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Atari's 30th Anniversary
Atarian writes "Atari was officially incorporated 30 years ago. While many thought Atari started the video game business, that was not correct, it was Magnavox and its Odyssey console designed by Ralph Baer that would be the first. Atari would be the company that would put videogames on the map right from the start back in 1972 with the release of PONG, its coin-op arcade machine first setup in Andy Capps Bar in California, the game was a smash hit and people begin lining up first thing in the morning at Andy Capps just to get inside and play games on this magic box with a TV inside. Atari would then release its VCS (Video Computer System aka The Atari 2600) and launch Atari from its meager $500 starter capital beginnings into a $2 billion dollars in sales monster in 1982. Atari would later fall to the wayside to be replaced by Nintendo, then Sega, and othes that followed. Atari is still around in a small way, and still keeping the name and spirit alive to this very day, 30 years later. 'Have you played Atari today?'"
The Atari logo is on the Neverwinter Nights box. Feaky eh?
Oh yeah.
Pitfall.
Word.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
sPh
I have an original 2600, but it seems to have degraded or something over time. I can't get it to work anymore. Is there a place that can fix an old Atari?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Or is everyone here a snot-nosed kid with Linux for brains? :)
Why yes, yes i have... its on each Neverwinter disk, as well as the first screen you seen when you hit "play".
;)
I am not sure their offical role in the developmental process, however, but I did play Atari today!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Yes, it was one of the best consoles of all time. I remember playing all the great classics. Such a great time, crowding infront of the TV now and playing with a cold beer in hand.. Brings back a lot of sweet memories.. It will live in many hearts forever.
Tramiel, IMHO, was the killer of Atari. He still owes a cousin $10K for a book on programming the atari computers.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The Atari logo is also in Blade runner.
Maybe Ridley Scott should get Lucas to go in and replace it with an sony logo.
i remember when i got a 2600. My dad and I played combat ( the one cardridge had like 20 games ) for hours. Every now and then I'll see some freshman with an Atari shirt and it always makes me smile. Rock on Atari!
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Jaguar had such potential and like previous Atari systems it was ahead of its time. Unfortunately the developer support just wasn't there. I owned a system and I don't think I can even recall the names of 5 games available for it. Maybe one day they'll make their return as a console maker. For now though they've gone the way of Sega and produce/publish games. Not only for consoles but for PC.
At it's time atari was way ahead from anybody else. Too bad Atari brazilian cartridges where low quality and none of the ones I own survived until today, but I can download the roms and play it with stella on linux. Note: downloading roms if you own the original games is legal. (Even that they're broke I still own them)
Combat was the shit! there was something special about being able to play 27 different versions of the same game... all on one low capacity cartridge no less.
--cheers
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
The golden age of 8-bit computers. What can you say? Not only was Atari the foremost console manufacturer at one point, but they produced a decent home computer. I still have my 800XL and run M.U.L.E. on it occasionally when I need a fix. Or 7 Cities of Gold.
Nothing like nostalgia to remind oneself of one's age.
...to wear that Atari shirt with pride! Happy anniversary Atari!
My atari st was by far my favourite computer. It was my first and it seemed every week or so I would discover something new to do with it. The graphics on the games were better than most PC games until the 486 generation, and the sound is still amazing. I remember gleaming with pride at how much better all of the sierra quest games looked on my ST than the PC screenshots on the box.
I sat for HOURS mesmerized by Space Invaders.
I remember lining up outside a store when Pac-Man was released for the 2600, then running like hell when the doors opened to snatch a copy out of the box. Those were the days, my friends...
If you're in Vegas August 10th or 11th, stop by and meet some of the people who made it happen: cgexpo.
Now tell me... was there a game that ever had as many game play options as the classic Combat? There were DOZENS of them... planes, tanks, mazes, visible, invisible, bouncing rounds, rapid fire, etc. etc. etc.
I can still remember my little sister and I playing this for HOURS. Good times...
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
Everyone rejoices the 30th birthday of Atari, home to such great games as Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em! and E. T. - the Extra Terrestrial.
Thank god I still have my 7800 in working condition....
Every now and then one of the freshman wandering around campus will have an Atari shirt on. hehe, I wonder if they have ever seen an old 2600 in real life. The combat game with the ricochet invisible tanks was my fav.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
It put a huge smile on my face to see the Atari logo upon starting Neverwinter Nights. What part did they have in the production of the game?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Show of hands: How many Slashdotters remember seeing that first Pong game? I would have guessed it closer to 1975, but such is my fading memory. I read that Nolan Bushnell installed the first quarter-operated Pong machine in a Bay Area pizza restaurant, and the next day the owners called to complain that it was broken. He went to check it, and found that the reason it wouldn't work was that the coin box was absolutely stuffed full.
You young sprats today can't appreciate what a weird feeling it was to twist a knob and see, up on the black-and-white TV screen, something responding to the motion. It was one of those "everything has changed" moments.
Oh well. Time to order some Geritol.
I'll never forget how I spent endless hours playing Pac Man, Asteroids, Defender, Tron, or about a zillion other games on the VCS. It is ALL about Atari.
Nintendo, Sega, the 3D0, the Playstation (or PS2) all suck in comparison to the stalwart Atari game console. Now I'm in the mood to sit on my driveway in a lawn chair, enjoy a Negra Modelo, and reminisce about the good ol' days. Oooooooh well.
