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

Atari in San Jose

[fm6]

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.

Milpitas?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I was there once...

[kreyg]

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.

Add trackball

[lightbuddy]

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

Marble Man Roms

[Xenolith]

Could some fine ex-Atari employee please release the ROMs for Marble Man (Marble Madness II), so it could be emulated for the PC? I don't see any reason to withhold the ROMs at this point in the game. I can't see anyone profiting, etc.

Thanks for hearing my plea...

Re:Infogrammes bought Atari

[Dot.Com.CEO]

No. Atari went downhill when Jack Tramiel failed to compete with Amiga. The Atari ST (FM/E) was not a big deal in the US but it was HUGE in Europe, especially Germany. I remember most of the software available, especially apps, was German at the time, including an amazing DTP software (Calamus), an EXCELLENT Mac Emulator (Aladdin?) and most, ahem, disk copying software.

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.