Retronauts - 582: 1974 & ’84: The Years in Review Revue

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

As we move into 2024, Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, and Kevin Bunch look back in time to the years 1974 and ’84 to explore the gaming events taking place 40 and 50 ago. History! Events! Happenings! Bad jokes! It's all here, friends. 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 episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Notion A.I. This weekend Retronauts, call this podcast a necktie because we've got the fours in hand. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And that intro was a joke for the few of you who have ever worn a necktie in our audience. I realize that's not really the cool nerd thing to do these days. So just trust me when I say it was a funny sartorial punchline. Anyway, here to make lots of stupid jokes about things no one cares about. We have, actually, I kind of feel like that's all of our MO. So, um, I found the perfect group for this, really, in addition to myself, Jeremy Parrish, we have here also in North Carolina, but not actually recording in the same space as me today because of health issues, which seem to be prevalent over the past few years. Please, who is returning to this show for the first time in quite a while? That's me, Ben Jedwards, triumphant return of the king. We'll see how triumphant it is. Yeah, that's true. Let's not get ahead of ourselves yet. Here on episode 582 of retronauts, that's a long streak, you know, to maintain triumph.

One episode for every patch of hair in my head that I've lost since we started. If we're going, if we're going that, that route, yeah, we're all in trouble. And also calling in from the beautiful state of Maryland. That's right. This is a zipper. tipper necktie enthusiast, Kevin Bunch. Wow, you can get zippers on those now? Yes. I don't know where it came from. I just have one. And my wife always makes fun of me whenever I wear it. Too easy. That's even better than Velcro necktie.

Yeah. So, yes, this is technically, it's a Retronauts East, which is only appropriate because this is the next episode or the next entry in our annual years in review review review review yeah there needs to be some echo on there i gotta hit that in post um you probably know the drill at this point because you've probably been listening to retronauts for many of these 582 episodes but just in case you stumbled drunkenly into this podcast in the wake of uh you know your office christmas party or whatever where they made you wear a necktie and then you threw up all over everyone. The way this works is that we are about to enter the year 2024. And so we are going to look back decades in history to talk about

1974, 1984. And in another episode, we'll talk about 1994. And Bob's going to do one 2004. We're not going to talk about 2014 because that just doesn't feel retro. I don't know. It was 10 years ago, but I'm not ready to do. Like I quipped on Twitter or X, whatever it is. Retro gaming feels a lot like modern gaming these days. Yeah. PlayStation 4 is not that different PlayStation 5, which is the current hotness. Yeah. Yeah, we're just going to skip 2014. But 1974, that feels really old. That's That's before any of us were around. And honestly, I don't know that much about the gaming events of 1974.

I feel like there weren't that many. But 1984 is still kind of fresh in my brain because that's when my, you know, my neurons were firing the best. And my synapses were, yeah. Well, like, it was, you know, that very, very formative period of my life. That's when you coalesced from a cloud of gas into a human being. Yes, that was me. traveling from planet to planet to my gaseous form and finally taking shape as a human here. So, yeah, we're going to talk about 1974 and then 1984 this episode.

And although I say that 74 was before our times, last year I went into the years in review, review, expecting us to just sort of elide over 1973. and then we ended up spending more than an hour talking about it. So I know how retronauts works, and you know how retronauts works these days. Instead of just doing surface-level skims of topics, we get bogged down. We go to the maths about things,

and it's cool and good and a little unpredictable. So let's see where the day takes us. I don't know. Anyway, 1974, let's cast our minds back to, oh, it's all black because we didn't exist. All right. So what do we know based on television and books and newspapers and just historical documents? What was happening in that year, in TV, history, film, and other things? Well, this was the year of the Watergate scandal.

So that was happening. Oh, when politicians could actually get. drummed out of office for doing criminal things. I remember those days. Those were nice. I wish I remember those days. Yeah, okay. I don't know that they existed at some point, and that public perception of a politician would actually be sufficient to make them resign. And yeah, those were good days. Well, actually, I don't know. Was 1974 a good year? It seems like everything we're talking about here. It was kind of bad. Well, I think there was a lot of, you know, angst in the country over the Nixon stuff.

That's my take of it. I think it really stressed people out. And of course, there was the oil crisis where the oil decided to well up and take over the world. Is that actually what happened? Yeah, that's what they tell me on the TikTok, you know. Anyone using TikTok is not actually old enough to remember any of this stuff. So, yeah. Yeah, we had the oil embargo basically going on, so because the U.S. was so heavily dependent on oil, much as it is now. But more so, that caused a lot of problems with transportation and entertainment and basically anything you could think of. So really great time to be getting into coin-up video games, really.

Yeah, and it didn't just affect Americans. other countries were heavily petroleum-dependent. I know kind of a famous part of Nintendo's lore is that the OPEC crisis really, really affected them because Japan only produces like 2% of its own energy or something like that or of its own petroleum. So they had to import just about everything. And Nintendo had kind of committed to these large-scale installations that involved a lot of plastics for which, of course, oil is an essential component. And so everything became very, very expensive. And they had to scramble to survive. But they did because Nintendo was really good

at pivoting in those days and just turning on a dime and changing its entire fundamental video business structure. And whatever you want to say about Nintendo president at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who has a pretty harsh reputation for the way he treated people and the way he went about business, he definitely did have the ability to say, well, this isn't working time to just completely reinvent everything we're doing. And eventually, you know, some of those struck gold. So that was, that was a big deal there, too. I want to say that the oil crisis happened, you know, it was existing at the same time that the Vietnam War was starting to go really, really poorly for the U.S., not that we actually formally declared war there, but

we kept sending kids over there to get chewed up by the meat grinder. So it was kind of like a war in everything, but its technical proclamation in Congress. And that was going really poorly. And so the government was looking for an exit strategy. And, yeah, nothing good. It's great times, 74, 73. the general time frame. The American world really needed

escapism. They needed video games to take them away from all that. And it's a shame because video games just weren't quite happening yet. Pong, you know, had hit it big a few years before in arcades, but we didn't have home pong yet. There was basically the MagnaVox Odyssey

in terms of home entertainment. And that was pretty much it. So in arcades, people were kind of still figuring things out, still trying to come up with ideas that weren't just Pong, but with some weird variant, or not even a weird variant, just a straight-up Pong clone. So a very formative day is not quite what we think of as video games today. Yeah, I liked, I was reading the other day for a presentation I did about how Atari's Steve

Bristow, one of their game design engineers, he estimated that only about a quarter of all the Pong machines that were produced in 73 were actually Atari's, and that everything else came from something like 50 companies, just putting stuff out because Atari couldn't meet the demand. And that ended up creating a whole glut of Pong machines on the market, which kind of, it kind of crashed the video game side of Coynop for a little while. They didn't really recover all the way until Space Invaders came along. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that Atari wasn't like super sour about all the, the clones that were happening because it, I don't know, what's your reading? Alan Alcorn told me, he just saw it as the other companies as fulfilling demand that they couldn't meet.

And so his story was he started getting these boards back sent back to be fixed. There were pong boards, but they're actually clones. And so, yeah, I think there's some of that both. One is that it didn't hurt Atari that much because they couldn't meet that demand anyway all over the place. But then there's what Kevin's saying, which is, yeah, you can have a glut and a crash because of all that. So it's, you know, double-edged type of situation. Yeah. And 74 was when the cocktail arcade cabinet form factor sort of hit its stride to the extent that it ever hit a stride.

And that sort of helped spur some flagging sales because, oh, hey, Now you can play Pong as a table with your buddies while sitting down. While sitting down drinking your beer or whatever. So, you know, that helped. It didn't make up the gap of, you know, the Pong cabinet glut, crashing everything. But it was there. It was a factor. So, you know, you had companies looking at what other kinds of games can we do to sort of kick things back off.

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And that seems good, I guess. But I mean, there were video games happening that were not just Pong clones or Pong ripoffs or whatever, unauthorized Pongs, Pong likes, etc. There were some new games, new, new game concepts. Yeah, we have a whole list of these that we can sort of run through. Yeah, let's do that. Let's talk about these new innovations in video games that do not involve just hitting a ball or a block back and forth from one side of the screen to the other. Because, you know, that's a pretty radical change for video games. I mean, yeah, there was computer space, but video games in terms of, like, what people

actually wanted to play, that there wasn't anything until Pong, really. Yeah, this was a cool year for some arcade games, most of which you can not play today because they're not emulated on account of not using microprocessors. They're all transistor, transistor logic. And only some of those have been implemented. and I'm not sure if any of these have been. I think maybe Tank, which we'll get to. Surely, surely Tank.

And Grand Track 10 must have been implemented somewhere. Maybe I'd have to double check. I can't imagine games this, you know, this significant would have gone completely untouched by the enthusiasts to make up the MAME development community. They're so old. I think a lot of people don't care anymore. I mean, honestly, this is a horrible thing. say but a lot of the generation that grew up with these games is dying now like they're the people like half a generation older than me they are not my parents generation they're like the gen Xers

and they are not as um prominent in what i would say the like the retro gaming scene and stuff uh now is they you know when i first started in the 90s they were the ones doing everything you know like paying attention to uh that that period of history so So I feel like it's very neglected, and that's why we need to talk about it. Yeah. So when you say dying off, you don't mean literally dying. You just mean, like, losing interest. People, some people literally dying, yeah.

