Retronauts - 530: Atari Archive and the 2600 Launch

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Jeremy Parish and Jared Petty chat with author Kevin Bunch about the launch of his book, Atari Archive Vol. I, and dig into the lessons he learned about the creation and launch of the groundbreaking VCS console. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week's Retronauts is brought to you by ExpressVPN and My Sheets Rock. This week in Retronauts, we race the beam. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Retronauts. I haven't actually figured out when this is going alive, so I don't know the number, but it's in the 500s. And this week is a very self-indulgent episode as I desperately promote my employment and my continued employment prospects. Yes, this week we are talking about Atari, but in the context of a book that I helped edit and design for limited run games. So those of you who feel that there is no journalistic integrity left in Retronauts, you are correct, and I don't care, because we have with us the author of Atari Archive, Volume 1, Kevin Bunch, to talk about the origins of the Atari system and also the process of putting together a book about the early days of Atari. So Kevin, I've just introduced you, but please introduce yourself again, just for the redundancy.

Hi, I'm Kevin Bunch. I'm the author of Atari Archive, and I do the YouTube series of the same name, and have been for several years now. And also with us here is another person who was indispensable and integral to the creation of this book. The fun is back. Oh, yes, sir. It's me. That is anachronistic, sir. This is a book about 1977 and 78.

Yeah. And you are deep diving into 19. Yeah, that's true. You're a decade out of sync. I am completely out of sync. And that's probably a terrible precedent being set for the rest of the episode. I'm Jared Petty, also of limited run games. Very happy to have been a small part of this project and happy to be here with you. I mean, you edited the whole book. So that's not a small part. That's an important part of the process. It's a chunky book. It's a beefy boy. Yeah. It's a, it's a, this is a large lad. It's, what, like 278? No, 288 page. of Atari content and yeah like you know a fair number of those pages are full page photographs but there's a lot of text in here because Kevin did a lot of research about it and I've been kind of weird about like talking about the books that I produce in on retronauts because I feel like it's two separate streams of continuity and is it wrong to promote things that I do in my day job on the podcast?

Is it a conflict of interest? I guess. But also it's super germane to this podcast's subject of talking about video game history, preserving video game history, getting perspectives and facts about video game history. So, yeah, so I feel like this episode had to happen because the three of us here in this room, primarily Kevin, but, you know, all of us, created this book about Atari's Or. origins in the console gaming space. This jumps, you know, through their

sigida years and, you know, the early arcade years, and directly to the Atari 2,600's development, creation, etc. But it is by far the most comprehensive and detailed look at not only

the early days of the 7,000, the 28th. 2,600. My God, there's so many numbers. Should not have had that second Pinot Grisio. I mean, you did hit the right numbers. There is a 7,800. There is a 2,800. You just scramble them up. No, the early days of the 2,600, but also just the context of the video games business, so to speak, as it existed at the time, which was not really that

much of a business. But, Kevin, you did a great job of just, like, laying it all out there, and really, I think, showing what was unique about the 2,600 and its library compared to the the competition. And, you know, I think when you read through this book and you read stuff about like the MP 1000 and the Odyssey, like you get a really great understanding of why the 2600 succeeded. So let's talk about this book. Like, I don't know, like as the author, looking at this completed book, what are your thoughts? And, you know, how did this even happen? It is still deeply surreal that I have a book at this

my 39th year of existing and what my 15th year of writing stuff professionally it took you that long my God yeah I don't know what I was doing that's what zines were for man I mean I did do some writing for zines

in the 2000s I wrote for the digital press fanzine for a while there and actually one of my first writing credits was on their 2004 For video game collector's guide, their advanced one, for like the 16-bit stuff. I did the Memorex this section. But yeah, for this, this took a fair bit.

I'd probably just repeat some stuff from our Q&A that we did really today. That's fine, because the people listening to this podcast... Mostly weren't there. We're not there. Maybe there were like three people listening to this podcast who were there, but five, I guess. Okay, five. So I apologize to the five of you who were at the Q&A. Thank you for coming.

This is old material for you, but for the thousands, tens of thousands of other people listening to this episode, not having been at the Q&A about the book, this is all fresh and new. So Kevin rehash away. Yeah, sure. So I'm a journalist by trade originally. I went to school for that. I worked at several newspapers full-time and freelance. But with video game writing, there was the fanzines. And then in 2008, or thereabouts, Jen Frank, who, you know, formerly worked at one-up

and made some retronauts appearances at that time frame. Some very memorable retronauts appearances. Go check out Archive.org and look up Retronauts, and you can hear some great episodes with Jen on them. Especially about Atari, because she was also a giant Atari nerd. Yep. So anyway, she had a website, Infinite Live. dot net, which you can find on the wayback machine if you really want to let's check it out.

And she asked me if I would write some retrospectives for it, you know, giving me Jeremy's retrospectives he had been doing for OneUp.com and on his own website as like examples. It's like, yeah, it's the kind of thing I think you'd be really good at like doing yourself. So I wrote a few of those. You know, two of us liked Atari stuff. So that was a regular topic Was Atari era I know I did a

Casey Crazy Chase The sequel to Casey Munchkin And that one actually got picked up by Kotaku Nice Yeah so that's somewhere That wasn't an Atari game though That was not But it's a great game

I also wrote one on Mountain King Which was on the 2600 And it's a really good version of it Not in this book But still Great game And Burger At It was the other one that's jumping to mind.

But anyway, flash forward a couple of years. Oneup.com still existed at the time, and Jeremy was still working there at the time. And he... Yeah, that was a long-ass time ago. All those health-in days. Uh-huh. And they were doing theme weeks at the time, I remember. And they had a theme week about the Atari 2,600, because it had just turned 25 or something, 35.

I don't remember. It's like 2012. And I submitted a pitch for an article for it about, you know, people who collect Atari 2,600 games. And I wrote that up. It was pretty fun to put together. He really liked it. Posted it online. And I thought, you know, that was a lot of fun.

I would like to write about video games more. I can't really do that at my day job working in a newspaper where I'm covering, you know, city council. council meetings and science news and all sorts of fun stuff. So maybe I'll do that on the side. And at that point, I hadn't quite figured out how I wanted to do that. And then, flash forward a couple more years, I discovered Cron Tendo, and I discovered, you know, Jeremy Parrish was doing his Game Boy project at the time. And I thought, that's an approach I could use.

I could go through the library of the 2600 in this sort of a similar fashion and sort of dig into the history of each of these games. The problem was, of course, at the time, I didn't know when any of these games came out. No one else on the Internet really did. So that took another three years to hash out a release list just by going off of whatever sources I could find. And some of those do appear in this book.

There's a little appendix section where I mark out where... Oh, no, you have an amazing bibliography. I am so lazy when I put my books together it's just like a random mishmash of stuff that I've heard and then I just like look at it in public sources and I'll mention it in the article or the

video like hey here's a thing but you actually have you know you've been respectable and scholarly about things. It's wonderful. It's going to make future researchers have a lot easier time finding I'm not doing much good for the community but that's okay because you are

you did great research here and you documented at all. And it was such a pain to put that big bibliography together. I bet. That part of those book, it sucks always. But yeah, so I started doing these videos in 2017 for Atari Archive, which is my YouTube channel, going

game by game. And then after so many years of this, I thought, well, I've got a lot more resources now. I'm kind of interested in revisiting some of these early videos and fleshing them out more, but I don't want to make another video. because that's a lot more effort than I have time to deal with

when I have so many new games to deal with, relatively speaking. So I thought, well, okay, I can put up stuff on this website that nobody visits because nobody goes to personal websites anymore. I think the one I have for Atari Archive gets maybe like 20 hits a month tops. It's almost one a day. Most of them are me looking up stuff for my own. video projects. Oh, well, there you go.

