Retronauts - 740: The Years-in-Review Revue: 1976 & ’86

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

The end is nigh! The end of 2025, that is, and the kick-off to 2026 with our annual look back through the decades at the biggest gaming events of 40 and 50 years ago. Jeremy Parish, Kevin Bunch, Benj Edwards, & Jared Petty tag team to wrestle Father Time. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, in the Latin, the word for shiks is shaksh. Retronauts episode 749. This is an episode that you can divide by sevens, but that is not what this episode is about. This episode is about dividing by the sixes. It is a years in review review. That's right. The annual tradition kicks off. We are going to keep this to two episodes. I swear to God, I am going to, everyone has a shock collar affixed, and if they go too far off topic, they get a little jolt. So we're going to stay in a very orderly fashion. It's going to be great. And we are going to get this episode through 1976 and 86. That's right. We're looking back 50 and then 40 years. And then the next episode we do, we will look back 30 years. And then we get to

20 years and that's a Bob Mackey episode. So I guess technically that's three. But they're kind of different things. Actually, this year, this year's review in review is a different thing. because they were kind of getting unwieldy. And also, I think we've been doing this for 10 years now. So we're starting to recycle materials. So I decided to take a different format, a different approach. And joining me on this epic journey into the past half century of video games, games, games, games we have. Let's see, here in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Ben Edwards, the one and only, the two and only as well. I've got a clone myself recently. Have you? Fantastic. Hey, it's me, the clone. Be quiet. I'm doing a podcast. All right.

I can see the shot collar is going to get a workout today. That's why you invested the shot collar. And a little further up the East Coast, a little further. This is Kevin Bunch. Not in Raleigh, but Raleigh adjacent, I guess. Ish. Yeah, it's like a four-hour drive. We can get there in an afternoon.

You know, I'm from the Midwest. That's a bookcase. As long as traffic around Lorton's not too bad. And finally, way up along the coast in a place that's probably too cold to fathom at the moment. It's pretty cold here. Hi, this is Jared Petty, the easternmost of Retronaut East all the way from Atlantic Canada, out here in another time zone and everything. Yeah, I was going to say, are you in that little snippet of Canada that's in a weird time zone that nowhere else in North America is? I am.

I am in the Atlantic Times. I'm out here and just peeking out, looking down. If I look south, all I see is Atlantic all the way to South America and Brazil. Wow. So you're kind of alone in that time zone. You and the, you and the penguins? No, no. The penguins are the other way.

It's the polar bears. No, I know, but I mean, you said all the way to South America, so I assume it extends all the way to Antarctica. That's true. I think I can go all the way down there. But yeah, I'm up here in the magical land of Canada. We don't care about polar bears. They're assholes. Polar bear.

Well, I mean, they do eat people occasionally. Really. It's okay. You have puffins. Yeah, there are puffins. That's true. Puffins are very rare in Prince Edward Island, but they do live up in New Brunswick just a little ways from here. You guys have fantastic oysters, though. Oh, my God, we have the best oysters I've ever eaten in my life. And I know hyperbole is par for the course with me, but no kidding, y'all. Like, I didn't know oysters could taste this pure. They are briny without a hint of, like, not a hint of that sea. sourness you sometimes get through, just clean tasting, like nothing I've ever had. I've actually had some, this is totally off topic. Oh, God, the shot collar. I was going to say, I've really had some really good oysters lately. It's been, it's been remarkable. There's something

in the water. I probably don't want to know what it is. Anyway, so the four of us have gathered together today to talk about the sixes, 1976 and 86, in video games. So the idea that I had for this one we'll see if it works, but it's probably going to be better than just me like reading off a list of things that happened in that year and people jumping in occasionally to wander off track. And yeah, it's always, it's always a little chaotic. So what I'm doing this time is skipping that because if you really want to see and know what happened in 76 and 86, go back and listen to whichever episode that we've already covered that in. Instead, I'm asking everyone, what, what, what, do you think were the most important things to happen for video games in that year? So it's just going to be a couple of items per person. And we're going to move pretty quickly. There will probably be some overlap. But basically, defend your thesis is what I'm saying. So we'll just kind of round robin it. And we'll start with 76, go through the four of us, and then move along to 86. And it will be phenomenal, delicious commentary. That is what you come to Retronauts.