It could be two things. That always happens. But it's not like they're, you know, the greatest generation and they're in danger of just no longer being around to tell us their stories in any near point of the future. There's, you know, there's like a cycle of culture where, you know, a new. generation comes up and they look back and then they kind of rule the scene for a little while and that this generation's time we're talking about is pretty much long pass and now people are looking back at the Xbox and stuff. So we're talking about like absolutely ancient history. I don't know how much of the enthusiasm is there anymore to, you know, emulate or simulate

these games. And there is like, because these are all TTL logic games, there's a specific skill set you need to emulate these properly. You need to be able to read schematics. You need to have access to the boards, probably, because the schematics don't always have how they actually work. You know, there's like a Rata involved.

And you need to be able to translate that into, you know, an FPGA code or you know, software code. So I understand. It's a bummer, though, because these are very formative as I'm excited to talk about. So, I guess

I guess it just surprises me because I feel like the kind of people who get into emulation and, you know, creating these, these recreations of game systems really thrive on being the first to do something on saying, oh, here's a space that hasn't been explored before. Here's, you know, a task that no one has accomplished. I want to try that. But I guess, yeah, you're right. There is, there is that element of personal interest that has to be involved, like, oh, I grew up with this. I love this. So. we are we're talking about games that that you know predate most of the people who are active in the scene now I guess that does make sense I mean these are 50 year old games if you are if you're someone who remembered these when they came out you're uh at least 56 or so yeah and you're you're the market for or the community of potential coders for this working out of nostalgia are you know looking at new careers as Walmart graders at this point and are they fun are they game's fun to play today. See, that's another issue. Like, there's a lot of games, like, from the NES era that are still just wonderful games, and you want to play them forever, and they're timeless. But some of these are so old and primitive that it's hard to, you know, attract a lot of

excitement about them. I'll say, I have gotten to play a couple of these, because, you know, the cabinets are rare, but they do exist. And I think some of them are actually pretty good and pulled up pretty well. Yeah, I mean, I think Grand Track 10 is pretty cool. But the thing about Grand Track 10 is that it's really dependent on the physical setup. You want those steering wheels. You want to have a whole bunch of people kind of standing around a station competing with each other. If it's just, you know, like, hey, use your USB joystick on maim by yourself. It's not going to have the same kick. It really is an installation-based game. in a way that later-day video games were generally not.

So, yeah, I guess I can see where some of the fundamental appeal of a game like that would just be lost no matter what. Yeah, and a lot of that for Grand Track 10 especially is just how the game was made. So, like, this was a game that was basically a manufacturing nightmare because it was designed at cyan engineering for Atari. Syed was a company that was acquired by Atari and basically served to sort of their skunk works for the next decade or so. These are the folks who designed the 2,600 hardware. They worked on Atari's various dedicated games and all sorts of other weird little projects. And this was one of their first things that they worked on.

This was Atari's first real racing game. This was one of the first racing video games period. I think it might be the first. And it was the first game to use ROM chips to store graphical data. That's how they stored the maps of the trace tracks, because it would have taken way too many diodes and other mechanical parts to do that otherwise. It's the first arcade cabinet to use an actual monitor and not just a television that they bought off the manufacturer.

It's also the first game that used interlaced graphics to sort of produce a higher resolution. and smoother animation. So it's a lot of really cool ideas in here that designer, I think Steve Mayer, and he had some help from Larry Emmons and Ron Milner, Ron Milner, to put it together. But on the flip side, because this wasn't really something that they'd done before,

you know, they designed this custom chip for the game circuitry that sort of was supposed to act as a security lockout to keep other people from cloning it. The problem is this was too complex for National Semiconductor, who they contracted to make it. So they had to do a three-chip design version of it, which added to the cost. And then, you know, National Semiconductor saw the state of the coin-op video game market, got worried that Atari wouldn't actually be able to pay them. And so they stopped producing copies of this game.

And there's my kid, good times. he's also really sad about the lack of accessibility for these games he sure is and it got more ridiculous you know they had this steering wheel and these pedals that they just use authentic car parts for this from automotive manufacturers that's amazing which is a wild decision like instead of just making something cheaper then so this was not cost effective. Al-Alcourt had to come in and redesign the circuitry inside the machine to account for the fact that they could no longer get these three chips.

And in the end, the hardware for this game to manufacture cost $100 less than Atari was selling it for. Oh, ah. Or no, it was the other way around. That's right. It cost more to build than it did to sell. So they were losing money on each machine. So, yeah, not a great business model. This is the game that almost killed Atari, right, Kevin? Yep. This is the game.

So even though this game sold like 10,000 units and was very popular on location, everybody was really into it, Atari lost a boatload of money on it, alongside the pawn market sort of collapsing. They ended $74, $600,000 in the red, which precipitated them selling their Japanese business, Atari, Japan, to Masia Nakamura, who turned around. and rebranded it as Namco. And it continued selling, you know, Atari games and eventually started doing his own.

So it was the best failure that ever happened because, I mean, Namco, incredible company. Yeah, Namco definitely had a good run. And you can thank Grand Track 10 being way too expensive to make for that. And you can't really play Grand Track 10 that easily today, but, you know, they kept revisiting these ideas multiple times because this is like an overhead racing game. you're sort of maneuvering through the track. This one's a single-player game, but they did a two-player version that was Grand Track 20. They did Indy 4, which was a four-player game.

They did Indy-800, which is an eight-player game. I was getting a little ahead of myself there. Okay, so Grand Track 10 isn't the one that you play in a group, you know, with multiple people. That's something different. Right. And then there's Sprint and Sprint 2, which I think use microprocessors. So those are a little more accessible. And Indy 500 for the 2,600, that's really in the same vein as Grand Track 10,

just with a much simpler map design. So this Super Sprint, too. Yeah, Super Sprint. I was just saying, and when I was a kid, I played Super Sprint in the arcade, and I thought, wow, this is really interesting. And I didn't know at that time that it had a lineage that went way, way back, you know, to these early racing games. Yeah, I feel like the, oh, sorry.

I was just going to, well, the only thing I know about Grand Track 10 is I think it was Steve Wozniak's favorite arcade game. He said he and Steve Jobs used to play it together at a Tori. He'd come over and hang out and play it. That's what I remember him telling me anyway. Yeah, I feel like the legacy of this game continued on into the 90s

with Ivan Ironman Stewart's off-road. Oh, yeah. It's very much the same kind of spirit of game except it adds the dimensionality and the higher resolution. And you have three people who can, you know, compete side by side. But, you know, still

that sort of top-down racing controlled with a steering wheel in a single-screen self-contained track. And it's just really about doing laps the fastest. A great kind of game design concept. It's a shame you don't really see that anymore. But, you know, it did have a heyday. Like, off-road was everywhere in 1990-91 or so. Definitely.

That was in every arcade I went to back then. Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah, it was inescapable. It was the gauntlet of its day. I played a fair bit of off-road. I was it a year or two ago when I was visiting Chicago. A friend and I just, I don't know, we got into a game and just ended up playing it for like 20 minutes.

It's just, it's a really fun concept. And Grand Track 10, it's probably a little dated, being single player and you really only have the one map design. Dots, a bunch of dots. A bunch of dots. But it's a pretty neat little game If you come across it Sure, give it a shot The fun thing about it

I've only played Sprint I think is the oldest one of these in the arcade At the Muzi Mechanique However you pronounce it In San Francisco They have a Sprint machine Which is a key game's derivative of this But the fun thing is just the responsiveness

Of the little You know Car on the screen to your steering wheel And how it's sort of analog You know And that's also what was fun about Indy 500 on the 2600 is if you have the driving controller, you have this 360 degree wheel you can spin around. It looks like the paddle controller, but it's actually, you know,

like an encoder wheel instead of a potentiometer. And so you can just keep turning constantly and it's really smooth and fun. So really quickly, there were quite a few other arcade games worth mentioning. We don't need to go into any detail about these. Well, I think, I honestly think Tank was the most important game in 74. Oh, that's right. Your name's next to it. Go for it.

Yeah. I just think Tank was important because it was, first of all, it's, I think it was Key Games as first original game. And Key Games was formed by Nolan Bushnell's friend, Joe Keenan, who was a neighbor of his. And back then there were these exclusive

agreements where you could only produce a certain number of games with a certain distributor. And so Nolan's idea to get around that was to form a fake company. It's a real company but like a shell company kind of thing called Key Games

and put some designers there and let them, you know, double Atari's market under two companies, you know. So up until Tank, I think every one of their games had been a Pong clone or some kind of clone of an existing Atari arcade game. But Tank is this, you know, from November 74 was designed by Steve Bristow and Lyle Raines, developed by Lyle Rains, and it's a top-down, you know, shooter kind of game where you, if you've ever played combat on the 2600, it's a lot like that, where you have two tanks on the screen,

and you can move them around. The arcade unit has tank controls, so it's got twin joysticks where you, you know, control each thread left and right, and you can fire at each other, and you try to kill the other player and avoid mines and things like that. And it's, you know, one of these games, like Kevin said earlier, doesn't have a CPU.