Because that's where I have all sorts of release date information that I've dug up posted. And then I thought, well, I could do a book, and I was sort of playing around with the idea of self-publishing something that would basically just be, you know, like these write-ups I'd been doing and do a cheap little e-book thing. And that was about the same time you approached me for this press run games thing and asking if I'd be interested in putting together a book. And I already had this in mind. I'm like, let's do this.

Let's do Atari Archive, Volume 1. And we hammered out what years it would cover because I wanted to give some value for the money there. So we cover 77 and 78, so that's 20 games. And the fact that you're calling at Volume 1 is very exciting to me because I really enjoyed working on this book and doing the layouts and everything. And, you know, the photography,

just a chance to visit all these games that really are from, before I had access to home video games. So it's all kind of new to me, and I'm excited about doing a volume two with you. Yeah. Get on that. I got to read this book a couple of times in prepping this, and it's easily, I've read a lot of books about Atari.

This is easily my favorite. And a lot of that comes down to something you talked about earlier in the QA. You know, we were talking about the video game basketball. Yeah. And you pointed out, you know, that it would be, You and I both enjoy that game. You pointed out that at the time in 1978, when someone was designing basketball, there isn't really a lot of source material to go to.

There hasn't been basketball and video games before. And so you have different companies, not just Atari, but different companies that we now think of as defunct, but that then were active, vibrant developers that were competing and coming up their own original ideas. And everybody was trying to simulate a sport, but they came at such different angles. Things that felt like Pong to super primitive,

side-scrolling, inaccurate, strange takes with players, it looked like players, but they didn't actually feel fun, all the way up to almost, you know, a sort of a forced, false-depth approach, someone inventing that for a one-on-one sport where the AI scales to how far the player is behind, and all of these, this takes arriving at all.

almost exactly the same time, from different teams at different companies, as they all try to figure out this medium, that's really exciting. No other video game histories I've read touch on that reality, because that's unique to this period and this story. And Kevin, I really think you just say some bold, energetic things that are going to excite people that care about history. Even folks that read a lot of history books about games are going to be startled how little they know about this. And I think that's really cool. Hey, friends, Jeremy here.

You've been listening to me talk about how old games fit into my life for a decade and a half, so I like to think of us as friends. That means there's no longer any such thing as too much information between us, right? So let's take a trip to the TMI zone together and talk about the weirdest things about getting old. For me, it's the way my eyebrows have turned into unruly Professor Xavier-looking messes, the fact that I sometimes experience absolutely unbelievable night sweats. The eyebrow thing is no big deal. Tweezers exist, but when I wake up in the middle of the night, after sleeping hard,

there's nothing to do but try to fall back to sleep at a clammy, damp bed. And that's the worst. Or at least it used to be the worst before I discovered My Sheets Rock. My Sheets Rock created something that they call the regulator sheets, which are designed specifically to keep hot sleepers cool and cold sleepers comfortable. They're made from best-in-class bamboo rayon, the so-called holy grail of sheeting. This miracle material transfers body heat twice as effectively as regular sheets and reduces humidity by 50% so you can experience your best night's sleep yet. They regulate temperature, weak moisture, and stay breathable.

Plus, they're super soft, so you sleep comfortably every night. That means that my sheet's rock is my first line of defense against those random nights when my body says, yes, night sweats and decides to just go for it. These sheets keep me feeling cool, so I stay dry. And when even that's not enough to keep night sweats at bay, they dry out much faster than standard cotton sheets, which means I can drop right back to sleep in comfort. If you don't believe me, well, their five-star customer reviews speak for themselves.

Plus, they offer a 90-day risk-free trial and free shipping and returns. Check out My Sheets Rock at mysheetsrock.com slash retro, and enter our code, Retro, we're 10% off in free shipping. That's my sheets rock.com slash R-E-T-R-O, code R-E-T-R-O. Another great thing about this book is that you've included so much direct research material in here. You know, scans of these old trade magazines that I've never heard before.

You actually took the time to get permission to do that, that God bless you. And you did original interviews with people. You also found interviews with people who were, you know, pivotal to this era online and cited those sources. And it's just, it's a really just a comprehensive picture of what video games were in 1977, which was not much. But there was a lot of thought and energy being put into how can we make money making little blips move around on a television. screen. And, yeah, just the different forms that took is really interesting. And, yeah, like, seeing the different interpretations of things like just simple math games and how every company did their own take on that or on basketball is really great. And you do a good job of, you know,

providing some context for other systems in kind of these standalone chapters, but also within each game's entry as part of the 2,600 library, you do an excellent job of saying, well, this is the thing that existed on 2,600. Here's the other stuff. It's really interwoven

here. So it's not just a book about the 2,600, but about really home video games and their origins. And that is such a great, just you know, for anyone who cares about video game history and the growth and birth of

this medium. It's, this is indispensable. And I'm not just saying this because, you know, I worked on it and published it. Like, I'm, I just, I'm kind of in awe of what you've put together here. It's, it's a really great document. I'm glad you're here to represent integrity. I'm here with the money, definitely right now. Yes, I know, I know you, Jared. You're just so, so mercenary. I am. Totally. I just, I just go to the highest bidder. Another thing that I really loved about reading this, that I, you know, we complain constantly. about modern video games, about how derivative they are, about how unoriginal games are, about how every game is just the game.

Man, it's always been that way, or worse. I mean, everybody had to have their, it turns out everybody had to have the shootout game. Everybody had to have their math game. Everybody had to have their space game. And it's amazing how, while these play radically differently, how similar the concepts are, and the fact they're all coming out at the same.

same time. And it really is kind of the more things change, the more that this same reality. I think there's this kind of mythic idea that once video games were a magical, experimental creative land, where everything was new and fresh. And there are a lot of new fresh things here. It's just there's four versions of all of those new fresh things. That's neat. We're Jeremy and I're kind of popping on the praise here, man. What I really like to hear from me is you worked really hard for a really long time to make this. What

shook or surprised you when you were digging through and finding all this material, when you were learning all these stories, what really jumped out at you just like wow, I hadn't thought about it that way before? So, yeah, thank you. Contextualizing the history of

the console was like really important to me because it's so old. And these games, especially in this 77-78 period, are just so early and relatively primitive for the Atari library and what it would get later on. And yeah, to answer your question, I feel like combat, like the first game made for the system was the one that I found particularly fascinating to write about. Because if you looked up online, you know, resources for the game's development,

you'd find, like, an interview with Jodecure who helped design the final 2,600 hardware, and like he helped work on an early version of this game that then got passed along to someone else who finished it out. And I talked to literally everyone involved in the creation of combat,

which was more than just a Joe to cure and this other guy. There was two other people on top of that. So I was able to track down and interview Larry Wagner, who at that point had not done any interviews about his time at Atari. mine was like the second he had done in a week and he had like something else lined up with the history channel which also gets mentioned in here

but he explained the part of it that he worked on and he also had all of his documentation still he had donated the originals to stanford but he still had you know scanned them all for himself so he sent me the scans and we were able to go through them together and actually included my interview with larry at the back of this book because he's really interested in getting his own story of his time at Atari out there just because it hadn't been before. So if you want to read about that, that's in here too, as well as copies of all those scan pages. He gave me permission on that.

But germane to combat, one of his documents mentioned the different revisions of combat because it was being developed the same time as the Atari hardware was being finalized. So that was sort of a chicken and egg sort of situation and the very first revision

that he had on his list mentioned that it came from Cyan Engineering and it had a tank game. It had the Jet Fighter game which is, you know, that's on the retail cart. It also had a racing game and a version of Pong.

