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Classic Console TV Ads
superpenguin writes "Here is a site with some TV ads for classic computers/games systems like the Atari and Intellivision, as well as games for those systems. Find out whether Atari basketball or Intellivision basketball plays more like real basketball. Some real gems here. These ads are in Real Media format."
Hey, it's on there - neato :)
:)
Way of the Exploding Stick - More fun that Mario Brothers
For Commodore Computers - where they compare the Vic 20 to the 2600 and the C64 to the Apple 2, IBM and Radio Shack computers,
Commodore Billboard
A lot of these ads and technologies came about before I was old enough to do anything about them, but I still remember a fair bit.
:P
I lived in England when the first Nintendo hit the market, and I begged and begged my parents to buy me one. They finally did, on my first birthday in the United States, in 1989.
What's interesting about this, though, is that I didn't quite understand the concept of a console game system. I even asked my mother where the coin slot on the Nintendo was, as embarassing as that seems, now. I guess I was quite a confused child.
Check out the commercial for the original Legend of Zelda game on the NES.
I'm not sure which is worse, the lyrics - or that nerdy looking rapping blonde kid.
Seeing those old ads reminds me of how exciting computers used to be. Perhaps it's just because I'm old. Do kids still get a kick out of looking at screenshots of the latest games? I bet they don't care much about stuff like screen resolution and amount of RAM anymore - that stuff isn't so relevant anymore.
The old Legend of Zelda ads were tripped out. Anyone remember those?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
The site has some other good stuff as well, like: Bootup screens, Magazine adverts, and emulators on which you can run the ROMs of the classic games. Thanks to Whoeverrunsthatsite.
That Intellivision Poker and BlackJack dealer was one pompous prick-hole. Primitive virtual emotions --- he'd get pissed when he'd lose and his eyebrows would turn like \/. I believe that was one of the first interactive "people" in games that I had ever experienced.
Dear Lord! 20 posts on slashdot and I'm still getting 60K+ downloads from the site.
Unviewable? Why is that?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
20+ MB of movies on that page, and it's still not slashdotted. He's gonna get one HELL of a bandwidth bill.
I found it! it's a miracle!!!
I found the Real Player 8 download on their site instead of the RealOne Crap
Real Player 8
Would you like some cheese to go along with your whine? Crikey, they warned you about the realmedia in the blurb! If you really care, stop being such a little girl and find the nearest loser with a box that can play the video. Alternatively, you could just use your imagination and pretend you watched the video; by this time tomorrow, you won't know the difference. Or you could just suck it up and keep quiet.
Yes, this is a flame, feel free to mod me down, but you have to admit the original poster isn't being very proactive. (The irony that I'm whining about someone else whining isn't lost on me, either, but what the hell...)
Because s/he apparent couldn't use Google to find the Unix versions.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
What I really want are videos of current Japanese videogame commercials. A while ago some big gaming site posted the Chu-Chu Rocket commercial, and since then Edge (UK videogame magazine) has been summarising an ad each month. Now I am hooked!
Does anyone know where I can download some of these? I would particularly like to see the Japanese ad for Tactics Ogre: Knights Of Lodis on GBA.
Unix Realplayer
That really pisses me off. Why do videos have to be saved in Real Media format? What's wrong with MPEG? Perhaps I don't want to install RealPlayer on my system?
I know it might make sense if you're encoding and streaming, but think of your public. I won't let RealPlayer anywhere near my Win32 system (hey, I'm at work... :-P) because it screws up all the file associations...
Nowadays, everyone I talk to wants to talk about framerates. 1280x1024 is a given for screen resolution, and colordepths surpassed the limits of human perception long ago. Of course, the framerates people talk about have surpassed what they can see, too, since they're usually talking 90+ fps on computers whose monitors can only do 70-odd hz at 1280x1024 and they tend to be using their own out-of-the-box visual input and processing hardware, where persistence of vision starts taking care of things around 30fps, making anything faster only useful if something is moving across the screen quickly enough to go in huge jumps at lower framerates.
The last time I was wowed by anything of that sort was when I plugged a Playstation 2 into a 5' wide HDTV and fired up Gran Turismo 3 on a 16x9 screen aspect ratio. From about 8 feet away from the screen, it doesn't look pixellated anymore, whereas a console sending out a standard TV signal looks terrible on a screen that large, let alone the distortion from the wider screen.
Other than that, I am starting to get the feeling that the biggest limit on what games can do nowadays isn't what the hardware they are being run on is capable of, whether it is a console or some gee-whiz computer with some overclocked GeForce card with Peltier cooling. It seems to me that the limiting factor is more how much time the artists on a game's production team can afford to put into the models - going back to games like GT3 and GTA3, it looks like the polygon count on any one screen is oftentimes well below the capability of the hardware.