It's all discrete logic. And I think that it was important because, you know, Tank was a big commercial hit. It sold 10,000 units and spawned four sequels, Tank 2, Tank 3, Tank 8, and Ultra Tank later. I like they just skipped from 3 to 8. Yeah, 2, 3, 8, yeah. Three players to 8 players. Yeah. But Tank 3 is not the same as T&K3 from S&K, correct?

Yeah, not the same. But, yeah, I think I'd play that other game. Anyway, so the success of Key games helped Atari get out of that mess with Grand Track 10 because they re-merged with Key in September 74. I guess that's actually, technically, I've got my timeline messed up because it was released after they merged. So I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. If I remember, it's because the response to Tank when they showed it off was so positive that they were like, well, you know, we don't have to necessarily keep this up.

So, hey, we're going to merge two separate companies becoming one. So it was successful. And I think that the success helped Atari, you know, get through that tough period. And the coolest thing about Tank to me is this connection with the Atari 2,600 joystick, which is they, Atari, you know, made dedicated consoles for a while before the 2600 came out. They did a video pinball and like a stunt, what is it, stunt racer. Stunt race. Yeah, I have that. Stunt cycle, yeah.

And, of course, the Pong units, a lot of Pong units. But they planned a tank to a dedicated console, home console. And they designed this joystick for it that looked a lot like the Atari 2,600's CX40 joystick. It's a precursor of that. And so when I figured that out like 15 years ago, I saw a picture of this, you know, cancel Tank 2 console that was like on Kurt Vendell's site or somewhere. I don't remember where it is. Then I emailed Steve Meyer about it, who was the designer of that joystick who worked at Sion

engineering, and I asked him questions about it, which, unfortunately, I completely forgot what he said, but he just said, yeah, this is the precursor of the Atari 2600 joystick. So I think it's fun that that game led, you know, around and about way to the legendary 2600 joystick. This is one I have gotten to play the actual cabinet of Cedar Point in Ohio used to have this in their arcade space, and I remember on one of my trips, I think I was in college at the I played a few rounds with a friend of mine, and it actually holds up pretty well. You know, it's got a much more complex map than combat does, and the minds do make going through the center part, sort of a treacherous idea.

I was going to say a bad idea, but that's a good description. I think I've played a remake of this, like, you know, an adaptation of this at probably, you know, us this, this. simulates the logic and all that stuff. And who, Kevin, who programmed to combat? I can't remember now, was it? That was Joe DeCure who did a very primitive

version of it, and then Larry Wagner worked on it too. He was sort of the guy who turned it from a prototype into an actual game. So isn't it interesting that this tank game was so well respected or loved or something in Atari that it became

basically the pack-in game for the 2,600. Or was it, Video Olympics came first, Kevin? I can't know. It was combat. This was their pack-in. The Sears got Air Sea Battle, which seems like a downer. But, yeah, it's pretty cool. And I think the Atari 50 collection has a, like, a remake of this, like, or Tank 16, I think.

It's something like that. It's like a massive multiplayer version of it, and it's pretty bonkers. it's a it's a cool game it's a fun game it's a great two-player game and the me and my brother playing just playing combat on the 2600 when we were kids it was a wild and thrilling kind of thing which is funny So some other games from 1974, lots of potential firsts here. It's always so difficult to say, yes, this was absolutely the first thing that ever did this. But there's a great list here that I assume Kevin put together.

That's right. That includes pin pong, which was a video pinball game that I've never heard of. But I appreciate the wit happening here. They took Pong and said, ping pong. That's what Pong is based on But what if you take away the first G And then you have pins Like in a pinball game

And you should look at the video of it sometime It looks really cool I'm shocked at the 74 game Because it even has like the flippers and everything Huh I'm gonna do that right now This is one I wish I could play in person so bad Oh what a groovy ass cabinet

But do you think any machines exist? Have you ever seen one in person? I have not It was not a very popular game, so it did not have a very big print run. I know they exist, but yeah, it's pretty hard to come by. Yeah, even I'm looking at the Arcade Museum website here. This game ranks one on a scale out of 100 of common appearances. This is ranked as a least common game.

No one on this website lists their game. in their collection, apparently. Yeah, this is one I'd love to see emulated. No, wait, sorry, sorry. There are four known instances of this machine, presumably owned by our current and past members. Three of them are owned by our active ping pong collectors, or pin pong collectors, sorry.

So it does exist in extremely limited numbers, but it is pretty cool. I mean, it's got the, it's got a reversed out color scheme instead of having white lines on a black screen, it mostly reverses it. So the field is white, which you didn't see in a lot of games at this time. So it gives it kind of a distinct look. And also, the cabinet is just so cool.

It's so groovy. It's just pure 70s. It's got this like, I don't know, secondary drug trip. Yeah, swirls and circles in the background, which has nothing to do with the game. But it just, yeah, it looks great. it's stylish it is do you think this influenced video pinball uh sorry video pinball on the Atari 2600 Kevin it did not because I interviewed Bob Smith before he passed away and he said that one was actually more influenced by Superman Atari's pinball machine oh wow interesting I mean

pin pong ping pong video games are all drawing for no pinball video games are all drawing from a common source yes okay wow that was I have to say. It's a very tricky name. Language is difficult. I was like, oh, it's so clever. But now that I've talked about it a little, I actually hate it. Some other games here, Speed Race, not to be mistaken for Speed Racer, early racing game. Let's see. Pacecar Pro is another racing game that you list as a color game.

What does that mean exactly? It's hard for me to find good screenshots of it. There's a blog post here saying, was this the first color video game and saying, no, maybe not. No, I think there was a color version of gotcha from Atari in 73 that had a color monitor first. But this was a very early color game. It's also one that's really hard to find because Electra was not producing these in huge numbers either. But from what I understand, it also included a robot car opponent. So, like, there was a computer-controlled car that would always follow sort of the same path through the track, and you were racing against that.

So it's kind of a neat little thing. Wow. Even in 1974, AI was taking over our jobs, the job being Player 2. Yeah. God. Don't say AI. That's my day job. Sorry about that.

It's sanity, my friend. Insanity. And Speed race is an interesting one because that was by. Tomohiro Nishkato, who worked at Taito and went on to make Space Invaders. But this is one of his early video game efforts. And it's a racing game completely unlike Grand Track 10 because it's sort of a straight shot up the road. And you're driving your little vehicle. And it really seeks to encompass more the concept of moving fast than the concept of maneuvering through a racetrack.

So it's very different. It's the name Speed Race. Yeah, so it's a very different approach to the same idea. It looks cool. And I'm pretty sure there's footage online. It looks kind of like Grand Prix from Activision, one of those type of games where you're always going up, up, driving straight up, vertically scrolling past stuff, which is, it looks neat. And who published this? Is it Taito?

It was Taito in Japan, and Midway published it in the 75 in the U.S. under the name Wheels. Wheels. Okay. I feel like that loses a little something. Yeah, it's not very interesting. Amazing. So you have two games here listed as having human representation, human characters, baseball and TV basketball. Which of these do you think came first?

Because baseball, it says, first rendition of human characters in a commercial video game, probably. But that actually comes in your list after TV basketball by Taito, which also has human characters and baskets. Yeah, I was going by different companies. when I was organizing these. I'm not sure which one came out first. I feel like baseball might have. So TV basketball, it's like a Pong-style game, also by Nishkato at Taito. Your paddles are like little humans, and the goal spaces are baskets.

Like, it looks cool, but I've never actually seen it in action. So baseball, this is from Ramtech, which I think came up in the breakout episode. and they basically made computer monitors in that kind of equipment, and they just got into video games after Pong came along. So baseball was one of the early baseball video games. It has a very wild cabinet design where you're looking down at the baseball field from above, and the cabinet is designed so that it looks like you can see the stands and the outfield and everything, which also worked against it because it turns out

that a setting a monitor that way is very heavy and it'll crash through the machine if you leave it. But yeah, it's a really neat little game. They licensed it out to Midway to do clones of it and Midway eventually did a microprocessor-based version of it. I think that's tornado baseball. So you can check that out. I don't know how close they are

because this is another game that's not emulated. And I know someone is working on building a clone of it just to get video footage, but he hasn't quite finished that work yet. I have to say, tornado baseball sounds way more exciting. You're right. Like baseball during a tornado? Yep.

It blows you away. That's just life in West Texas when I was a kid. Yeah. And the other Ramtech game I have on here is Clean Sweep, which we talked about in the breakout episode. This is sort of the game Atari looked to when they were making breakout as like, hey, let's take that idea and do something else. But it's a ball and paddle game where you are bouncing a ball around the screen, trying to pick up all of the dots, you know, sort of like a Pac-Man head-on sort of thing.

I know one person who has played this when he was a kid, and he said it was very frustrating because it was very difficult to get those last few dots with a breakout style control scheme. The Eternal Conundrum. Doesn't this predate breakout, no? Yes. By two years. Wow. Do you think this influenced breakout?

It did. If you look through some of the early Atari memos that they have of the Strong Museum, they reference Clean Sweep when they were discussing breakout in the planning stages. So I don't think it was that and like the idea of a one-player version of Pong, which I guess Clean Sweep is also the same concept. But yeah, it's a really interesting and influential game that, you know, probably not super fun to play now, but it's cool. All right. So, let's move along from arcades to video game consoles, because that's a really easy one to talk about in 1974.