for. I promise that our podcast commentary will be as tasty as the best oyster you can imagine. If you do not like oysters, I'm sorry, imagine something else instead. So let's go back in time to 1976, but not actually go back in time to 1976, because there was no internet back then, no Adobe Premiere. I could not make a living back then. It would have been rough. But let's cast our minds back to that time. A time when not very much was happening in video games. I would have been in trouble as a video game historian. So let's talk about 76. What little that happened in video games in 76? was important. And I am going to start with my top pick, which maybe overlaps with someone else. Benj, you put three on here. Well, Kevin and I had a lot of overlap in what we wanted to do. Okay, why don't we start with you because you had to be special and put three on here?

So what's your first thing on the list? I am not looking at the list, but I think it was probably the Fairchild Channel, right? Can I encourage you to be? Bring up your Google document? Let me see. I lost it. Have the clone bring it up. Well, you talk.

Yeah. He can, he can hold up like a pasteboard or something with the information. I see it. That's why he had three. The clone wanted to do one, too. There. Yep. Well, yeah.

I wrote a big, big article about the Fairchild Channel F, which came out in 1976. Back in, I don't know when I wrote the article anymore. It's like 2015 for Fast Company. about the invention of the video game cartridge. So Fairchild Channel F was the first game console with interchangeable program cartridges stored on ROM. And it started as a technology invented by a company called Alpex Computer Corporation.

Wallace Kershner and Lawrence Haskell built a prototype and they shopped it around. And it caught the eye of people like Jerry Lawson over at Fairchild and they brought it in-house and ported it over to their own chip, their own microprocessor. I think it was the F8, right, Kevin?

Yep. The prototype was an 80-80, I think. So, you know, it was just a fascinating story because Kevin knows this now, too, from researching all this stuff, which is the idea of having a cartridge, like, you know, an interchangeable cartridge was not extremely unique.

There were several companies, that had the idea at the time and were working on it. And Fairchild happened to sort of achieve it first. And I think maybe the prototype created in the early 70s, around the time of the 8080s launch was maybe the first prototype. But at some point, everybody had this idea where it makes sense to just be able to change out the ROM chips with a connector that's removable. So you can just flip out, switch out.

the games. And then you can have a razor and razor blades model like Gillette, where you sell the console at a loss or something and you make most of the profit on the software, stuff like that. Man, I wish that video game companies just sent a free console to everyone when they turn 16, like Gillette does. That would be so cool. Yeah. So how, Binge Edwards, is the Channel F's cartridge system different from the interchangeable cartridges on the original Odyssey? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, Well, it is. That's why I asked it. I love this. I love this. You could argue it of so many interesting ways, which is that, you know, the little card that goes into the Odyssey, or at least in 1972, was a jumper card that switched on and off different modules inside that console.

In a way, it programs that, you know, it does have flip bits in a way by those connections by programming that console to act in a certain way. But that console did not have a computer inside of it. And it doesn't have ROM chips. So it doesn't have like a complex. program, like a computer program, like software running on a CPU. So the Fairchild Channel F has a CPU. It's a fully fledged computer in there with RAM and a CPU, and it has a program running in software and, you know, stored in binary ROM chips. So that's the difference. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I would say the Odyssey, like the jumpers just sort of activated the abilities that the system already had built into it and just kind of awakened what was there,

whereas the Channel F's cartridge approach was, the system didn't necessarily have any of that code built into it already, and the program was introducing that and saying, here's something totally new for you to do that you could not have done without me. Yeah. It's far more complex.

So, yeah, I would say, pretty soon after that I think RCA RCA Studio 2 those people were working on a cartridge system at the same time Kevin's looked

into that a lot and Atari was sort of thinking about it and Fairchild just happened to come out first probably because they had the head start.

