing I have to mention, which is
that Atari Corporation released the Atari t T zero three
zero or zero thirty. Never heard of it. It's workstation
three Mega hurts processor workstation. So they were still staying
in the home computer business at that point. Yeah, they're
they're trying to hang in there. Uh. And I don't
have any notes for ninety one, but in yeah, in
(19:12):
ninety two, Atari Corporation would release the Falcon, which would
be the last of its computer systems. The Falcon was
the last time they tried to do a home computer,
and then they made the decision to switch back to
trying to do video game consoles. Again. So that's why
we see the release of the Atari jag Jagua if
(19:34):
you want to go with the British pronunciation jack again,
Atari is doing the right thing there ahead of the curve.
It's the first sixty four bit system. Yeah, so it's
so it is graphically and as far as the processor
goes more powerful than any of the competitors on the
market at that Yeah, and had had a couple of
success successful titles that think the Aliens Predator, that's one
(19:56):
that's considered to be one of the best titles for
that system. Tim This two thousand that was the other one,
was really good, um, but the controller on it was terrible. Yeah.
It was huge and it was unwieldy, um, and didn't
have a lot of software support. Right to the titles
that we just mentioned are pretty much I was like, well,
beyond that, I can't really justify buying this. It says
(20:18):
there were sixty seven games ever released, and I don't
think more than ten of them registered on the radar.
You read over the them and you're just like, well,
I never heard of this there. That's got to be
one of the reasons why this Jaguar never took off. Yeah,
well in the sixty four was just awesome and they
had good games, and then you had the PlayStation coming on,
(20:41):
like when Sony starts really throwing down then it really
this was like a last like a star in the
just reaching for that rope at the end of the rope,
trying to grab ahold of it and Nintendo and Sonny
was just pulling the rope higher. So we haven't talked
about Tory Games for a little bit. That's the that's
the branch that did the Arcade Ursians not and also
(21:02):
produced some home video under home video games under tension. Uh,
Time Warner Communications. Just in case you didn't know, Warner
and Time merged in nine, just a little bit of
a merger. Yeah, Time Warner Communications purchased controlling interest in
Atari Games, so Atari Games would get consolidated with other
properties in nine and become known as Time Warner Interactive.
(21:25):
So Atari Games was part of Time Warner Interactive. But
this means that part of Atari is back with Warner.
Remember Warner was the one that sold it off, So yeah,
Warner had sold it off to Namco. Then employees bought
it back from Namco and then Time Warner Communications buys it,
and it's just this is why it gets really hard
(21:46):
to talk about the end of Atari UM. And in
another confusing thing, uh, JT Storage was a hard disc manufacturer. Yeah,
JT has merges with Atari Corporate Shian So this is
the home computer one, not the Atari games one. So
JTS merges with Atari Corporation. But JTS was in a
(22:07):
tough spot because it was already had a cash flow problem,
and so it was looking for a way to avoid
going into bankruptcy and thought that by acquiring Atari, which
had lots of cash, but not a whole lot of
market share because most of the cash from Attari was
actually coming from lawsuits like they were going after other companies. Yeah,
(22:32):
so they weren't making money off their products as much
as they were off some of the lawsuits. So JTS
comes in, acquires Atari, then fires almost all of the
former Atari employees and liquidates the remaining Atari inventory as
a means of helping stave off this impending disaster, which
(22:53):
it did not do. Two years after that has bro
Interactive UM by JTS for five million bucks. Yeah, essentially
it bought the Atari Corporation from JTS for five million
JTS actually went bankrupt that year. It essentially bought the
Atari name for five million. Yeah, because at that point
there really was nothing left, right because and at this
(23:16):
point in the name, it's like your your drunk uncle
who was he was a big shot in high school.
That's what Atari is at this point. Yeah, it's like
you know, stumbling around in the alley, you know, don't
you know who I am? And around the same time,
to make matters worse. Okay, So that that's Atari Corporation, right,
getting acquired for five million by Hasbro Interactive. Meanwhile, around
(23:37):
that same time, Atari Games was split off from Time
Warner Interactive, so it didn't stay at Time Warner very
long either, like three years it was gone. It splits
off and is purchased by w m S Industries, which
was the parent company or Williams and Bally Midway. Right,
So now we're seeing a consolidation of the big games that,
(24:01):
you know, twenty years earlier have been the defining names
in in arcade entertainments. So they purchase Atari Games. Uh,
And meanwhile you've got Hasbro Interactive that's acquired the Atari Corporation.
So at that point, yeah, that's true, but don't get
(24:22):
ahead of me. So at that point, when when Hasbro
gets hold of Atari Corporation, w MS Industries doesn't want confusion.
You know, they just purchased Atari Games earlier. Yeah. Yeah,
we're already confused. So what they do is they rename
Atari Games. Atari Games gets renamed into Midway Games West.
(24:43):
So now when I talk about Atari Games, I'm actually
talking Midway Games West. Don't worry, we'll come back around
to make things more confusing later. So yeah, so now
we get to two thousand, that's when the dot com
bubble bursts. Poor Atari because through two bubble bursts, right,
the video game bubble and then the dot com bubble.
Man So they probably had were affected by the real
(25:06):
estate bubble in some way too. Probably I was affected
by the dot com bubble. I worked for a human
resources management consulting firm at the time, and most of
our clients were dot com companies. Yeah, suddenly our client
lists got a lot smaller. Yeah, but look where you
are now. Yeah, it was a long road, but I'm
glad I'm here. Uh so Hasbro, because Hasbro Interactive was
(25:29):
hit hard by this dot com verse. Everyone was right,
you mean, you just had this. It was another market
correction that was then devastated a lot of companies and lives.
So Hasbro decides to sell off Hasbro Interactive, including the
intellectual property from Atari Corporation. Remember that's the home computing one.
They sell it to a French company that I always
(25:51):
misspelled because I always think that the name is a typo.
Yeah in in info Games. Yeah, I keep thinking it's
Info Games. It's info gram because it's spelled like info
Games but with an extra are there right after the
ga the French that was in two thousand Yeah, and
uh So Hasbro Interactive becomes info Grams Interactive and in
(26:12):
two thousand three, unless you have anything between two thousand
and two thousand three, thank goodness. So in two thousand three,
Info Grams Interactive is renamed Atari Interactive, and Infograms creates
a subsidiary called Atari Incorporated, which has its own listing
on NASDAC. Yeah, they still saw value in that Atari
(26:32):
name despite the pummeling it took over the years. And
keep in mind that by this point there's nothing left
of the original Atari attached to the Satari name. The
Atari name is a name and an idea, but it's
no longer associated with the original company at all. So
the European branch of Infograms became known as Atari Europe
(26:54):
and Infograms Australia became Atari Australia Infograms the UK became
Atari u K. Yeah, And there were re releases of
some of the classic games. There were some newer games.
One called Alone in the Dark in two thousand and
eight was supposed to be pretty good. I never played it.
Fantastic good. So they had some successes, but again that
(27:15):
was just confusing because they were, you know, a publisher
and a distributor, and they really didn't really know what
they were doing completely with the Atari name. Right. Infogrums
in particular was into this like acquisition mania, like they
were they were buying up properties left and right, Yeah,
which is always a little dangerous, yeah, because it can
lead to a lack of focus, which is exactly what
(27:35):
happened in this case. I mean, obviously hindsight tells us that, right,
we wouldn't necessarily know that otherwise, But it is the
case Midway Games in two thousand three, Midway Games West,
I should say, what used to be Atari Games. Now
Midway Games West disbands, So now Atari Games is just
a name. In fact, there was a holding company that
(27:57):
was still called Midway Games West, but it was just
a whole in company. There was no nothing else to it.
It was not an office, no that secretary, no games
coming out of it, nothing, So it only exists as
a name. Literally. At this point, two thousand four, the
Atari Flashback launches. Now the Flashback is a dedicated console
(28:19):
with games that are hard baked into it, so it
doesn't use cartridges as a selection of games. It looked
like except for some added buttons here and there. Um,
I bought. I don't know who made it, but I bought.