This reminds me of an episode of Dallas in which one could see the Barnes playing "Yar's Revenge" on an Atari VCS system... wasn't this some kind of advertising ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Of course the notion of "classic" depends on your age. Remember though, we're all generation X brother. Sheit, I was born in '76. I sure as hell remember these kind of ads. In my country we also had these cool Pacman stickers that came in cereal packets. Anyone remember those?? Waka waka waka...../.
What's incredible about these ads is that they have that "retro futuristic" theme. Watching them now, you still feel like you are witnessing something from the future. Plus, bonus Phil Hartman.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Wow, what a difference a few years makes. Personally I found the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 much more fun than the NES. Hell, for one thing I didn't need to blow on all my Atari game carts to get them to work. I seem to remember having that be a huge issue whenever playing an NES game. Pull out cart, blow on connector, put it in slot. If you didn't it had a good chance of not working at all or the colors would be screwed up, etc.
Also, before the Atari I had tons of fun on my Commodore Vic 20 writing stupid Basic Goto loops and playing games in the early 1980's when I was a kid. The Vic-20 had some cool games too.
Wow, you're young. Classic for me is definitely the Atari 2600, Intellivision. I can even remember playing the Fairchild system (which I think was hardcoded with only a few pong-type games).
I also remember making lineprinter banners of Snoopy, Neil Armstrong's Moon photo, playing "Civil", a civil war stimulator on an HP3000 timesharing system, and hand-typing program listings from "Creative Computing" into my Apple ][.
An I'm only 35!
I'm sure they care who sees the videos, if not then they wouldn't be offering them at all.
I took the time to explore the site, appariently it's a one-man operation. Which is pretty impressive given the quality of the site. I'd encourge donations to keep him afloat, as he politely asked for on his main page.
So case in point: He cares enough to post them for the public to look at. So he doesn't put them up in Quicktime, .MPG, .ASF, or whatever flavor of encoding *YOU* prefer. At least he did it.
It seems like he was trying to cater to low-bandwidth dial-up users. And this is a good thing to me (i'm on cable) because there are alot of people still on dialup, and i know how it feels when i was on dialup.
It is *logical* for the webmaster. It saves him time to get the commercials in various formats, it saves him bandwidth, while at the same time providing something that many consider interesting.
I'm not trying to rag here, but really it isn't as bad as you make it out to be.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
I never considered Slashdot to be some pinnacle of jounalistic integrity, but come on, this is nothing more than a ploy to boost Atari's cartridge sales and edge out up-start Nintendo. That is so not rad, guys.
Oh I remember how badly I wanted the Coleco Adam system. With it's white casing, it was just so pretty.
:-(, which I guess is ok, because my friends only had C64s
I never got one though
Live web cams
Find out whether Atari basketball or Intellivision basketball plays more like real basketball....
In which version do they go on strike?
In this case, I don't think it's Real Player that's entirely at fault, or the Real Media format in general. These look like digitized videos of low-quality VHS recordings from back in the day.
I think you're going to have a hard time getting a good rendition no matter which format you choose.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Exactly. I know if I fall in a hole in the ground, all I have to do is stretch my neck and I'll float right out. Just have to be careful when you get to the top. Got to work to the side slowly or I'll fall right back in.
Of course I haven't falling into a hole yet, cause even time I see one, I stretch my neck while standing next to it, but I don't see a flashing light come from the hole, so I just stay out.
Dave Ahl! Creator of Hunt the Wumpus, publisher of Creative Computing and printer of that damn Nuclear Reactor simulator for the PET in every single BASIC computer listings book. (And I can connect with those memories - I spent time with a Nybble magazine and my Apple ][ as well).
Whatever happened to him? A google search doesn't turn him up. Also who was the guy (Landstrom, Langford?) who did the insane postscript coding - raw programs in postscript to generate fractals and the like. He advocated selfpublishing, and I have one of his books in storage somewhere.
Heh. I'll stop now - this story is already flooded with "Remember..." posts. Good to see there are some other people out there on Slashdot from the dawn of the PC (back before that meant "IBM PC"), and who remember timesharing systems.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It is funny to me. So many people comment that they were too young to remember these ads. I was born in 1969 (an old fart I guess) so I remember most of them. The day has come when I am retro (old school).
I learned BASIC on a Trash80. I had an Atari 2600 and later the Atari 800 computer and played Star Raiders thinking it was the bomb and remembering how it stayed in the top ten for Computer games sales forever. I played games that came on tape drives start the load and go to dinner and a movie (sorta like I do when I start a mozilla compile now).
