Atari Alumni

Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell Returns

Editorial Staff — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:41:23 +0000

It’s been 28 years since Nolan Bushnell founded Atari for just $500. The businessman, who used Pong to first launch the arcade craze in 1972 and later brought gaming into the living room in 1984 with the Atari 2600, is now back with the company.

Bushnell is now on the board of directors for Atari. A lot has changed at the company since he sold it to Hollywood’s Warner Communications for $28 million back in 1976. These days, the French-owned Atari has struggled to re-establish its brand with the type of game experiences that early titles like Asteroids and BattleZone held (and still hold) with gamers. Nolan, who’s early Atari days are the subject of a new Paramount Pictures biopic with producer Leonard DiCaprio, believes the timing is right to capitalize on what made Atari successful in its heyday. He talks about his return to the company in this exclusive interview.

GamePro: What was Atari like back in its heyday?

Nolan Bushnell: Working at Atari years ago was hugely exciting. It was adrenaline everyday from all of us. From all the employees’ standpoint, everybody thought that they were part of something very special, and it really was a great place to work.

GP: What are your thoughts on today’s social gaming craze that in a lot of ways harkens back to what the original Atari arcade games and Atari 2600 were all about?

NB: One of the things I would like to point out is that I just joined the board. I’m actually on a learning curve of what is going on at Atari. We’ll have some great stuff to be announced in a couple of months. Right now, though, I agree that the historical point about games, and the historical question of the social arcade experience fits hand in glove with some of the things that are happening in the social media and the casual game market today. It’s gonna be such a no-brainer, that it almost goes without saying.

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Why the Atari Lynx failed

Editorial Staff — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:39:13 +0000

The Atari Lynx was an ambitious video game console released in September1989 by Atari Corporation. The first color handheld portable video game system ever made, it sold fewer than 500,000 units, and was quickly abandoned by the company. The console features a backlit coloured screen, configuration for left-handed and right-handed players, networking capabilities, and games that were first loaded by tape and eventually ROM. Due to its tape drive and lack of memory, the games loaded at an unreasonably slow pace, one of the contributing factors to its failure.

Marketing played a large factor in the game’s lack of success, as is the case with most video games. At the time of Atari Lynx’s release, Nintendo dominated the video game market with Tetris, made for the Game Boy and wildly successful. Nintendo also enjoyed a strong relationship with retailers, who had to be heavily convinced to sell the Atari Lynx, given the shaky performance of the 5200 and 7600 consoles. Furthermore, Nintendo had numerous third party developers, which resulted in a larger library of games.

Why the Atari 5200 failed

Editorial Staff — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:35:49 +0000

The Atari 5200 was supposed to replace the Atari 2600. After all it was the evolution to the next level for Atari. The 2600 was very successful and right now has to be known as the longest running console in video game history. Though not intended to last this long, this one would be used to have improvement in the graphics among other items.

Using the controller for the system had been deemed not working as well. Of course, it does depend on when it is bought and it is something that really should have been addressed right away. It had a bunch of numbers around, which was different at the time and still is.

Of course, depending upon the game, it has to do with the fact of simply having some extra buttons for certain commands to be performed. When that was done and was reviewed on Game Trailers with the Angry Video Game Nerd though it was just for comedy.

Warren Robinett Interview: A. Merrill’s Talks to the Programmer of “Adventure” for the Atari 2600

Editorial Staff — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 04:30:14 +0000

Warren Robinett was a programmer for the Atari Corporation, and was responsible for the design of the classic Atari 2600 game “Adventure”. The game was a visualization of earlier text adventure games, and a huge influence on later games like The Legend of Zelda. “Adventure” is also famous for containing the world’s first “Easter egg”, since the programmer put his signature in a secret room within the game. The interview was conduced in 1998 by A. Merrill (a friend of Arthur’s Hall) and posted on a college web site that no longer exists. I’m a video game geek at heart, so I hope some of you will enjoy this as much as I do.

