Imaginary Worlds - Atari vs The Imagination Gap

Episode Date: January 12, 2017

Tim Lapetino's book "The Art of Atari" is full of eye candy for anyone who grew up playing those games -- especially if you gazed at the game boxes, with illustrations that barely resembled the blips on screen. But the book also tells the story of how Atari invented the video game console as we know it, pioneered the lifestyle of the Silicon Valley start-up and kickstarted a billion dollar industry before Atari gobbled too much, ran smack into its own ghosts and flattened into a yellow pancake. With Atari veterans Steve Hendricks and Barney Huang. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Molenski, and this is Tim Lapitino. He's a graphic designer in Chicago, and he runs a website called the Museum of Video Game Art. My dad brought home our first Atari 2600 in 1983, and we busted it open right away, and it was magical you know the idea that you could play games on your tv and i remember very distinctly one of the uh you know very first things i looked at is just looking at those boxes and just trying to make sense of the idea that what i was seeing on the screen was totally related to what was going on in the box. I wanted to save

those and I wanted to line them up. I wanted to line them up on my shelf. My dad's like, why do you want to keep those? Just keep the cartridges. You know, keeping the boxes, that's like keeping the box for your refrigerator. And you're five, you know, he's like, okay. I mean, I wasn't going to argue about it. But of course, I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars recapturing those by rebuying them when I was an adult. And now as an adult, Tim has put out a book called The Art of Atari. It's got interviews with designers and executives and a lot of eye candy for anyone who loved those games back in the 80s. But he says the book is not meant to be a nostalgia trip. This art and design is really worth visiting

because it deserves to be up there, you know, with the great design of the 20th century. I learned a lot of things about Atari that surprised me. I mean, first, the company was founded way earlier than I realized. The visionaries behind it were Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. They started collaborating in 1968. Their big breakthrough, Pong, came out in 72. The home console version was out two years later. Everything was going great for them, except every time they released a new game for the home division, it came in a completely new console.

And they released Stunt Cycle, Video Pinball, and then multiple Pong, Super Pong, Ultra Pong, Crazy Pong. Soon you've got a pile of these things in your living room. What they needed to invent was an 8-track player for video games. We take this for granted now, but they're basically inventing the video game console from scratch. It's funny to think about the idea that in some of the early documentation for these things that said, you know, this will not hurt your TV. And there was real concern that, you know, were kids all going to turn into vegetables? So they made it a point to be friendly and approachable and make the technology seem human. That's where Atari turned to product designers like Barney

Huang. Our design goal was to make it look sophisticated. And what we looked at, we looked at Bang & Olufsen, which we call B&O. They had very sophisticated, you know, out-of-the-box thinking design. And basically what they did was they took all the normal controls that you see on a stereo equipment

that's so confusing and just hit it. And they made it very simple. And one of the things too was to design it so you go, that's really cool. I just want to buy it, and they made it very simple. And one of the things, too, was to design it so you go, that's really cool, I just want to buy it. Just to have it as a centerpiece in your living room. Yeah. He had to wrestle with basic questions like, where do you plug in the controller?

It was kind of like in the past, you plug it in the back, because it was really easy when you made the PC boards and stuff. No, no, no, no, no. Then you have the cable wrapping around it. How long should the cable be from the console to the controller? Should it be three feet? Six feet? Well, when people play with it, they're going to be sitting on the couch. The table's going to be right there, so maybe three feet max.

And part of the things, too, that was just coming on was sound, right? So sound wasn't very sophisticated back then. If you look at the old video games, it was just beep, beep, beep, beep, boop, boop. I mean, now it's all dialogue. It's like you're talking to somebody. But back then, it was pretty primitive. But for then, it was pretty sophisticated. So what kind of sounds do you make?

So it was that fundamental. Because there was no reference point. It was like, all right, you shoot somebody. The other issue they had to deal with is something that Tim calls the imagination gap. The graphics for those games were pretty crude. I mean, early on, they were just rectangles and blips. And if you were given these games with no information, it might be hard to imagine what kind of world this is taking place in. You know, we also didn't have this sort of subculture of video games with magazines and reviews.

All that stuff came a little bit later. But very early on, especially with the Atari 2600, the first time that you really encountered a game was going to be on a store shelf. That's why the box covers were so elaborate. Most of the illustrations were done in a montage style, like an Indiana Jones poster. That way, an illustrator could cram a lot of story into one image. So you might have in something like Super Breakout, you have this astronaut's head. You know, it's really large. You have the rainbow

wall reflected in the curve of his helmet. But then in the background, you have the rainbow wall reflected in the curve of his helmet, but then in the background you have the actual rainbow bricks behind him. Or take checkers. You've got this guy sitting at a table playing checkers, and he's got this woman hanging on his arm. It's a castle in the distance. And there's a great story, even if it's just a suggestion of a story, of some kind of family affair and some issue and challenge in this majestic sunset. And it's still checkers.