My first PC was a 386SX (for SUX) and I remember when I first got online at my local BBS at 2400 baud thinking it was lightening fast.
I remember working of the Mac SEs in the education labs. So much good GUI sense in such a little package. A fully functional GUI OS on diskspace half of what some PDAs have now.
Jeez, I remember loading linux for the first time and I thought it was enough to have a quick machine with a Unix-like OS. I did not even care about the fancy desktops and GUI eyecandy.
ACK
Where's bill plympton nowadays? Kinda funny seeing him push videogames. I think I saw him in a SNL commercial for some cheese-based trivia game.
I find NES and Sega Master system to be the Classics (although atari was first) simply becuase the games made the video game industry what it is today. In my opinion, they were more influential than atari, and far more ground breaking than PS2 or Gamcube. (I consider Xbox a pc with less functionality) So, call me what you will I guess, but in my opinion, classic starts with NES.
And you would be incorrect. Classic starts with PONG, and goes up from there.
Software Wars
OK, So I might get flamed for this. In my opinion, classic is when a genre becomes popular (and maybe affordable) to the masses. No matter what year you were born. Some of us (like me) are just lucky to have experienced the real dawning of a future classic.
Classics for console systems is 1977-1984, give or take a year or two. Everything since then is icing on the cake. If you didn't experience the classics at that time, you missed out. Blame your parents for being too busy doing drugs or planning their careers to have kids and prevented you from being born at the right time to enjoy the new age of gaming consoles.
Screw all the snot nosed brats that downplay the classics for what's out now. What do you think you'd be doing now if the classics weren't doing what they were doing then.
<REALITY CHECK>
Oh my... I'm beginning to sound like my parents.... I'll just go back to eating my oat bran cereal now
</REALITY CHECK>
There's some revisionist plot, I am convinced, to label ET as the "worst video game ever", and "the game that killed Atari". Most people who prattle this off on the net are under 20, so they clearly weren't around when it came out. It was a fun game. Not the best game ever, and it was derivative of the better (imo) Superman, but it certainly had plenty of fans.
And at least it taught our generation an important lesson about wells! One which I note the children of the nes age didn't pay as much heed to.
It'll be a few years before there is another good "don't fall in ditches" edutainment presented to kids. It runs in 30 year cycles - Timmy always getting rescued by Lassie, ET stretching his neck to float, and soon... who knows? The incipent arrival of a new antiditch educational program was presaged by Dawn's comment in BtVS: "What if they're all in a ditch somewhere? Ditches are bad. Mom always used to talk about the ditches"...
Ghods, I need coffee...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
yep .... it's my fault. I am the webmaster of the website. It's great to get this amount of feedback after so much work. All help it promoting this private owned site is greatly appreciated.
People are free to email me more retro gaming/computing adverts in whatever format they have.
On the point of realplayer format; it was the only format that the adverts were available in.
Hope you all enjoy them.
Regards
HT
the "newest QuickTime format" is QuickTime, and is certainly not an MPEG-4 derivative. Just because QT6 can export .mp4 files and read MPEG-4 properly doesn't mean QuickTime has changed. It's just been extended again. You don't seem to know what you're talking about, son.
That was classic intercourse!
Here's the soundtracks to a few old 80s commercials I found on videotape. There are some video game commercials in there, but the most "unique" one by far is the one for Mister T Cereal.
I'm totally with you. But not just about games. It was about computers themselves. They were so powerful that they left science behind and took on an aura of magic. And much of the "common art" of the day (television shows, movies, magazines, books, etc.)used computers as a device to suspend disbelief: maybe a computer could do this...
;)
actually, I'm not going back far enough- from the 50s and 60's computers were the enemy- the mechanization and resultant dehumanization was the constant theme played into the ground. 2001, Colossus the forbin project, etc. etc. "computers are evil becuase they can destroy you" - then there was a switch to the thinking that "well, they're dangerous, but thats becuase they're powerful..." and that is what I am a product of.
So my childhood was filled with the movies "war games", "tron", "wierd science" (oh yeah, my parents tried to instill a sense of "culture", but all that crap went in one ear and out the other)
Now I'm sure this can be related to the first time you had a computer go "on line" not necessarily internet, but through a modem to a local bbs. It was empowerment. There were others out there who had the knowledge and there was plenty for the taking. Everything from computer hacks, to zero-day warez, to Ann-R-Key (say it real fast) files, this was the final step.
And in the background of my mind I knew that all the pieces of the recipe were in place, and the new revolution was just an arms length away. It was the future, and it was dying to be discovered.
yes friends, it was pr0n.