-Shatner

Q: What is your education?
BA Rice University 1974 in “Computer Applications to Language and Art” MS Berkeley 1976 Computer Science

Q: When did you start working for Atari, and how old were you?
I worked there November 1977 to June 1979. I was 26 when I started.

Q: Did you do any game programming before Adventure?
I did the Atari 2600 cartridge Slot Racers as my first game. Then I started Adventure, got sort of stuck, did the Atari 2600 Basic Programming cartridge, and finished Adventure and Basic Programming at the same time. This all happened in about 18 months, which sounds very short now, but remember that the game cartridges had 4K of memory back then. They filled up fast.

Q: Did you carry around the idea for Adventure in your head for awhile before you programmed it, or was it an off-the-cuff sort of thing?
It was directly inspired by the original text Adventure, created by Don Woods and Willie Crowther, which was sweeping the world of the old ArpaNet in 1978. I played it with my friend Julius Smith at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he worked.

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The 10 Worst Atari 2600 Arcade Game Ports

Editorial Staff — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 04:25:09 +0000

The ’80s was the decade of the arcade. And the early part of the decade was dominated by the Atari 2600. But even when these two juggernauts were at their heights of popularity, they were not two great tastes that tasted great together. Part of it was that the abilities of the two platforms were just too different. And there were some exceptions. Space Invaders worked fine, probably because the original was so basic. Asteroids looked crappy, and flickered like mad, but if you thought of it as its own game sort of based on the original, it was still fun. Same for Phoenix, Missile Command, Battlezone, Night Driver, and a few others. But coin-ops in general didn’t fare well in their translation to 8-bit. Some worse than others… by which we mean these.

10) Amidar

Okay, it’s tough not to attack the game itself (which is pretty nonsensical, since you’re either a gorilla or a painter, chased by either headhunters and pigs… ooookay, fine), but the port itself is just as goofy. The pace is glacial, even for a relatively slow game like Amidar’s arcade original, and worse, you can’t really tell what the characters on screen are without referring to the box the game came in. Not an uncommon complaint for the 2600, granted, but still — there’s bad, and there’s worse.

Star Trek Online Season Two: Ancient Enemies Released

Editorial Staff — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:50:34 +0000

Atari, one of the world’s most recognized publishers and producers of interactive entertainment, and renowned MMO developer Cryptic Studios, have announced the availability of Season Two: Ancient Enemies, the latest content update for the Star Trek Online universe. Season Two: Ancient Enemies is available at no additional cost to current Star Trek Online players. The content update allows players to encounter and battle even more of Star Trek’s iconic races, and enjoy all new Episodes. Star Trek Online is also now available for a new low price of $19.99.

Star Trek Online’s Season Two: Ancient Enemies boasts the following new features:

A new level cap: players can now reach level 51. (The previous level cap was 45.) With the increase come new ranks within the Federation and Klingon factions.

All new rewards and content: including new Tier 5 ships, high-level versions of every Special Task Force mission and Fleet Action, and Mark XI gear rewards.

The Game That Killed Atari

Editorial Staff — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 04:33:36 +0000

It might seem hard to believe today, but back in 1982 the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was huge. It didn’t have the “teen appeal” of Titanic or Twilight, but it was the kind of movie grandparents, parents and church youth groups could feel good about taking their little ones to see. And so take them they did… and the movie became a phenomenon.

It only made sense, then, that there would be a video game tie-in based on the movie. Although newer systems like Activision offered better graphics than the stodgy Atari 2600, Atari’s gigantic user base ensured that the company would win the rights to make the game. When kids found out that E.T. the video game was coming out, they gleefully added it to their Christmas lists by the millions. E.T. was perhaps the hottest gift of the 1982 Christmas season.

There was just one problem… the game sucked. The graphics were so horrible and the gameplay so boring that even today, 27 years later, the game still makes it onto “Worst Video Games of All-Time lists”. In fact, given the game’s high-profile at the time, it often ranks near the top of those lists, too.