And I was really interested in this. So I asked him about it and he's like, oh yeah, that's just what they gave me. And we cut the racing game in Pong because they didn't fit on the next hardware revision on the cart. So where did those come from? I checked with the guys who worked on the Atari hardware design, Steve Mayer and Ron Milder, and they're like, oh yeah, we put together that original version of this game, that like very primitive demo just to like prove that this stuff would

work on the hardware we designed. And then we sent it along with Joe to cure to Atari once we finished. Scient engineering, I should specify, was a company that they bought, Atari had out and was sort of like their R&D Skunk Works house. They worked on this. They worked on a few other projects in the 70s and a whole bunch of other things after the $2,600. But, yeah, so I was able to sort of assemble the whole early history of combat's creation for this book

as well as trying to put it in place of time because it is a port of a couple different Atari games, Jet Fighter and Tank. And it also had other versions. of that game for other platforms, which I make note of, and, you know, what they did well and what they didn't do well

compared to Atari's. And, you know, it's just, it's, it's interesting to me, less to, you know, make a judgment call, like, oh, this game's not great. This game kind of, you know, it's not that fun in 2023. For me, it's more interesting to consider

how were these games looked at at the time? And, you know, what sort of impact? did they make, both internally and on the broader market. And I hope I did a good enough job on all of these, because some of these, like, basic math. It's really, it's basic math. It's a math game. And I took this as an opportunity to delve into why did all these companies make math games. There's not too much to say about basic math, but I was, with that one, And especially I was really impressed by just how much detail you went into on math offerings from other companies and why those existed.

Yeah, and there is basic math, but there's also things like flag capture, where you're just like, oh, you know, these really early games, flag capture, if you plug one into a $2,600 and turn it on today, you'll turn it right back off. It's a bunch of squares on a screen. But you do a great job, people are like, no, no, no, this is compelling. this is and original yeah wasn't really this wasn't one

that wasn't cloned all to death can you tell us a little bit about that yeah it's a little bit like the Bokosco

wars of its day yeah so flag capture was made by Jim Weather I think it was his first game at the company

and he wanted to make a port of Stratigo the board game that was clearly not happening on the 2600 hardware

and two kilobytes of cartridge space so he sort of trimmed it down I'm like, okay, Stratigo is about checking squares for a flag. And I'm going to make a game where you're checking squares for a flag against another player. And these squares can sometimes have a bomb that'll send you back to your starting point. I can make game types that'll adjust how your scoring works.

Sometimes the flag will move and you'll have to just sort of predict where it's going. And it was one of those games he described in an old interview. I didn't get to talk to Huather myself. But he described it as a game that you either got and really, really liked, or a game that you just bounced off of hard. And I really liked it. And I think that came through in how I wrote about this, because it's actually a really interesting game.

And it is a lot of fun with two players. I roped in a few different friends of mine to do all the two-player content on this thing. And they weren't through, well, depend on it on the game. Some of them they weren't thrilled about. Some of them they really enjoyed. What were some of the other popular two-player games? during your research So

Home Run The baseball game It's a very stripped-down baseball game But we had fun with it Basketball Great game Everyone loves it

Slot racers Kind of a weird one It's a weird one Regardless But Yeah Was that the first Atari Racing game

On the system So that would be A tie between Indie 500 And Street Racer Okay. Indy 500 is the first versus thing.

So they did like indie racing and street racing and then we're like let's do toy cars also. That name on that one is so goofy and I get into it in the book too because this was Warren Robinette's first game and his initial idea was that

it would be like a road rage kind of game where you'd all be driving cars around with rocket launchers on the hoods and you're shooting at each other because you're twisted metal 1977. Yeah, because you're mad at each other and there'd be cop cars

and such. He couldn't fit the cop cars in and for whatever reason Atari's marketing changed the name to slot racers from a game about shooting each other in a maze. I haven't figured out who at

Atari came up with that decision. Maybe a future revision of this book will have that if I ever land that, but In a world with more ROM space, they might have accidentally invented GTA. Right. Or Interstate 76? or 78 or whatever it's called.

Yeah, 76. I love that game. It's been timely. Yeah, right, exactly. I'm going to take a moment to embarrass my boss in... Josh? No, no, you. I'm not your boss.

I'm just your fellow press run writer. All right. Well, I'm going to think a moment to embarrass my fellow press run writer. Another thing I really like about this book is that in addition to just very solid research and good quality of writing, there's a lot of original photography. Jeremy puts a ton of work into taking... good pictures, and he's trained himself over the years to take marvelous close-ups, and the amount of time he puts into it's really impressive, but it's a really good-looking book. There's

original photography of the game boxes, the cartridges, a lot of the hardware, and it's very nicely done. Again, I read a lot of video game books, and none of this is just cheaply ripped from somewhere, you know, low-res. This is all original work. Yeah, I'm a big fan of not just downloading random-sized JPEGs of varying quality and approach from Google images, but actually, like, tracking down original games. And Kevin had most of these games already. So I happened to be up near where he lives last summer for my nephew's graduation. I was like, well, I'm like 30 minutes from you. I should just come over and photograph your collection. And then everything that didn't show up in the book.

It wasn't already in his collection and needed to be in the book. We just acquired and photographed. And, you know, initially the idea, I think, was just to get a version of each game. But as the book evolved, I think we both kind of agreed, like,

to really make this properly comprehensive, we needed to get the Atari and Telegames versions of all the games that had alternate versions, which I think at this point was all of them, right? And then there's a few alternate releases, like, was it basic math became fun with numbers? And there's one other that also had a third concentration.

Yes, that's the one. So, you know, we were able to rely on some people that we know, like Chris Rundazo, who works with Castlemania Games, I believe. No, Stone Age Gamer, lent us the extremely rare revision of fun with numbers. were able to photograph that. So it was a community effort for sure. But, you know, as we worked on this, I think the opportunity kind of, we became aware of this was an opportunity to really go comprehensive with this material and just create kind of the definitive document about this era of Atari. And that means just taking photos of all the stuff we can find so you can look at the back of the boxes, some of which have descriptions of the games.

some of which just have little grids saying, here's what's in the game. This is probably the prettiest photo of an RCA Studio 2 that exists. Where is that? What page is 87? 87. All right. Turning your hymnal to page 87.

That's a pretty nice picture. And then your compadre, your collaborator who let us photograph TV bingo, the game that only like three copies exist. Yeah, I have a collector buddy who lives in the area, and he was also interested in contributing to the book. So he brought a few items for the studio, too, that there was no way I was ever going to purchase.

Yeah, and like, realistically, like from an organizational standpoint, it doesn't necessarily make sense for this stuff to be in here. But this material is so rare and of such high quality that I, as the editor, I just said, I've got to put this in there. Got to take the opportunity. Why not? Just so high-resolution photography of a game from 1976 or 77 that only

exists in like enough copies that you can count on one hand. Like we've got to get that in there. I believe that my heavy sixer and CX10s ended up in here somewhere. Yeah, you're uh, I believe I believe they are on the collector's edition. Oh, that's right. That's the

collector's edition. Yeah, once I wondered about that. Yeah, we photographed to my light-sixir, which ironically was not used for any of the video capture in this book. I used my grandmother's old at 2,600 Jr. that has a stellar picture out. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, but you can definitely

tell these are direct captures, not from an emulator. Like, there's ghosting and some fuzziness. It's just, they just look real. Like, this is what I remember Atari games looking like. Yeah. Not super crisp, and And, you know, they also don't have the weird proportion issues that you get sometimes when you look up 2,600 footage on YouTube, where people don't understand that, hey, this needs to be 4x3.