The most fun thing piece of trivia that I think of when I talked to Lawrence Haskell and Wallace Kirshner interviewed them from my article

back in the day and their prototype cartridges had I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, they had a, like a, what they call a D.B.25 connector or D.E.25 if you want to be technical or whatever it is. No, maybe it is a DB25 for that one. But it's like a bunch of pins, like an old serial port or a printer port kind of thing. So they had a box with that. And that was their prototype connector. And so I think it was the engineers at Fairchild, like Nick Tallis for who made the edge connector. And actually, it was the other guy wrong. Ron, what's his name, Kevin? Ron Smith. Ron Smith sounds right, yeah, yeah. He designed the mechanical aspects of the cartridge,

and Nick Talasfor designed the enclosure of the cartridge. He was like the industrial designer. So Nick chose to make the cartridge look like an eight-track tape because that was familiar with people, similar size and shape and stuff. And Ron had to figure out how, the cartridge would insert and remove, you know, many times without failure and all those stuff. So all that had to be invented, which is really fascinating. And so what's interesting

is that some of those techniques later went over to Atari and Activision when some of those people left. And I, Kevin may remember some of those stories. There was a guy named Hardy or something who worked with a Doug Hardy, I think. Yeah, I can't remember that. Gosh, it's so fuzzy. He got poached by Atari and basically designed their cartridge slot technology to protect the edge connector. And because, you know, they already had the Channel F to look to as sort of a guiding experience, the Atari one is much, much simpler. Yeah, it has fewer points of failure. Yeah, I think the, like, the Fairchild Channel F slot rotates upward and connects or something like that, you know. It's really weird.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a little over-engineered. A couple of parts of the Channel F are kind of that way, though. I mean, you can see certainly the background coming from a semiconductor background there in the company. There's a lot of over-engineering, over-complexity to that design. Trullers are that way too. The PlayStation 3 of its time. Kevin, you also have Channel F on your notes here.

It seems like binge stole a lot of your thunder. But do you have anything to add that he did not already snipe from you? Yeah. So, you know, echoing a lot of what he said, I do want to note that what really sets the Channel F apart for me and kind of makes it more notable than just the fact that it was first out the gate is that, you know, this system really pioneered the approach of selling games, like new games, year-round. Because up to this point, you know, video games were very much seasonal. You'd get stuff in the holidays. of the fall, and then you would just see nothing the rest of the year. But because, ironically, it cost them so much money and time and effort to meet the FCC regulations to get this thing on the market for November 1976, they needed more cash flow. So what they wound up going with was like, okay, we're going to start selling new cartridges in the spring and in the summer, in the fall.

and people will just have a constant stream of new material. I talked with one of the folks who worked in their marketing department, and that interview was in one of the recent issues of Romchip, the online journal. And he really goes into a lot of the stuff they had to come up with for selling a system like this. Like they had special teams of, you know, mostly part-time workers, is mostly housewives going out and demonstrating the machine and how it worked at like stores across the country. It's very fascinating, both from like a technical standpoint and from a how the hell do we sell this standpoint. So I'm a supporter of the Channel F on this list here.

All right. Would you buy a Channel G if they came out with one? You know, the library on the Channel F was not bad. I could be interested if they fixed all of their quality control issues. This is a Kickstarter idea for someone out there. One more thing. We need to mention just briefly talk about Jerry Lawson a little bit, which is one of the reasons I ever wrote about the Channel F, because I was looking for black, you know, pioneers in the video game industry and computer industry. And he was instrumental in that project.

He did not lead the Channel F project, which is sort of erroneously reported because one of my pieces, the one that everybody cites doesn't mention the guy who actually led it. And I unfortunately forgot his name. I have it in my notes, but they're not helping rectify history here. I can't rectify history. But that will be rectified in the future book, probably. So Jerry was, you know, it couldn't happen without him. And he was a very, a rare gifted engineer and salesman of the semiconductor industry of that time, who happened to be black. And so it's just a cool social and cultural touch point for that system.

pioneering system in many ways. Speaking of pioneering systems, Jared, take us through point one on your list here. Yeah, I went heavy on hardware for all of today. And it starts with 1976. We usually think of 77 is the birth of the home computer with the Apple 2, the Trash 80, and the pet. You know, the three kind of really iconic pre-built home computers that started everything off. But a year before, here in 1976, we get two. extremely influential developments in computer gaming history.