Oh, there's actually two here. Okay. I'll eat my word. Tell us about the video action and the video master home TV game. That's a mouthful. So these were two games that were unrelated to the Magnavox Odyssey, which was still on the market. And they're basically just pong machines. The video action is really interesting because this was released by URL or Earl. I'm not sure how you pronounce that. But they basically repurposed their existing stock of arcade clones.

Pong boards and sold them as a consumer product. So this had a $500 price tag, not a huge seller. I believe someone marked in that it has a built-in display, which is quite wild. That's what I found out. 500 bucks is a lot of money and 74 money. Yeah, yeah, it is. And then in Europe, this was where the Video Master Home TV game came in. This was more of a traditional, like, clone of Pong design.

for the home. This was sold in the U.K., France, and West Germany. I haven't been able to find anything on how well this did, but I'm guessing it was sort of a moderate success. Just pure speculation. Yeah. Other than that, you had the

Odyssey. I spent a long time about, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago trying to figure out what the second video game console was. And I think it was the video action of Universal Research Labs, I think. That's what URL stands for. that sounds right yeah and and the european one i think came first um the video master or something

like that but it's just such a hazy foggy time in history that's not extremely well documented and it's hard to pinpoint exactly when something or other happened and um it's weird like if you think about odyssey coming out in 72 and then home pong coming out in 75 and i think that inspired the other Odyssey consoles that were more dedicated type things to come out. And there's this gap, you know, that you're like, what happened in that gap? And it's, uh, what do you think happened in that gap, Kevin? Mostly VagnaVox having the market to itself, because no one else was really figuring out how to do this in a commercially viable way.

What's interesting to me, Kevin, this is something I don't think I ever told you, is I interviewed, you know, years ago I wanted to do this big article about the Odyssey and how it was created, the Magnivox Odyssey, and I interviewed, I don't know if it was Clarence Grief or someone, another person who said that they had played around with making a console version of the Pong Board itself, like the arcade Pong Board. They had mocked it up and they had something ready to go and they tried to sell it to Atari or something and they didn't want to do it. probably because Atari is working on their own thing. But it's just interesting, all the weird little things that happened in that period of time. Like that's when Alpex got started developing their prototypes and things like that that would come out later. Yeah, the Project Raven that became the Channel F. And RCA had the Fred that was in development that became the Studio 2 and the Cosmac VIP and all sorts of fun stuff. And if you think about it, the speed of that development was a much lower pace than today because, you know, things get rolling like a snowball, things build off of each other. And back then, you know, this is all very new, extremely new, extremely primitive compared to today as far as the tools they had to develop these things. And it's funny to think, like, why didn't this sort of this, some of this stuff happen more and faster? But it's, that was fast in 1974 standards.

So anyway, that's the consoles. I guess that's all I got to say about them in 74. I have exactly zero to say about them. But I do have a little to say about computers because, of course, home computers were still not a thing in 1974, unless you had a very large home and a lot of money and said, you know, I need an ENIAC in my living room, my very, very large living room that's extremely well-cooled. Nevertheless, it looks like someone started up a magazine about communications. Even though to use computers, people had to go to like a military lab and, you know, sneak in, you know, be considered the next Rosenbergs. Very dangerous. And yet, and yet here we are with a magazine called Creative Computing. Tell me about this computer magazine. Who is it for? Why did it exist? Well, this is my impression of that time period. And this is, I'm just working off memory here because I didn't research.

Oh, good. I love impressions. Yeah. I'll just say it in a different voice. No. You see, David L. Maybe don't do that. Okay. Okay. This is the era, if I'm not mistaken, of like, the mini computer, you know, like PDP8s and things.

Data General Novas are more prevalent. They're coming not just in giant universities, but maybe a school might own one and let the kids use it, you know. Or a company, you know, a company. my own one or something. They weren't really personal computers at all, but they were coming down in price and they were more common. And, you know, someone invented

the basic programming language of, I don't even remember what it was, 72 or something or 60-something. I don't remember, just don't listen to me. It was invented by that point, and that created a common platform where if you have a basic interpreter across all these different mini-computers

and mainframes, you can share a, program and it basically kind of works on all of them. You know, you have to make some adjustments for the system. But that's an interesting thing going on at the time. So David all starts up this computer magazine that has these listings of basic programs. And a lot of them are games. And that's when, you know, Lunar Lander and all that started circulating among other different labs and places with computers because of these types of magazines. And it's just fascinating if you think about it. And it wasn't aimed at personal computing at this point, 74, you know, but it was just one of these incremental steps toward that phase, you know. Yeah, this was a, this was also a time when computer terminals were coming down in price as well. So you could have a high school that doesn't have its own mini computer, but they have a terminal hooked up to, you know, a nearby university or what have you, that can access that computer.

So this way, your kids can go to the computer lab and get experience using computers without having to break the bank. And that's really sort of what creative computing was for, especially early on. It was that sort of educational target audience. But it even had games early on. You can flip through the first issue on the Internet Archive, and it has a game in there, depth charge, which is supposed to teach kids about, you know, I guess. I guess 3D spaces in a text game environment. So it's pretty cool. By the way, basic was invented in 63 just so I don't go, so I don't be upset that I bungled that up.

Don't worry, we're getting into some basic history with this next thing. I popped in here. All right. Give it your best pot shot. Oh, so it did it there? So this is pot shot as the next game I listed on here. This was first publicized in September 74. by the People's Computer Company newsletter.

And this was sort of the same basic idea, sort of computer enthusiasts. It sounds like some sort of communist, you know, institution, the People's Computer Company. Liberation Front. Did they make those Russian systems that Tetris ran on? Oh, God. You know, this, if I remember where it was based out of California, it was probably like a very sort of hippie culture kind of thing. And they were very big on open source copyright-free software, which was sort of the style at the time. So, yeah, this was first publicized in September 74, but it was written at some point between 1969 and 1974 by Arthur Lerman, who was a physics professor at the University of Dartmouth University.

I don't remember which way that name is. I interviewed him last year He didn't remember any more specific time frame than that But it was written in Basic for the Dartmouth time sharing system Basic was invented at Dartmouth DTSSS the time sharing system was designed as a way to make computing more accessible for the student body And to those in like high schools that were connected to Dartmouth

Lerman you know obviously he was a physicist He had a computer, he did not have a computer background, but he became sort of an evangelist for the basic computer language and computers in general just using this in his classrooms. So, you know, early on they had teletypes for these things. He helped the school get plotters and eventually a storage monitor for this kind of work. These allowed you to draw graphical images. So he used these in his physics classes for examples like a ball. bouncing or to show orbital mechanics. And in turn, this led to pot shot, which, as described by Lorman, would draw a random

mountain in the middle of this playfield. And then you would have two artillery emplacements on either side of the map, and players would take turns trying to hit the other person by adjusting the angle and the power of their shots, which sounds like every artillery game ever for a reason, because this was the progenitor of that entire genre. It did not have collision detection, which is my favorite thing that he described. So his 12-year-old son would con people by betting them in matches and then just firing a full-power shot, like, directly through the mountain at the other person. As so often happens in real-world engagements.

Yep. So this is the great-great-grandfather of Scorched Earth, one of my favorite PC games. Yeah, Scorched Earth, guerrillas, artillery duel. shoot on the CompuColor too, which seems very much based on the description of this game that showed up in People's Computer Company. He also developed an alternate version, which like Pot Shot is also a lost program at this point. No copies have turned up. But this one had the guns in Earth orbit, and you're still trying to shoot each other,

but you have to deal with orbital decay and other weird physics things. So as he described it, the old. way to really succeed in this was to fire your shot ahead of you because then it'll get more velocity, you know, firing off of your thing. It'll catch up with the other person from the back. You had to, you know, just for the fact that the orbit was going to decay over time, et cetera. But it's, it, they're really cool. He designed these to help teach physics and it seems like a really fun way to teach physics. Yeah, it does. It's amazing. So one last thing for

on the computer front is not a 1974 innovation by any means. But I do want to talk a little bit about Plato and what was happening on that platform. platform. You know, Plato was a, it wasn't really a physical system so much as a software framework from what I understand at the beginning of the 1960s, but by the 70s, it had basically evolved into its own sort of hardware, software ecosystem that existed basically at universities at a few, you know, institutions of other sorts or technology-oriented companies. But a terminal, a Plato 4 terminal was, you know, more than $10,000 in 1974 money, so it's not exactly something people were putting in their kids' bedrooms. But Plato was, you know, a very

forward-thinking system and the advent of the Plato-4 system in 1972, I believe, introduced things like plasma-based screens with high-resolution graphics, like 512 by 512 pixels, which was, you know, unmatched by game consoles and computers for years, you know, late 90s, I think, is when late 80s is when anything started to catch up with that. And also touch screens, just a lot of innovations, networked systems, and that sort of thing. So with the advent of Plato 4 in 1972, I really think that the Plato system sort of hit a critical threshold where it was accessible to a lot of people and powerful and flexible enough for a lot of people to start experimenting with. And so you started to see a lot of design innovation in terms of

software design happening on the Plato system in the early to mid-1970s. And of course, that includes games. And we've talked, you know, in the past about various Plato, you know, sort of landmark Plato games go back. And I think the first time we really engaged with that was in our Rogue Likes episode many years ago, but we've touched on it since then. And I believe even as recently as talking about Star Trek games, because there were so many Star Trek inspired games on the Plato system, because that's what the kind of people who were programming on Plato were into at the time with Star Trek reruns. You know, probably the first online slash fic was uploaded to a Plato system and confirm, you know, it involved Kirk and Spock getting together