Yeah. So they just put it in the actual pixel resolution, square pixels, and it's, like, all stretched and distorted and squashed. So, yeah, the screen captures in here are, they're authentic. Yeah. I mostly don't use modded hardware, which means that it's a really convoluted setup where they're going into an RF demodulator into the capture device,

which depended on the time period of when I photographed any of these. Some of them I did in the kind of frame lister. Some of them I used a Retro Tink 5X. But yeah. Yeah, and that's where my commitment to authenticity ends when it interferes with my convenience

like some of that's just too much BS so I'm totally happy to use modded systems or I did I did have to use systems FPGA is it's fine I did have to use emulators for a few things

like some of these arcade games like what am I going to do there? Oh yeah arcade games or unreleased I have some photos of some stuff from RCA from their pre you know

release stuff that only exists as binary files and emulators. So, of course, I'd grab screens of those. You didn't want to build an RCA Studio 2 ROM flasher? No, I didn't want to build the 1801-based Fredotronic hardware now. Yeah, that would have been, oh, man. Fake gamer, I'll tell you what. The MP1000 I have, actually, the RF signal out of it was so bad.

I had to have Krista Lee, who's done a lot of cool mod stuff for Jeremy. I had her do a composite mod for it, which apparently was a real journey for her, since the documentation for that mod is not very well. Yeah, and just a shout out to Krista Lee here. She really seems to like these horrible journeys. I mean, like, I still am left in awe of the work she did to bring S-video capture to an epoch cassette vision. Like, that was a month-long journey for her. hundreds of hours of work apparently and you know in the end like I paid for that time

and I can't imagine ever paying that much for a video mod again but just the fact that this was done and she figured it out is amazing so yeah like she's one of those people that is an unsung champion of game preservation and documentation you just cried out like like the lord there at the end it is finished. Pretty much. So if you're ever looking for mod work done on a vintage console or restoration, Sound RetroCo in Seattle,

Krista Lee, she's the best. Awesome. Yeah, she does great work. So all the MP1000 photos in here, which I just turned to a page that happened to have one on there. That's thanks to her composite modding my system so I can actually

get an image out of it without resorting to an emulator. Kevin, I'm curious. you wanted to write a book. What are books about video games you enjoy reading? So I really enjoyed I've enjoyed Jeremy's stuff. I've got a few of his books. I enjoyed

They Create Worlds by Alex Smith, which I've pulled from quite a few times in here because he was just very in-depth, especially on early computer and arcade history. And actually one of the books I'd like to go to

is a book from 82 called The Winners Book of Video Games by Craig Cuby and the reason I single that one out is because Craig wrote this book about video games and it wasn't just like a strategy guy and how to get high scores. It was that too

but he also did a lot of work talking about the games at the time and like the context that they existed in and like what was popular and what used to be popular and what was what's like sort of a B-tier game And he did a lot of work just presenting these in a way that really struck a chord with me when I was a kid and was checking out his book from the library. And that still stuck with me.

Like I ended up buying a used copy of his book just to like have it on my reference shelf. My public library had that book and I read it over and over and over. My mom worked there and she would bring it home for me. I just read it so many times. I was the only person who checked that book out past 1984. I remember that distinctly from the stamp page. Yeah, this isn't about 1990 that I'm reading on my figure. This would have been around 91, 92.

I remember excitedly telling my friends in elementary school about how Berserk had voice synthesis and none of them giving a crap about Berserk or voice synthesis. So, you know, got to find your audience, folks. You know, I'm going to be able to see. Let me paint a picture for you. You're working on your laptop in a busy coffee shop when nature calls. Do you just leave that precious piece of technology there for all to see and take?

If you're sensible like me, the answer is no. Yes, most of the time you'll be safe, but the sad truth about public spaces is you never know if there are bandits afoot. Folks, the point I'm getting out here is that using the internet without express VPN is just like abandoning your precious laptop while you stroll off to relieve yourself. Whenever you go online and connect to an unencrypted network, you leave yourself vulnerable to vile hackers on the same network. And if you're unprotected, your personal data is up for grabs. And there's no need to enter some elite hacker academy to learn these skills. With some cheap hardware, even a child can do it, and make up to $1,000 for their efforts. That's why you should use ExpressVPN.

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And because I don't go into an office every day, I find myself working in plenty of public spaces. Do you think I want hacker children getting their grubby little hands on my podcasting riches? The answer, of course, is no. Secure your online data today by visiting ExpressVPN.com slash Retronauts. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-V-S-V-N dot com slash Retronauts, and you can get an extra three months free. Once again, that is ExpressVPN.com slash Retronauts. So we've talked a lot about the book, but let's talk about the system.

itself and the games. Like, from your research, how did the 2,600 even happen? That's kind of a big question, but I think it's time for you to walk us through it. Like, you know, obviously Atari was an arcade company. They made arcade games, and they'd hit it big.

They were the first company to hit it big. And quickly, you know, everyone said, oh, let's make pawn games also. But, like, at what point did they say, hmm, these things we sell to, you know, play in bars, those could also be done in homes, on TVs. Yeah, so, you know, circling back a few years to about 1975, the company published their Home Pong standalone console

that was also designed, I believe, by Cyan Engineering, same folks who would later work on the 2600. And this was post-Pong boom. This would have been the Pong bust from 74 when nobody care about Pog anymore. and the only way to sort of get any juice out of that was to sell a home version. And a lot of companies were at the time because the technology had gotten to a point where you could have home game systems that were more advanced and still affordable than what you were getting off of the old Magnavox Odyssey from 72,

which also comes up a fair bit in this book. It was not a huge hit. It was like a modest success, depending on who you talk to. The Pong, on the other hand, did very well for the company, for Atari specifically. So they wanted to do a follow-up. They did do a couple of other dedicated home game systems, Pong, video pinball, stunt cycle. But Steve Mayer, Ron Milner, they were sort of brainstorming. Like, okay, we got to figure out a new process for designing these systems.

What if we design a single CPU-based hardware, and then we can just program our games for that and just sell each dedicated system using this setup. Wait, that's stupid. Why don't we just sell the hardware and then sell the games on some other medium? That'll be much more cost effective. So that's what they ended up coming up with.

They had to figure out what microprocessor they could use based on the price tags at the time and what deals Atari could get. At the time, video games weren't such small fry. None of the major microprocessor companies were giving sweetheart deals in anything. And they had a few alternatives. None of them really fit exactly what they were looking for. By chance, they ran into Chuck Petal from Moss Technologies, MOS technologies.

MOS technologies. I don't call them Moss. Whatever. No one knows. It's lost to history. Yeah. They met him at a computer fair, which I go into again further in this book in great detail. So Steve Mayer, Ron Milner, they met up with Chuck Petal, who was sort of their big guy at the time selling the 6502 microprocessor, which they had just come out with.

And they sort of went back and forth with him figuring out how to get a cut-down version of that, 65-07, which is what they used in the 2,600 final design. It couldn't do everything a 6502 could do, but it did everything they needed it to do, and it helped keep this thing affordable, which was their big thrust for the

design. Steve Mayer and Ron Milner, they'd been working on some early sprite-based hardware for Atari's arcade games, like Sprint 2 was the one they pointed out to me. It was one of the first ones they were working on with that.

sort of design mentality. And they thought, okay, let's carry that over to this home system, too. Which is why you have a system that has two player objects, two, you know, missile objects and one ball object. That gets reused for everything under the sun over the next, you know, 14 years and beyond. Yeah, it's really kind of amazing how much 2,600 developers did with basically nothing. Yeah. The Frankensteinian design, the fact that they opted not to have a frame buffer because of expense, and Kevin, you can talk more about this, but what should have been a technological curse and did make programming the thing an absolute nightmare, did, on the other hand, provide unprecedented flexibility for breaking the system.

It's just so hackable that you can get away with a lot of things they never imagined. I mean, I'm sure you can share more on that. Yeah, so they found that out very early on. So Steve Mayer explained to me that their design mentality was that, like, well, okay, if we put everything that we would want in this thing to make it really effective with like a frame buffer, et cetera, it would cost too much, we can't do that. If we set it up so that it's like a supply chain, a modern supply chain, where you're getting everything you need just in time for your stores.