The release of the Altair and the Apple One. Now, very few people had either of these computers. But the people that had them started a snowball chain reaction. Wasn't the Apple One like a kit made out of wood that you had to mail order and assemble yourself? So the Apple One was a board sold for $66.66 by Steve. Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The steves were funny guys. But it's suitable for the topic of this episode.

This is all the sixes. Yeah, it's a board that you could hook up to a cheap display and mount in a suitcase with a home-built keyboard or mount in a wooden box. Really, the Apple One isn't a lot of it's just a prototype for the Apple II. And even there, we see some of the gaming influence. People always talk about how it, you know, design the Apple II so he could play breakout on it. And, yeah, that's true. But the Apple One already has the paddle interface built in. moving that direction. He's already working on color graphics. He's already working on fast, you know, getting stuff moving around the screen quickly in ways that, very unorthodox ways that made it cost effective. The Apple one and two's visual driver technology for that six color slash pseudo monochrome display it had is very Byzantine and brilliant and weird in a way I can't quite get my head around, but it was good for gaming once you understood it. And the reason I bring this up is even there's only, there's only, there's a

only a few of them. There's this little list from an Apple catalog in early 1977. And this is a list of Apple One software directly from Apple, not Apple II. That's before they launched the Apple II. And we see, you know, the basic tape cassette, but then we have ports from the popular like All Book about Basic, or we have ports from mainframe games that were popular at the time. So we find Mastermind, Lunarlander, Blackjack. Hamarabi, Star Trek, you know, that the coordinate graph-based Star Trek game that wasn't all the mainframes, these games are all reported to home computer by hobbyists in the first few months, and then Apple's actually selling them.

It is probable that some of these games were available on the Apple One or being developed in 1976, and people were doing the same kind of thing on Altar with CPM. And so we had these two strains of what will become one, kind of the business world PC branch that will morphin eventually to the IBM PC. and then on the other side, the home computer, Apple, leading us into what became fundamentally for many people, a gaming machine. It's a very important development for history, even though not a lot of people touched it. Those people had disproportional influence on what would happen a year later. The people writing software for this thing now were the whizzes that were blowing people's socks off with commercial software on cassette and 1978.

All right. You know what I'm going to be. So I'm going to take my turn now, finally. And I actually stepped back from events in the games industry such as it was at the time. And I'm looking at sort of the bigger picture of things. And I want to mention the fact that basically, the global economy bounced back from its mid-70s recession in 1976. This was something fomented by the OPEC manufactured crisis where six oil-producing nations of the world said,

you know, people are taking advantage of us and our resources. And, you know, the Western world is experiencing this time of unparalleled prosperity that has been ongoing since World War II. and, you know, that's nice for them, but we would like our cut, too. Among other things, there were, there was a lot of politics involved, a lot of bad feelings about Israel and land grabs in the Middle East that we do not have time to get into, but it was a complicated, a complicated situation, but the important thing was that the OPEC nations put an embargo on their oil, and it caused the cost of petroleum to skyrocket. rocket to three to four times its price around the world in a matter of months. Basically, in

1973, oil went from super cheap, $1.80 a barrel or something to four times that. And so much of Western civilization's growth in post-World War II prosperity was built on the availability of cheap petroleum to make plastics for, you know, ease of transport, et cetera, that really took a huge toll. And, you know, the U.S. in particular was already dealing with political turmoil domestically due to the Vietnam War and the fact that that was going very, very poorly. And we were just about to get out of that. And that's also part of the problem because, you know, like Kissinger was running international policy at the time because Nixon and was so tied up with Watergate and was too focused on Vietnam to pay attention to what

