The Last Days Of Atari - In Full Color

AtariKee writes "Scott Evans (famous to video game collectors as the sole owner of Army Battlezone and two Marble Madness 2 machines) stopped out at the former Atari's Milpitas, CA facility [most recently a Midway office] and took a large collection of pictures of what was once the mighty arcade giant's headquarters." The good news is that Scott "was able to obtain and preserve the majority of what you see here."

Comments

Build your own arcade.

[Einherjer]

A friend of mine built his own arcade.
Go here for some instructions and photos: http://www.edu.uni-klu.ac.at/~akogler/mamelade/

Re:Maybe im wrong but Atari isnt really dead

[fm6]

No, Atari disappeared a long time ago. Exactly when is hard to pin down -- the history is convoluted. The current Atari is just a French video game company that acquired the name pretty much by accident when they bought up Hasbro Interactive.

Re:Fun Game

[Deusy]

Or you could try the Free Software equivalents, of which there are 2 that I know of:

* Neverball
* Trackballs

One of the common misconceptions with Free Software is that there are not many high quality games. There are many, many high quality Free Software games.

Talking of game quality... isn't that why Atari went bust? If you don't make good games or good games hardware packaged with good games any more, people won't pay for them.

Re:Fun Game

[Anonymous Coward]

Marble Madness was also THE killer app of the Amiga 1000 when it was released back in 1984.

Later on Defender of the Crown for Amiga stunned everyone with even more unbelievable gfx, sound and music ...

Infogrammes bought Atari

[naztafari]

Essentially when the original founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell sold it to Warner Communications in 1976, everything went downhill and Atari turned to crap because of lack of vision. (corporate bloodsuckers were running the show) What you see as Atari now is Infogrammes (that company with the rainbow-armadillo ribbon logo), which bought up Atari, and which now apparently is trying to capitalize on Atari's name by changing its name to Atari. Well, its got Unreal under its wing...

Re:Infogrammes bought Atari

[Bendebecker]

Actually what really killed Atari can be linked to several factors:
1) The 2600 cartridge glut. This is the prime error Atari made. Back in the day, they let everyone make carts for the system. At first this was great becuase it quickly built up a game base for the console. However, by 1982-83 things were out of hand. There was rampant piracy (look at Pitfall by Activision and Tomboy by Imagic), companies that had no business making games were making some of the shittiest games of all time, and no one could tell if any one game was better tahn another. Eventually the market reached saturation and then became over saturated reulting in no company with the exception of a few stars like Activison (which still took a hit) being able to make money. Among the biggest losers was the part of Atari that made the games (remember ET?).

2) The console remained on the market too long. They didn't update the things oon enough. What you want to do is get people hooked on the first console and then come out with another while taht interst is peaked. Atari sat on its ass until sometime around late 83-84.

3) Tramiel's bumbling. Jack Tramiel proved in 1983 that he was the worst manager in recorded history. He took a company that controlled 95% of its market and flushed it down the crapper. In 1983, Atari lost over 500 million dollars (and the whole industry at the time was only worth about (3 billion at best). At some points Atari was losing millions of dollars a day. This can be associated with a lot of his decisions, among them complicating the atari buecracy to a rdiciulous degree. You could never get things done if you tried to follow his rules and if you didn't you were fired. People who had been working for the company since '74 were being fired for the mere fact that they bent the rules in order to actually get work done.

4) Tramiel's late '80's policies. Atari was dying by '85 but Jack Tramiel's main poilicies were what drove the nail in the coffin. Jack Tramiel had, I believed, designed one of the odesseys in the late 60's and he had based his market policies on that experience. Back in the 60's the press had gone to him for news about his game system. As a result Tramiel in the mid to late 80's decided that a good a product sells itself and so, while other companies like Nintendo and Sega were dropping fortunes into advertising, Atari was basically eliminating advertising. By the tiem Jaguar came out, the kids didn't even know Atari still existed.

5) The jaguar. Good concept, bad timing. They designed the 64 bit system but made one critical error - 64 bit games take more time and money than 16 bit games. The developement process for a single game was about 6 months (with a massive team) where Nintendo was coming out with games by the truckload and since no one else wanted to make games for it (or could afford to with cash geysers liek Nintendo games), Atari was left with a system that they could not possibly make profitable. It's software library was never going to be more than a couple dozen titles and in order to offset developement costs each would have had to cost 200-300 a piece. Through almost no advertising and you get a flop.

6) Tiem warner. Atari during Bushnell had a monopoly on the type of chips that made the Atari 2600 as good as it was. There were about 9 companies that made the chips that could compete with Atari's systems and Bushnell had the foresight to go and make exclusive deals with them all. Bushnell understood the game business. Time warner did not. They tried to sell video games like they did records. They saw these deals and didn't understand that there was a monopoly, only that they were overpaying for supply and so they dropped the contracts. Result: those businesses went out and sold the chips to Atari's competitors.