We all know how well that works in a pandemic, but for a video game system, it works pretty well, as it turns out. So this thing doesn't have a whole lot of RAM. It has no screen buffer to keep track of where objects are, like, colliding with each other. They had to build that into the hardware design because there's no way you can get that in software without the frame buffer and everything. But, yeah, they made a machine that the programmers would have to develop

for line by line as the electron beam is going down the cathode ray tube on the television, which incidentally makes this nightmarish to run on most upscalers. But it's a very fascinating design that works really well for a cathode ray tube television. It's a good little CRT. And almost immediately, people were figuring out how to break this. So you look at Bob Whitehead's first couple games. He did Starship, which is a port of an extremely new arcade game by Atari, Starship One. This is a first person like space game, which really shouldn't be doable on the hardware,

but he made it work. He had the flickering technique, which would show up a lot more on later games, where you just alternate on each frame which object you're showing, so that way you can have the illusion. of having a lot more things on screen and it doesn't look too bad. Which it kind of found an ascendant

on like the NES. You know, with, it had a famous limitation of eight sprites per resolution, like per scan line. So when you had, you know, more than eight sprites, the system had to kind of cycle through them.

And programmers who really kind of understood what they were doing would say, oh, we have to give priority to this. And programmers who didn't understand would just be like, ah, just whatever happens, happens. So that's why you get the screen flicker on, I have Sprite Flickr on NES. And, you know, when you're displaying stuff like this, it's recorded, or displaying at 60 frames per second, but shows up on like YouTube at 30 frames per second or whatever, everything looks terrible. Like, it is, it's, yeah, the 2600 is a great example of how integral, specific,

technologies, display technologies were to the technology of the game systems. I mean, you know, there's famous things that you can't use on an LCD screen like, you know, the master system 3D glasses or light guns or rob the robot because they're timed and keyed to CRT technology. But the 2,600 as a whole just depends so heavily on the quirks of, you know, what was very well established technology at that time. I mean, CRTs had been around for half a century. And they look, you could see that, you know, they could use that phosphorus fade to their advantage.

Things didn't disappear instantly on old TVs. That's why, that's my flickering works. Exactly. It doesn't work great, but it works. And on the CRT, it works even better. Like, it's like, oh, I can and it's stunning how innovative that was. Somebody thought that up. Like, we're used to

video games from retro games flickering, but that was, you know, Bob Whitehead's like, this is solving a problem I have. Like, that it's like 99 cents somebody thought that up it's incredible that there was a first time and we can track it or uh you know he did the blackjack game which has multiple objects on one line that shouldn't be possible but he figured out like okay if i do it this way i can repeat the same object over and over again and as long as like it doesn't have to change state individually it'll work uh which you know blackjack doesn't you just have to change whatever uh faces on the card Larry Kaplan came up the idea of,

oh, I can just reuse the same object on multiple lines because the CPU has already moved on from that last one. And that's how he made AirC battle work. Like, I can't imagine how that game would have been if you were only shooting at like one object at a time. It would not have been fun. But he figured it out. I like what you said earlier

about the 6502, I think so much it makes the 2,600 successful, is that they chose the right processor. And the 6502 is legendary. It became legendary. At the time, it was cheap enough, and that's why a lot of people went for it. It was cheap, and it was just fast enough. But the 6502 really could handle the kind of math 2,600 games needed,

and they could handle it speedily. The 2,600 has big, ugly, chunky sprites, but they move super quick. You turn the accelerator on in Space War, one of the games in this book, and it forms a line across the screen, eventually the objects moving so fast, and the processor can keep up with it.

The Apple 2, the 2,600, the Atari 8-bit line, the NES, the Commodore 64, even by extension, the Apple 2GS, and later the S-NES. And the turbographics. And the turbographics. Don't forget about the turbographics.

My favorite 6502 base machine. It's a beast. All from that family, first the 8-bit, and then the last year, I kind of cheated with the S&S, that 16-bit version. But what a, what a, if they had gone with something else that had gone with a different design philosophy, and the nice thing about your book, you see what happens to people who did. Yeah, a couple of the other things we were looking at. They were looking at, what, the Intel 80, 80, if I remember off the top of my head,

and the 6,800, not the 68,000, because that wasn't out yet, but 6,800. And those were used in the Odyssey 2 and the MP 1,000, respectively. And they worked, but they were, with the architecture, those machines used. I don't think you could have done the same things that the architecture of the 2,600 did. You know, both those machines kind of chug. Yeah, had you used it in the 2,600, it would have been a mess. It's really fascinating, the weird tricks people did in so early on with this hardware. of history when these days have passed long ago

Will they read a much with sadness For the seeds that we let go We turned our days from the castles in the distance Eyes cast down on the pap of least resistance So one of the things that kind of comes out in this book is that all the games in 77 and 78 came out in two versions. There was the Atari game that probably everyone knows. And then there was something

called telegames, which was exactly the same game, but just repackaged. And before this podcast, we had a book signing event, and then we had an audience Q&A session. And I realized that the telegames version, of Atari releases were like basically Costco Kirkland repackaging

of existing products. How did that even happen? What was the deal? So that is correct. A lot of the major department stores at this time had their own store brands of things that other companies had made. Like, I remember

growing up we had a Montgomery Ward's microwave. Did Ward make it themselves? No. Someone else did. But it was Ward branded. And that's the part I remember, which is sort of the same idea here. Yeah, I mean, you still have that with, you know, Walmart's great value and targets various in-house brands. And sort of the same idea here. Atari and Sears had a relationship going back to that home pong system.

Sears had sold it before anyone else. They had a timed exclusive on it, which my understanding was that was something Atari had to push back for. that was only timed because Sears wanted to be the sole seller of this thing. And they needed Sears because they needed that money and they needed that marketing muscle to get their machine on the shelf. But by the time the 2,600 come along, Home Pong had been a big hit for both companies. They had a very lucrative relationship. So Sears wanted in on the ground floor for their programmable system as well. and they actually helped shepherd this through FCC approval

because at the time the FCC had to sign off on basically anything that would be emitting radio frequency signals which is how all of the game systems at this time put out their picture. I remember talking to Al-Alcourt about this, who was one of the people I interviewed for this book, specifically about the 2600, which I don't think anyone has really done. They always want to talk about his work on Paw. and the whole the arcade division.

But, yeah, for 2600, he specifically said there were people at Sears who knew their way around these RF frequencies and FCC's requirements like the back of their hand, and they just helped push this thing through, and that's how the $2,600, sorry, now I'm getting the wrong numbers. That's my fault, sorry about that. That's how they got the $2,600 out the door and out of the shelf, so much more smoothly than literally every single other company in this book. And as to where that leads to the telegames,

that was sort of the price they paid for that marketing muscle from Sears, which was at the time the biggest retailer in the United States. They wanted their own branding. This was how they got it without having to have exclusive games yet. They did get a couple in subsequent years after the console had blown up and became a huge hit. But at this point, they just have their own versions of these games. The interesting thing is that Sears packaging was actually more lux than Atari's own packaging.

Like the gatefold covers with the manual it tucks into the front, it's super nice. And actually Sega took cues from that with the SG-1000. The original large box versions of SG-1,000 games had packaging very, very similar to that. And eventually they dropped that in favor of more compact, you know, tab opening type boxes. But at the start, that was kind of like, it just felt premium. Like you open it, there's the manual, there's the game. It just, you know, had a kind of a self-closing tab fastener.

Really, really nicely made. And they're really solidly built compared to like the cheapo boxes they started using in 78. Oh, man. Like, I mean, yeah, when I think of, you know, 80s Atari packaging, late 80s especially, they just, 7,800, X-EGS, it is, it links. All that is just, oh, it's terrible. Like, there's no way to find a game that is just not, like,

warped out of shape because they use such cheap cardboard and such cheap interior structure. Yeah, it's barely a solid. It's like watching Star Trek, and they find a founder, and it suddenly just morphs into this gelatinous mess. My first 2,600, was a Sears Video Arcade. That's what my family had. They bought it at Sears, and a lot of my games, my early games, likewise, were purchased at Sears.