was happening in the Middle East. So it all just went pear-shaped. It was a bad time, the mid-70s, a time of austerity and tightening the belt buckle and, you know, just a sudden arrest to the idea of, you know, this is like history is beautiful. Everything's going to be great forever. And everything became kind of cynical as a result. But eventually that more or less worked out. Things stabilized, things stabilized. Petroleum went back to being available and dropped in price again. And the economies around the world started to recover. And so, you know, that recovery basically paved the way for video games to happen again. You know, I don't think that if the embargo had continued, that video games would have been able to thrive. People, families would not. I've been able to spend 200 bucks on an Atari system, especially when you're talking 200 bucks in 1970s, which had recently inflated pretty significantly from where they had started the decade thanks to the embargo and other things. But also, you know, so many of the products that

computers and video games are based on revolve around the use of petroleum, plastics and internal components and things like that, manufacture, transport. All of these things are dependent on oil. So the end of that recession, the end of that oil crisis came just in time, I think, for these innovations in hardware design, in delivery concepts like the Channel F's cartridges, just in the general know-how and thinking and expertise and mass availability. And mass availability, of computing components. There's some other things that we'll talk about momentarily that helped, you know, kind of democratize computing and take it out of the academic and military spaces. But, yeah, the oil crisis and the recession ending really, like, if they hadn't

happened, if they hadn't come to an end at that time, I don't know how different video game history would look. I don't know how much that would have slowed the evolution and development and popularity of video games, but I feel like it would have been pretty significant. So to me, that is probably the most significant thing in 1976, even though it is very nebulous and not specifically tied to video games. But you look at the countries that were hit the hardest by the OPEC embargo, and that's the U.S. and Japan, which is also the two countries where video game innovation really happened the most in the late 1970s. So, you know, that's, it's one of those kind of knock on effects, and you look at it and think, what if, how would things have been different?

And it would have been sad. It would have sucked because I like video games. And I'm glad that they could exist. Anyway, any thoughts on that recession, the embargo? Jared, I know you're kind of a political history wonk. That's the thing I love. Yeah, but I couldn't agree with you more. I think you've nailed it.

It's a fantastic point, both the economics and, frankly, the availability of the patrols. You know, we can even say, well, maybe it would have all been game and watches, but game and watches take plastic to make. They would have been makeable, but they'd cost significantly more. Little metal game and watches, just a little piece of metal in your pocket to cut into your thighs and really cause some pain. Yeah, and then I think about something like, you know, the Apple II chassis and how much plastics in that. You know, there's... Don't think about arcade games, you know, like that molded... I don't know, is fiberglass petroleum based?

I'm thinking, you know, computer space based. but also things like joysticks even you know cartridges like just everything it's and yeah the the economic distress I wasn't I was born at 79 so I missed this but my folks have been pretty clear about how rough it was there for a couple of years getting getting fuel in your vehicle and the cost of living increases that it was bad enough that Nixon had gotten kicked out and they voted Reagan in like five years later like that's how bad OPEO was, or the OPEC crisis was. Pardon me, I didn't need to vilify OPEC. I mean, they caused problems, but some of those problems that they caused, you can understand the grievances. Where they were coming from. Yes.

Yeah. So it was a bad time for everyone, really. And it actually, like, the embargo ended up hurting the OPEC nations also because, you know, they made a lot of money off of the increased cost of petroleum. But as prosperity slowed, the due. demand for things slowed. And it just, yeah, it was just a feedback effect. So part of, part of the reason the OPEC crisis ended was that, I forget the people involved's names, but they looked at their economies and said, oh, this is actually working against us in a lot

of ways. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, you had shakes and individuals who had a lot of stake in the oil industry who became very wealthy, but overall prosperity dropped, even in the countries that were behind the embargo and bringing in, you know, the additional revenue from oil. So, anyway, this is getting off topic and I don't want to activate the shock collar. So I'll stop now and hand it over to binge Edwards to tell us about point number two. By the way, on your list. I found out who was in charge of the Channel F project.

I found my notes while you were deliberating the oil and plastics things, which was a cool thesis. Thanks. So, a guy named ER Williams was in charge, the project manager of the channel F project. Something interesting, Ron Smith said about that from my interview with him. He said, Jerry reported to ER Williams, but however, because Jerry was a longtime employee of Fairchild, he knew very well the vice president and people above ER, so he had pretty good influence at Fairchild. He wasn't just a normal guy off the street like the rest of us, because we were employed directly. directly to support his game effort and Jerry. We knew, and we knew Jerry had been there for a long time.