At one point someone was selling the joystick plugs directly
into the Yeah, that had like twenty games or something
on it. Um, and that was I played the heck
out of that thing. Oh yeah, I did too. I
(28:40):
have one of those at home. But I have one
of those at home right next to my TV. So
not trying to brag or anything. I mean, I realized
that almost everyone out there probably has a larger TV,
so please don't mind me feel badly about myself. But
the Flashback did okay, And they came out with different
versions of that thing exactly like the first one, did
not have ver eate and it's so that just did
(29:01):
not fly with me. Yeah, but it's all for the
nostalgia crowd. Yeah. So that came out with models in
two thousand four, two thousand five, two thousand eleven, and
two thousand twelve. Different companies would produce it over the years,
but they were all licensed by Atari. And by Atari
I mean Atari Home Computing, which means uh infograms as
opposed to Midway Games West, which is I know, really
(29:25):
two thousand five. Okay, seriously, has Bro, what the heck
are you doing? Has Bro buys back some intellectual property
from Atari s A, which is the info Grams version,
the home computer version also known as Atari Inc. As
the subsidiary of Atari, say, for sixty five million dollars. See,
(29:46):
that's what's confusing. Yeah, that's crazy that Hasbro got out
of the game and then literally got back into it,
you know for that. Yeah, clearly that dot com bubble
scared everybody, and then once we started seeing recover are
people wanted to get back into it. The ones that
were still around anyway. Now, now At is not your
drunk uncle, it's just the abused, like confused, I don't
(30:09):
even know which which way is up at this point.
This is this is the this is the person who's
just wandering the street and talking about how you know,
the trees are convincing them to buy Dorito's. That's what
this is. That now we're at that point. Yeah. So
in two eight, Infograms offers to buy out Atari Incorporated
shares to make Infograms the sole owner of Atari Incorporated
(30:30):
again because they had listed Atri Incorporated on NASDAC, so
they sold shares to other parties, making it a publicly
traded company. But now they're saying, well, we need to
fix Atari like this, this brand is not doing what
we needed to do. We think that this brand, Yeah,
we think this brand could save us because Infograms as
(30:51):
a whole was having a lot of issues. We want
to be able to rebrand ourselves. But in order to
do that, we first need to get all of Atari
back belonging to us. So they offered to buy it out.
It's accepted, and Infograms reacquires Atari uh completely, so now
it totally belongs to Infograms uh. Atari meanwhile had acquired
(31:12):
another company called Cryptic Studios, which developed a game called
City of Heroes. It's an online multiplayer game where you
create a superhero um and you an original superhero that
you can play. It was one that I always wanted
to get into it, but I never I never had
the time to dedicate to those massive online games and
their monthly subscription base. For well, now they're mostly free
(31:33):
to play, but back then they were all monthly subscriptions,
and you're busy creating your own real life superhero persona.
That's true, but you know that's a that's an alter
ego thing that we need to steer away from. So
two thousand nine, good grief, could this story get more ridiculous?
(31:55):
Warner Brothers Entertainment purchases the Midway intellectual property, including the
name Atari Games. So for the third time, Warner Warner
owns something called Atari. Yeah nuts, three times buying and selling.
I don't know. So meanwhile, Namco Bandai acquires Atari Europe
(32:19):
from Infograms. Infograms itself changes its name to Atari Essay
to create a united company, and it also has the
Atari Group, which is a collection of divisions from around
the world, like Atari Italia, that kind of thing. Um
that still have the Atari brand name. Here's a name
we haven't heard for a while. Bushnell. He comes back.
(32:42):
He actually because of an acquisition ends up on the
board of directors for Atari, so Atari Incorporated specifically, so
they brought him back for that very reason, right to
sort of get some attention again, I imagine. So yeah,
because this is again one of those things where you've
got the name but otherwise there's no connection. But now
(33:06):
you've got the guy who founded the company. So that's
big news. And it definitely did get a lot of
people writing about it at the time, although if you
look at two now you realize not a whole lot
has will remind you of the old golden age of
Atari um So. In eleven, Atari Incorporated sells off Cryptic Studios,
(33:30):
the one that they had bought the City Heroes one.
And in ten Atari Incorporated files for bankruptcy January. Oh
so remember this is the This was formally Infograms Atari
Incorporated was formerly part of Infograms, now part of Ataria. Say.
Atari Incorporated files from bankruptcy partly to escape the debt
(33:51):
accrued by its parent company h and In. In an
effort to pay off the debt, they attempt to sell
off the portfolio of more than two video games, but
they received fifteen preliminary bids and none of them approach
the price that Atari was hoping for, so they don't
accept any of them. Instead, they decide they'll sell bits
(34:13):
and pieces off rather than rather than sell everything off
at a price too low, They're going to sell bits
and pieces off and try and get themselves through it.
And it works. I mean they sell some stuff, not everything,
but they sell some stuff, and then by the end
often they emerged from bankruptcy December. So like the entire
year of Ati Incorporated is in bankruptcy, the saddest year.
(34:36):
Maybe it's hard, I mean, there's a lot of competition
for that time that titleen Finally last year, that's when
we have the documentary that we talked about previously, the
one that went out to the desert to dig up
to find out if et really was beneath it the cartridge,
not the character, and that kind of resurrected a little
bit of interest in Attari again. Yeah. Yeah, there was
(34:56):
a lot of talk about there were a lot of
people wondering whether or not they were actually gonna find
to anything, if they would just find scraps as opposed
to entire cartridges, And as we mentioned in the previous episode,
they did find cartridges. So Um. Yeah. The whole story
behind that is they manufactured four million cartridges. They were
unable to move three and a half million of those.
(35:18):
Man So they had only a couple of choices. Do
you store this and hope that you can one day
sell it, because keep in mind, storing stuff costs money, right,
you can't. It's not like there's just a magical space
like that. It's gonna occupy space that you would otherwise
use for something else. Or do you call it a
loss and throw it away? And they chose option number two.
(35:40):
And so what's amazing to me about the whole et
debacle is that, um, word got it. I mean this
is pre Internet and word still got around that fast.
From Johnny telling his neighbor Billy how bad it sucked,
and Billy telling his neighbors there wasn't copies. There was
no like kataku for him or something for people to
say like this is still in cul the sex Yeah,
(36:03):
and then and then scoffing over bargain bins at your
local toy store. Um. And so what's going on with
a Try now, Well, it's focusing on developing games for
social platforms like Facebook and for mobile devices primarily, although
they're looking at some other stuff as well. Right. Yeah,
a former employee name Fred Uh, I don't know how
(36:24):
to pronounce that. C H E s in a I S.
I believe is one of the French fellows from info Grams.
Perhaps perhaps he's now the CEO. And he said that
he is going to try and be relevant in the
PC world again with a few different things. Uh, notably gambling. Yeah,
real casino gambling and just for fun casino gambling. So
(36:46):
I think this would be like if you walked into
a casino, you know how you see all those licensed
slot machines like Lord of the Rings. That one, by
the way, treats me really well. So I love the
Lord of the Ring slot machine, but I can see
like the Centipe slot machine, and then some of the game.
They're gonna do both. They're gonna have a licensing program
and they're gonna have an actual online casino social casino
(37:08):
with virtual money, and so the gambling thing and licensing
and games. They said, the flashback they're gonna keep around. Uh.
They have one idea for they're going to create some
new I p s. One is for the LGBT community
called pride Fest, and um, he said, they're developing a
new Asteroids game that is a PC game where you
(37:30):
will actually be surviving on the asteroid itself. So turn
things around a little bit. They're trying, Um he thinks
that they can capitalize on that Atari name and get
it back to relevance again. But I don't know. Yeah,
so you know, it's whether or not we see anything
(37:53):
coming out of this division. Also, keep in mind the
the Atari games that was purchased by Warner Brothers Entertainment. Know,
the story is not necessarily over for Atari, although you
could argue that as far as the original company is concerned,
that story has been over since the eighties. So uh,
it's an interesting and and sometimes upsetting story, the rise
(38:15):
and fall of the of Atari and it all. Yeah,
and and there's people I remember reading things like could
the video game crash happen again? And if you look,
there is a large number of different providers that are
all trying to clamor for attention. Now, when we think
of consoles, we think Nintendo, Sony an Xbox. Some people
(38:36):
would say just Sony an Xbox. They don't even think
of Nintendo. Um, but then we have the mobile game market,
we have computers, PC gaming is hitting a resurgence. So uh,
and then there are people like me who hold back
from buying current generation consoles because we don't necessarily see
the value in them or the reason to upgrade, or
(38:56):
I was given one by my father in law. Yeah.
The ending by one, we get to that point where
we think, you know, it's it is possible. You can't
never say that you're too big to fail. Yeah, that's
a rookie massake Kip, Pride comes before the fall. That
that's true. So we have completed the story of Attari.