They were also light years ahead of the times with their computer lines as well.
Its too bad the tramiel brohters were morons and let the company die. Mostly due to no foresight and inablity to understand marketing.
Plus the illegal marketing acts of Nitendo helped nail the coffin tight.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No.
What no one remembers -- probably because they were too busy playing Pong or something else on their 2600 -- was that Atari made computers, too. My father bought an Atari 130XE back in the *day*. It was a great little box, comparable to the Commodore 64 (remember those?), although with 128K of RAM and a 300 baud modem. The greatest part was that it was primarily geared towards gaming. It wasn't one of these modern behemoths with a fancy video card and all that; the guts of it were those of a video game console. It was programmable in BASIC and the memory had massive constructs for tracking collisions and all sorts of things. It was like a mod chip on your desktop.
Ah, the good old days!
...you can build your own Atari 2600 from off-the-shelf parts (IIRC, you can get most of them from Digikey and similar places)!
Several people are also working on making portable Ataris (and other systems):
http://www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/ - this guy portable-izes lots of systems...
http://www.classicgaming.com/2600ce/ - and this guy is working (slowly) on making a 2600 compatible device that could be mass-produced.
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
Do Do Do Do Fa Mi - Re Do
:)
The tune came back INSTANTLY as soon as I saw the words in the story. (sniffle)
Commodore had Bach's Two-Part Invention. Was there a tune associated with Apple II's advertising? (the Lemonade Stand song doesn't count
Atari is one of the developers working on Test Drive, Unreal Tournament 2003, VRally3, Godzilla, Terminator, Splashdown, Transworld Surf, MX Rider, Neverwinter Nights, and Stuntman.
can be found at Warren Robinett's Adventure here. Arguably the coolest Atari game of all time, it was one of the first games with an easter egg, and a "Zelda" type interface. Dragons, castles, goblets, and a bat, and it all fit in 4K of memory. The most telling thing about this, they paid him $22,000 a year, and they sold 1 million copies of the game, at $20 a pop.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I went to Atari Computer Camp in the early 1980s. Anyone else?
I used to have an old 400 with the tape drive... The tapes never did manage to load properly, but that never really dampened my then-5yr-old enthusiasm for video games... Eventually, the joysticks got to where you couldn't move down in a game, but that didn't stop me, either ("Why would you wanna climb down ladders in Donkey Kong?"). God, I miss that machine...
Anyhow, I managed to pick up a 2600 with 8 games a couple of weeks ago for $10, so I guess a few games of Death Star Assault would be in order for a proper observance, I guess...
---- Registered voter of the guilty party ("It's Our Fault!")
The Atari logo is also in Blade runner. Maybe Ridley Scott should get Lucas to go in and replace it with an sony logo.
Interestingly enough, most of the companies that were featured in the futuristic world of Blade Runner have since gone bankrupt. So many, in fact, that this observation has been dubbed The Blade Runner Curse
GMD
watch this
I had an Atari ST (first series) with :
There were 1, 2 and 4Mb versions as well - studios all had at least 1Mb of RAM because Cubase wouldn't run in 512Kb (except the cracked versions).
Loads of great games were out for it, and some good cracking crews with much less of the pretension of the new WareZ k1dd1ez... they had to snail mail disks amongst themselves pretty much...
I learned a lot of my trade on that Atari ST. It was a 16 bit architecture, ahead of its time for its price, and trained my hands on a mouse, touch typing, and of course coding in STOS Basic and later 68000 assembler (remember devpac, anyone)?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The computer was a hand me down from my uncle,
who got himself a shiny new IBM PC.
He gave me the computer, along with a bunch of game cartridges and a tape drive, an atari basic cartridge and a couple of books about Atari basic.
The first line of code I ever typed
were in Atari Basic, it went something like this:
10 PRINT "HEFFEL";
20 GOTO 10
RUN
Expert Java EE Consulting
Like I just said... wow, just like Wil Wheaton. :)
Damn! I can remember ATARI! In 1984 I was a 10 years old kid who played TUTANKHAMON with his brother on Atari 2600 all nights long :) Then in 1985 I got a computer and now I am a self proclaimed guru. It all started with Atari. Memories, memories...
Is a sad sad little console.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
I remember all I had was a ColecoVision. Good games on that, but I was jealous of all the other kids who had Ataris. I was so thrilled when they finally came out with a cheap plug-in module to play Atari games on the Coleco console. I begged and begged until my parents finally gave in and bought it!
Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Tennis I believe were the first 3 games we had, and I spent many a sick day home from school playing all of them until my hands were sore.
Happy Anniversary, Atari, you really did make growing up even more enjoyable.
its actually my girlfriends collection (and site), but she is a videogame history buff, so theres lots of info here too.
its gunna /. quick so watch out.
I want 2D games back.
On holiday (in Playa del Ingles, Grand Canary, in the Canary Islands recently) I spotted two fully boxed Atari 2600 systems for sale for 15 Euros (~ GBP10/15USD) each. Also on sale were at least four clone systems at 10 Euros a pop.
I was tempted to buy one - £10 for a piece of history! - but decided not to as I'm sure the one that I had as a kid is lying in the loft right now just aching to be brought down again.
