Remember Atari

[Art Blade]

Atari started the video game industry and then it vanished suddenly. Documentary

edited to push the video out of the forum's front page.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'll have to watch that later when I get more time, I spent a lot of my youth with the Atari 2600 and the 400 computer. Then I remember after the console market crashed that you could pick up entire systems for $20 and I remember my parents paying well over $400 for the one they gave my brother & me for Christmas.

[Art Blade]

I never had one but a friend did.. for some reason, I wasn't home much, then..

[Dweller_Benthos]

LOL, yeah we spent a lot of time with it. Just happened to have the storage drive turned on for some music and this is on there, Christmas 1978, I'm on the left, discussing with my brother how to hook it up as the dog tries to figure out what was so interesting. Blurry photo my mother took on the old polaroid camera, another blast from the past.

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I watched the whole video, and yeah, E.T. isn't the worst game, not even for the 2600, there were a lot of really bad games made for it towards the end there as many companies tried to cash in on that market.

[Art Blade]

nice story and pic, Dweller, thanks for sharing Goodness, a Polaroid.. I bet that is about as alien as a 2600 to most of the younger folks these days

I too watched the entire vid (of course I did) and it was indeed a blast. I liked it a lot. The story of how they "worked" at Atari.. the word "intravenously" sticks out a bit.. lol, crazy. But that freedom and taking in the right people to let them do their thing leading to an enormous success with everyone happy, company and customers alike, is something recent companies should think about, hard. It certainly worked, not only at Atari.

Little fun fact: "atari" is an expression and a position from a Japanese board game called "Go" and essentially it means "attack." The logo, those three stripes/swooshes are also pointing to that Go board attack position. Imagine a board with a grid painted on it. You place your stones (one player white, the other black) on the crossings. If there is one single stone (let's say white) on a crossing, picture two black stones on two adjacent crossing, like so:

After white's turn
+B+
BW+
+++

and now, ATARI! looks like this:

after black's turn
+B+
BWB
+++

If white doesn't defend itself like so (only way out for white)

+B+
BWB
+W+

then black will take the white stone with the next move, like so

+B+
B+B
+B+

You can now see why the Atari logo looks like this position

+B+
B+B
+++

[Dweller_Benthos]

Pretty cool, I seem to recall hearing that the name was based on a game but not the details. I've heard of Go!, but never played it, though we used to play a very similar game probably based on it, called Othello, where essentially you have the same game play with a grid and black & white pieces that have the colors on each side. Putting a piece of your color on each end of a row of pieces of the other color lets you claim all those pieces as your color. The person with the most pieces at the end wins. Getting the corners was the main strategy even if you had to sacrifice to do it as a corner piece can never be changed by the other player and you can then sweep the board from there if you play right. I lost many games before that little tidbit of info was revealed to me.

Anyway, back to the video, I had heard quite a few years ago that they wanted to dig up the dump to find what was there, seems it took them until only a few years ago to actually do it. I'm sure they will be able to or have already sold those cartridges online. There are a lot of geeky nerds out there who'd want a piece of game history like that. As far as I know, my game system and the games are still in the attic somewhere. I really need to clean that out one of these days.....

[Art Blade]

Go works indeed somewhat like you described and right now I've got to be careful not to confuse Go with Gobang, played on the same board and using the same stones, it was a "light" version of Go. I remember taking captured stones off the board as those stones are single-coloured only.

And yep.. get that Atari from your attic.. might get a new car for it

[PZ]

Great pic and story D_B! 

I have not thought about Atari in years.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Thanks PZ! I've played the games every once in a while on an emulator, the actual game downloads are tiny, they were only 4K, so you get pretty much all of the cartridges that ever existed in a download of only a few megabytes as I recall.

Art, I don't think the systems are worth that much, would be nice though!

[Art Blade]

depends on the car you are envisioning..

[Dweller_Benthos]

True probably something like this:

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[Art Blade]

 

I loved matchbox cars.. didn't have many but I remember a Jaguar E Type, a Mercedes and I know I had a few more.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I was only kind of into them, but my brother had tons, he would set up tracks all around the living room and we'd race them on it. Of course, we'd also set them on a collision course with each other and see who won.....

[Art Blade]

 

Back to that 2600, I remember one game we were quite fond of and played simultaneously, a competition, using a split-screen function: FROGGER. It's not a typo, it's not "fragger."

Frogger was about crossing the screen from bottom to the top with a frog. The lower half would be a multi-lane highway with cars to avoid or you'd get run over, the upper half would be a river with floating logs to hop onto. Those moving objects would drive/float at different speeds and you'd often end up trapped. Most of the time you'd either be run over or fell into the water. I hated to sit on a log drifting towards the side of the screen without a log coming up to jump onto.. you knew you'd die and couldn't help it. It was fantastic to make it from the bottom to the top and score.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Oh yeah I remember frogger, though that's one I don't think I had on the 2600, I saw it in the arcades though. Along with Pac-Man they weren't my favorite games as they required planning ahead and making the right choices and I just liked shooting things lol.