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A History of Atari — the Golden Years
simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, Steve Fulton has published a massive 23,000-word history of Atari from 1978 to 1981, encompassing '... some of the most exciting developments the company ever saw in its history: the rise of the 2600, the development of some of the company's most enduringly popular games (Centipede, Asteroids) and the development and release of its first home computing platforms.' Best quote in there for Slashdot readers, perhaps: 'Atari had contracted with a young programmer named Bill Gates to modify a BASIC compiler that he had for another system to be used on the 800. After that project stalled for over a year Al was called upon to replace him with another developer. So ... Al is the only person I know ever to have fired Bill Gates.'"
that today they sue their fans and anybody who gives a negative review of their games
oh how the mighty has fallen
Star Raiders.
Star Raiders
My father was a die-hard Atari user back in those days. I remember asking him why Atari was not as popular as it used to be as the years went by, and I'll never forget his answer:
"Because Apple went to lunch with the schools, IBM went to lunch with the companies, and Atari didn't go to lunch with anybody."
I never learned how much truth there was in that answer, but I really liked his response! That, and his "Join the Revolution! Buy an Atari!" stamper.
30 years later they still have people making brand new original games for the Atari 2600 like this one or that one!
You just got troll'd!
I played Atari from when I was 3 until I was 8(1984-C64+ 1985-NES). I can't see anyone having played more hours of it than I did. I don't know. For some reason, I wanted to be the best video game player in the world. A video game allows children an outlet to their problem solving and reflex desires. I saw Atari 2600 as something new to my generation, so I played it as hard as possible. I figured that I may not be able to compete at games that have been around longer than I have because people had the age advantage on me. But video games were fresh so I put all my effort in them to get better. I was #1 in Starcraft for a while, and #1 in Warcraft 3 for a while too.
But as cool as it sounds to be the best in video games in the world... It really is hard to rate a video game player. You have all different genre of games.
No one probably cares, but I have memories. One of the memories was 1983 when I thought Atari 2600 should just keep making games. I never thought to myself that the video games could get better though with more powerful computing. Just breathing in today's world is living the dream for a video game player. And once you played out all the video games, you have the potential to make games too.
God spoke to me.
Listen, could you pseudo-gamer-journalists stop writing about Atari's history? We've all heard and read about it a million times. We ALL know about Atari. We all know about Ralph Baer, Higgenbotten, and that Centipede was designed by a woman. Now, how about some REAL history even us old gamers don't know about?
What was it like working for Cinematronics? What was their culture like? Why did they go out of business? What was it like being on the Dragon's Lair team (and I don't mean just talking to Don Bluth and Rick Dyer; that's been done to death. What about everyone else like the tech developers? Did they think it would take off? What about the teams involved in vector games? What was that like?)
How about Universal? What happened to them? What was it like working there? The art department must have been a trippy place considering the fascinating psychedelic art their arcade game cabinets had. Who designed Mr Do? Lady Bug? When could they sense the writing was on the wall? Why couldn't they compete?
How about Stern's video department in 1978-82? At least you know where to reach Gary Stern today...
How about Williams video department? They made such cool games (Robotron, Defender, Sinistar...) What was their workplace and culture like?
Write about something new for fuck's sake.
in case you don't feel like clicking through 20 pages of ads, you can view the article as one page here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3766/atari_the_golden_years__a_.php?print=1
I remember getting my first Atari 800... Then after that the 800XL, 130XE, 520ST, 1040ST, etc.. The 800XL was my first real chance to learn to program. Previously it had been on a Commodore Vic-20 at a cousin's house. I actually owe my career to those days spent writing little BASIC programs to do simple things.
At the time there was a magazine called Compute!. It had program listings for multiple machines including the Atari, Commodore, Apple IIe, and later on, the PC, ST and Amiga lines. Many of the programs were written in BASIC, but as the magazine progressed more and more were written in 6502 assembler. It was tedious to key in those listings (essentially typing in HEX dumps with a checksum) but we managed.
In middle school I was in one of the first programming classes in the school and district. The computers were all Apple IIe and Franklin Ace 1000s, but the instructor had a soft spot for the Ataris. For the end of term project I wrote a little quiz program that flashed a question on the screen in one of the Atari graphic modes, then read the 8-bit joystick port to see which answer was selected. I also tried to write an Infocom-like game, but it proved much harder than I had anticipated. I did get the user to be able to navigate a map though :D
For a long time I missed those days... Luckily Linux came along and all is well again...