But now we've got a little time to talk about
(39:16):
some personal reflections beyond the stuff that we've talked about
in the previous episodes. So, Chuck, what are some of
your fond memories of Atari in general? Uh? Well, buying
pac Man on Christmas Day? You know it's stunk. The
buying was great. Yeah, and actually, man, I actually enjoyed
(39:36):
playing it as um a twelve year old. Um. I
didn't realize how bad it's stunk at the time because
it was pac Man in my house. Um. And you know,
as a little kid, you're not like, oh, this doesn't
look just like it and sound just like it. I
think older kids probably were a little more like that,
but um, I was young enough to where I enjoyed
(39:57):
it adventure. Like we talked about man um the imagination
playing adventure well, the fact that they incorporated things like
the bat mechanic, which meant that you could never expect
the same gameplay experience two times in a row, which
was pretty interesting. Like a lot of these games, like
the early games, it involved memorizing patterns, and if you
(40:20):
memorize the pattern, you could play definitely, but that didn't
work for games that actually would uh introduce some sort
of element that could at least be perceived as random. Yeah,
River Raid fantastic, huge game to me, that holds up
still today. Yeah, it's a good game. I think out
of all the shooter games. That's like by shooter, I
(40:42):
mean like you're controlling a ship that's moving around and
shooting things. In this case, it's a it's a jet,
it's flying over a river. Uh, that one. I didn't
own River Raid, but a friend of mine from down
the street owned it, and I would go over to
his house all the time to play it because it
was the one title on Atari that I really did
but did not have. Well, actually, No, there were two
(41:02):
river Raiate and Pitfall. I never owned either of those,
but I played the heck out of them. I think
river Raid was the first top scroll game. Yeah. Uh,
Pitfall was huge and that kind of introduced the platforming
genre of video games. Yeah, and Warlords. Uh man. I
(41:23):
had a ton of Oh, Frogger. I mean, I know
that was sort of a kids game, but I still
like Frogger. It's still challenging. I liked Frogger as well.
I remember I had some games that I wish had
been better, Like I had Donkey Kong Jr. That really
was it didn't measure up nearly as well to the
arcade version. I had Popeye, which also didn't measure up
(41:46):
very well to the arcade version. Um, but I mean
it was. It was like I had a lot of
those those games licensed games and stuff as well. Uh yeah.
I I also have really fond memories of arcades, Like, oh, dude,
you know, there were there were times where I would
just go to the arcade to um, you know, spend
(42:08):
a dollar or whatever, and you know, you always try
and find the game that you figure you're gonna get
the most value for your money. Like I can play
this one for a long time. I'm going to play
this one. Um. And luckily there were also a lot
of them made by Atari that were really fun. I mean,
Star Wars is still like I love the Star Wars
trilogy game that came out that was modeled after closer
(42:30):
after the movies, like with better graphics and everything. But
there's still a place in my heart for that vector
graphics Star Wars game. And I wasn't kidding when I
said that I would actually consider purchasing one of those
because that was, um such an such a fond memory.
Like the two Arcade games I went back to over
and over, We're We're Star Wars and Spy Hunter. Um No,
(42:54):
Spy Hunter was not an Atari game, but oddly enough,
I think Spy Hunter two ended up being distributed under Ratari,
even though Atari had nothing to do with the original
Spy Hunter. But that just shows another way that the
Stari story makes no sense when you look at the
whole thing. Yeah, and you know, I hate to sound
like the old guy, but um, I'm really thankful that
(43:16):
we grew up in that generation. There was something really
special about seeing something invented for us, uh, right in
front of our very eyes created out of nowhere, like
we talked about in I think episode two, when there
were three TV stations or you know, five or six
TV stations and crappy handheld games and it was just
(43:38):
it blew my mind. And I spent a lot of
time in the arcade, and the games today are amazing,
but the mind blow isn't there like it was back then,
because it's all building on what happened before it, and
this was building on out of thin air. And it also,
I mean, it was an era where a single person
could develop a game from beginning to finish. You know,
(43:59):
now we have companies that have entire divisions dedicated to that.
It was also an era where people were making weird games,
like weird games that could be a lot of fun
but had nothing to do with it. Like you look
at yours Revenge, I dare you to tell me what
that's supposed to be. It is bizarre, but it's awesome,
and there are a lot of really fun games. Yeah, huge,
(44:22):
huge risks right both in the arcade and in the
home video game market, just people saying let's create some
a fun experience. It doesn't matter if it quote unquote
makes sense or whatever. These days, you look at video
games and a lot of the companies tend to get
hung up on creating franchises. They want they want to
create a title that they can make essentially clones of
(44:45):
with modifications. Yeah, and then that way they have built
in a built an audience they've got. All right, these
are the people who are Call of Duty players. So
let's put out a Call of Duty game every single year.
They'll buy it. We we we know they'll buy it because
they are Called of Duty fans, as opposed to saying
what kind of cool experience can we create, which is
(45:08):
sort of given rise to the independent developer community. So
in a way, those early Atari days are very similar
to what we see with the independent game community these days, except,
of course, the independent game developers are are not, as
you know, not as organized in a sense, they're nonder
an umbrella like Atari was. But other than that, they're
(45:29):
they're operating in a very similar way. You look at
those early days of Attari, it really did sound a
lot like what an Internet startups sounds like today. Yeah,
you were defining what you did and so there weren't
rules because no one had done it before. Yeah, we're
talking earlier so man needs to get on that Atari movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(45:51):
We talked about the possibility of you know, someone needs
to do a documentary about this, like take this idea
of the rise and Fall, the three episodes that we
have done, um, and really look into it and make
it a film to document what happened and explain the
processes and uh, because it does get so so convoluted
(46:13):
and complex towards the end of its existence. And of
course we could argue that by that time, it's you know,
it's saying the name Atari is meaningless because again it's
just a word at that point, um, which is sad. It.
It did have such an important part in my childhood.
I mean, I I played so much both in the
arcade and blister my hand. Oh yeah, oh no, yeah,
(46:36):
you would get like I remember because by the way
I would hold the joystick, um in the in between
my thumb and forefinger, where I would I would grip
the thumb stick, I would have a blister right there,
and um. Yeah. It also was one of those things
that would frustrate me because I'm a left hander, and
so I I ended up Yeah, I coped well enough,
(47:02):
but yeah, it was a little if I guess it
kind of helped with my precision of my right hand.
Otherwise I probably would just be flailing around the office
on fire all the time. So I thank Atari for
that as well. Yeah, but yeah, it's funny because I
never owned you know, when the Atari crap video game
crash happened. Atari was the only video game console I
owned at the time of video game consoles being being built. Right,
(47:27):
So I got in television, but that was after in
television had was no longer a thing that was. That
was a hand me down. I didn't get a Nintendo.
I never had roommate had one, so I didn't buy
one of those. You see. I what I did was
I transitioned over to computers, and I got I became
one of those snooty computer gamers because the games on
(47:48):
computers were deeper, more sophisticated. They didn't have the arcady
kind of graphics that dedicated video game consoles could have,
but they did have a richer game experience in my mind,
and so I became a computer gamer. Now it's funny
because now I'm a console gamer again, although I'm now
transitioning back the computer gamer, and that's because of services
(48:09):
like Steam, which allowed me to buy games and have
them download directly to my computer, and I don't have
to go to a store. I don't have to buy
a box. I get the game delivered straight to my
computer and I can play it off of there. So
it's funny because I keep going back and forth. I
went console to PC two console. In fact, I was
consoled for a long time with the uh In sixty four, GameCube,
(48:32):
the PS two, the PS three, the Xbox, the Xbox
three sixty I have all of those and the Dreamcast.
I've got a Dreamcast too. I'm thinking back now, I've
never bought a console. You've only been given was Christmas.
My college roommate had the first Nintendo, had the Super Nintendo.
(48:53):
Another college roommate had the sixty four. My friend in
l A had the Xbox. Who lived next door to
men who bought me the or gave me the three.
Not all of us can walk outside and expect consoles
to rain down from the heaven. Never bought one. Just
occurred to me, to be fair, some of those word
gifts to me. Actually, the Dreamcast was given to me
(49:14):
after Dreamcast had already folded and uh my wife bought
it like a used Dreamcast and then we just got
like a folder full of games that that came out
for it. By the way, I should do a full
episode just on the Dreamcast some point, because that was
also an amazing system, uh that died unnecessarily like it
(49:35):
it was. It was kind of like the Jaguar and
that it came out and it was clearly superior to
it's it's uh competitors in space, but because of bad
timing and a bad library early on, it never took off,
at least not to a point that could sustain a company.