So, if you want an Atari 2600, and a holiday in the sun to boot, visit Playa. The store concerned is a TV, video and music outlet one the first floor of the "Jumbo Centre" shopping precinct.
Enjoy.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Reissues of arcade classics (centipede, tempest, asteroids) for my PC.
Screw the reissues. Just download MAME and you get to play the EXACT SAME game you remember as a child.
I always thought a very underrated Atari game was Warlords which was kind of a 4-person cut-throat version of Breakout. You had to defend your "castle" against a bouncing ball and use it to destroy the castles of your 3 opponents. Cool game.
GMD
watch this
A friend of mine who worked as a manager in Atari during the biggest revenue period said that the Warner Brothers entry to Atari resulted in a peculiar culture running the show and turning the upper stories of the organization into the biggest party he'd ever seen. Lear Jets, coke and lots of perks. The jokes about "knee-pads" were supplanted with folk lore about how notice of promotion was handed out during that period: You look up at the underside the of the desk while servicing your superior to see the words: "You've been promoted."
Seastead this.
I just found my two atari 2600 systems in my closet, still work fine...
A lot of musicians still have Atari ST computers in their studios. Thom Yorke (of Radiohead) often wears a t-shirt with an Atari logo on stage. And recently Infogrames bought Atari, so we'll probably be seeing a lot of games released under the Atari brand (Neverwinter Nights being the first of those).
RMN
~~~
... supported Atari. Don't believe me? Look here: Solaris for the Atari 2600
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Want the Atari 2600? How about that and everything else made since then? I stumbled across this auction. Holy cow.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Combat was the shit! there was something special about being able to play 27 different versions of the same game... all on one low capacity cartridge no less.
Those old videogames will always have a place in my heart because they were challenging and simple (not to be confused with "easy") at the same time. Today's modern games do not interest me at all. I work hard all day long and when I come home I don't want to read some kind of manual to learn how to play a game. And screw thinking! I just want to lean back in my easy chair and blow up some aliens or eat some power pills.
Combat is a prime example of the beauty of simplicity. Each of those games was pretty straightfoward. It's immediately obvious what you're supposed to do. And if you get bored with game #17 on the cartridge, just click over to another variation. Combat could keep you entertained for months. And it probably took almost no time to code up. I don't understand why today's games don't make an effort to return to maddeningly addictive, simple games (like Tetris). Wouldn't churning out games like this be more profitable then spending months rendering some photorealistic first-person dungeon shoot-em-up?
or am i just showing my age?...
GMD
watch this
I can play old mame games, and NES roms, and have a good time, but the 2600 is too primitive to enjoy in our modern nvidia-soaked world.
I still think the Pitfall II music was really cool, though ;)
Do you remember this one? It really got me going. I loved this game. Even my then
wife-to-be thought it was hoot. Check out Custer's Revenge.
Then about a year after that, everybody was saying it. I was just talking to this girl at a head shop a couple weeks back, and we were talking about the orgins of 420. Now I'll have to go tell her...Thanks man!
Till this day I still use my Atari 800XL, with SpartDosX and a Linux box acting as a file server.
Thank you Atari for getting me into Basic, Action!, and MAC/65!
If it wasn't for you I wouldn't be where I am today.
Mod the above post down!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
not fore sale though.
I want 2D games back.
Atari lost its greatest talent to a small company called Amiga. Their loss (after a fight that COmmodore settled by buying the small company outright) came back later and bit them on the ass.
Commodore wiped the floor with Atari, just before they got crooked out themselves. If Commodore and Atari hadn't had such a fight, it's entirely possible that the Microsoft monopoly wouldn't have happened.
In short, Atari's only real contribution was in the gaming console. Otherwise, their 68k-based machines were worthless without the custom chips that came in their competitor's 68k-based machine (you know, the Denise, Agnus, Paula, et al).
Forget Atari, they're just a dead dinosaur.
Anyone remember the first RPG/Adventure game ever created?
;)
No, it wasn't Dragon Warrior.
This game was also the first game to have an Easter Egg, as placing a certain object in a certain place would cause the programmer's name to pop up.
So, who still remembers where the secret room in the red castle is and thinks they can find their way through the maze on the first try?
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
Cubase on the Atari ST is a great tool. Still got my TT030, which is basically a beefed up ST. Best part about the TT030 is a it can drive a 1280x960 monochrome display. Excellent for editing in Cubase, back when viewing multiple windows simultaneously was a Big Thing. Except lots of compatibility went out the door with the TT-- Notator, for example, doesn't work. Along with most of the ST games. Still got my VCS 2600 for the cartridge games though. Now if only I could find some joysticks & paddles...
I still own an Atari LYNX. This handheld system was far more powerful and innovative than nintendo and gameboy systems at the time. The games for i are great. I still like to play blue thunder, road blasters and of course Klax.
My first computer: an Odessy 2000. It had these little paddles with round dials we used for pong and kicked so much butt.
:(
In addition, it was the first (only?) console to have a baseless mecury joystick for games like Space Rescue. This joystick decided the direction you wanted to go by where you pointed it. It was accurate as hell for that old box too. Only problem was that if you got tired you could just rest the joystick on anything...
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Check it out.