So I had the telegames versions of several of the games in this book, laying around the house. It's funny. I had the telegames version of Starship, Outer Space, as a kid. I remember my aunt had that when she got rid of her whole whole Atari stuff. She gave it to us because I still played the thing. so it took me a long time to realize oh there's an Atari version of this called something else because at the time

he was getting secondhand like I didn't know this so I really wanted to make sure that Sears had representation in here and yeah that did lead as you mentioned earlier to us getting photos of both in every case but I think it's valuable like just to see how

Atari and Sears presented the same game. Sometimes it's almost identical, you know, aside from the trade dress. Like the Sears Telegames boxes are a very consistent style, black with, you know, a colored title, and then there's kind of an inset frame in a rounded box that has artwork in it. And Atari has kind of their own style. But, like, sometimes the presentation, even the titles are almost identical. Sometimes they're wildly different. And it must have been really confusing for, people to go shopping in 1978

and be like, I've got a, you know, I want to buy a cool Atari game. I wonder which one I should get. Oh, there's these games I've never heard of at Sears. Like, how many people do you think bought the same game twice by mistake, assuming they would be different games, only to get them home and realize I already own this one, but it was called, you know,

whatever, whatever, you know, I don't know the titles, the alternate titles, but. I'm going to guess it's a non-zero number. I know some of the ads that I saw at the time, which didn't make it into this book necessarily, would mention that, oh, it plays like, you know, such and such. Like, for example, space combat plays like space war. It's the same game, but that's how they would, like, bill it.

But, yeah. Yeah, so I'm looking at Street Racer. The telegames version is called Speedway 2. So the game modes in Street Racer are Street Racer, Slalom, Dodge,em, Jet Shooter, Number Cruncher, Scoop Ball. On Speedway 2, the exact same modes are called Kamikaze Road Race Slalom Scoop Ball. Okay, there's two that are the same. Number Cruncher, that's also the same, and Roller Ball. So, like, 50% of these modes are presented under different names.

So even that's, you know, like you would look and maybe cross-reference and say, well, do I want this other race? game. It looks like it has some of the same content, but there's some unique content. I don't know. Were people that savvy about buying video games back then? There was no, certainly no internet at the time, but not even really a games press to speak up, to say, you know,

like, to offer reviews, to offer shopping guidance. Yeah. You were just kind of, you know, tossed into the deep end and figure it out. Yeah, at this point, it was like, does your local newspaper write about video games? Like, do they have someone who does that?

There was one paper in Ohio that did, and I referenced it several times in this. And then there was video magazine. They had their, what's it called, Arcade Alley, I think, column that Bill Cuncle and Arnie Katz wrote, starting in 77, 78. I don't remember off the top of my head. But those were your options, and beyond that, you were sort of relying on these salespeople at these retailer's shops and they may or may not know a lot about this topic

that was something I came across several times in the retail industry press from this time frame is just like how do I sell this stuff I'm mad about it because I need to have dedicated staff hanging around these video games that are not shilling for other objects

yeah I mean selling a $30 video game versus selling a $300 $300 refrigerator, where's the margins in that? So, just growing pains there. Eventually, after 79, I think basically

almost all the Sears branded versions of the games have the exact same title as the Atari ones. But even with, you know, games that have the exact same titles, Blackjack, for example, Atari has casino rules and private rules and telegames has

Las Vegas rules instead of casino rules. and home rules instead of private rules. If you stop and think, those are the same thing. But then also Atari says one player, two players, three players, which telegames doesn't mention except down at the bottom, not as a feature, but it's just, you know, how to play it. So, yeah, I just feel like they're kind of working at odds with each other here. I also love how some of the art on these is obviously, you know,

the same game, flag capture, and capture. And it's obvious that two different artists got the same brief. Yep. Like, here's the art brief. And so, in capture for, you know, telegames, there's kind of this, you know, conquistador guy standing on a beach, and there's like a little pirate ship out in the corner and a mountain and a guy climbing and they're holding flags. They're like, okay, so there's supposed to be like a pirate ship and a flag and a guy. But then you flip the, like, flag capture by Atari,

and it's just dominated by this huge, lavishly painted, patched pirate face with this galleon, like going through the middle of it, a flying, like, There's flames coming out of the British flag and dudes with swords running out of one side. What do you do when your game consists of nothing but a grid of boxes? Yeah. Literally, that was all flag capture was. So it was, you know, the sky's the limit in terms of your creative interpretation of this. What is this that you imagine it is?

And that's what I like is that, like, you know, they hire two different people to draw these, like, based on the same specs. And they get one person who's kind of like, well, I guess I'll make, listen, another guy's like, I am going full on Horatio Hornblower here. Captain Jack Sparrow, here I come. But still, it's a grid of boxes. You can understand why Nintendo went with the black box pixel art style to say, hey, this is actually what you're getting more or less when you buy this game.

There are no painted conquistadors here to represent a black box. It is, you know, a little blue grid on the screen. It is Mario here. It is little, little Eskimo guy with a hammer. A lot of honesty in marketing from Nintendo in that period, which I think culminates when they're just like, that first you have the black box games with this pixel art, and then you just have the Zelda gold cartridge with a little corner. It's like with a hole showing, guess what's inside this box? It's also gold cartridge.

There's a cartridge in the box. That's what you're getting. It's gold, just like this gold box. But it was remarkably effective. And, yeah. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you do get stuff like brain games, which is called brain games in both. versions, and it has titles like Touch Me

and the question is, which version of this wizard do you want to play Touch Me with? Yeah. I love how delightfully... One of them looks really angry, so I don't know if I want him playing Touch Me with me. I love how delightfully 70s, a lot of the Sears in particular looks like.

The art for math is just gorgeous. You put this on the side of a van, and people are like, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely going to go toke up and there. You know, Kevin, for you, like all these very early games, I think that folks that go back and play ROM tag with these, largely you're going to skip most of the early 2,600 ROMs just based on the primitive nature of the graphics. Of this first batch in Volume 1, what games did you really, really enjoy the most?

So my favorites, there's basketball, which I think we alluded to a little earlier today a couple of times. That game holds up really well, and I think that is borne out by the fact that it was still selling into the late 80s pretty handily. Breakout is a fantastic conversion of a game that's kind of timeless. Like, breakout's just fun. I'm a big fan of a flag capture, as we talked about. It's a game you either love or you hate. I love it. An Indy 500 holds up remarkably well if you can get some.

two driving controllers. It can be a little tiring on your hand, just holding down the accelerator button on those things, but... That's a problem with a lot of older racing games. Exactly, like, you know, Radracer, you accelerate by pressing up, and that destroys your hand after a while.

It does. I don't know why it does, why it should, but it just doesn't feel good. It's the worst. But like, Indy 500 has ice physics on one of the stages, which is really fun to go skating around. Is that gaming's first ice level? I think it is.

Wow, that's cool. And for 8,500, for folks that don't know, maybe you mentioned the driving controllers, which look like the pedal controllers, but... They are completely different internally. And this is the only game that used them at the time. There's a few hacks and homebrew games that used them, you know, since then. Yeah. But as far as the original retail era of the system, that was it.