Um So, Yeah, a lot of warning messages in this
(49:57):
in this series too, But Chuck, I gotta thank you
for joining me on this. This was so much fun.
Who knew it was going to be an epic three
part started out? Yeah, thanks for having men. Thank you.
We've been in this studio for nearly three hours a
little bit. Yeah, it turns out dude soup in this uh,
(50:18):
because we we've got first of all, I think at
six pm they turn off the air conditioning system because
I'm reading it and says off on it, and yeah,
there's just three of us in this tiny little room.
But thank you for joining me. Remember you can find
Chuck's stuff over at stuff You should know a phenomenal show.
If you have not subscribed to that, well join the
(50:40):
rest of the human race. Come on, you gotta check
it out. Josh and Chuck are phenomenal. They break down
topics in a way that's accessible and funny and informative.
Check it out. Thank you, my friend. You are welcome.
And if you have any questions, comments, you've got a
suggestion for a future episode, write me. My address is
tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Drop me
(51:00):
a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle at
all three is tech Stuff h s W and we'll
talk to you again. Releason for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it have stuff works dot
com
Get in Touch with Technology textuffm Hey there and welcome
to text UFF. I'm Jonathan Strickland. With me in the
studio is Chuck Bryant. We have been here for hours.
It feels like it. Literally it has been two hours.
But it's funny but that we were just talking though
(00:25):
off Mike about how this is a three parter and
were we could do a whole season on this if
you really wanted to get into all the details. Yeah.
In fact, I came across some websites and by all this,
we're of course talking about the rise and fall of
Atari things. This was a request from Jeff on Facebook.
He wanted to know about this. We could go there
(00:46):
could be seven eight episodes where we talk about all
the things we're going on. There were incredible political moves
going on behind the scenes. There were some amazing technological development.
We haven't really touched on the major competitors with Atari
that we're causing extra problems for them, like uh, you
know the early on the in television and Cliko, but
then later on we're talking Nintendo and Sega and then
(01:08):
Sony with the PlayStation. I mean by that time Atari
is pretty much out of the picture. Anyway. But I mean,
it's just so much to talk about. I found some
some websites that even broke it down into when Atari
hired people. And I'm not talking about the big names
we've mentioned talking about like Marty Accounting exactly. I mean,
(01:28):
it was phenomenal. The documentation that's out there. So we're
going to now pick up in UH that tells you
how detailed we've been. If you haven't heard the first
two episodes in this series, go back listen to those first.
It's an amazing story. So is when something happens to
Atari that redefines everything, and some people consider this yet
(01:52):
another death of the company. That's when Warner, which had
purchased Attari from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Warner
splits Atari into two entities one of it one of
them is a home computing division, which is called the
Atari Corporation, and the other is the arcade division, which
(02:14):
is called Atari Games. And it sells off the home
computing division. So Atari Corporation gets sold to a man
named Jack Tramiel. Yeah, he was the original founder of
Commodore UH in the famous Commodore sixty four computer, which
was great for its time. Oh, Yeah, fantastic. There's a
full Tech Stuff episode about Commodore published on February first,
(02:37):
two thousand twelve. It's good, it was. It was fun
to talk about that too, to talk about the development
of the Commodore system. So Tramiel was another another pioneer
in personal computing and home electronics, and he saw some
promise in that home computing division of Atari, something that
after the video game crash of a lot people thought
(03:00):
had no value whatsoever. Yeah, he renamed it, uh I
think he renamed it the Atari Corporation. Yeah, Yeah, he
decided to call it that because obviously, you know, now
you have two separate entities that both have the Atari
name in them, Yeah, which is always confusing in the marketplace,
and it's going to be confusing in this episode because
we're gonna be talking about the fate of both of them, right,
So we're gonna follow both the fate of the Atari
(03:22):
Corporation and the fate of Atari Games. So Atari Games
at in nineteen eighty four was still with Warner, not
not for long, in fact, would be when that changes.
So some big stuff happens in home video games. That's
when the Fama com also known as Nintendo Entertainment System
is released in the United States, which was Tyson's punch
(03:47):
out right there. Um. Yeah, so that was something that
convinced people maybe home video games aren't as dead as
we thought they were. Because the video game crash, we
pretty much thought that's it. Personal computers are going to
take over. There won't be any home consoles dedicated video
games anymore. Because that idea played itself out. Apples on
(04:08):
the scene at this point, Yeah, making a stink. Yeah.
In fact, by they're selling the Macintosh because that came
out four so they Yeah. But the brilliant thing Nintendo
did was they learned from Attari's mistakes. They said, all right, well,
we are going to license games like they have to
be certified by US. You can't develop for Nintendo independently
(04:30):
without submitting the game for US for certification. That way
we still have some control over warners wanted, but they
didn't get out ahead of it in time like Nintendo did.
No Act Activision pretty much doomed Atari because Activisions set
that that precedent that a third party developer can can
create uh cartridges for another platform that they don't own.
(04:53):
Once that precedent was set and that policy wasn't in place.
It was. It was game on literally for everybody wanted
to develop for Atari. Yeah, and pardon my ignorance because
I'm not a current gamer. I'm still stuck in the eighties.
Activision still around, right, uh huh, Well it's part of
something bigger. But yes, but they survived everything and did
(05:14):
well for them. Well, I mean I could do a
full episode on what happened Activision too. It's kind of
like it's kind of like a Tari you know how
Atari technically still exists today, so at any rate. Um uh.
Also in that's when Warner Communications sells the arcade division
(05:34):
of Atari Games to a competitor, Namco. Yes, so that's
the company that that developed pac Man. Yeah. Namco only
owned it for about a year, and then some employees
bought Atari Games from Namco and then uh made a
few more pretty good arcade games, Paper one, it was
a big one. Gauntlet, Yeah, Gauntlet was a big one.
(05:56):
Wizard needs food, good games, so they pumped a little
more lifeblood into the car Atari Games division. Yeah, they
also started to develop home games. But here's the thing.
When Warner split it up between uh Atari Corporation and
Atari games, Atari Corporation had the sole right to sell
(06:19):
home games under the Atari brand, yeah, which they had
already proved the struggle post without a really great, solid
follow up that didn't didn't jump over. Yeah. And then
you've got Atari Games that was making these these arcade games,
and they wanted to make home video games, but they
couldn't do it under the Atari brand because that belonged
(06:41):
to Atari Corporation. So they created a new brand called
Tension t E N G E N, which also comes
from a uh an aspect of the old board game
Go Atari in Tension the game the board game the
Japanese for a game Go, or it's great, Yeah, it's um.
(07:03):
In fact, there's a great story that uh going way
back to the first episode we talked about the the
founders of Atari, they used to play Go in their office,
which was an office that was originally meant for one person,
but two people had to share it, so they would
play games of Go in between actually getting any work done,
although according to uh Ted, Mr Nolan never really actually
(07:26):
did any work as far as he could tell. But
then I remember he had a lot of sour grapes
for legitimate reasons. So if you notice what's going on
now is Atari UM the corporation is getting really fractured.
Um their home computer business with the eight hundred, we're
doing okay, but they were behind the curve, so to speak,
(07:51):
and they were playing catch up. They were announcing a
new computer system, the Atari ST. They did that at
the Winter SES. I did an episode about CS once
where I explained this. But once upon a time there
were two big c S events. One happened in the
winter and one happened in the summer, and now there's
(08:11):
only the winter version. But so this this was back
when there were still two and at Winter c S
they announced a r S T. The ST stands for
sixteen slash thirty two, which refers to the microprocessor and
its internal and external bus connections. But anyway, it had
five kilobytes of RAM yeah, smoking fast yeah, and uh
(08:33):
it could be expanded up to four megabytes. So there's that.
Had a graphical user interface. So jewey uh or gooey
if you prefer. Once the whole Jeff gift thing came out,
it messes everything up. I always say gooey because jewey
does not sound like it's appropriate to me at any rate.
It we'll go with gooey. I think that's the more
(08:56):
than more than overwhelming choice. It also had a floppy
disk drive, and it would be the cartridge drive. Yes,
so I had both. Yeah, and it would be produced
up until the early nineteen nineties. Yeah, and it was
the cheapest sixteen bit computer. Um. And like like you said,
if it was around to the nine nineties, it did okay. Yeah.
In fact, in Europe it did pretty well. Here in
(09:18):
the United States did okay, and in Europe it did
it did better. Um. And then we've got, uh, the
Atari Corporation releasing the Atari seventy eight hundred Pro system
In nine six soft dred had come out, and then
the seventy eight hundred comes out. It had digital joysticks
rather than the older analog type, and the seventy hundred
had a weird little story and that it was manufactured
(09:41):
and then shelves in a warehouse basically for um, I'm
not really sure how long. Two years. Yeah, two years.