I think Yar's Revenge was the best game ever for the 2600. It was hypnotic and soothing, but still tense and involving.... a very simple design, but A LOT of fun. Basically you had to nibble away (literally... you looked like a mutant bee) at the shields of the enemy, um, fortress or something.... and eventually had to shoot the glowing thing in the center. Later on, your little shots wouldn't hurt it anymore, and you had to somehow trick the enemy fireballs into bouncing back, or something like that. I'm not entirely sure. It has been waaaay too many years since I've seen it.
... and that one is, what, two years old? Long time.
Another one we spent tons of time on was Maze Craze. I bet we spent several hundred hours on that one game. Don't know why it was so addictive, but I think that was my first ever case of serious game-lock. Didn't have any idea what that was at the time, of course. I can still kinda hear the funny crunching noise it made when the enemies touched you and you died.
Games nowadays are unbelievably good in comparison, but I don't enjoy them as much.... maybe I'm just getting old. I still buy them, but don't really care for most of them anymore. Counterstrike was the last Truly Great game I've played.
A cartridge based home game system that predated the Atari 2600? Hint: It was made by a company that's still around and was founded by one of the inventors of the integrated circuit.
They've got some creative people behind the brand name still.
Guantlet and Guantlet Legends have the ATARI logo.
Are you referring to the Magnet-box Oddity One?
That company should be a study in how NOT to run a business, 10 yrs growth to build a brand name up there with Coke, then 10 years steady decline to oblivion. Bushnell cashed out just a little too early, Warner couldn't manage it, then Jack Traimel made a valient attempt, and eventually got the Swordquest prize over his fireplace.
Anyway, I was happy to find a 1979 Sears 'wishbook' with the Atari 400 in it. Also, the way to run a classic Atari 800(XL) system today is use the APE (Atari Peripheral Emulator), run it to your PC serial port, then you can mount disks from a PC and have tons of Atari software (my entire collection fits on a CD) at your fingertips. It also daisy chains with a normal 850/1050 fdd if you need to get data on/off 5.25" floppies.
Personal faves: Blue Max, Kennedy Approach, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Hey, I played THAT game... it was certainly one of my favorites.
:-)
I can't remember any other party game that was as much fun... even playing alone.
Ok... back to Super Monkey Ball
Gerry -- #include "ea!.h"
According to this, the home version came out in the fall of '74.
http://www.geekcomix.com/vgh/first/atpong.shtml
(picture and screenshot within)
You know... that !$@$#% annoying game where you were a little spaceship and you had to fly over the pattern of dots on the screen in a certain number of seconds to advance to the next board... which had more dots in a nastier pattern with less time, etc...
I think I went through about 10 controllers just on that game, I had a bad habit back then of throwing them around the room when I didn't finish a board. That has got to be one of the hardest games I ever played. I have ninjalike reflexes for my age and I give sole credit to that game for them.
Other favorites... damn...
River Rage
Yar's Revenge
Dig Dug ($30 for a game was a lot back then!!)
Adventure
Berserk (guilty pleasure I know)
Pitfall
Tron
Anyone know how many carts were published for the 2600/7800 series of Atari Games?
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
just put NWN play cd in the Atari CD-ROM drive, it plays great! 2-bit color, 50x40 resolution. I mean the cdrom drive had a whole 8k of ram at half speed!
Best video game ever. 3D world... role playing game... spent hours on end playing that game.
Hackers are still going to great lengths, sometimes encountering Dissapointing results, just to get their PONG fix.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Considering the rough ride Atari has had in recent years, I was quite surprised when I got my copy of Neverwinter Nights last week and discovered that one of the prominant company names on the front (and in the opening credits) was... Atari!
I wish them well, as without the venerable Atari 2600, I might have never wandered down the home computer path, and then I'd have to find something ELSE to blame my lack of a life on.
Anyone else remember and love two great old Atari 400/800 games: Drelbs and Necromancer? Quite original at the time; I don't think anything like them has been done since.
(Drelbs was a maze-runner, and Necromancer was the one where you grew trees)
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
From my resume. I worked there briefly in late 1982.
While it was a very comfortable place to work... one could already see the place had no future. In high-tech, complacence = death. I'm surprised the place lasted as long as it did.
The place had a very nice large hot tub and good food in the company cafeteria.
I take a certain amount of perverse pride in the fact that I was really there. The people who romanticize the place obviously weren't.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Atari = Lame graphics, lotsa games. Coleco = Better graphics, not as many games. But. Zaxxon and Smurfs. And don't tell me you never tried to find the topless Smurfette easter egg. :)
And I'm STILL waiting for Tunnels and Trolls to be released for the Colecovision.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
The Controller was ludraciously complex, and yes the development support wasn't there -- but those are key ingredients of making a successful system. I have a terrific article from an old computing magazine talking about the failure of Halcyon, Phillips 3do, and other vintage "before-their-time" systems.
Also, let's not forgot the Atari handheld "Lynx" system. Some of the ports were pretty terrible, but the four player support preceeded GBA by awhile, eh??
I played my Atari 2600 three days ago. Atari 2600 emulation was the first emulation I ever followed, mainly because it took so long to get it working! Indeed.
indeed..
After reading some of the posts I pulled out my Grand Pa's 2600 from the attic and played some combat and basketball. I gotta say the graphics are terrible, and I can get better sound from the internal speaker on my pc. I think the ps2 is way better!
