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

Maybe im wrong but Atari isnt really dead

[BorgxXx]

they just put out a little game under theyre new company name ....some game based on some movie series called "The Matrix". Probably wont amount to much i hear the movies didnt do to well :)

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.

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

[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.

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: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:After seeing "Gauntlet" pictured, I am stuck...

[funwithstuff]

I don't remember the Gauntlet voice ever saying that. I do remember it saying (definitely in all caps):

"RED WIZARD IS ABOUT TO DIE"
"BLUE VALKYRIE IS ABOUT TO DIE"
"GREEN ELF IS ABOUT TO DIE"

But maybe I'm not very good at Gauntlet.

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...