They basically were just going to sit on it, and
then finally they said, well, the decision was really as
arbitrary as let's just sell these things. Yeah. They released
like a couple of early models U but in that
two year period. But they, like you were saying, they
(10:02):
didn't sell it like it. People talk about it being
uh uh re debuted or reintroduced, but it never was
fully introduced in the first place. But one cool thing
about it was it was backwards compatible with almost all games. Uh. Yeah,
so that's kind of neat, you know, it's better than
theft UM and yeah, it ended up uh not really
(10:29):
competing very well against the Nintendo Entertainment System. It would
only be produced until or supported until that's when Atari
announced they would no longer UM produced games or consoles.
There was also JR companion model to basically that the public.
(10:50):
At this point, uh, Nintendo Fever had struck and Sega
started to come out with their systems, and Atari was
just kind of sadly lost in a shuffle there as
far as the home systems go. Yeah, if you're if
your mascot wasn't a little Italian plumber, yeah, you were
out of luck. So Attari would release the Atari x
(11:14):
E Video Game System a k a. The Atari x
E g S, which was based off the eight bit
computers Attari had previously created. UM. So think of like
the fifty two hundred was kind of the video game
console of the four eight hundred bit or four D
eight hundred Atari computers. This one was the next general
(11:34):
it was based off the next generation of those same
home computers. Yeah, those confusion in the marketplace, and I
think confusion within Atari. I don't think they even knew
what kind of company they were at this point. No,
I don't think so. And this one actually had one
game hard coded into it. So the Atari you could
play other games, like you could get the disks for
other games and play them, but it had one game
(11:56):
that was hard coded into it, and that was Missile Command.
So it's not a bad choice. But yeah, it was
again one of those things where you might feel that
Atari didn't have a clear vision for what its place was.
Things just some kind of money. And in nine they
would release the five twenty st E and the ten
(12:17):
forty STE models of its home computer, which had an
increased color palette and a graphics processor, right, a dedicated
coprocessor for the graphics, which is something that's common now
but at the time was pretty new. Yeah. So, I
mean they were they were doing some of the right
things on the home computer front, but there was just
so much more competition. Now, Yeah, you had you had Apple,
(12:38):
you had the IBM compatibles, and you had IBM plus.
The Amiga was still out there. Um you can't forget
about the Amiga. No. I had a friend who was
a die hard Amiga fan, and I gotta admit the Amiga.
The thing I loved about the Amiga was that, well
before anyone else, it was doing amazing sound and graphics,
like years before anyone else had managed to do that
(13:02):
in an affordable way. And uh so, I remember my
friend had several games for the Amiga that I found
to be like light years beyond anything I could play
on my Apple two E or my two eight six
at home. Um so, but the the CPU on these
devices had a blistering speed of eight mega hurts. We're
(13:25):
talking about the multiple Giga hurts now, and it's a
little a little slow on that and in fact, my
phone is way faster than that. Um But that's also
when Atari Corporation acquired the right to manufacture and sell
a handheld gaming console that had been developed by a
different company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the links was really cool.
(13:45):
It had been developed by a company called Epics E
P y X but Epics had entered financial difficulty and
it owed a lot of money to various companies. The
largest that it owed money too was Atari. Actually the
largest amount it owed was to Atari, and so they
had this kind of settlement to say, like, well, how
are we going to make good on this because Epics
is on the verge of just disappearing, And as part
(14:08):
of the deal, essentially they signed over this this handheld
gaming system they had been developing, and that became the
Atari Links. And the Links was great. I remember I
had a couple of friends I had it. It um.
It was released around the same time as the Game Boy,
but it had full color graphics. It looked better, it
sounded better. You could link them together. Yeah, you could
(14:28):
link them together. It was it was sort of large. Um.
It was had a horizontal UM I guess body UM.
So it was big, which wasn't great. It was a
little ungainly. The battery life would only last four to
five hours, so that was kind of frustrating because this
is this is not the era of rechargeable batteries for
most people. You were popping out old ones and replacing
(14:50):
them with new ones, so that could get really frustrating.
But the one thing Links did not have was a
game called Tetrish, and that is what basically was the
death blow was just such a huge deal. It was
the killer app. It was the killer app, and it's
what made game Boy what it was. And I got
(15:10):
the game Boy. Yeah, and then and then like you
would think that, well, maybe if they can stick it out,
then the Links will have a chance because the Nintendo
game Boy, once everyone's got that, they'll see that the
Lynx has got uh better stats, and maybe I'll go
with that. But then in Sega came out with the
game Gear, and Sega was already doing really good business too,
(15:35):
and that just that just meant that the Links had
no place in that competition. I feel bad for a
try at this point, because they're coming up with superior products.
In certain cases, it still can't get market. It's either
bad timing or it's a combination of bad timing and
a lack of a compelling library to these games. It
really shows how you need to have strong launch titles
(15:58):
to move a console. Yeah, there's a lot more to
it than just like this has the best graphics. In fact,
you know, going into personal account here, I don't own
a current generation game. I love gaming. I consider myself
to be a gamer. I'm not a hardcore gamer, and
certainly I'm sure any of my listeners listening could beat
me at any game of their choice. So I don't
(16:20):
want to I don't want to put that out there,
but but I will say that I love gaming. But
I haven't purchased an Xbox One or a PS four
because we're finally at a point now where it's different.
But for the longest time, the libraries weren't compelling enough
for me to make that investment. Right, so I would think, yes,
it's clearly superior to the system I have now, but
(16:40):
the games aren't games that I want to play yet.
I want to wait until there are enough games that
I want to play to justify that expense, and now
we're at that point. I just haven't well. For one thing,
I'm not allowed to have a present for another year
and a half. I have a two year two year
period where I can't get presents, or at least my
wife won't buy me presence. For a good reason, and
(17:02):
it's not a bad one. It's that I made a
substantial donation to a nonprofit and in return, the agreement
was two years no presence, you're a good man. Here's
my deal with gaming now is I uh played Nintendo
and stuff through the through the sixty in college, was
way into it and then sort of dropped out for
(17:23):
a long time until my stepfather, I'm sorry, my father
in law gave me his PS three a couple of
years ago because he just didn't want it. And since then,
I buy like I just look up once a year
and buy like the two best reviewed games of the year,
and I'll play those for about a month and then
(17:44):
that's it. Well, we don't have the time to go
to gaming three years old, you know, to fix up
my house. I know, I've got a house, I got
a puppy, I got four animals. Yeah, we've gotten to
a white We're obviously getting a little off topic, but
it's true, like we we just have reached the point
in our lives where now you just can't game like
anymore about about the last of us. Fantastic game, fantastic game.
(18:08):
But see, I still have that gamer in me because
I was addicted to this game. Yeah. Um, and then
I bought one of the bio BioShock BioShock, but the
steam Punk win, right, so BioShock Infinite. Yeah, that one,
and I played that one through and that was really great.
The music in that game is amazing. Yeah, and that's
the extent of my gaming. Now I hear two years,
(18:30):
I'll buy the best two games. Although after the last
of us, I don't I mean, I don't see how
you can get any better. It was a very emotionally
impactful game. I mean, right at my stories. Uh so, yeah,
back to the get back to No, I love doing this.
I would just totally continue on that conversation otherwise. But No,
(18:51):
there's only one thing I have to mention, which is
that Atari Corporation released the Atari t T zero three
zero or zero thirty. Never heard of it. It's workstation
three Mega hurts processor workstation. So they were still staying
in the home computer business at that point. Yeah, they're
they're trying to hang in there. Uh. And I don't
have any notes for ninety one, but in yeah, in
(19:12):
ninety two, Atari Corporation would release the Falcon, which would
be the last of its computer systems. The Falcon was
the last time they tried to do a home computer,
and then they made the decision to switch back to
trying to do video game consoles. Again. So that's why
we see the release of the Atari jag Jagua if
(19:34):
you want to go with the British pronunciation jack again,
Atari is doing the right thing there ahead of the curve.
It's the first sixty four bit system. Yeah, so it's
so it is graphically and as far as the processor
goes more powerful than any of the competitors on the
market at that Yeah, and had had a couple of
success successful titles that think the Aliens Predator, that's one
(19:56):
that's considered to be one of the best titles for
that system. Tim This two thousand that was the other one,
was really good, um, but the controller on it was terrible. Yeah.