Hello Cruel World
Holy crap! Awesome!- and I thought I was totally pathological
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Nintendo has been around for More than a a century
"In short, Atari's only real contribution was in the gaming console"
You forgot the Atari 400/800 etc line. Roughly the equal of the Commodore 64, and far superior to the Apple ][ line of the era as well.
Atari is before woc logo. Just got the linux server running. Life is good
I remembered that, back in 1903 going into one of those Yokohama arcades.
We'd be standing around sipping Coke (which had coke in it back then) and playing those old games that ran on mechanical devices with a 1-bit CPU.
Each game was the size of a barn, and instead of a sound chip there was a sort of 10-member choir in the balcony.
The modern videogames just don't match the thrill of pulling levers to let the barrels roll and watching the guy dressed like a plumber try to jump and avoid them in a basketball-court sized arena in that first "Barrel Kong" game.
The "Zelda Gannon Capture" game they had running in Tokyo had as many costumes as a Wagner opera.
It cost 3 yen.
Here's an idea of companies to be included in an edited version of Blade Runner that could use it...
Starbucks
Walmart
AOL/Time Warner
Microsoft
Disney
Anyone I'm missing?
Happy people make bad consumers.
Anyone know where you can get atari t-shirts these days? Side note: Isn't atari the equivilent of "check" in the game japanese board game "go". ?
I believe NwN is an Atari game. Am I mistaken? Atari doesn't do so much hardware anymore, but they still have a hand in many popular games.
This is a really interesting hack. An Atari 2600 portable; to bad they didn't think of it years ago.http://www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/ First post!!!
Hmmm...the seller must be getting married.
A good reason to hate the Atari t-shirt craze:- :-/
Wear one of these (as a genuine Atari fan), and you're going to be taken for a freshman wearing the latest flavor-of-the-month corporate branding exercise (superficial tech nostalgia); or some ageing I'm-still-with-it-I-bought-Moby's-latest-album type if you're obviously too old to be a freshman
It'll be worse in (say) two years time; you'll look like one of the above types with a fashion sense that's two years out of date.
Perhaps you'll get away with it in 10 years time. If you're lucky. But watch out; the t-shirt craze nostalgia itself kicks in around 2017.
Of course, you could wear a t-shirt with one of the original Atari logos (i.e. the S/A logo, or the Go board). Unfortunately, both those suck.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
As far as arcade games go, Atari has always produced my favorites.
From the vector classics such as Tempest and BattleZone (dating myself), to Hard Drivin'/Race Drivin' (the first great driving simulators, IMO), Steel Talons (helicopter simulator), STUN Runner (I *so* want a Shockwave on the freeway sometimes), and the Rush series (San Franciso Rush, Rush 2049)... all have had fantastic game play. Heck, after too much Race Drivin', I finally couldn't play driving games without good force feedback. How else do you know when the wheels are on the edge of losing grip? 8-)
You know, I've gone through three IBM clone PCs in the last few years after system crashes and faulty hardware and buggy software.
A month ago, I bought a 25-year-old Atari 2600 in an eBay auction and it runs great. For you trolls who snarl that the Atari is lame or the graphics are dated or the systems of today are so much cooler, I just have to ask: what system do you have that will still be working in a quarter century?
Let me help you out: none.
I had an odyssey II console (I believe this was back in 1976 or so). At the time I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. It even had a keyboard and a basic programming language.
The games were basically pong with celephane transparent overlays for alternate game context.
For instance, there was one that was a picture of a haunted house and everytime a window would light up you were suppose to shoot at it.
come on fhqwhgads
Reguardless, the Jag has 2 games that make it all worthwhile to own a system:
Tempest2k, and Rayman.
At the time they came out, Rayman didn't exist for the PC (might have been on other consoles), and tempest sure didn't. Two of the better games out there, IMO.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I remember my first games on the 2600: Mrs Pacman, Defender etc... The good time... When I became a great boy (14) I got my 520 STF... And then I used to program with ST Basic :-( and later GFA Basic. ... and now I'm a geek :-)
*** Korbinus ***
http://www.geotruc.net
I've seen other, more sophisticated network tank combat games. But this one is striving to be true to the original...
/ combat.as p
The Atari 2600 Combat Project
http://nehe.gamedev.net/nehegames/combat
My heart skipped a beat seeing that logo. I thought to myself "Whoa, what the heck is that? I wonder how Atari messed up the game?"
Really, my fond memory of Atari games took over, those chunky graphics, monotone sounds, and the endlessly repeating *fun*, and I got a bit nervous. Nostalgia is good for selling something old fashioned, but is not a good marketing idea for selling something new.
NWN will help build the Atari name, to help push the images of games like ET out of my mind. But does it really matter? I don't buy games just because it was produced by a well known company (not after FF8 that is). I will do what I've been doing for years (with the exception of the aforementioned FF games) which is try to get into the beta test, read the previews, beg my reviewer friends for a copy, download the demos. It doesn't matter to me who's logo is the outside of the box as long as it's a great game.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Geez, don't you people get tired of posting that link? I mean, it was funny last year maybe. (well, not really that funny) Is it that you have some repressed homosexual feelings deep down and this is a cry for help?
--
Twoflower
*notices the Atari logo on his Neverwinter Nights CD's...and the small "cutscene" when you open it*
that *HAS* to be why it's so great!