It was obvious. So he wasn't officially in charge of it, but Jerry had the sway. I think ER Williams came from Motorola, perhaps. And so Jerry's, according to Ron, Jerry Lawson's position was electrical engineering manager. Ron Smith was mechanical engineering manager. So there you go. All right. That will be rectified in a future book.

I don't know I'm going to I'm ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

ha so Okay. Actually, I'm going to hand the mic over to Kevin now, since he didn't really get to introduce a point of discussion of his own since you guys over. Kevin, take it away. Sure. So I want to make note as my second item was the October announcement that Warner Communications was purchasing Atari, which was a pretty good deal for both companies. So basically, 1976, Atari is deep into development on what would become the VCS. But there was a recognition that if they wanted to do more in the home console space, because previous year they got, like a Pong system out through Sears. If they wanted to do more in that space, they needed more money than they had. Atari went through several, like, you know, boom and bust cycles in its short life at that point. And, you know, they were making decent money through 75, but they did not have nearly enough to really, like, get this thing over the finish line.

And at the same time, Warner was dealing with a downturn. in the recording and entertainment industries, and they were very interested in getting into sort of more high-tech entertainment, and therefore Atari was the perfect fit for them. So they started negotiating, you know, Nolan Bushnell tried to jerk them around for a little while, but finally they came to an agreement. No. No, shocker.

Shocker. But, yeah, they finally came to an agreement in October. Warner purchased Atari, gave it all the resources. as it need to finish the VCS and to really expand its operations in the home gaming space, which kind of became its bread and butter there for a while. And it worked out really well financially for Warner up until the late 1982. So that was pretty well. Would you consider this Carter's October surprise?

Yes, without Warner buying Atari. Could Jimmy Carter have won the presidency? see. So another great what if. Sorry Jerry Ford. So they paid $28 million, right? That sounds right. Didn't they?

I haven't done an inflation calculation, but it feels like that's not really a lot of money, even if even in $1976. I feel like that would be about $200 million or so based on just kind of the way inflation went. If it were today, it would be like, let's, let's be generous and say a quarter of a billion. Yes. today it'd be like a billion dollars or something the way things go with VC and all that stuff just thinking about that even if we're a billion dollars today buying a company with that potential at a billion

would be considered like a steal I mean that's that's a tiny Disney paid what five six billion for Star Wars and that was a decade and a half ago now you know yeah it's just incredible still very unproven technology at the time though the VCS hadn't even come out yet so that wasn't, you know, they didn't know it was going to be a huge boom in cartridge games and everything quite yet. So it became far more valuable after Warner pushed the VCS, the 2,600, we're talking about out the door. Yeah, I don't think the 2,600 would have become as big as it did, if not for the backing of Warner.

No way. They've never finished the thing, I don't think. I'd much less gotten into stores, no. I mean We're all talking about the good times of the studio too Sorry Kevin I was going to say if they did finish the 2600 It probably would have come out much later than it did

And would have missed its window Yeah But like Bannie Gerard had seen like what they were working on Internally so like he knew that there was Something good brewing Yeah So I think the VCS, the 2600 The promise of that is really what sold him on Atari

Atari cultural approach to games that was different from the other companies, whereas they were, one thing I wrote about in one of my articles was that the other game manufacturers were largely semiconductor companies or TV companies or something. And Atari was just a software, you know, creative house making interesting games. And so games was their primary, you know, and entertainment was their primary product. And so it was something special about what Atari was doing at that time. Oh, yeah.