It was huge and it was unwieldy, um, and didn't
have a lot of software support. Right to the titles
that we just mentioned are pretty much I was like, well,
beyond that, I can't really justify buying this. It says
(20:18):
there were sixty seven games ever released, and I don't
think more than ten of them registered on the radar.
You read over the them and you're just like, well,
I never heard of this there. That's got to be
one of the reasons why this Jaguar never took off. Yeah,
well in the sixty four was just awesome and they
had good games, and then you had the PlayStation coming on,
(20:41):
like when Sony starts really throwing down then it really
this was like a last like a star in the
just reaching for that rope at the end of the rope,
trying to grab ahold of it and Nintendo and Sonny
was just pulling the rope higher. So we haven't talked
about Tory Games for a little bit. That's the that's
the branch that did the Arcade Ursians not and also
(21:02):
produced some home video under home video games under tension. Uh,
Time Warner Communications. Just in case you didn't know, Warner
and Time merged in nine, just a little bit of
a merger. Yeah, Time Warner Communications purchased controlling interest in
Atari Games, so Atari Games would get consolidated with other
properties in nine and become known as Time Warner Interactive.
(21:25):
So Atari Games was part of Time Warner Interactive. But
this means that part of Atari is back with Warner.
Remember Warner was the one that sold it off, So yeah,
Warner had sold it off to Namco. Then employees bought
it back from Namco and then Time Warner Communications buys it,
and it's just this is why it gets really hard
(21:46):
to talk about the end of Atari UM. And in
another confusing thing, uh, JT Storage was a hard disc manufacturer. Yeah,
JT has merges with Atari Corporate Shian So this is
the home computer one, not the Atari games one. So
JTS merges with Atari Corporation. But JTS was in a
(22:07):
tough spot because it was already had a cash flow problem,
and so it was looking for a way to avoid
going into bankruptcy and thought that by acquiring Atari, which
had lots of cash, but not a whole lot of
market share because most of the cash from Attari was
actually coming from lawsuits like they were going after other companies. Yeah,
(22:32):
so they weren't making money off their products as much
as they were off some of the lawsuits. So JTS
comes in, acquires Atari, then fires almost all of the
former Atari employees and liquidates the remaining Atari inventory as
a means of helping stave off this impending disaster, which
(22:53):
it did not do. Two years after that has bro
Interactive UM by JTS for five million bucks. Yeah, essentially
it bought the Atari Corporation from JTS for five million
JTS actually went bankrupt that year. It essentially bought the
Atari name for five million. Yeah, because at that point
there really was nothing left, right because and at this
(23:16):
point in the name, it's like your your drunk uncle
who was he was a big shot in high school.
That's what Atari is at this point. Yeah, it's like
you know, stumbling around in the alley, you know, don't
you know who I am? And around the same time,
to make matters worse. Okay, So that that's Atari Corporation, right,
getting acquired for five million by Hasbro Interactive. Meanwhile, around
(23:37):
that same time, Atari Games was split off from Time
Warner Interactive, so it didn't stay at Time Warner very
long either, like three years it was gone. It splits
off and is purchased by w m S Industries, which
was the parent company or Williams and Bally Midway. Right,
So now we're seeing a consolidation of the big games that,
(24:01):
you know, twenty years earlier have been the defining names
in in arcade entertainments. So they purchase Atari Games. Uh,
And meanwhile you've got Hasbro Interactive that's acquired the Atari Corporation.
So at that point, yeah, that's true, but don't get
(24:22):
ahead of me. So at that point, when when Hasbro
gets hold of Atari Corporation, w MS Industries doesn't want confusion.
You know, they just purchased Atari Games earlier. Yeah. Yeah,
we're already confused. So what they do is they rename
Atari Games. Atari Games gets renamed into Midway Games West.
(24:43):
So now when I talk about Atari Games, I'm actually
talking Midway Games West. Don't worry, we'll come back around
to make things more confusing later. So yeah, so now
we get to two thousand, that's when the dot com
bubble bursts. Poor Atari because through two bubble bursts, right,
the video game bubble and then the dot com bubble.
Man So they probably had were affected by the real
(25:06):
estate bubble in some way too. Probably I was affected
by the dot com bubble. I worked for a human
resources management consulting firm at the time, and most of
our clients were dot com companies. Yeah, suddenly our client
lists got a lot smaller. Yeah, but look where you
are now. Yeah, it was a long road, but I'm
glad I'm here. Uh so Hasbro, because Hasbro Interactive was
(25:29):
hit hard by this dot com verse. Everyone was right,
you mean, you just had this. It was another market
correction that was then devastated a lot of companies and lives.
So Hasbro decides to sell off Hasbro Interactive, including the
intellectual property from Atari Corporation. Remember that's the home computing one.
They sell it to a French company that I always
(25:51):
misspelled because I always think that the name is a typo.
Yeah in in info Games. Yeah, I keep thinking it's
Info Games. It's info gram because it's spelled like info
Games but with an extra are there right after the
ga the French that was in two thousand Yeah, and
uh So Hasbro Interactive becomes info Grams Interactive and in
(26:12):
two thousand three, unless you have anything between two thousand
and two thousand three, thank goodness. So in two thousand three,
Info Grams Interactive is renamed Atari Interactive, and Infograms creates
a subsidiary called Atari Incorporated, which has its own listing
on NASDAC. Yeah, they still saw value in that Atari
(26:32):
name despite the pummeling it took over the years. And
keep in mind that by this point there's nothing left
of the original Atari attached to the Satari name. The
Atari name is a name and an idea, but it's
no longer associated with the original company at all. So
the European branch of Infograms became known as Atari Europe
(26:54):
and Infograms Australia became Atari Australia Infograms the UK became
Atari u K. Yeah, And there were re releases of
some of the classic games. There were some newer games.
One called Alone in the Dark in two thousand and
eight was supposed to be pretty good. I never played it.
Fantastic good. So they had some successes, but again that
(27:15):
was just confusing because they were, you know, a publisher
and a distributor, and they really didn't really know what
they were doing completely with the Atari name. Right. Infogrums
in particular was into this like acquisition mania, like they
were they were buying up properties left and right, Yeah,
which is always a little dangerous, yeah, because it can
lead to a lack of focus, which is exactly what
(27:35):
happened in this case. I mean, obviously hindsight tells us that, right,
we wouldn't necessarily know that otherwise, But it is the
case Midway Games in two thousand three, Midway Games West,
I should say, what used to be Atari Games. Now
Midway Games West disbands, So now Atari Games is just
a name. In fact, there was a holding company that
(27:57):
was still called Midway Games West, but it was just
a whole in company. There was no nothing else to it.
It was not an office, no that secretary, no games
coming out of it, nothing, So it only exists as
a name. Literally. At this point, two thousand four, the
Atari Flashback launches. Now the Flashback is a dedicated console
(28:19):
with games that are hard baked into it, so it
doesn't use cartridges as a selection of games. It looked
like except for some added buttons here and there. Um,
I bought. I don't know who made it, but I bought.
At one point someone was selling the joystick plugs directly
into the Yeah, that had like twenty games or something
on it. Um, and that was I played the heck
out of that thing. Oh yeah, I did too. I
(28:40):
have one of those at home. But I have one
of those at home right next to my TV. So
not trying to brag or anything. I mean, I realized
that almost everyone out there probably has a larger TV,
so please don't mind me feel badly about myself. But
the Flashback did okay, And they came out with different
versions of that thing exactly like the first one, did
not have ver eate and it's so that just did
(29:01):
not fly with me. Yeah, but it's all for the
nostalgia crowd. Yeah. So that came out with models in
two thousand four, two thousand five, two thousand eleven, and
two thousand twelve. Different companies would produce it over the years,
but they were all licensed by Atari. And by Atari
I mean Atari Home Computing, which means uh infograms as
opposed to Midway Games West, which is I know, really
(29:25):
two thousand five. Okay, seriously, has Bro, what the heck
are you doing? Has Bro buys back some intellectual property
from Atari s A, which is the info Grams version,
the home computer version also known as Atari Inc. As
the subsidiary of Atari, say, for sixty five million dollars. See,
(29:46):
that's what's confusing. Yeah, that's crazy that Hasbro got out
of the game and then literally got back into it,
you know for that. Yeah, clearly that dot com bubble
scared everybody, and then once we started seeing recover are
people wanted to get back into it. The ones that
were still around anyway. Now, now At is not your
drunk uncle, it's just the abused, like confused, I don't
(30:09):
even know which which way is up at this point.