Four? "What you talkin' about Willis?!" The ComLynx port on the Lynx is a bus type (ie. think ethernet.) The drivers are capable of pushing 16 units together. There were/are several games that would allow 8 players. So there.
Star Raiders for the 400/800 computers.
Coolest. Game. Ever.
Ever.
Seriously, Ever.
The Intellivision tried to rival the Atari for a while, but it was the Colecovision that ended up actually usurping Atari dominance.
I once read that the only original employee from Atari (a few years ago) that still worked for the company was some lady that started off originally as the owner's babysitter.
She was paid extra to sit around even while not babysitting and answer the phone, pretending to be a secretary. It was done to give the illusion that Atari was more than a small time operation.
When I read this, a few years back, she was still with the company as it was then though it didn't mention what she did. Perhaps she still answered phones?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Speaking of straight facts...
:)
The displacement you mention didn't occur; the Atari 2600 and Intellivision competed head to head. The Atari 2600 was the clear winner, despite not having the horsepower of the Intellivision. Atari had the arcade licenses everyone wanted to buy.
By the time the Colecovision rolled around, Atari had moved on with the 5200, and the Intellivision had more of the same out (INTV II; smaller console but more or less the same hardware). Coleco was the winner here, for the same reasons Atari won early on.
JMHO
I totally worship Atari, just like a guy will worship his first girlfriend, because Atari was my first computing/gaming experience. I buy a new Atari-logo shirt every year to replace the previous one that's all worn and tattered. And now, I must tell you that today's Atari sucks; it is now little more than a trademark.
The real Atari, that almost created the whole gaming industry, vanished into obliving when Nolan Bushnell left. The spirit of Atari died at the hands of Jack Tramiel and bros. They sold away the sense of community among Atari owners and turned the whole organisation into a color-by-numbers business, produce this, release that, literally taking away what made Atari unique in the first place : innovation.
These days, the Atari name and logo seem to be passed around whomever cares to borrow it. Hasbro, Midway, Activision... all to cash in on old-timers' nostalgia. The most notorious is Hasbro, they quite brutally raped the classics when they released their series of remakes. Frogger 3D, Centipede 3D, Asteroids 3D, Missile Command 3D: shit, shit, shit and more shit. Atari is no longer about computers and games, these days it's all about money.
This isn't a 30th anniversary, _my_ Atari died when I was still just a child. I'm sick of seeing the good name being pimped left and right. It's just fucking with my memories.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
BTW the Mame version has nothing on the 2600 native version.
Great game! 4 players even!
Blogging because I can...
Ah, The Jag. I still have mine.
I think the controller got a bad rap for size. Like you I thought it fit my hands perfectly. Heck, it's smaller than the Xbox controller! And the button placement was excellent, unlike those too damn close buttons on the Xbox...sadly the internals for the pads sucked. Push up and you got Up+corner all the time, ditto for any other direction. Plus the overlays made the numpad keys slightly difficult to press...ended up just leaving them off the controllers and just looking at them when necessary.
Some of the games rocked too, sadly fighting games were the "big thing" at the time and the Jag lacked any good ones, plus it got stuck with a lot of crappy 3d-ish 'beta' generation games instead of some decent 2d games it could handle better. 3-d games like Cybermorph or AvP/Wolfenstein were the exceptions and not the rule when it came to the games that came out for it. Heck, it didn't have any RPG games either.
I'd say the Jag was a good system with crappy support and a couple of poor design decisions that killed it before it could take off. The biggest was probably their push for the CD addon and CD games way too early in the life of the system and long before any CD games were actually ready.
The first Odyssey (thick joystick cables, celophane TV overlays) did indeed take cartridges. They all seemed like slighty different version of Pong, but they were carts.
I still have a couple of 2600's lying around.... I should hook 'em up again.... many hours were lost playing missile command, and spider fighter..
This article has pursuaded me to relieve myself of work duty and fire up my old ATARI and pop open a can off Fancy Feast and chug a Jolt... Slashdot - My Savior :)
Does anyone know if Infogames acquired anything more than the intellectual property for Atari? When Atari folded and sold, its assetts must have gone somewhere. It would be nice to get my hands on some of the Jaguar and Lynx development units. For that matter, it would be nice just to get the games for cheap for both of them.
You're right about TOS, but STOS was something else entirely. STOS was a programming environment/language specifically designed for making games. It looked very much like BASIC but had many built in functions and things for handling various game related tasks. AMOS was the Amiga version.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
check out the little green desktop
Great twitch game. You had a bucket of sorts at the bottom and an evil guy at the top dropping bombs. (Lots of them.)
Catch all the bombs and you are golden. Drop one and *flash* (literally) your paddle is one shorter and the game is harder.
For an old ~1.7Mhz system, this game could easily test the limits of your reflexes.
Does not go over as well in emulation. Something about the feel of the paddle, and the big graphics....
Blogging because I can...
How come they always say Nolan Bushnell "invented" pong. Seems Baer did so much earlier. What gives?
I thought it was Infogrames (not Infogames) that had atari stuff. I hope you are right; I've never played a grame and never hope to.
Owen Rubin- creator of Atari coinops Major Havoc, Space Duel, and others.
:)
Howard Delman- coinop hardware and software engineer. Designed the vector graphics hardware for Asteroids and Lunar Lander.