Steve Hendricks drew many of these covers. Checkers, for instance, I wanted to try to develop some sort of a backstory, even though there wasn't really a backstory. They even went to town on the game manuals. even though there wasn't really a backstory. They even went to town on the game manuals. The Warlords was one I had so much fun with because you've got a father and these four warring sons, and they're always fighting each other. So it really made it a lot of fun.

They were all following the vision of George Opperman. One of the things I think it made working at Atari so great was working for George. George really was a bit older than, you know, almost everyone else who worked there, including the founders. And he had some real experience running his own firm. He was sort of one of these triple threats. You know, he could illustrate, he could art direct, and he could design. And he really shaped the company's ethos.

He designed the Atari logo and their font, which is very round and friendly. He liked that montage style of illustration. And remember those banded rainbow colors, which were very much associated

with the Atari brand? He was fond of those too. This is him from an industrial film. At Atari, we like to think that everything industrial design and graphics do contributes to making every Atari game an adventure for the player. He was a chain smoker. He drank about 40 gallons of coffee a day. He was definitely a workaholic. The time he spent there was over and above the call. You know, the time he spent there was over and above the call.

And, you know, he never bragged about it. He never lamented it. He just loved it. He'd be there on weekends, Saturday and Sunday. He died one day on his drawing board over the weekend. You know, they found him Monday morning or Sunday night or whatever, the janitor or whatever. So he died of a heart attack and it's just like, oh my God. Yeah, there's some quote in the books and they felt like he kind of gave

his, he was a true believer, he really kind of gave his life to the company. Oh, he gave his life to the company. All right. He gave his life. He died on his drawing board. In a moment, the rising star of Silicon Valley blows up into a million pixels. Or more like a hundred pixels. Still the 80s.

Discover a world beyond your wildest dreams. Discover Atari. That's how you want to play Pac-Man? Pac-Man? Who is he? I'll show you, Grandpa. Pac-Man is a video game cartridge you have to buy separately to play on the Atari video computer system. Your parents hook it up to the TV. I talked with a lot of designers about Atari,

and they all share the sentiments of Steve Hendricks. It was the best place I think I've ever worked. Atari was the first company in Silicon Valley to create the kind of work environment that we now associate with internet startups. I think Atari was the leader when it came to employee benefits and perks. We had a gym because we played ping pong during breaks. Barney Huang. You could wear sandals. I mean, today it's no big deal, but back then you could

wear sandals, long hair. I mean, there was no dress code. But the culture at Atari went one step further. You know, I mean, we're having parties like you can't believe. And we had named bands, you know, back then, you know, I think we had Santana one time. Like, who does that? There was a lot of divorces, a lot of affairs. It was just crazy back then. But everybody had a passion, So everybody worked very hard. So everybody worked hard and everybody played really hard. These are 20-somethings, right?

And they're just having a lot of fun. People felt like, hey, this is the Bay Area, so drugs are being done. It was this creative, freewheeling culture. There wasn't like a particular job description. People molded to fit the company. And they pulled people in who had all kinds of disparate backgrounds. You know, there was no such thing as game designer. That's so interesting.

Think about that. Yeah, there was no, you don't put an ad out for a game designer because they just, they didn't exist yet. They were, they were creating them. Right. Absolutely. And I think you had some really interesting personalities, maybe even some people who might not fit in somewhere else, you know, ended up fitting into these places. And some of these guys were legitimately brilliant.

You know, I mean, unbelievable programmers really pushing the envelope. But, you know, what comes with brilliance sometimes is a little bit of weirdness. And I think Atari as a company really embraced a lot of that. In some ways, they couldn't afford not to, right? Because they were growing so fast. They were just strapped to the rocket and they were just trying to make things happen and get everything done. The company was growing at a record speed, but it still felt small enough to be like a family. They had honchos who were just down the hall, always willing to hang out with programmers. a family. They had honchos who were just down the hall, always willing to hang out with programmers.

But that started to change in the mid-70s when Atari was sold to Warner Brothers. Up until that point, it was a really sort of rollicking, free-form place. But after Warner came in, it started changing things. Warner brought money with them. They brought experience in marketing. There was a lot of good things that they did. And, you know, you'd really say after Warner bought the company, that really became the golden age of Atari. But at the same time, they brought other things, too. They brought a corporate structure. People came in who really didn't know anything about this new era of video games. They came from textiles. They came from, you know, people selling deodorant. And that started causing a culture clash. Steve Hendricks and Barney Huang got disillusioned. And it wasn't just the corporate structure and suddenly having guys in suits to answer to.