This is this is the this is the person who's
just wandering the street and talking about how you know,
the trees are convincing them to buy Dorito's. That's what
this is. That now we're at that point. Yeah. So
in two eight, Infograms offers to buy out Atari Incorporated
shares to make Infograms the sole owner of Atari Incorporated
(30:30):
again because they had listed Atri Incorporated on NASDAC, so
they sold shares to other parties, making it a publicly
traded company. But now they're saying, well, we need to
fix Atari like this, this brand is not doing what
we needed to do. We think that this brand, Yeah,
we think this brand could save us because Infograms as
(30:51):
a whole was having a lot of issues. We want
to be able to rebrand ourselves. But in order to
do that, we first need to get all of Atari
back belonging to us. So they offered to buy it out.
It's accepted, and Infograms reacquires Atari uh completely, so now
it totally belongs to Infograms uh. Atari meanwhile had acquired
(31:12):
another company called Cryptic Studios, which developed a game called
City of Heroes. It's an online multiplayer game where you
create a superhero um and you an original superhero that
you can play. It was one that I always wanted
to get into it, but I never I never had
the time to dedicate to those massive online games and
their monthly subscription base. For well, now they're mostly free
(31:33):
to play, but back then they were all monthly subscriptions,
and you're busy creating your own real life superhero persona.
That's true, but you know that's a that's an alter
ego thing that we need to steer away from. So
two thousand nine, good grief, could this story get more ridiculous?
(31:55):
Warner Brothers Entertainment purchases the Midway intellectual property, including the
name Atari Games. So for the third time, Warner Warner
owns something called Atari. Yeah nuts, three times buying and selling.
I don't know. So meanwhile, Namco Bandai acquires Atari Europe
(32:19):
from Infograms. Infograms itself changes its name to Atari Essay
to create a united company, and it also has the
Atari Group, which is a collection of divisions from around
the world, like Atari Italia, that kind of thing. Um
that still have the Atari brand name. Here's a name
we haven't heard for a while. Bushnell. He comes back.
(32:42):
He actually because of an acquisition ends up on the
board of directors for Atari, so Atari Incorporated specifically, so
they brought him back for that very reason, right to
sort of get some attention again, I imagine. So yeah,
because this is again one of those things where you've
got the name but otherwise there's no connection. But now
(33:06):
you've got the guy who founded the company. So that's
big news. And it definitely did get a lot of
people writing about it at the time, although if you
look at two now you realize not a whole lot
has will remind you of the old golden age of
Atari um So. In eleven, Atari Incorporated sells off Cryptic Studios,
(33:30):
the one that they had bought the City Heroes one.
And in ten Atari Incorporated files for bankruptcy January. Oh
so remember this is the This was formally Infograms Atari
Incorporated was formerly part of Infograms, now part of Ataria. Say.
Atari Incorporated files from bankruptcy partly to escape the debt
(33:51):
accrued by its parent company h and In. In an
effort to pay off the debt, they attempt to sell
off the portfolio of more than two video games, but
they received fifteen preliminary bids and none of them approach
the price that Atari was hoping for, so they don't
accept any of them. Instead, they decide they'll sell bits
(34:13):
and pieces off rather than rather than sell everything off
at a price too low, They're going to sell bits
and pieces off and try and get themselves through it.
And it works. I mean they sell some stuff, not everything,
but they sell some stuff, and then by the end
often they emerged from bankruptcy December. So like the entire
year of Ati Incorporated is in bankruptcy, the saddest year.
(34:36):
Maybe it's hard, I mean, there's a lot of competition
for that time that titleen Finally last year, that's when
we have the documentary that we talked about previously, the
one that went out to the desert to dig up
to find out if et really was beneath it the cartridge,
not the character, and that kind of resurrected a little
bit of interest in Attari again. Yeah. Yeah, there was
(34:56):
a lot of talk about there were a lot of
people wondering whether or not they were actually gonna find
to anything, if they would just find scraps as opposed
to entire cartridges, And as we mentioned in the previous episode,
they did find cartridges. So Um. Yeah. The whole story
behind that is they manufactured four million cartridges. They were
unable to move three and a half million of those.
(35:18):
Man So they had only a couple of choices. Do
you store this and hope that you can one day
sell it, because keep in mind, storing stuff costs money, right,
you can't. It's not like there's just a magical space
like that. It's gonna occupy space that you would otherwise
use for something else. Or do you call it a
loss and throw it away? And they chose option number two.
(35:40):
And so what's amazing to me about the whole et
debacle is that, um, word got it. I mean this
is pre Internet and word still got around that fast.
From Johnny telling his neighbor Billy how bad it sucked,
and Billy telling his neighbors there wasn't copies. There was
no like kataku for him or something for people to
say like this is still in cul the sex Yeah,
(36:03):
and then and then scoffing over bargain bins at your
local toy store. Um. And so what's going on with
a Try now, Well, it's focusing on developing games for
social platforms like Facebook and for mobile devices primarily, although
they're looking at some other stuff as well. Right. Yeah,
a former employee name Fred Uh, I don't know how
(36:24):
to pronounce that. C H E s in a I S.
I believe is one of the French fellows from info Grams.
Perhaps perhaps he's now the CEO. And he said that
he is going to try and be relevant in the
PC world again with a few different things. Uh, notably gambling. Yeah,
real casino gambling and just for fun casino gambling. So
(36:46):
I think this would be like if you walked into
a casino, you know how you see all those licensed
slot machines like Lord of the Rings. That one, by
the way, treats me really well. So I love the
Lord of the Ring slot machine, but I can see
like the Centipe slot machine, and then some of the game.
They're gonna do both. They're gonna have a licensing program
and they're gonna have an actual online casino social casino
(37:08):
with virtual money, and so the gambling thing and licensing
and games. They said, the flashback they're gonna keep around. Uh.
They have one idea for they're going to create some
new I p s. One is for the LGBT community
called pride Fest, and um, he said, they're developing a
new Asteroids game that is a PC game where you
(37:30):
will actually be surviving on the asteroid itself. So turn
things around a little bit. They're trying, Um he thinks
that they can capitalize on that Atari name and get
it back to relevance again. But I don't know. Yeah,
so you know, it's whether or not we see anything
(37:53):
coming out of this division. Also, keep in mind the
the Atari games that was purchased by Warner Brothers Entertainment. Know,
the story is not necessarily over for Atari, although you
could argue that as far as the original company is concerned,
that story has been over since the eighties. So uh,
it's an interesting and and sometimes upsetting story, the rise
(38:15):
and fall of the of Atari and it all. Yeah,
and and there's people I remember reading things like could
the video game crash happen again? And if you look,
there is a large number of different providers that are
all trying to clamor for attention. Now, when we think
of consoles, we think Nintendo, Sony an Xbox. Some people
(38:36):
would say just Sony an Xbox. They don't even think
of Nintendo. Um, but then we have the mobile game market,
we have computers, PC gaming is hitting a resurgence. So uh,
and then there are people like me who hold back
from buying current generation consoles because we don't necessarily see
the value in them or the reason to upgrade, or
(38:56):
I was given one by my father in law. Yeah.
The ending by one, we get to that point where
we think, you know, it's it is possible. You can't
never say that you're too big to fail. Yeah, that's
a rookie massake Kip, Pride comes before the fall. That
that's true. So we have completed the story of Attari.
But now we've got a little time to talk about
(39:16):
some personal reflections beyond the stuff that we've talked about
in the previous episodes. So, Chuck, what are some of
your fond memories of Atari in general? Uh? Well, buying
pac Man on Christmas Day? You know it's stunk. The
buying was great. Yeah, and actually, man, I actually enjoyed
(39:36):
playing it as um a twelve year old. Um. I
didn't realize how bad it's stunk at the time because
it was pac Man in my house. Um. And you know,
as a little kid, you're not like, oh, this doesn't
look just like it and sound just like it. I
think older kids probably were a little more like that,
but um, I was young enough to where I enjoyed
(39:57):
it adventure. Like we talked about man um the imagination
playing adventure well, the fact that they incorporated things like
the bat mechanic, which meant that you could never expect
the same gameplay experience two times in a row, which
was pretty interesting. Like a lot of these games, like
the early games, it involved memorizing patterns, and if you
(40:20):
memorize the pattern, you could play definitely, but that didn't
work for games that actually would uh introduce some sort
of element that could at least be perceived as random. Yeah,
River Raid fantastic, huge game to me, that holds up
still today. Yeah, it's a good game. I think out
of all the shooter games. That's like by shooter, I
(40:42):
mean like you're controlling a ship that's moving around and
shooting things. In this case, it's a it's a jet,
it's flying over a river. Uh, that one. I didn't
own River Raid, but a friend of mine from down
the street owned it, and I would go over to
his house all the time to play it because it
was the one title on Atari that I really did
but did not have. Well, actually, No, there were two
(41:02):
river Raiate and Pitfall. I never owned either of those,
but I played the heck out of them. I think
river Raid was the first top scroll game. Yeah. Uh,
Pitfall was huge and that kind of introduced the platforming
genre of video games. Yeah, and Warlords. Uh man. I
(41:23):
had a ton of Oh, Frogger. I mean, I know
that was sort of a kids game, but I still
like Frogger. It's still challenging. I liked Frogger as well.
