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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!
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
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.
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)
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.
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....
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.
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
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
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
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
"...and there was this one time, at Atari computer camp...I took a WICO joystick and stuck it up my..."
Chris
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.
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
~~~
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 ;)
not fore sale though.
I want 2D games back.
"What part did they have in the production of the game? "
:D
They provided their logo!
"Derp de derp."
And I was envious of people with ColecoVisions. All I had was a Coleco Game System, the predicesor to the ColecVision. It had about 6 built-in games, all of them variants of Pong. They were all hard wired in and you selected them with a switch.
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...
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 $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Check it out.
They've got some creative people behind the brand name still.
Guantlet and Guantlet Legends have the ATARI logo.
That company should be a study in how NOT to run a business, 10 yrs growth to build a brand name up there with Coke, then 10 years steady decline to oblivion. Bushnell cashed out just a little too early, Warner couldn't manage it, then Jack Traimel made a valient attempt, and eventually got the Swordquest prize over his fireplace.
Anyway, I was happy to find a 1979 Sears 'wishbook' with the Atari 400 in it. Also, the way to run a classic Atari 800(XL) system today is use the APE (Atari Peripheral Emulator), run it to your PC serial port, then you can mount disks from a PC and have tons of Atari software (my entire collection fits on a CD) at your fingertips. It also daisy chains with a normal 850/1050 fdd if you need to get data on/off 5.25" floppies.
Personal faves: Blue Max, Kennedy Approach, etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You know... that !$@$#% 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.
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.
My brother and I saved up for the Arcadia Supercharger for our Atari instead.
Much better games were available for this classy add-on.
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 is before woc logo. Just got the linux server running. Life is good
Never had one at home...my parents thought video games were a total waste of time. That didn't stop me from playing them at other people's houses, though.
I picked one up off of eBay last year, along with sticks, paddles, a driving controller, and some games. Just like old computers, old video-game machines are dirt cheap—and much more fun than emulators. (A cartridge that could be loaded with downloaded ROMs and played would be nice, though...doesn't somebody make such a device?)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
Before Atari, I had a Fairchild Channel F video game system. That one came out at about the same time as Magnavox Odyssey I wish I still had it, but I took Commodore's offer for a $100 rebate for trading in you old video game or computer with the purchase of a Commodore 64. I do still have my C-64, but having the Channel F too would rule. Did anyone else have one of those?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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-)
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.
--
Twoflower
Star Raiders for the 400/800 computers.
Coolest. Game. Ever.
Ever.
Seriously, Ever.
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.
You can dupe the bad sector protected ones, then play them anyway.
Listen to the beeps as the Atari reads each sector of the disk. After a time, you will hear a different sound, or a pause or something. This is the bad sector!
When playing your duplicated disk, simply open the drive door at the right time, then close it.
Most of those games are looking for a disk error, but they don't care which one!
I remember Ultima ][. Turn Atari on, wait 19 beeps, flip the drive door...one...two...close! The 1040 drive was the best for this because it had the little lever on the front that allowed for accurate timing.
Was a much nicer time back then.
Blogging because I can...
BTW the Mame version has nothing on the 2600 native version.
Great game! 4 players even!
Blogging because I can...
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.
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...
I never had the original odyssey, but my friends had Odyssey 2. I remember it's membrane keyboard, and thinking it could have made a decent computer. I also had the airplane dogfight game, and a flying sucer game for Channel F, as well as a few others. It's controller was capable of so much, but needed a trigger button. I think it was an analog control. After I traded it in for the Commodore 64, They finally offered a controller with a trigger, and a space invaders game. Someone should set up a museum for all those old-time game systems, and early computers. I also miss my Amiga 1200, but that's another story.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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.
The original Odyssey was the one with the cellophane overlays and the Pong clones. The Odyssey II -- or, rather, the Odyssey^2 -- was the one with the keyboard and the computer programming cartridge.
My family had an O2, and I feebly hoped that it would be able to withstand the juggernaut that was the 2600. Oh, well.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
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
~~~
I meant for the PC / Mac. I think Atari released several games for consoles (even before being bought by Infogrames), but I don't remember any Atari games for PCs (although there were some conversions of old Atari games).
RMN
~~~
I remember that...the tune was the old American stanby "Turkey in the Straw"