in a way that Gene Roddenberry may or may not have supported. I don't know. He had some pretty forward-thinking sexual ideas, honestly. Some weird ones too, but also some occasionally progressive ones. Anyway, that's all beside the point. The point is that... No. Two of the first... That is the point. This is this is going to be a Star Trek sex episode. Slash fix. Okay, sure. Yeah, sorry. Okay. Yeah, there's a lot of questions that we can ask about trills and, you know, what all that entails. But anyway, no, what I want to point out is Kevin put in the notes, two of what might be the very first computer role-playing games may have made their debut on Plato in 1974, but maybe 75. because these are not commercial releases and we're just, you know, projects that people put together in their spare time at school or work or whatever, it's really hard to pin down

an exact date. But both of these are interpretations of Dungeons and Dragons to the point that one of them is just called D&D. But, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, the tabletop game, the very basic first set, the original version 1.0, debuted in 1974. So this was, you know, kind of cutting edge stuff. People saw D&D, played D&D with their friends, said, dude, I am going to make a computer program that does this. And of course, these were very, very simple. But D&D and Pettit 5 were probably the first games to attempt to convert Dungeons

dragons into a digital form. And of course, they're vastly simplified. But, you know, I look at the crazy orange, you know, amber high-resolution plasma graphics that represent these games online. And I'm just immediately taken back to early computer, like home computer and arcade takes on the RPG, such as Venture from Exidy and Arcades. And, And I can't even remember what the names were, but they were, you know, Ti-99-4-A games, tunnels and trolls maybe, where the action consists of like very simple characters, figures, humanoid figures, actually, though not an arcade game. So maybe that's something we talk about separately. But they're basically in rooms with monsters nearby, all very simple representations. And combat's extremely simplistic.

But there's a lot of text kind of conveying what's happening. in these games, you know, wildly sophisticated stuff for 1974 and fairly accessible because, you know, these were networked systems. So even though there were maybe just a few thousand of them in the world, they were at locations like universities where they were sort of in the public spaces and people had time to get on these systems and explore with them. And they could use, you know, I believe dumb terminals, to connect kind of like a Vax. So you had a lot of people playing these games and being influenced by them. And these games were absolutely direct inspirations for things like rogue and wizardry because the people who created those games in the first place had access to Plato and experimented and experienced Plato and saw these and said, hmm, yes, good idea.

I'm going to do some of this myself. So even though these are games that are all but completely lost to time, unless you really want to get into the weeds and try to do Plato emulation on modern systems and dig up the files and everything, very, very influential just on future game designers. So I feel like this maybe even more than some of the arcade games is sort of a pivot on which game design and game evolution turned and really kind of. of the stage for what was to come in the 1980s. Is that overstating the case? I don't know. I've been monologuing here for five minutes. I don't think you're ever stating it.

I think it's, well, in two ways. Monumentally important, I think Dungeons and Dragons was the seed that inspired lots of games. And not just this, but there were parallel games, you know, on other mainframes and later home computers like Temple of Epstein and some of those other games that were inspired by it. and the rogue games, you know. And so I think that I'm not quite sure how influential Petit 5 and D&D were as far as people who saw them, because I haven't done the legwork of asking people, hey, did you ever play this, you know? But I have seen them referenced in relation to, what was their names, Toy and Witchman, is that the creators of Rogue? Like, I know that they've mentioned these.

I'm positive about that. That is a fascinating connection, you know, because Rogue was extremely influential, as we all know. So Plato is this weird parallel universe of, like, really advanced stuff that most people didn't know much about until very recently. And if I had grown up using Plato, I would be talking about it all the time, just like I talk about BBSs. That was kind of like my formative thing that a lot of people didn't experience. but it was still really important among a certain group of people. And I think the Plato stuff was too. Yeah, Kevin, any final thoughts there for Plato or 1974?

Not really. I haven't really delved into the history of Plato too much, but it is very cool. I should look into it more often. I played a simulator. I don't know if this is still the case, but about a decade ago, someone was running a Play-To server, and you could download a client and get on there and play a lot of these games. And it was really amazing. So I played some kind of D&D, one of these things.

And it was very, it's just absolutely insane that this happened in 1974. Because in 1984, you know, the games still weren't that sophisticated, you know, like on home computers. So it's amazing. Incredible. Yeah, Plato is just this really fascinating mid-partisan. point between, you know, mainframe computers and home computers that really sort of gave the average person, at least the average person with access to a university, their taste of these super advanced computers that were happening, you know, science labs and things like that

in the military. So it's a really fascinating piece of video game history that I keep meaning to dig into more. But definitely before my time and definitely something I did not have access to myself. But really kind of a great segue into 1984 because, as you mentioned, a decade later, a lot of video games still weren't quite to that point. We're going to talk about that. But first, what was happening in 1984, what was going on in the world? I mean, you know, Big Brother took over and only Apple's Macintosh prevented the world from falling into fascism, according to that commercial. But what else was happening?

Oh, man. I was three. I was a year old. Yeah. I was three. Eighty-four was a good year. I started preschool that year. That was good.

Milbrook Methodist preschool. A truly landmark event for the video games industry. Yeah, well, I mean, if I had died at that point, you know, this episode probably wouldn't happen. Wow. Bleak. 84 was important. Well, thank your parents for vaccinating you from smallpox or whatever. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, parents. TV film, well, someone wrote notes Indiana Jones in Temple of Doom, the worst movie in the Indiana Jones. Well, maybe it's not the worst anymore. That's pretty bad. The original trilogy, the worst. We did a whole Retronauts episode on that where we tore it apart and it was terrifying. It was a terrifying film for me when I was a kid because they tried to pull out Indiana Jones's heart. And Star Trek 3, the Sir Trish Spock, not exactly the best Star Trek film.

But it didn't introduce the Klingons with the weird foreheads? No, that was the motion picture. Really? Okay. Yeah, like the first five minutes of the motion picture, you get the Klingons and their newly redlit ships and speaking guttural Klingonese and then getting blown up or actually, I guess, is zapped into the library by Viger. Yeah, something else happened in Star Trek 3. That's important, but who knows what it is. No way.

It was Christopher Lloyd showing up. Yeah, that's the key. Ghostbusters, one of the greatest films of all time, came out in 84. Yeah, that one kind of makes up for Temple of Doom and Star Trek 3. It does. That was my favorite movie for most of my life, I'd have to say. Such a great film where they try to capture ghosts, you know, with technology. I'm sure you've heard of it.

But politics, Reagan. No, yeah, he got reelected and... Don't do drugs. Utterly demolished Walter Mondale. And the regulatory state in the U.S. He did that too. So, great job. We're still, like, in the Michael Jackson Thriller kind of bleed out era a little bit, still going.

Yeah, this was really kind of the heyday of MTV. Yeah. Like, everyone was making music videos and being very creative and sinking a lot of money into them. So, yeah, like, anyone who had access to. MTV on cable, they were the coolest. You'd go to their house and watch videos and be like, oh, man, I love the song, and now I love it even more because there's a fun video with it. We had cable early, so I had the Disney Channel MTV when I was very, very little, and

it was fun. It was amazing. What was the hottest music, New Wave? Was this the height of New Wave music in America? Yeah, I would say New Wave and Post Punk were pretty much, they were big. Oh, yeah, Van Halen was big. I am. RIP to disco.

I feel like I should be able to just pull cool events from my brain about 1984, but I kind of feel like it was actually, as I think about it, one of those sort of interim years where there's like, oh, a really big thing, like lots of really cool stuff happened in 83 and in 85, but 84 is just kind of like, you know, we had to get from point A to point B. I believe that was the year that America completely dominated the Olympics, the USA, because, uh, um, The Soviet Union boycotted after we had boycotted in 1980. So, yeah, without the USSR to provide our primary competition, we just steamrolled the events and got some crazy number of gold medals. Is that the Mary Lou Retton Olympics? I believe so, yes. I have a commemorative McDonald's 1984 Olympics Cup that's made out of glass. It's my prize possession.

I'm drinking out of it right now. Wow. I'm just kidding. I have it, but I lost it. I don't know where it is. So maybe it's not that important. So, yeah, I guess, I don't know, it's kind of hard for me to really point to a single thing that was like, wow, that was such a cool thing that year. And that's also true for the video games industry, because at least here in the U.S., the console market, which is my primary point of concern, just was not doing great.

They were trying. We don't need to necessarily bang on about that too much because we talked about it pretty extensively last year since that was 983 was really when things started to go south for the video games, you know, the console industry in the U.S. But of course, so many things were happening elsewhere in the world and on other platforms that, you know, it kind of balances out for the fact that Atari and all of its third parties more or less. went away. Yeah, the 84 was a rough year in general. Like, Calico was still making a go of it through the year with the Cleco Vision and the Adam. I don't think they fully dropped those until 85, but they weren't really making money off of them. You know, a bunch of companies closed up shop after how bad 83 was. I know Mattel almost went out of business and they kind of sold off all and television stuff, wash their hands of it.