I was just about to say exactly that. I remembered Atari 800 Star Raiders from my childhood, and got the 2600 port as an adult hoping it would be as good. Not even close. So I just play it in emulation instead.
Someday I'll find that deal on an atari 800 Ive been looking for. My dad gave ours away many years ago.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"I felt that the computer system should not be a closed system, we needed to have third party software developers. I could see Steve Jobs out evangelizing, and Atari was saying that if you write software for the Atari computers, we will sue you. I just thought that was foolhardy. They were from the record world, where you sue people."
- Nolan Bushnell
You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
my... girl Atari ST ;)
Actually, I had the Atari ST when I was in college... I really liked it and I could do my assembly projects on it (our assembly and hardware classes were all based on the M68K).
As others have noted, the classic space combat game is Star Raiders. But Star Raiders was excellent on the Atari 800 and 400 computers; the official Atari version for 2600 was, IMHO, very poor.
Happily, the Activision folks made an excellent knockoff of Star Raiders called Starmaster. The most important parts of the Star Raider experience are there: you can raise and lower shields, you have a galactic map, you have multiple star bases, the enemy will surround and destroy the star bases, you can get damaged, and you can dock with a star base to repair damage and refuel.
If you love 2600 gaming, get a copy of Starmaster and play it in your old 2600 or 7800. Once you have a legal copy, get a ROM image from somewhere and you can also play it in Stella. Starmaster and Millipede are my two favorite games to play in Stella.
If you fondly remember having an extra, weird keyboard thing for the game, you are remembering the official Atari 2600 Star Raiders. If you don't remember that, perhaps you are remembering Starmaster. (In Starmaster, the screen does turn blue when you have the shields up.)
For completeness, I'll add that Imagic sold a game called Star Voyager. It is a very simplified Star Raiders sort of game: you fight enemies, then fly through a warp gate to go to a new level and fight more enemies. There are no star bases; you cannot be damaged, but you can run out of energy. When you are out of energy, any enemy hit kills you. Warp gates refuel your energy. While it has no strategy at all, it is fun as a light shoot-em-up game.
P.S. Not every Activision game is gold. They had a game called Robot Tank, that was essentially Starmaster all over again, except that this time there was no way to repair damage. As a kid, I hated Robot Tank as much as I loved Starmaster.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Here's 10 Years of Atari/Atari Games VaxMail, this is history!!!!
http://www.textfiles.com/games/ATARIMAIL/
Description from the site:
Jed Margolis got his hands on something precious: a decade of internal mail from the now-defunct Atari Games corporation, makers of some of the more beloved arcade games in history and one of the more amazing stories in computer history. Buried among these large collections of e-mails from the Atari Corp. VAX are discussions of programming, trivia, jokes, and some real insights into the day-to-day concerns of this company.
Perhaps if Bill Gates hadn't been fired... he wouldn't have ended up creating Microsoft.
How would a world without Microsoft be? Would we have the internet as we know it? Less viruses, probably. But now that I think about it... the internet may have not had the same popularity... Linux would still be for hobbyists... would we have a browser war? What would have happened to specs made by the W3C? Maybe Netscape would still be alive... AND buggy.
Most people are idealistic and want to believe that Bill Gates was the ONLY evil in computing - but what about the "patches welcome" attitude in programming?
Sometimes I'd like to start a contest on "how the world would have been without Microsoft". Would we have social networking sites? CSS 2? Ubuntu? And would the Mac have adopted a Freebsd-based Operating System?
How would the 80x86 computers run, for starters? Would they run Unix? CP/M? Would videogames use even worse copy protection schemes? Would the PC be an actual competitor against Nintendo and Sony? Or maybe, Atari would take the place that the XBOX has now?
I'd love to see the possibilities with my own eyes. Just to satisfy my curiosity.
Because he enforced consequences for actions, and stuck to his word? I don't see a problem with that. I only had to lose a few toys I really liked before I started learning how to pick things up. There's no saying that their father threw it out... perhaps he just sold it or gave it away. Either way, it's called "parenting".
Just because the Atari cost more than other toys shouldn't make it any less susceptible to the rules.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.