Kevin, do you play a lot of 2,600 homebrew? Here and there. not as much as I used to but I also have a toddler so not playing as much as usual as I could That's been one of the shocking things for me and one of the joys

of the Atari 2600 is that This is a system that by the time I got it in 1982 was already several years old I wasn't I was three But the system was Here in 2023 People are still creating new 2600 games

and because of that weird architectural thing we talked about earlier they're still finding new ways to hack the system to do stuff that nobody thought possible and so unlike a lot of systems that you kind of see top out

you know you get used to like the 10 year later home brews that blow things away or you know late C-64 home brews of Ghost and Goblins were just like how did they do that? Yeah. But the 2600 they still have haven't hit the peak. The versions of Wizard of War and Super Cobra, or Gallagher that came out recently are just stunning. Zookeeper. I brought that one to Magfest last January and had it set up in

the museum space for a little while, and folks kept coming like, wow, this is a $2,600 game, huh? And I can't play doodle bug on my iPad anymore, but I can play it on my $2,600. Or doodle jump, pardon me, that there's people found a way to port that. Is there a game called doodle bug? I don't know. There should be a doodle bug. Yeah, I touched on that a little bit

just my like intro to the console, like how the early homebrew stuff really kicked off while the body was still warm on this platform because it went out of retail circulation at the end of 91, early 92, depending on the part of the world. you were in. But the first homebrew developments for this thing were like 93,

94, like this thing was dead but not forgotten for very long. And since then, it's just been sort of a snowball. Like, there's so many homebrew games for this thing and I cannot keep track

of all of them that keep getting made. Yeah, I can't imagine trying to collect all the homebrew games. That just seems like a fool's errand. Mm-hmm. And a lot of A lot of them are, like, really impressive. Like, they, you know, they're using what people have learned about the system over, you know, decades. Some of them are pulling out, like, illegal opt-cats for the hardware that, you know, shouldn't work, but they do on the 2600. And then stuff like the Gallagher port, they have on-cart hardware expansions, which only, I think, like there's a couple of,

2,600 games that use extra RAM built in, but I think Pitfall 2 is about the only one that has extra hardware, hardware. It's got the audio processor. That or anything on the Star Path, yeah. But yeah, David Crane's Pitfall 2. His DSP chip.

Yeah. But it is neat to see what they could do with an arm processor on the cartridge without breaking. It's not like it's using it as a pass-through or anything. It's still limited by the TIA but just doing some neat new stuff with it. Yeah. Taking some of the off of the CBA.

So many, so many acronyms being thrown around. What's a TIA? What's a DSP? What's, let's ask the... TIA is the television interface adapter, and that's the video chip, basically, for the 2,600.

That's one of the custom chips in the thing. There's also the riot, which is their input-output chip, and the CPU, the 6507. All right, you were asking about the DFS, That's a digital signal processor? I think so.

I feel like it had a different acronym. I think David Crane decided to be cute and like give it his initials. Yeah, like the DCP or something, I can't remember. The David Crane processor? It sounds right. But it allows you to play the music in Pitfall 2 as well as do a couple of the other visual tricks that he was there. Yeah, like the scrolling that the game uses. And, yeah.

It's not just music, but it's like dynamic music, right? It is. Yeah. That game was so... That man, man. That game's amazing. That game is so forward-thinking, and if it had come out in any time other than 1984,

it probably would have been a massive, like, influential hit. It is the most un-David-Krain-David-Krain game ever. I love David Krain. He's a great dude. What are you saying? That game is, like, the basis for a boi and his blob. But it's not murderous. Oh, I see.

In Pitfall, too, when you die, you go back to these magical things called waypoints that he puts all over the game. Yeah. If you lose points, and then you're like, oh, well, I'm never going to get the high score and get my path. Right, but compared to, like, Pitfall, Boy and his blob, Ghostbusters, is just not nearly as, like, just vicious as those games are. Those are all very demanding games. Pitfall 2 is very merciful. Is Ghostbusters demanding?

Can be. It depends on the version you're playing. Well, the AES version, but that wasn't David Crane. That was, that was Bits Lab making some bad decisions. But even C-64s, if you fool around, you're going to. going to get stopped pretty quick. And that is... There's no time for fooling around. You've got to clean up the town. Exactly.

But yeah. 2,600 Homebrew, really interesting. I think I even... I don't remember if I grabbed any screenshots. I think I did. Yep. There's screenshots in here of an Indy 500 hack from the early 2000s that added in a bunch of new maps.

Just as an example, like, yeah, this is the sort of thing people were doing. When they had access to this hardware through emulation, they started making their own versions of these games, and it just sort of escalated from there. We were talking about David Crane. His Outlaw is in here, and Outlaw is not my favorite 2,600 game, but the gunfight spin-off homebrew that was made a few years ago is. It's just that game with everything improved and with Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire playing while you shoot at each other. totally worth your time. Yeah. It's hard to go back to

Outlaw after playing some of the other versions of it, but like at the time... Oh, at the time was amazing. Oh, yeah. Had a lot of fun with it. Outlaw's incredible for when it came out. Yeah, and your article on Outlaw is great. It really gets into the history of it of gunfight and how it intersects kind of

with Space Invaders. Yeah, there's a weird history for that. Yeah, there's a lot more heritage for this game than you might expect. And they got to include some information there about David Crane's design perspective and why he didn't really

like he was okay with how a gunfight came or outlaw rather came out but it wasn't how he wanted to really make games and he sort of discusses how he doesn't care to have like a million variation in a game. He wants to just make a game with his

ideal set of features and let the players figure it out from there. Again, extremely forward thinking. also how I feel like most people play 2,600 games nowadays. I don't think a lot of them go delving into the different game types. Yeah, all those dip switches on the concert. You don't want to play Invisible Space Invaders?

I mean, I can. All combat mode should just be set default to bouncy bouncy tanks, and then we'd be good. Good old tank pog. My favorite was Skeet Shoot, which is from 81. It's a much more recent game,

relatively speaking. But the default mode on that is off and if you go messing with the different game types on there, it gets kind of playable. So I described it the other day as a game that goes from, oh God, what was the term I used? From wretched to mediocre or something? Something like that, yeah.

Yeah, wretched to mediocre is a good description. Like, just fascinating that that was going to be the default game type on that one. I think all games should switch with that slider. No, like just wretched to mediocre. Like, you can just do that when you buy a bad game. Instead of starting your game at like 7 out of 10, it's just wretched to mediocre. Yeah. So in addition to, what, is it, like 20-ish?

Yep, 2,600 games that came out in 1977 through 78. You also touch on, you know, the MP 1000 games and the Odyssey games and the, all those other systems. There's several other systems that you talk about. Why was this system successful where the others failed? I mean, you talked about, we talked about like the 6502 and how that was integral to the way the game's played, but sheer technology alone doesn't make that big a difference. I mean, it does, but we've seen Nintendo succeed with game systems

that are technologically inferior to what's on the market, Game Boy or Switch, either. Yeah. So from my perspective, putting this together, it was sort of a confluence of a few things. part of it was the price point made sense so that aspect of the design was very smart

were the other systems more expensive a lot of them were the Channel F cost more I think eventually the 2,600 undercut it pretty well but I know the Bally Arcade cost like $300 at launch

versus the $2,600 which was like $160 somewhere in that range Like, a lot of people did sales at the time, so it sort of bounced around, but that was the general vicinity. So Ballet was like, no, no, go get a second job to afford the

Atari. And, you know, it was a system that had, like, nigh arcade quality graphics and gameplay, so, you know, you got what you paid for, but still. But it was like a, it was that was a factor. Corporate support was a big factor, because Atari had

Warner's backing. Warner had more money than God at the time and they wanted to make this thing succeed. So they gave Atari all the resources they needed for it. And once the company in the 2600 had a little bit of a downturn in 78, they changed out the leadership, but they didn't kill the whole thing. They just let them figure it out, and they did. Then you look at some of these other platforms like the Channel F, that was put out by Fairchild, which had all sorts of issues with quality assurance and production problems. and on top of that

their other markets were imploding so you know the system wasn't going to save them when they were hemorrhaging cash APF which made the MP1000 they were just they were small player

they never really had the resources Magnavox they didn't have the like the C-suite support that they needed for it for a few years there and that sort of undercut it so like all of these had different issues that sort of undermined them

from becoming the same kind of hits the $2,600 was. But at the same time, the $2,600 hardware was such that you could do all sorts of weird things. You could do space invaders on this thing. You should not have been able to do space invaders on this hardware. No, it really doesn't make sense. But they made it work, and that was their breakout game, which it's not covered in this book, but...