Spectra video left the industry. A Magic was in really rough shape and was like doing contract work for Parker Brothers, which basically ran through 84, trying to sell video games and then gave up themselves. So it was not a great time. And it was especially bad for Atari, which I'm happy to jump into real quick,

because this was the year of the Atari divorce. I mean, I feel like any discussion of video games, especially in the U.S., needs to begin in 1984 with just what was happening with Atari and all the fallout that resulted. Yeah, so, you know, Atari had spent the first half of 84 trying to stabilize itself. They had a new president, James Morgan, if I remember. He was raising the price of the Atari computer line to try and, you know, make it make money again. They were really working on this Atari 7,800, which was going to come out in, I think, July, and that was supposed to really give a shot in the arm to the video game industry. A lot of retailers were kind of pitting their hopes on that as giving them a boost. There was always the possibility of them localizing this family computer from Japan.

Yeah, that was discussed. for for Nintendo. But all of those sort of hit a wall because on July 1st, Warner signed an agreement with Jack Tremel, who was the Commodore

founder, and he left that company and he was looking to get back into the computer business. He assumed control over all of Atari's consumer division assets and liabilities, which included all of their IP rights,

for the games that were published up through June 84. So Warner kept the coin-out business as well as various other little divisions of Atari, like their telecommunications, Atari Tell, some of their overseas offices. But that was a pretty small portion of Atari's overall business. So Tremel, you know, he tried to collect on these like $300 million and bills owed. It didn't really, he didn't get all. of that money together, and he got stuck with some additional costs related to the 7800 and its games because Warner refused to pay General Computer Incorporation, which designed all that stuff.

He ended up having to foot that bill, which meant the 7800 didn't come out until 86. He had to lay off a bunch of people in the interim, but it's not like he was avoiding the home console industry. He did drop the price of the Atari 800 Excel, which was their lead computer at the time. And he announced that they were going to be putting out new versions of that hardware and the Atari ST the next year. But he also upped production of the Atari 2,600. And this is when the Atari 2600 Jr. made its debut in Europe. Didn't start selling in the U.S. until 86.

But for whatever reason, they got it out the door over there first. It must have been a market that hadn't been saturated yet, you know, the European market. So they're like, let's make a low-cost one and sell it over there. Yeah, and Tremel did focus a lot on the European market. I think he saw there was a lot of opportunity there, especially because he had connections in Poland and other parts of the Soviet Union block. So once they started opening up in subsequent years, he was able to sort of get his foot in the door before anyone else and start selling Atari hardware. Yeah, the challenge with the European market back then was before the European Union, it was just all these little isolated kind of walled gardens, you know, on a per nation basis. You didn't have European distribution.

You had distribution in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and in Spain and in Portugal and in, you know, binelux and all that. It was so segmented that, you know, when you look at European release dates, they're always, the 80s, just a year, because it's impossible to really pin down, or not impossible maybe, but an extraordinarily difficult task to get all that information from all the different distributors and, you know, everyone who had to work through different regulations in different territories, just to pull all of that into a single cohesive document or a bit of information. Yeah. So that's a, it's a huge, a huge challenge and consoles had not made headway there.

It was, you know, people love video games in Europe, but they were mostly playing on kind of locally grown computers or the Commodore 64. But I guess, you know, the success of the C-64 in Europe made Trimel think, oh, yeah, we can do this with consoles. No worries. We can figure out the PALCICAM thing. No big deal. Yeah. And, uh, I know the 2600 had a base in West Germany. because Atari, even before Tremel, really focused in on that market for whatever reason.

Like, it wasn't anywhere near as big as the computer market in Europe, but it had a scene. And, you know, Phillips, they were selling the Video Pack, Odyssey 2, hardware, and various European territories. But you're right. Like, if you want to know how these things were selling, you have to look at each individual country, and it's a big lift. And God bless all of those European video game researchers who do that work, because that is a lot. Yeah, there's a reason I don't cover that stuff very much in my videos. It's just, yeah.

You also have the language barriers, you know, just so much to work through. It's really beyond my capacity. But Trammell, I guess, thought, you know, Atari 2,600 Jr. It's going to be the one to crack that nut. So bless him. And, you know, Tramel had a reputation, shall we say, for being a very ruthless businessman. So that kind of bit Atari in the ass eventually because no one really wanted to work with him.

But at this point in time, it seemed like a reasonable shift for the company. You know, he was born in Poland. Yeah. So if you think about the focus, you know, the connections and everything. Mm-hmm. Anyway. No coincidence that Atari computers were huge in Poland. So we get some of the coolest, like, 90s, you know, Atari 8-bit software from the Poland.

Polish community there. Oh, yeah. I didn't realize that. Yeah, it's amazing. There was a great retro gamer article about it a few years ago where they just talked to various Polish game developers. And because Poland didn't have copyright laws, really, a lot of these are just bizarre takes on Western properties that they had bootlegs of.

It's really cool. It's a whole fascinating realm of computer history. I agree. Yeah, I mean, copyright law. Laws are an artifact of decadent capitalist countries, and someone under the Soviet influence at the time would have had no use for copyright laws because they couldn't own anything anyway. So, fie on them. Let's make, you know, the A-Team video game or something, I don't know. I'm off my soapbox. That was Atari at the time. Yeah, it's a bit of it. Don what's a house of those and everything goes.

Yep, it's a big year. I think of, like, when I think of video game history, I tend to think of it as sort of like a timeline or something, some kind of visual three-dimensional object, and 84 is like a hole. I think of like, what is the biggest release of 84? And I just natively blank, aside from what we're going to talk about. Yeah, I mean, there were still some games coming out on 2,600. And actually, some of the best 2,600 games arrived in 1984, which is a damn shame because they were large. overlooked, you know, retailers didn't want to carry them. Consumers didn't want to pay a full price for them. So they kind of went into the memory hole, but they're really good,

these handful of games, especially from Activision. Do you want to talk about some of those Ben? Yeah, I'll talk about Pitfall, too. I feel like that is the most important video game of 1984 console game, probably, in my opinion. Anyway, it was, you know, divine. It's a It's an Activision game, designed and programmed by David Crane, and originally targeted the 2,600, later ported to other consoles, of course, and computers. It's a sequel to Pitfall, of course, which was, what, 1980? 82. 82, okay, 1982, the seminal platform game, you know, jumping through the jungle and you've got, I'm talking about Pitfall One right now, or you grab onto vines and swing over alligators and pits and water. water-filled holes and things like that.

Pitfall, too, ups that ante significantly because it's not just left-and-right scrolling, but repeating-type things to get the highest score. You actually have a huge adventure with a giant map that has a lot of different terrain to it. You know, you start out, I think, above ground, if I remember correctly, you go underground, you fall in, you know, water and you're swimming, and then you jump out, and you explore cave systems and you're trying to rescue your niece, your pitfall Harry, you're trying to rescue your niece Rhonda

and Quick Claw, an animal friend, and trying to find the Raj Diamond. And I loved this game when I was a kid. We had it on the 2,600, and the music, first of all, is what really stands out because it has this soundtrack that not only goes So not only is it very rousing and playing plays through the whole game

but if you get hit it changes and becomes like a minor key rendition of the same song as your little ghost of a guy goes back to a checkpoint which is another interesting thing about this game it's probably one of the first games with a checkpoint system where you don't have lives

you get to different checkpoints, and wherever you get hit or, you know, quote, die, you go back to this, the last checkpoint that you had touched. And it's, it was a fascinating, you know, way of, you know, providing this bigger adventure without the frustration of having to start all over again if you get hurt somewhere in it. The soundtrack, you know, comes courtesy of this custom chip that David Crane designed called the DPC, the display processor chip. And it was sort of like a co-processor type of thing where it could, it added hardware sound channels and had a hardware random number generator, some graphic streaming capability that sort of fetched data. and put it in the CPU faster, you know. And so it let the CPU do more things at once, basically, by handling some of those tasks. And so it could play this soundtrack as you're playing

and allowed for more sophisticated graphics, too, at the same time. And it's just an amazing game. It's really well done. It's fun. And I just Googled how does the DPC work? And it came up with Google snippet was my article. about it's like thanks a lot you just got a i'd yeah it's uh from one of my pc world articles from 2017 where i wrote about the chip just that it's a fetching assistant but i know there's a

lot more to that chip and how it worked that was probably not even taken advantage of at that time and so it's neat that you know later nintendo did all these mapper chips for the nes that's what let it have such a long lifespan beyond on the original Famicom, these sort of kind of co-processors that are in the cartridge. And this was one of the originators of it. There were other things first, like CBS RAM, something like they put some RAM in the parts. Yeah, to give it the system a little bit more RAM.

And I think that's a really fascinating approach. Someone realized, hey, we could just upgrade the console with every single cartridge. And that turns into the Super FX chip later, you know, for the Super NES and things. things like that, where you've got a real co-processor doing lots of processing, and it's this extremely expensive, you know, approach, but it can extend the lifespan of these consoles significantly. And that's why Pitfall 2 was so great. So one funny anecdote I just randomly read, I was searching for it, that was about the music, and I found a thread on Atari Age from 2007 that says, Pitfall 2 music is overrated. like a big argument about the music and somebody said that

there was an ice cream truck playing the Spitfall 2 music on their street the other couple months ago in 2007 anyway so it had some influence I do not doubt this influence like Super Mario Brothers or something it had to you know in other platforming games

I haven't heard you know have you guys ever heard of Miyamoto or somebody saying hey, we played pitfall and our pitfall too and it inspired us to make Super Mario Brothers? Nope.