Atari Cosmos

Editorial Staff — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:08:11 +0000

Atari Cosmos is a prototype game that was pretty much finished, but Atari decided to scrap at the last minute. (Partly (if not mainly) due to the fact that it really does suck as far as a game is concerned. They claimed it was 3-D or holographic, when in reality it was just a small grid of LEDs (7×6) with a dual-image hologram used as a background. There were two lights inside of the game shining on the hologram at different angles, and that would cause one of two images to light up (in the case of the Space Invader game, there was a constant background, and when you died an image of an alien shooting you would appear).

Eight games were developed (along with the holograms), and all of them were programmed into the base unit. A series of tabs on the ‘cartridge’ told the base unit which games to play. 6 Cosmos units are known to exist today, and 3 of those 6 are only empty shell mock-ups (although Atari made hundreds of the empty shells, it isn’t currently known if these were destroyed/thrown away, or if they are waiting to be found in a warehouse or garage somewhere…). One of the three working prototypes (and at least one of the mock-ups) belongs to Curt Vendel of the Atari Historical Society…

source: http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Atari/Cosmos.htm

Atari’s Haunted House returns to scare PC, Xbox 360 and Wii

Editorial Staff — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:28:55 +0000

Atari is finally bringing back its classic Haunted House franchise for a new XBLA, downloadable PC, and Wii game. For those of you who aren’t ancient, Haunted House is a maze game about a kid exploring a mysterious mansion in order to put an urn back together, hindered both by aggressive ghosts and total inability to see items or exits without lighting a match.

The new version benefits from 29 years of technological advancement by, among other things, displaying the player avatar as a person instead of simply disembodied cartoon eyes. The gameplay still involves avoiding ghosts and looking for pieces of a broken urn, but now also includes puzzles, bosses, and what sounds like a much larger environment than the original house, with “towers, basements and catacombs.”

The new Haunted House will be out in September, and you can see a spooky trailer after the break. Now that Atari’s started remaking its old games again, what’s next? Circus Atari for Kinect? It would make more sense than that other Kinect circus thing.

source: http://www.joystiq.com/2010/07/14/ataris-haunted-house-returns-to-haunt-pc-xbox-360-and-wii/

Atari vs. Nintendo

Editorial Staff — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 04:11:41 +0000

In the mid-1970’s the father of commercially successful video games, Nolan Bushnell was sitting on top of the world. A graduate of the University of Utah, Bushnell had just sold the company he had built, Atari, named for the Japanese word for “check” in the game of go, to Warner Communication for 28$ million. (Koerner, 1999) A November 15, 1976 Business Week headline proclaimed that “Atari sells itself to survive success.” (Atari sells, 1976) Indeed the small company was growing so fast that manufactures could not produce the internal circuits fast enough, as Edger A. Sacks, the vice-president of GI’s Microelectronics Group, explained “the trouble is that demand is 50% to 60% greater than anyone anticipated,” and in turn Bushnell could no longer continue to create the additional funds needed to overwhelm the competition and appease the demand. (Demand overwhelms, 1976)

In 1972 Bushnell had invented the first commercially successful videogame, a simple ball and paddle game called, Pong. “To be successful, I had to come up with a game people already knew how to play, something so simple that any drunk in a bar could play.” Bushnell later recalled. (Koener, 1999) As such Pong was originally tested in a bar called Andy Capps in Sunnyvale, California. Two days later the owner of Andy Capps contacted Atari saying that the machine was broken. Al Alcorn, an original employee of Atari was sent to repair the machine, finding that the coin box, a milk cartoon with the top cut off, was overflowing with quarters which prohibited the machine from working. The machine was soon fixed, Alcorn replaced the milk cartoon with a casserole dish, and the quarters continued to flow in (Sheff, 1993; Demaria & Wilson, 2004).

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