Atari had gone from a revolutionary company to a company that just wanted to keep the status quo going. It struck me that they weren't really interested in doing any new products. The 2600 and all it was just going so great, sort of like why mess with success? As people started to play the games, it's like, okay, I got it. People wanted more and more and more. And you had to have the creative process of what do you make it, how do you make it challenging? Sometimes when you're just doing the same thing over and over, it's possibly that creativity block. The other problem was that all the money flooding into the company was mostly going to the top.

These programmers who were a lot of the creativity behind the games started feeling like they were being used, right? Atari's the fastest growing company in US history. And these guys and girls don't have credits on the games. Their names aren't even on the boxes. They're definitely not getting compensated in a way that's commensurate with the sales of their games. And several of the programmers came in and said, hey, you know what?

We think it'd be fair to institute a kind of a bonus system because look at how much money these games are making. They felt that they should be compensated because they were actually creating the revenue, which is true. So it's like, hey, you know, this game is selling a bazillion of them. I should make a little something off of this. Which rubbed Barney the wrong way. He felt like everybody was chipping in to create this great experience for the players, and crossed that imagination gap.

I guess if I was to just say it was just greed, that's all. It was just greed. Atari management at the time did not respond well to that. And you start seeing a couple of groups of programmers leaving Atari, a set of guys left and created Activision. You know, there are stories that guys at Activision, you know, if they left Atari, they wouldn't fly in the same plane,

like the president and the vice president, because if the plane went down, they wanted some of them to survive. I mean, there was definitely a lot of ego going on here. They were also creating non-Atari games for the Atari system. And some of them were really good, like Pitfall, which was one of my favorite games as a kid.

And Atari, of course, is livid, and they sued them, you know, seven ways to Sunday, and they tried to get them shut down. Eventually, courts ruled in Activision's favor that, yes, they could create games for these systems. There was no monopoly on that, and that actually opened the door for some of the downfall of Atari, because once

one company started making software for this super popular system that had sold millions and millions of copies, now all these other companies realized, hey, you know what, we could get a little piece of that pie. And as the years went on, you started seeing this increase in this glut of games, a lot of which were not very good. Although Atari put out its share of duds, like the infamous E.T. game that was so bad, the unsold cartridges were dumped in a landfill in New Mexico. But, you know, a really bad high profile game like E.T. cannot compare to the bad press that Atari got from this. You know, towards the tail end of Atari, you had these small fly by night companies creating X rated games for the 2600. You know, towards the tail end of Atari, you had these small fly-by-night companies creating X-rated games for the 2600.

You know, Atari didn't want to have anything to do with that stuff. But here it was, those games were sitting on the shelves, competing against them, you know, giving them sort of a bad name. If that surprised you, then you and I are in the same boat because I had no idea that there were X-rated Atari games. because I had no idea that there were X-rated Atari games. So I went online to check them out, and of course at that point I suddenly felt like the only person on the Internet that didn't know about these things, because there's actual gameplay that you can watch on YouTube. And some of them are hilariously naughty,

but some of them are just horrifying. One of the more infamous ones is called Custer's Revenge, and basically it involves, it's terrible, it's absolutely terrible. You're a naked Custer, and you're basically trying to avoid all these arrows, and then you've got a Native American

woman tied to a stake, and let's just say the goal is for you to have your way with her. Yeah, and it's all happening in 8-bit graphics, which is even more weird and disturbing. By the mid-1980s, the video game industry in the U.S. had imploded. That void that was left in the market was quickly filled by Japanese companies, Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation,

and they dominated for a long time because they learned their lesson from Atari. You have to have full control over the games you can play on your systems. You know, Atari's era was sort of the Wild West. They learned and they sort of put some fences around it to protect themselves. But they were still following the model that Atari set out in the 1970s when they basically invented this industry. The other thing that hasn't changed, even today, is that all the video game companies are trying to close that imagination gap as we keep demanding more and more. The next big breakthrough is supposed to be virtual reality.

There's no handheld controller. There isn't a three-foot gap between you and the screen. You put the console on your face. But I'm sure that someday people are going to look at the virtual reality that everyone's buzzing about today, and they're going to say the same thing that people say about Atari. Wow, people really had to use their imaginations back then. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Tim Lepitino, Steve Hendricks, and Barney Huang. And if you grew up playing Atari games, let me know what were your favorite ones. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook.

I tweet at emolinski. I haven't asked this for a while, but if you could also put a good word into iTunes, that would be great. It helps people find the show. And you can see images from Tim Lepitino's book, The Art of Atari, on my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.