(oh-kay, ignore that last line. But you know what I mean!)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Can they even support a *nix?
I wonder if the 2600 can play fixed point OGG?
I wonder if the 2600 can play fixed Point OGG?
I wonder if the 2600 can play Fixed point OGG Vorbis?
I wonder if the Atari 2600 can play fixed point OGG?
Sorry, I got the c-taco repost virus.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Check this out for your answer:
l d=0&commentsort=0&tid=127&mode=thread&cid=4199 690
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=39317&thresho
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Then you really need to check out Atarian Magazine. It was a short-lived Atari-run magazine that only ran for three issues. Only issue #1 is archived there, but you can see why it didn't last long.
Be sure to check out pages one and two of the "Adventures of Atari" comic. Will Atari defeat the evil forces of Ninja-Endo? Stay tuned, kids!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Thats the one I was hoping for.. The Under 50 bucks slogan is a riot thinking back.. LOL,..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I remember articles in Electronic Games (anyone else get that magazine? It was great!) discussing the various techniques used to shoot the commercials to avoid seeing the scan line.
There were long discusions about some fellow who developed a method of actually having someone stand in front of a TV and talk about a game being played in the backround. IIRC it was something similar to the 'blue screen' used in movies and newscasts...big stuff in early eighties!
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
I miss my SX-64. I used it all the way until the early 90's, even running VIPTerm in 80 column Eyestrain-O-Vison on that tiny CRT.
:)
It's too bad it's so damn heavy -- the SX-64 is portable in the roughly same way that a cement block is portable. You could probably kill someone by swinging an SX-64 at their head. Also, don't forget your extension cord because the SX-64 never heard of batteries, and the cord that comes with it is about as long as your arm..
But you can play an aracde perfect game of Ms. Pac Man or Donkey Kong on it, check your e-mail, write a paper, surf the web, watch some fantastic demos, and crank up the SID chip music. It's hardc0re.
I think it's time for me to buy another one.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
These ads are in Real Media format and thus completley unviewable to me :)
Remember, we all love CHOICE at Slashdot!
When I think "old computer" I think about the Atari 400 and that awful, awful Timex Sinclair thing that had membrane keyboards as opposed to keys that would actually move up and down! Of course, considering how many cookie crumbs and burrito bits are lying in the cracks of my keyboard right now, I guess I shouldn't be chuckling quite so hard...
The other thing that sticks out in my mind is daisy-wheel printers. Sure they were more expensive than the dot matrix printers and a hell of a lot slower, but you could actually read your printouts! What a novel idea! Man, I wanted a daisy-wheel printer so bad!
The Timex Sinclair is worthy of a post or two in itself! Not only was that keyboard a joke but the friggin' screeen would blink everytime you pressed a key because the memory couldn't handle the strain of adding another character to the display! One of my friends got one and we laughed at his sorry ass.
GMD
watch this
I remember waking up at the butt crack of dawn to play magic v. bird on my friends computer.
Heh heh, can't remember the syntax anymore.
LOAD "game"
Press play on the cassette.
Wait 20 minutes for the game to load off tape.
Play for hours until the power supply overheated or the joystick broke.
The 1541 floppy was a godsend when I could finally afford one!
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
How weird. Given the number of people that are fabulously wealthy without making any more contribution to the microcomputer era than blowing Bill Gates, it's almost unfortunate that Dave Ahl has to do anything these days.
I wonder why he left the computer arena and moved to being a financial planner.
I just threw out the old Fairchild system a few years ago. It had some good games for its day, I know I spent many hours playing Red Baron on it.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I'm 29 now and played E.T. on the Atari when I was a kid. IMHO, it was crap then and it's crap now. My cousin, on the other hand, loved it. So whether it is a good game or not is subjective.
But it is a fact that millions of copies of E.T. were buried in the Arizona desert because they could not be sold. In fact, Atari first paid way WAY too much for video game rights to the title, then actually produced more copies of the game than there were Atari systems in existence at the time. Too bad they didn't put that kind of effort into the gameplay. And that is what really contributed to the failure of Atari as a company: they stopped making great games.
Their half-assed port of Pac-Man, the E.T. debacle, and a dozen other crap games reveal what must have been serious management problems. In that light, games like E.T. were the symptom, not the disease itself.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Ah yes, the home computer where the printer is a very necessary periphial, seeing as it contains the power supply for the entire computer!
Another fun fact of the Adam, is it's annoying tendancy to zap any tape left in the drive when powering up the computer. Remember kids, power up the computer, and then insert the operating system tape! :P