In the end, Atari made a couple dozen mistakes taht we would say are obvious now but back then when the market was relatively new were not nearly so apparent. Even as late as '85 people though Atari was indestructible. But they got c

Re:Infogrammes bought Atari

[sunspot42]

How on earth did this post get modded up to "informative"???? Practically everything in it is either partially or wholly inaccurate.

>This is the prime error Atari made. Back
>in the day, they let everyone make carts
>for the system.

Eh? The VCS was one of the first home gaming system with interchangeable games. I don't think anyone had given the slightest consideration at that point to locking down the system so that only the manufacturer could produce games for it. Atari didn't, "let everyone make carts for the system." The VCS came out in '77, and didn't have a huge hit until 1980, when Atari licensed Space Invaders. That was the same year the 1st 3rd party developer came online - Activision.

Check out this site for a capsule history of the VCS.

>The console remained on the market too long.
>Atari sat on its ass until sometime around late 83-84.

Huh? The 5200 came out in early-mid 1982. It was a huge improvement on the VCS, being based on Atari's line of 8-bit computers. Probably its only major failing - and this helped killed the system in the market - were the large, non-centering joysticks that were difficult to use in many games (Pac-Man being a fine example) and prone to failure.

Again, check out the same site for a capsule history of the 5200.

>Tramiel's bumbling. Jack Tramiel proved in 1983 that
>he was the worst manager in recorded history. He took
>a company that controlled 95% of its market and flushed
>it down the crapper. In 1983, Atari lost over 500 million
>dollars (and the whole industry at the time was only worth
>about (3 billion at best). At some points Atari was losing
>millions of dollars a day.

How could you be MORE wrong??? Warner Communications unloaded Atari on Jack Tramiel *because* it was losing $500 million and they had no idea how to stop the bleeding. Tramiel didn't even arrive at Atari until July of 1984, after he'd lost a fight with the board of directors at Commodore and left the company he'd started. It's a little hard to blame him for Atari's losing $500 million in 1983 . . .

Actually, maybe you CAN pin the blame on him, since a lot of Atari's home videogame and computer sales were probably being lost to a little personal computer Tramiel's Commodore made. Perhaps you've heard of it. It was called the Commodore 64.

Again, here's yet another site, this one detailing the history of Atari's 8-bit computers, that brings up Tramiel's role in all of this (and some of the stuff he really did probably do wrong at Atari).

There are several other factual errors in your post, but I don't have the time this morning to correct the remainder. If Atari had made as many mistakes as your post did, they'd have gone out of business in the mid-'70s and we'd have never heard from them again.

ANSWERED: PC Parts Storage Storage Solution?

[DCowern]

Wow... Ask Slashdot really came through this time. Answering the recent Ask Slashdot, the pictures below show how the pros store their "parts". I hope you're paying attention, OriginalSpaceMan. :-)

• Game board storage room
• More boards....
• More boards....
• Closeup of Proto controllers and other parts.
• Prototype controllers and other parts
• A lonely catbox and adapters.

Re:why is he famous?

[jonathan_ingram]

There's a fairly long-winded story, which boils down to this:

These prototypes had been rumoured to exist for a long time, but no-one had actually confirmed that they owned one. When Mr. Evans did announce that he owned one, there was enormous interest among ROM-collects and MAME programmers, who wanted to get their hands on the ROMs to 'preserve' the game for humanity (and, as a nice side-benefit, enable everyone to play them on their home computer). Scott said that he would be happy to sell them for $10,000, expecting that this would put the emulation horde off. However, a campaign started on emulation sites to raise the money, and Scott very quickly realised that they would actually reach the asking price, so he pulled the offer. Much muttering ensued.

Re:Man, that old asteroids machine...

[JAYOYAYOYAYO]

Also attributing to the success of Asteroids was the fact that it was the first machine that let people enter their initials for high scores. Its sad that Atari couldn't last, I think their decline was in large part due to Yu Suzuki's incredible arcade innovation over at Sega. They just couldn't keep up.

Mirrored In case it overloads.

[OdanTheAncient]

1. http://www.thexdershome.com/ataritrip

Re:ANSWERED: PC Parts Storage Storage Solution?

[PainKilleR-CE]

It's important to make sure, though, that those 'plastic tubs' are proper containers for ESD-sensitive materials. Otherwise, you could end up with a lot of fried parts.

Writeup isn't quite right...

[w.p.richardson]

The game is called "Marble Man", not Marble Madness. It's an unreleased Atari prototype that he rescued from the brink of extinction. There are apparently only 3 or so in existence. So it's not quite as pedestrian as Marble Madness, which you can still find in a classic arcade from time to time.

Marble Madness for Unreal Tournament

[Anonymous Coward]

Marble Mania 2003

Re:Fun Game

[Chasing Amy]

Why not just download the original arcade ROM and MAME? :-) It's the most faithful to the arcade original, for obvious reasons...