They don't really talk about that sort of thing. Miyamoto has referenced Pac-land, which, you know, he's talked about how he got his blue sky idea from that game.

I've seen some Japanese sources put pitfall too in that lineage, but I haven't seen their homework, basically. I don't know. Direct, no direct evidence. Yeah.

Yeah, we just recorded a pitfall episode, actually two episodes, where we talked about Pitfall, Pitfall, too, so you can hear more of that if you check those episodes out. But yeah, it's a, it's a big one. And there's kind of some interesting subhistory to Pitfall 2 as it was taken up by Japanese programmers like Sega and kind of reinvented to be more arcade style in some ways. but I've also talked about it as a precursor to the Metroidvania genre, because even though doesn't have a power-up system, it's very exploration-based. And, yeah, the checkpoint system is really pretty forward-thinking, something totally new in video games.

It's actually a good segue, because this was also the year Activision decided it wanted to get into the Japanese market more. So they signed an agreement with Pony Canyon to publish various works for the MSX. So Pony Canyon got the rights to pitfall one and two. Space Shuttle, Zenji, River Raid, Beam Rider, Hero, DeCathlon, and Keystone Capers. So, you know, if you're wondering why some of those games show up on the SG-1000 and the MSX, that's probably your reason right there. Yeah, there seems to have been some sort of odd relationship that I've not been able to unravel between Pony Canyon and Sega, but there is a lot of kind of sharing of properties between MSX and SG-1000 between those two companies, even though Pony Canyon's name doesn't appear on the Sega published games, Sega, you know, self-published everything on SG-1000. So I don't really quite understand how it all worked, but there were even some other games on SG-1000 from Activision that weren't included in this list, like Rock and Bolt. So, yeah, I don't know what was going on there, but Sega snap up those Western imports and also some from Bruderbund like Load Runner and Choplifter. And, you know, they made the arcade version of Choplifter, but then IREM was the company that produced the arcade version of Load Runner. So I don't know how all of this was happening. There were some curious deals happening in the background and I guess subcontracting and stuff. But in any case, it does show that the Japanese market was becoming a much bigger consideration.

And I can understand the appeal because, one, that territory was flush with money at that point. But also, unlike Europe, it represents a single language to import into, as opposed to a lot. Single distribution system focused on just a few major cities, really. And on top of that, Japan was also importing a lot of games into the U.S. So there was kind of this back and forth flow. And also, Japan used NTSC for its video standard. So there didn't have to be reprogramming for a different video standard with U.S. games. You could just take them over there.

And, you know, if you wanted to publish them on existing hardware, it was pretty easy to do that. So, yeah, the Japan-U.S. connection really continued to solidify at this point. I'll throw out that Activision's other last couple, 2,600 games. They put out Hero, Private Eye, and the 2,600 port of BeamRiders. this year. They're all really, really good games. They were really doing their best with that hardware. Parker Brothers was doing some really cool games on there.

They published a Magic Star Wars Arcade, and they put out Kubert's Cubes, which is a port that should not have happened on the 2600, but it's kind of neat that they tried. Cool times for the 2600, as long as you're not a company trying to sell it. Right. Or a retailer hoping to make profit off.

of it. Yeah. Before we jump over to Japan, maybe we should talk a little bit about what other console makers were doing in the U.S., which wasn't a lot, but it did exist. You know, Kaliko Vision was still around. We, I think we got our Kaliko Vision in 85, so I think the events of 84 determined why we got such a good deal on the Kaliko Vision a year later. Yeah, it's wild that Kaliko and Atari were still trying to sell brand new systems.

And the prices of both were just in the toilet. I want to say you could get a new Calico Vision this year, 84, for something like $70, which is bonkers. Yeah, they put out all these new games, you know, Parker Brothers, I think Zonics or Romox, whatever it was called, and Calico itself. So it Star Wars Arcade came out this year, Jiris, Artillery, Dual, War Games, Campaign 84. Yeah, those were some big ones. And I think Canada wasn't hit nearly as hard by all the problems in the U.S. Because I have seen a fair bit of ColicoVision software from Canadian territories. And there's even a game that came out in Canada this year, Sydney's Evolution,

that didn't come out in the U.S. until they imported some copies in 85. So it's really fascinating. So on the arcade front in the U.S., I feel like 84 didn't really have that many big games. I speak this from my personal memories of actually being obsessed with arcade games in 84 and just not seeing that many, like, oh, my God, new things. Yeah, the arcade market had kind of crashed in 84, like, well, 83 really, after the Laserdisc fad petered out. So this is why you don't see a lot of big games coming out this year. Like, there was punch out.

That was a pretty big deal. Yeah, but that wasn't from an American developer. That was from Nintendo. Americans, there was Marble Madness that came out towards the end of 84. That was the first Atari Games branded release, which is why everyone got really mad when it wasn't on the Atari 50 collection, because Warner owns it, not Atari. And that was a big game for a few reasons. I feel like it was a kind of logical next step from Crystal Castles with that isometric

viewpoint, but much more challenging and much more focused. It's actually a very small game. I just recently covered it for NES. There's not a lot to it, but because of its focus on speed and on, you know, like really, really precise control and physics, it's very challenging and very memorable. Had a great soundtrack, was programmed by Mark Serney, who has a... go on to do some other stuff that you might have heard of, heard of like the PlayStation 4.

So, yeah, kind of a big deal in its way. And also, I don't know, I just feel like it's a, as the first release from Atari games shows that, hey, this, you know, things have been going pretty poorly for all things Atari. But this new venture, we're still really serious about doing cool, innovative, enjoyable video games with eye-catching visual, and music. And here you go. This is proof of concept. And Atari games would go on to create tons of classics throughout the latter half of the 80s. And I, you know, I feel like this was

kind of their announcement, like we've arrived. Yeah. I agree. It was a cool game. And it's neat that Atari games could keep going with Gauntlet and 720 and other games like that. So also on the arcade front in America, a company called Nintendo didn't just published Punch Out, it also introduced another, not game, but a game system, the versus system, which was basically just NES hardware, maybe with a little extra RAM or something, but turned into a coin up machine. And this was actually the introduction of the NES, the Famicom, in America. I believe in early 1984, like February or so, they published or manufactured and distributed baseball and tennis. And the versus system was something you could take the game

ROMs out of and swap them around, change out the marquee. Not the first concept like that. You know, you had a Data East Deco and S&K had their system and that sort of thing. But, you know, it was a very low cost way to bring some pretty cool games to the arcades. And in 1984, I would say that baseball and tennis for Famicom looked pretty damn good. I mean, the Famicom. I mean, the Famicom itself was best in class for home consoles at that point, just in terms of its technical performance. So you put those games in arcades at the beginning of 1984, and you've got something that is pretty convincing. And you could hook it up with light guns and have, you know, versus duck hunt. Just a great start. And I, you know, actually remember seeing versus systems

in arcades before the NES ever launched here. So when the NES launched, it, It just felt like a natural continuity to me. Like, it felt like, oh, here's, you know, perfect home ports of these arcade machines, but I don't care about those because here's Super Mario Brothers and, you know, kung fu. But it was a pretty good start, you know, for Nintendo to sort of test the waters and see what the appeal of these games was. And I kind of feel like they used the versus system as test marketing for the NAS launch, which in itself was test marketing. But, you know, while they were trying to figure out how they were going to. to distribute the Famicom in America, which took them another year and a half, they could continue

to make use of the arcade network and arcade distribution that they'd already built with the likes of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye to get some of those games out there and keep the Nintendo name in front of people and just kind of grease the wheels a little bit for the initial, the eventual arrival of the NES. I think it's interesting. The versus system, was really a Western thing. You don't really see much in that vein in Japan unless it's imported machines. Like I've seen versus Super Mario Brothers in Japanese arcades, but they're all the American boards because that didn't come out in Japan. So, yeah, very interesting approach.

And this was the era where conversion kits were becoming a lot more popular than just dedicated arcade cabinets. And this really feels in that same sort of vein. you know, here's an even cheaper way to change your game out than having to go through a whole conversion kit. Yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about the fact that the versus system was pretty much a distinctly American innovation for Nintendo or creation. But I guess it does make sense because, you know, Japanese consumers already had access to these games on Famicom. They could just buy them and take them home. But also, as I know we've mentioned here, and as Matt Alt has talked about, there was a crackdown on the arcade centers at that time, laws, you know, and ordinances passed that prevented kids from spending time in arcades after hours. So Nintendo really started to gravitate away from doing anything in arcades at that point.

punch out and arm wrestling were pretty much their last arcade creations in Japan that I'm aware of. And, you know, Nintendo did maintain some arcade traction here with the likes of the Play Choice 10, which was basically the versus system, but as a, you know, an early attempt at the classic pirate cart 201 thing. They distributed R type for some reason. I feel like that's got to be some side effect of the sort of friction. that happened when Nintendo went over the arcade division's head at Irem to produce the Famicom versions of Kung Fu and 10-yard fight internally at Nintendo. And, you know, Irim's president was like, yeah, here's some make goods. Or Nintendo was like that to

Iram's president. Anyway, yeah, I don't know. That's always been a weird one to me. But they pretty much just dipped out of arcades after Donkey Kong 3 and Punchout and in Japan and focused entirely on the home market. It's a weird, weird time. Weird time for arcade stuff. Weird time for Nintendo. The versus system never seemed very satisfying to me because of that connection of like a warmed over console games put in the arcade, you know. Yeah, but I'm telling you in 1984, I do remember this. Like, seeing these games and thinking, I didn't think anything was. a miss. I wasn't like, well, these look crappy. I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, here's that, that, like, I didn't really follow companies that closely, but I did see the logos and stuff.