I saw breakout was their breakout game. Ah. No, that was breakaway. That was their breakaway game. Ah, there we go. Yeah, breakaway 4. It's on the cover. So we can look forward to Space Invaders in volume

3? That was 79 or 80? That was 80. I guess it depends on how I split up the years. I have to imagine it's going to be 70... 79 and 80. Yeah, I could see it. 81 would just be like...

It's own standalone volume. Oh, volume 2, you say. I do. I'm putting the pressure on now. There has to be a second volume to this. It says volume one on the cover. Come on. It's true.

There has to at least be one more. But yeah, so you had that as a factor, just that hardware architecture working for them and not just against them. And there was the name branding, too. Like Atari was well known. Odyssey was better known from what I gleaned from early reporting. But Atari was like number two,

and then you had everyone else. So they had that too. They had that Warner marketing machine to help out there and change that. And they had Sears, which was a big help, and they had Sears to help them get through the FCC, which I have a whole chapter in here about how the FCC screwed over everybody else. Which is incredible. It says that's a really important part of this story, just how.

I really love computer history, and a lot of computer history is defined by FCC regulations. I didn't realize just how much of an effect it had on the console industry around the same time. Yeah, and shout out to Dale Gettys, who's a researcher up in Canada, who his big obsession is the FCC and the history and how that impacted video games and computers, because I was able to run my draft chapter by him. It's like, okay, point out to me all the places that I need to rework, and he did that and put together something I'm very pleased with.

The lesson from consoles was follow the rules that we learned, and the lesson we learned from computers was ignore the rules and apologize later, and you win. That seems to be how dealing with the FCC played out. And it was fascinating to me how the different ways these companies approached the FCC problem. Like, Atari, they went through Sears, Sears got them, everything they needed, RF-wise. You know, Fairchild, they had to cover that thing and just a metal tomb and redesigned the hardware later. and RCA, they just ran the RF signal down the power signal too.

Yeah, that's amazing. And some weird design that made sense to them, and it got them through, even though the people at the FCC thought it was just a failure waiting to happen. Yep. It's an interesting part of that story, and I'm really glad I was able to fit it in here because it is so important and so overlooked

on why Atari worked and nothing else really took off to the same. degree. And, like, they, they had competition. Like, the Channel F sold pretty closely to what Atari was selling these years that they overlap. And the Odyssey did, too, up until Space Invaders came out. I love that Radio Shack was so bad at shielding and so widespread that they just defied the FCC. They're just like, no, we just have thousands of stores, we're going to do this anyway, and you can see us later, that they shipped a computer so badly shielded, that programmers made it a feature in their games to use the electricity leakage to put sound effects

through a radio that you sat next to your tandy. Like you tuned it to a station, and it would play the sound effects through the radio. Incredible. That was, and people would write for that ability. So when's the tandy book coming? Oh, no, no, never. I just love the weirdness of electricity affecting how this stuff works.

Sorry, I get excited about computers. That's all good. wind down now. But as a final thought on Atari Archive, Volume 1, 1977 through 1978, Kevin, what was your, I guess,

biggest challenge putting together this book? And what are you proudest of? So, there's a few challenges to this, depending on what time frame this all came together. And the first big challenge was finding out when these games came out, which I mentioned already. And for me,

the other real challenge was getting this into a shape that was readable and, like, interesting to go through for me, I think. I had a separate editor that I paid while this was in a much earlier draft state. So I'll give a shout out to her, Meredith Dimmick. She went through this and picked out all the things that didn't make sense to her as someone who knew nothing about video games. And it was like, hey, can you explain this better? Can you explain what the heck this means? And I think that made for a much stronger book

because it let me rethink how I was approaching some of these topics. So even if you don't know too much about, you know, how video games work under the hood or about video games in the late 70s, I think this is pretty approachable, thanks to, you know, her help on that. Research-wise, tracking down some of these people was a massive pain. So it turns out the white pages are my friends, as is the U.S. Postal Service. Some of these folks I just had... Grand institutions all.

Yeah, some of these folks I just had to write letters to and hope that they responded, and a lot of them did. And they were able to give me some really good feedback. In some cases, I had to go out to archives to dig around old documents and old papers to figure stuff out. and just switch out like a golden idol with Atari Links to keep a giant bowl Oh yeah yeah yeah I like this It doesn't work because the Atari Links is huge but it's so lightweight It's just empty away Yeah that was my failing that's why that's why the ball comes and crushes you

Yeah Did not make it out of that too Yeah All right, so, Kevin, thanks for your time. Jared, thanks also for your time. Thanks for putting this book together. It's a great read. Again, this is Atari Archive, Volume 1, 1977 through 1978 by Kevin Bunch.

It is available now for purchase at limited rungames.com. It's a press-run publication that Jared and I massaged into reality once we were given all the materials by Kevin. And I'm really happy with the way it came out, and I really feel like this is an essential document of video game history, and I'm really proud to have taken a part in it. But also, it's super relevant to anyone listening to this podcast, because it is a document of video game history that really provides more than just like, here are some video games. It dives into the cultural and business history of the games in addition to just, I

how they play and what a video game is. So it's essential reading. I highly recommend it, and it will be available on Amazon.com later this year. So if you don't like hardcovers and prefer paperbacks, well, Amazon's got your back. Good news.

For paperback. And, you know, special thanks to Jen Frank for putting together a very nice forward for this. Very, very heartfelt. And very helpful also in some of the editing and, like, leaving comments. and helping it come together.

So if you liked her work, she was a factor in this one as well. All right. So in conclusion, this has been a Retronauts episode talking about retro video games and game history and books there about. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com

and on Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. You can also find us on social media as long as those platforms still exist. It's much longer that's going to be. And, you know, we are Patreon-funded. Most of our funding for hiring editors and co-hosts and that sort of thing comes from Patreon. So subscribe and keep the show alive so that we can keep talking about cool books. And, of course, support Kevin in his endeavor.

Kevin, where can people find you on the Internet besides you're buying your book at Limited Run? So I have a YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Atari Archive, which is the video series that this book spun out of. I have a Patreon to support that, Patreon.com, Atari Archive as well. And I have the website that has, you know, assorted information and updates on occasion when I remember to. Atari Archive.org. And finally, I'm on various social media platforms, depending on which one, it's, you know, Ubersaurus or Euberus at Mastodon.com. That's one of them.

So you can find me here and there. And on various discords about game history. All right. And Jared? Oh, I don't know where to find me anymore. At Limited Run Games, doing my small part to help people publish their wonderful books about video games. And I'm not on Twitter anymore, so I don't know.

I'm over to Instagram, Miss Petticama, Jared. want to see pictures of me staring at things. I don't know. That's a good place to do it. I mean, I think it's important to mention the fact that petty comma Jared is not a comma. It is the word comma spelled out. That is. P-E-T-T-Y-C-O-M-M-A-J-A-R-E-D. That could be confusing to people who can't see it visually. You are correct. What about you, Jeremy? Oh, I'm on the Internet. You can find me around. Jeremy Parrish. I do all kinds of stuff. It's weird. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening.

Thanks again, Kevin, Jared, for talking about the origins of Atari 2600 and a book that expertly documents that process, that whole creation. I hope everyone will check out the book and look forward to more explorations of video game history and creations and publications and that sort of thing. That's what we do here, talk about old games and the people who made them

and the people who document them. It is no life. I see the beach. I see the future. Imagine every day. You're close. I'm where you're there. So cautiously at best and then so high.

As he's called my spirit flying into the sky, I've been too much to hear. your wondrous stories return to hear your wondrous stories I'll return to hear your wondrous stories. Thank you.