Mike Albaugh- coinop hardware and software engineer.
Ed Rotberg- programmer of Battlezone, Atari Baseball, and other coinops. Only a family page, I'm afraid.
Jed Margolin- hardware engineer, designed TONS of coinop hardware. LOTS of techie stuff on his page
And for the hell of it, Carol Shaw- programmer of early 2600 games (3D Tic Tac Toe) as well as River Raid for Activision.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the only ones I can think of at the moment.
Brian Deuel
Webmaster
http://www.orubin.com
Hey Tali,
Are you in Spring Green, or perhaps even actually logged in from Wright's architecture school????
"From the vector classics such as Tempest and BattleZone (dating myself), to Hard Drivin'/Race Drivin' (the first great driving simulators, IMO)"
When you live a totally 100% Atari life, dating yourself is probably the only chance you'll get at any sort of romance.
Is this like the old saw that Al Gore created the Internet?
Gore himself said he invented it when he was in Congress, when in fact it had been around several years under another name before he was elected.... and it even had the Internet name before he was elected as well.
Now, to watch the morons who think that Gore really DID invent it to chime in.
That was the first game of many more to follow that kept me up all night. Getting the golden challice back to the gold castle on the hardest level was worth my mom yelling at me the next morning for never going to bed. That game also had the first easter eggs I remember in a game- the secret invisible microdot in the black castle catacombs (I remember "created by Ray...somebody" I forget his name. Also, later on Tempest became my favorite. I only bring it up because recently I read that it was created by the same person who created DeBabelizer. Thought that was interesting. Wow, such great memories.
"I guess you can safely say that Baer designed Pong, but Bushnell broke it in the marketplace."
After Nolan broke it, who cleaned up the pieces and repaired the console? Maybe Nolan was at one of his prototype Chuckie Cheeses (the ones with real rats) and accidentally stepped on one of his rodent mascots.
"Technology without the price" was their slogan in the late 80's, and despite Atari's great success in gaming, the company sold A LOT of their 68k-based machines in Europe. I happily remember my first Atari, a 1040STF that I bought as a teen. The better machines (like the Mega ST, later: TT030 with astonishing 16, then 32 MHz CPU!) were beyond my reach, but I could afford an extension set to boost the black&white 640x400 display to ~690x450. What a gain! The GUI based OS ("TOS") was quite good for the time - it really kicked ass in comparison to Win 3.11. Even without the price, we got a machine that we could use to actually get some work done. That was different with Commodore's Amiga machines, which weren't too expensive - but they sucked because of their crappy color display.
Oh, if you want to know what Jack Tramiel (our hero!) is doing today... Electric Escape has a feature article.
Wasn't the first Zelda game some sort of pirate adventure on a converted British frigate in the Tokyo harbor? It was called Zelda Cannon, but there was a mispelling in the translation whicyh turned it into Zelda Gannon. Now, 100 years later, the Gannon evolved into Ganondorf, and there are no cannons in the game.
Perhaps Ganondorf's balding head streaming flaming red hair is some sort of lingering connection to the cannonball origins.
Has anyone made one? SOmeone had to ask!
Atari, besides playing an important role in the video game industry, also played a great role in my life.
I remeber I always was interested in programming video games but could not get access to a computer to learn how, then one christmas it all changed.
My Uncle, who worked as a programmer for several companies, gave me his development Atari XL 1200. Complete with all the programming docs straight from Atari and Microsoft (as well as over 350 copied games onto floopy)..and thus began my decent into code madness. So what if it took me a week to learn how to draw a flashing sprite on screen with 20 lines of code, it was fun! (especially using those official Atari QA test forms my uncle gave me with all those other documents)
Not only did Atari take a great many childhood hours away from me with all the addictive games, but also started me toward prgramming.
3Y3
---- Anyone can act smart, but it takes a smart person to act stupid. ----
I still have nightmares that Pac-Man is chasing me through the maze of my old high school, his yellow mouth filled with razor sharp fangs. Oddly, I've been told I sit too close to the TV
Old Man Jack single-handedly destroyed Atari by managing to piss off everybody he ever dealt with, including customers, suppliers, and employees.
His Cheech-and-Chong-lookalike sons were as incompetent as Daddy was an a-hole.
isn't "$2 billion dollars" redundant?
R.I.P.
but $2$ two billion USD dollars is.
That article is a bunch of FUD.
It does not get around the fact that he said he created the Internet at a time when it already existed.
Sure, he did help the Internet a lot, but he did not take any initiative in creating it. It was created before he was on the scene. It doesn't matter if the true Internet creators defend Gore because he helped it. Look at the numbers of the years of Internet creation, and when Gore was in congress. They prove him a liar, no matter.
Try learning a thing or two. Here's a start for a study in history. Events that occur on A.D. years with lower numbers actually occur before events with higher A.D. year numbers. Amazing, but true.
It is just one of several examples of how Gore makes himself look like such a boob when he makes these sort of outrageous claims and keeps insisting they are true. Also makes the partisan hacks like you who insist that lies are true look pretty foolish.
Wonder if the guy who lost the last election knows this. Probably not. It is an ongoing problem, and shows up elsewhere with the Love Story thing and his being in Congress and uncovering Love Canal (another instance where it was revealed before he ever got there).