I remember I had some games that I wish had
been better, Like I had Donkey Kong Jr. That really
was it didn't measure up nearly as well to the
arcade version. I had Popeye, which also didn't measure up
(41:46):
very well to the arcade version. Um, but I mean
it was. It was like I had a lot of
those those games licensed games and stuff as well. Uh yeah.
I I also have really fond memories of arcades, Like, oh, dude,
you know, there were there were times where I would
just go to the arcade to um, you know, spend
(42:08):
a dollar or whatever, and you know, you always try
and find the game that you figure you're gonna get
the most value for your money. Like I can play
this one for a long time. I'm going to play
this one. Um. And luckily there were also a lot
of them made by Atari that were really fun. I mean,
Star Wars is still like I love the Star Wars
trilogy game that came out that was modeled after closer
(42:30):
after the movies, like with better graphics and everything. But
there's still a place in my heart for that vector
graphics Star Wars game. And I wasn't kidding when I
said that I would actually consider purchasing one of those
because that was, um such an such a fond memory.
Like the two Arcade games I went back to over
and over, We're We're Star Wars and Spy Hunter. Um No,
(42:54):
Spy Hunter was not an Atari game, but oddly enough,
I think Spy Hunter two ended up being distributed under Ratari,
even though Atari had nothing to do with the original
Spy Hunter. But that just shows another way that the
Stari story makes no sense when you look at the
whole thing. Yeah, and you know, I hate to sound
like the old guy, but um, I'm really thankful that
(43:16):
we grew up in that generation. There was something really
special about seeing something invented for us, uh, right in
front of our very eyes created out of nowhere, like
we talked about in I think episode two, when there
were three TV stations or you know, five or six
TV stations and crappy handheld games and it was just
(43:38):
it blew my mind. And I spent a lot of
time in the arcade, and the games today are amazing,
but the mind blow isn't there like it was back then,
because it's all building on what happened before it, and
this was building on out of thin air. And it also,
I mean, it was an era where a single person
could develop a game from beginning to finish. You know,
(43:59):
now we have companies that have entire divisions dedicated to that.
It was also an era where people were making weird games,
like weird games that could be a lot of fun
but had nothing to do with it. Like you look
at yours Revenge, I dare you to tell me what
that's supposed to be. It is bizarre, but it's awesome,
and there are a lot of really fun games. Yeah, huge,
(44:22):
huge risks right both in the arcade and in the
home video game market, just people saying let's create some
a fun experience. It doesn't matter if it quote unquote
makes sense or whatever. These days, you look at video
games and a lot of the companies tend to get
hung up on creating franchises. They want they want to
create a title that they can make essentially clones of
(44:45):
with modifications. Yeah, and then that way they have built
in a built an audience they've got. All right, these
are the people who are Call of Duty players. So
let's put out a Call of Duty game every single year.
They'll buy it. We we we know they'll buy it because
they are Called of Duty fans, as opposed to saying
what kind of cool experience can we create, which is
(45:08):
sort of given rise to the independent developer community. So
in a way, those early Atari days are very similar
to what we see with the independent game community these days, except,
of course, the independent game developers are are not, as
you know, not as organized in a sense, they're nonder
an umbrella like Atari was. But other than that, they're
(45:29):
they're operating in a very similar way. You look at
those early days of Attari, it really did sound a
lot like what an Internet startups sounds like today. Yeah,
you were defining what you did and so there weren't
rules because no one had done it before. Yeah, we're
talking earlier so man needs to get on that Atari movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
(45:51):
We talked about the possibility of you know, someone needs
to do a documentary about this, like take this idea
of the rise and Fall, the three episodes that we
have done, um, and really look into it and make
it a film to document what happened and explain the
processes and uh, because it does get so so convoluted
(46:13):
and complex towards the end of its existence. And of
course we could argue that by that time, it's you know,
it's saying the name Atari is meaningless because again it's
just a word at that point, um, which is sad. It.
It did have such an important part in my childhood.
I mean, I I played so much both in the
arcade and blister my hand. Oh yeah, oh no, yeah,
(46:36):
you would get like I remember because by the way
I would hold the joystick, um in the in between
my thumb and forefinger, where I would I would grip
the thumb stick, I would have a blister right there,
and um. Yeah. It also was one of those things
that would frustrate me because I'm a left hander, and
so I I ended up Yeah, I coped well enough,
(47:02):
but yeah, it was a little if I guess it
kind of helped with my precision of my right hand.
Otherwise I probably would just be flailing around the office
on fire all the time. So I thank Atari for
that as well. Yeah, but yeah, it's funny because I
never owned you know, when the Atari crap video game
crash happened. Atari was the only video game console I
owned at the time of video game consoles being being built. Right,
(47:27):
So I got in television, but that was after in
television had was no longer a thing that was. That
was a hand me down. I didn't get a Nintendo.
I never had roommate had one, so I didn't buy
one of those. You see. I what I did was
I transitioned over to computers, and I got I became
one of those snooty computer gamers because the games on
(47:48):
computers were deeper, more sophisticated. They didn't have the arcady
kind of graphics that dedicated video game consoles could have,
but they did have a richer game experience in my mind,
and so I became a computer gamer. Now it's funny
because now I'm a console gamer again, although I'm now
transitioning back the computer gamer, and that's because of services
(48:09):
like Steam, which allowed me to buy games and have
them download directly to my computer, and I don't have
to go to a store. I don't have to buy
a box. I get the game delivered straight to my
computer and I can play it off of there. So
it's funny because I keep going back and forth. I
went console to PC two console. In fact, I was
consoled for a long time with the uh In sixty four, GameCube,
(48:32):
the PS two, the PS three, the Xbox, the Xbox
three sixty I have all of those and the Dreamcast.
I've got a Dreamcast too. I'm thinking back now, I've
never bought a console. You've only been given was Christmas.
My college roommate had the first Nintendo, had the Super Nintendo.
(48:53):
Another college roommate had the sixty four. My friend in
l A had the Xbox. Who lived next door to
men who bought me the or gave me the three.
Not all of us can walk outside and expect consoles
to rain down from the heaven. Never bought one. Just
occurred to me, to be fair, some of those word
gifts to me. Actually, the Dreamcast was given to me
(49:14):
after Dreamcast had already folded and uh my wife bought
it like a used Dreamcast and then we just got
like a folder full of games that that came out
for it. By the way, I should do a full
episode just on the Dreamcast some point, because that was
also an amazing system, uh that died unnecessarily like it
(49:35):
it was. It was kind of like the Jaguar and
that it came out and it was clearly superior to
it's it's uh competitors in space, but because of bad
timing and a bad library early on, it never took off,
at least not to a point that could sustain a company.
Um So, Yeah, a lot of warning messages in this
(49:57):
in this series too, But Chuck, I gotta thank you
for joining me on this. This was so much fun.
Who knew it was going to be an epic three
part started out? Yeah, thanks for having men. Thank you.
We've been in this studio for nearly three hours a
little bit. Yeah, it turns out dude soup in this uh,
(50:18):
because we we've got first of all, I think at
six pm they turn off the air conditioning system because
I'm reading it and says off on it, and yeah,
there's just three of us in this tiny little room.
But thank you for joining me. Remember you can find
Chuck's stuff over at stuff You should know a phenomenal show.
If you have not subscribed to that, well join the
(50:40):
rest of the human race. Come on, you gotta check
it out. Josh and Chuck are phenomenal. They break down
topics in a way that's accessible and funny and informative.
Check it out. Thank you, my friend. You are welcome.
And if you have any questions, comments, you've got a
suggestion for a future episode, write me. My address is
tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. Drop me
(51:00):
a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler. The handle at
all three is tech Stuff h s W and we'll
talk to you again. Releason for more on this and
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