And, you know, the grid-shaped Nintendo branding on the sides of the machines, like, really stood out. So, um, yeah, I remember seeing tennis and thinking, uh, that, that's okay. I don't really care about sports games, but neat. Okay, this game where you're like, you're shooting ducks, I like that. That's pretty good. This was about the same time Championship Baseball came out as a conversion kit from Sega and, you know, versus System Baseball looks pretty comparable. No, I would say it absolutely dunks on Championship Baseball. I mean, from a play style for sure. Well, visually, too.

Champion baseball is not a good-looking game. I can see you. The bells get shouting on the sun. You got your hair shut back in those way fell as I believe. I can tell you my love you will still be strong after the boys of summer have gone I think they're both good Okay

I'm just kidding I'm starting to fade It's been you were right that we would spend an hour Talking about 1974 I can't believe it I thought it was not possible That's how it goes We can take a break shortly

And then with the 1994 episode we can start by talking about 1994 stuff. We can talk about start. Wow. Talk about 84 in computers or something. Yes, 84 computers. So wait, that means I got to come back? Yes, that's right.

Oh, man. This can be big for me. I feel like you probably have memories of 1994. I feel like you have opinions about those games. 94 was a really good year. Yeah, well, we'll talk about it in the 94 episode. But we're still talking about 84 right now. Okay.

Time travel is confusing. Speaking of Nintendo and the Famicom and so forth, over in Japan, this was when the Famicom became an open platform of sorts, not totally open, but the first third-party Famicom publishers launched software that summer. Up until that point, you know, for the first year of its life, every game that came out for Famicom was published by Nintendo, not necessarily developed by. Nintendo, but pretty much a first-party title with some second-party work. But in the summer, Hudson, who had been doing work with Nintendo, they published, or they developed, you know,

the family basic keyboard and software for Nintendo to turn it into a little crappy home computer. They developed Yonin Mahjong, the much better version of Mahjong versus the original Mahjong that Nintendo published itself. I guess they got punchy and said, you know what? We should just make our own games and publish them ourselves. So in July, they published nuts and milk. And Load Runner, a conversion of Load Runner was one of the first Japanese developed versions of a Brooder Bunn's game that would go on to become a huge hit. And that load runner was a massive success on Famicom, like the best selling version of Load Runner on any platform in any territory by a matter of multiple. factors. It was just a huge hit. And with that, you know, I think because Hudson had such intimate knowledge of the Famicom from working hand in hand with Nintendo, that kind of opened the door for other publishers. Namco appeared shortly thereafter with Pac-Man and Galaxian and Zavius. Those all appeared by the end of 1984. And at that point, it was basically, everyone

was off to the races. And it worked really well for Nintendo because they did. no longer had to make all their own software, and they had all these different, you know, really talented studios making games for them. And I don't know what the licensing system was at that point. But eventually, you know, over the course of 1985, you started to see a, you started to see like a buildup to the Atari crash that had happened in the U.S. So they kind of battened down the hatches. But initially, you know, those were like emissaries for the Famicom just coming in and saying, hey, look at the potential here. You can do cool stuff. You know, both Lodrunner and Nuts and Milk were programmable games. You could design your own, your own stages. And I don't remember,

you could save Lod Runner to the Famicom Family Basic data recorder cassette tape. I think Nuts and milk also. But the Nintendo would release its own programmable games later that year in an 85 with excite bike and Mock Rider. So that kind of kicked off, you know, some cool. capabilities for the Famicom. And it just, you know, it was, I kind of feel like that's the point at which Famicom went from being another system in the Japanese console market to being like the system in the Japanese market. Because everyone else, all the competitors were just, you know, doing first-party publishing only. Like I said earlier, Sega only was the only publisher on SG 1000. And, you know, even into the master system, the Mark 3, there were only two games published by,

third-party developer publishers. So, yeah, Nintendo really kind of got ahead of things there and gave themselves a big advantage by allowing other publishers to publish, and then, you know, they had to kind of dial it back a little bit and put some controls in place to keep it from becoming flooded, but they figured it out.

And this was kind of the point at which Nintendo became the Nintendo we know today, like the Eternal Home console, creator and publisher. It must have been such an exciting time in Japan than for Famicom fans. I envy that. I would love to be like, I just got my Famicom and now all these cool games are coming out for it. And man, it must have been amazing.

I love those Namco ports, by the way, the early ones on the Famicom. They're all great. They got a cool cartridge design, too. Yeah, I'm really surprised Galaxy. It never came out here. Yeah. That Tengen never brought it out or anything. It's a really good port.

I think by the time, you know, people started publishing third parties started publishing in earnest on NES. Some of those early games were just too dated. Dig-Dug, Mappy, Galaxian. You know, Gallagher and Zevius came out here. And Pac-Man, of course. But for the most part, I think the early Namco games were just a little too mapper zero to really kind of hold their own in 1980. 88, 89. Yeah.

I think you're right. So we got sequels. We got like Digduk 2. We got Mapy Land. But, yeah, some of the early stuff, even though it was extremely successful in Japan, just it didn't really make sense over here. That's why I like going back to the Famicom and playing those,

because I like, I like these Namco ports of these games. Are there others that haven't played? And I went back in, yeah, there were some in Japan, like Galaxian, you know, that never came over. They're good ports. They're fun. And some of those did actually. make it over here as Famicom ROMs in, you know, plug-and-play systems, which is a little weird.

It took, you know, 30, 40 years for those to actually show up. But they did, eventually. Yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, 1984 was kind of a big deal for Nintendo. And there were other big deals, but we are running out of time and we're old, so we're running out of energy. So we will resume our discussion of mostly of arcade and computer games for 1984, especially on the Japanese side of things, as we segue into the follow-up episode to this,

the 1994 episode. So that seems to be the way of these year-end review reviews. Year of end review review. Yes, whatever. I can't even remember the name that I came up for these things. Oh, God.

All right. We're getting old, man. I know, right? I think someone just needs to do a retrospect on me, and I can call it a day. Anyway, thank you both for your time. We will wrap up this discussion. Hopefully you can both make it for the 94 episode once I get settled in my new home.

And in the meantime, we should do our self-promotion. Where can we find you now that Twitter has shit the bed? Well, I am still on X, which sucks. Sorry about that. Benj Edwards. Yeah, that nice way to destroy my community, Elon. Also, but right now I'm Ars Technica's AI reporter, so you can find me at arstechnica.com. And I occasionally write, you know, about history stuff, too. The thing is, is I did it a lot more last year before the AI news exploded. So I had more time to like sort of do, but now I'm like almost 100% AI all the time and it's kind of driving me crazy. So you admit that you've been. replaced by an AI. Part of my brain has been replaced. The funny thing is that it says Benj Edwards is an AI and machine learning reporter.

And people, when I first started, it said Benj Edwards is an AI. And because I have this pixel art logo that looks like an EGA Sierra game thing, people are like, is this Benj Edwards guy real? I'm not. You're an illusion. Yeah. I'm something Jeremy made. up.

Like, and just, anyway. My last pun is that instead of retronauts east, we should just call it retronauts beast because we got Kevin on it, because Kevin's a beast, you know? How do you feel about that, Kevin? I'm also East. The Beast from the East? I feel like that's biblical.

Yeah, I'm in Maryland. That's the East Coast. It's technically East. I just thought this is a great chance to just like ramp up the marketing with the beast, you know. Do the rebrand? There you go. Yep.

All right. So Ars Technica, that's where we find you. It's my prison. Kevin. So I've got a book that you can buy right now, the Atari Archive Volume 1. That's on the limited run game store and on Amazon. I also run the Atari Archive YouTube channel, which is Patreon-supported. And you can find me on primarily Blue Sky nowadays under Ubersaurus.

And you can find me, Jeremy. Oh, there you go. Way to go. I'm on Blue Sky, too. What is my name on Blue Sky? Jay Parrish. You can find me on Blue Sky as J. Parrish. Dot busky.

dot social. I think it's busky. I don't know. I hate the way they have the username set up. It's impossible for me to tag anyone. Oh, well, I'm old and I can't learn new things. It's very sad. But you can find me doing old things, of course, here on Retronauts and at limited run

games. my YouTube channel making videos, and again on Blue Sky as J. Parrish. That's J-P-A-R-I-S-H. Only 1-R- in Parrish. Don't get it wrong. Anyway, thank you gentlemen, both of you for helping me to travel back in time 40 and even 50 years to before our existences to talk about really video games before the video games industry's existence. So we're really getting primal this week, and I appreciate you taking the time to dig in the primal goo with me. And I look forward to following up with Retronauts Beast.

About 1994. Yeah, all right. Take care, everyone. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I don't know. Thank you.