Either that, or shucks, Al Gore was actually elected to Congress in 1961 and he did do all this stuff! What a superman!
Let's not forget *why* the ST was the 'little brother' to the Amiga; the Tramiel management alienated such luminaries as Jay Miner (responsible for the 2600's graphics and sound; unfortunately, I can no longer remember the name of that chipset), who went off to form Hi-Toro, later Amiga, which was then had to scramble for VC to avoid a reacquisition by Atari.
s ecret/lorra ine.html
Ironically, Commodore - led to 8-bit dominance by a Tramiel - rescued the company, and financed the Lorraine into the Amiga 1000. The ST was Atari's response, a nice machine built with largely off-the-shelf parts, but lacking the coprocessing and bus interleaving (the Amiga ran at about 14MHz, twice the 68000's clock, which gave the video and sound chips 'free' access to memory) that made the Amiga a powerhouse.
Certain revisions of the A500s could be upgraded by 'piggybacking' the RAM as well.
Some hard-to-find background on the Lorraine:
http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/
Still have the 1st 800 model released.
I remember attending "Atari Parties" back
East just to see how many people we could get
in one room with machines blaring at the same
time. It was bizzare.
I still get a kick out of Star-Raiders.
Todays games really have not changed that much,
Just better graphics.
/Steve
"I still have nightmares that Pac-Man is chasing me through the maze of my old high school, his yellow mouth filled with razor sharp fangs."
That was me. Back in 1984 I was a hall monitor at your high school. I remember you being 13 seconds late for that class. I was particularly jaundiced that year, hence the yellow skin. I liked to wear a T-shirt that said "Pac 10 Football", but I can understand if my horrible orthodontic work might have made you ignore all but the first word when I came charging at you.
And when you would run in the hall at the sight of me (another violation of the high school rules). I would yell out "Walk! Walk!" However, my Italian accent was much thicker back then, you thought i was saying "Wocka Wocka".
Fancy Feast? Are you really Spencer F Katt or something?
Ah - sprites and green screen graphics
Evil ZEN Scientist
Bill Kendrick wrote an excellent SDL version called Madbomber. It can be had from here:
o ad /
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/madbomber/downl
There's even a Windows version there but it's older than the current version. It's also in Debian Woody and Sid: apt-get install madbomber. This plays well with optical mice and I suppose a really tight mechanical one would work but I never did well with them.
Atari 800XL was my door into geekdom. As soon as I got my hands on floppy drive and Pascal compiler, I used it to compile assembly programs. 6502 was a great chip, and the first I ever knew :-)
For many people from my generation that entry point was Spectrum or Commodore.
People keep discussing business here, but where are those who actually started programming with these machines?
Just to clarify a little more:
Atari went bankrupt and what was left, including their "intellectual properties" was bought by Hasbro Interactive. Hasbro Interactive was then acquired by Infogrames, the large French game publisher.
Infogrames also acquired GT Interactive years ago. I wonder if they were hoping to publish id's and 3Drealms newest games.
http://www.oshealtd.com/#2600
1,300,000 Atari / Jaguar Video Game Cartridges
There are 46 titles to select from these 2600
and 7800 game cartridges.
Cost is $5.00 each (plus shipping) Minimum is 12 games.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
Atari had a hand in making Neverwinter Nights.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
I thought Splashdown on the PS2 was the first under the Atari label?
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Wrong about that speed (unless I misread you) of 14 MHz. To read from an A500 flyer (the one that introduced the A590 Hard Drive):
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU MEMORY Motorola 68000 . 16/32 bit . clock 7.16 MHz 512 KB RAM standard . 1 MB RAM with optional internal memory expansion A501 (user installable).
The Amiga had a slower CPU clock speed than the Atari ST but outperformed the Atari because of the multiple co-processors and the separate memory bus at which the co-processors got preferencial access.
To this day formatting a floppy does not affect other operations.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
You see a lot of Macs being used for sound editing (with ProTools), and some these are now being replaced by Windows machines (also running ProTools). Ataris are crap for sound editing, they only have simple FM sound. What gave them a place in most music studios was the fact they all came with integrated MIDI. And a lot of music studios still use them.
:-P
:-)
I have an ST 1040, but I'm absolutely incapable of putting more than 3 musical notes in sequence without creating something that's physically painful to hear.
The program I used the most was CAD 3D, which was written by some of the people who later created 3D Studio and 3DS MAX. It's funny that some features of CAD 3D only made it into 3D Studio by the time MAX 2.0 was released.
I still run some old games on my ST. Dungeon Master, Kick Off 2, Speedball, etc. 8 MHz of pure fun.
RMN
~~~
Does any one remember Mega Maze?
That has the best game play of any game previous to current day. Graphics were crude but after awhile it was who cares lets see how far we can go! Basically it was 1 million square area that you got to rom around in. Never got the code for save but would get set up and play for hours untill my luck ran out. Esp those darn cat's and monster-generators.
The other game that was about the same in fun was Battle for The Crown. The one that came in a issue of STart. Super simple & crude but wow was fun. Esp when you leard it cheated but made for even more fun after that point!
To this day formatting a floppy does not affect other operations.
Must try it, I have an old STE lying here somewhere... I don't remember it affecting operations on Atari either...
- Voice of Ambience -