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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."
its great to see people preserving out gaming heritage. I firmly believe that every game...yes even the dubious custer's rapin' rampage...deserves veneration as both an example for programmers and as a toy for me and all the kids people with real lives manage to turn out everyday
My company took over Atari's building on North First Street in San Jose. There was a whiteboard that still had a project status for porting various well-known arcade games to Apple, C64, etc. Very melancholy.
...sure brings back some memories. The first time I saw one was while shopping in a drugstore and of course immediately dropped in a coin to try it out. The grapics were just white lines on a black screen but the game sure was addictive.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The new building?
I can still remember seeing the Atari logo on a building off of Winchester Blvd., in Campbell. Or, it may have been in Cupertino.
Alas, gone like the 'roids of yesteryear. Still, there is something pure in its annihilation, like a Silicon Valley marriage.
ok... so why is this so remarkable? I read both the pages and I understand that only two Army Battlezone machines exist and he went through a lot of trouble getting the marble madness board to work, but that still doesn't explain it.
Not like it's Spot with no Spot Beanie Baby or something...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I had a job interview there in 1998 - they were known as "Atari Games," which I think was to distinguish them from "Atari," which was the part of the company that had more to do with the original console hardware (and the Jaguar?) and had spun them off at some time. In any case, they were owned by Midway.
It was an interesting experience, walking the halls and seeing posters of so many classic games. They were still developing arcade hardware, and I was being interviewed about porting one of the arcade games to the N64.
I believe I actually sat at the table in this picture - I had one interview over lunch with someone who was quite humorless and clearly hadn't slept for far, far too long. Actually, I think they got him out of bed to talk to me. I also played the green SF Rush machine in that picture - quite the arcade they had there.
I guess I should be glad I took a job with another company. Still, sad to see them go. RIP Atari.
sig fault
I'm the admin of http://www.midway.com. I hope the low comment count and the buried link keeps us from getting slashdotted during our last days in Milpitas. It's been real...It's been fun...Can't say it's all been real fun. Big shouts to the final few. Special thanks to Jeff Bell...the oldest (not age wise) real Atari employee. See Jeff's fish at http://dickdafish.org. I'll be helping him close the doors after 31 years of service. Jeff, I'll buy you a beer for lunch tomorrow. Oh yeah, and everybody should buy the new SpyHunter2! WWIII
End of an era...
Thanks for hearing my plea...
Journal
Amiga was better than the Atari ST in one crucial thing: games. It had both stereo sound and a hardware blitter chip. It was designed for multimedia, whatever that meant at the time. However, most people, myself included, who would choose the ST did so because of the Hi-Res 640x400 monochrome mode that was AMAZINGLY good on Atari's excellent mono white phosphore monitor. Mac emulation, for example, was a joy since you could run Mac programs both faster and at a better resolution than a Mac classic which, frankly, was good enough for almost everything at the time.
Atari lost it first with the STE. It was too little, too late. I don't remember specifically any games that used the advanced capabilities of the STE except for a couple that required it for paralax scrolling. Playing Shadow on the Beast on the ST was painful, for example, while it was a joy on the Amiga. Although I do remember tears of joy when I came upon a demo that managed to replicate perfectly the well-known and amazing, for the time, bouncing ball demo that sold more Amigas than people can imagine.
Then, they lost it with Falcon and the 68030 machines that were too expensive AND sported a TOS (operating system) that was mostly incompatible with past versions. Even though they were great machines TOS and GEM could not compete with Windows any more and many people, myself included, migrated to Wintel. But don't kid yourself, Europe was 66% Amiga, 33% ST at the time for computer games. PCs were few, they were very expensive and had ugly, UGLY CGA games. How could an EGA PC compare with the beauty that was Defender of the Crown and all the other beautiful Cinemaware games? ST was a force over here and I have not regretted any hardware sale in my life except the sale of my 1040 STE and monitors.
The Atari 800 was also a great computer, so I really have to disagree with you that Atari went downhill after '76. Arguably, what destroyed Atari was the overhyping and underperforming of the Jaguar, as well as Tramiel's grandiose figurehead management.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
I don't know enough to have an opinion but a few people on usenet have commented on this topic and were not too happy.(yea I know what a surprise people on usenet were complaining).
Mostly they were not happy because if there is a fire or such then much of video game history as we know it goes away forever. Alos there is the point that without letting dumpers access those boards, those games will simply rot and never be recoverable. So basically the collective opinion was "what a waste" since most people felt it should be donated to a museum or have parts or it loaned out so that the data on those boards and such could be preserved.
Like I said I don't know enough to say if they are right. Maybe they were wrong and this stuff is actually going to be correctly preserved.t I do agree that the utmost care should be taken so that 20 years of rare and valuable gaming history are not lost or forgotten.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
No. Atari was split apart, with "Atari" referring to the home computer and console part, while "Atari Games" referred to the arcade division that was bought up and passed around and such for years.
After the Jaguar, which died due to a combination of lack of development tools making development difficult on the unusual architechure, weak third-party support, and mainly the horrible managment of the Tramiels (they hired someone to turn the company around, who promptly quit when Jack Tramiel continued to insist that he approve every Fed Ex package sent out). They merged with a low-quality disk drive manufacturer, and I'm not sure what happened to them after that.
Atari Games became part of Time Warner, who sold them to Midway at some point, and they ended up eventually under Infogrames which them became part of Hasbro, who seems to want to be using the name again.
Honestly, I'd love to see them pick up all the rights and property and whatever for all the Atari home stuff and combine it all back together again. Might help keep the name alive.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Yes, the kid who wrote Marble Madness was Mark Cerny. He and I had been close friends when we were 8-11 years old, but I've lost contact with him since. Google reveals that he's done a lot of game design work since. He now has a game consulting company, Cerny Games (http://www.cernygames.com/).
He was incredibly smart as a kid (skipping two elementary school grades). I recall him describing the book _1984_ to me, which he read when he was eight years old, if I recall correctly. Also him trying in vain to explain fractional exponents to me.
mahlen
Half-done: This is the best way to eat a kosher dill -- when it's still
crunchy, light green, yet full of garlic flavor. The difference between this
and the typical soggy dark green cucumber corpse is like the the difference
between life and death.
You may find it difficult to find a good half-done kosher dill there in
Seattle, so what you should do is take a cab out to the airport, fly to New
York, take the JFK Express to Jay Street Borough Hall, transfer to an uptown
F, get off at East Broadway, walk north on Essex (along the park), make your
first left onto Hester Street, walk about fifteen steps, turn ninety degrees
left, and stop. Say to the man, "Let me have a nice half-done."
Worth the trouble, wasn't it?
--Arthur Naiman
So *that* is what happened to him. Cool.
What was really neat was working directly under the guy who developed Missile Command.
The most bizarre things about the company when I worked there in 1987 were:
No, nobody realized that we were going to become part of history.
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