I mean, we were talking about this. They couldn't have seen the boom that was going to come from the VCS, which took a couple of years to happen anyway after it finally hit the market. But they had watched Home Pong just through Sears do quite well. They'd watched Atari effectively form the electronic arcade industry with Pong and Tank and some of their follow-ups. I mean, they had a lot of reason to believe that there was gold at the end of that rainbow. Mm-hmm. And I think it's also fun to note that they had Atari had to work. work out a settlement for the lawsuit with Magnavox over the, you know, Odyssey patents

for displaying stuff on a TV screen. And the arrangement was actually quite generous for Atari. They, like, only had to pay a fairly small royalty fee, and I believe they had to share whatever home console technology they came up with with Magnavox up through, like, mid-77. which they, you know, offered them information on the 2600, and Magnovox did not really pick up on it, which would have made for a very interesting, like, what-if scenario where what if, what if Magnovox's Odyssey 2 was just like a VCS clone? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Instead of whatever weird architecture it is. Yeah. Or they become the first third party. Yeah. So speaking of Atari, I'm going to take my second turn now and say one of the most important. significant things of 1976 happening in the video game space is video games. It is a video game.

It is Breakout by Atari. An arcade game, because they did not have a console yet. But Breakout is absolutely one of the most influential video games of all time. I mean, if you really want to be reductive, and who

doesn't in this economy, you could just say breakout is Solitaire Pong, where instead of playing against another person, you're breaking a wall of bricks. Okay, sure. It's Pong Sideways played solo. But that radically changes the experience. It's no longer a sporting event. It becomes more of a test of individual skill, of planning, of understanding, you know, how to manipulate the ball and where, you know, just how to dial the paddle around and hit the ball at just the right angle. There's a lot of

subtlety to break out based on just the very limited sandbox of things in that game. You've got a row of bricks that you have to break individually one at a time to clear away at the top of the screen. You have a paddle at the bottom. And you have a ball that bounces around, reflects off the wall, hits a block, it breaks it, then bounces back to the paddle. Very simple, very basic. But, you know, once everyone got tired of Pong clones, everything was a breakout clone. And breakout was extremely influential for the people who made video games. I mean, we've already talked, kind of touched on the fact that Steve Wozniak created the Apple 2 so that it could play a mean game of breakout. And, you know, they did come from an Atari background.

So they had kind of that connection there that actually, that was the game that Steve Wozniak designed the interiors, the innards for. And Steve Jobs made a lot of money off of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Steve Jobs got rich and Steve Wozniak made the game.

And cried in a hot tub afterward when he found out. Yeah. I mean, that's the 70s experience right there, crying in a hot tub. With Nolan Bushnell, apparently. Wow. I mean, if I were in a hot tub with Nolan Bushnell, I would be crying a lot. I've heard a lot of versions of this story. But one of them is that when Was was found out, he was in a hot tub with Bushnell and Bushnell told it was like, hey,

what'd you ever do with that blank thousand dollars that I gave Steve for a breakout? And he's like, he never told me. The ready bastard. Yeah. But also if you look across the sea to Japan, I guess that's an ocean, not a sea. If you look across the ocean to Japan, breakout was hugely influential over there. Like everyone made their own breakout clones. One of Nintendo's first games was Monkey Magic, a game where you play breakout, but the

blocks are arranged in the shape of a monkey's face. You know, they were dressing it out. juishing it up a bit. Space invaders is basically breakout except that the bricks fire back at you and your ball doesn't reflect. It just flies straight up in a line. But I mean, there's a very direct line from Pong to breakout to space invaders. And, you know, space invaders begat so much. It's such a wealth of innovation and creativity. But like any Japanese company, any Japanese game manufacturer or developer that got into the business in the late 70s made a breakout clone or three. And that was just the thing you did. And certainly the same was true in the U.S.,

but I feel like it's even more visible over there. And you can see, you know, just kind of how it built on and expanded. So yeah, to me, breakout had so much influence. It just creeps into every sort of origin story of video games that you can imagine. So, um, To me, that is the most important video game of 1976. Are any of you three playing Ball X-Pitt right now? No, but I heard about it that it was good. I wonder. Ball X-Pitt, it's 2025.

We're talking about 1976. Ball-X-Pitt is fundamentally breakout if Breakout was designed by someone who had just played vampire survivors. Like, it's fantastic, but it's the same game effectively. I want to- I want to mention a couple things about Breakout, which I'm pretty sure I've talked about on Retronauts before, maybe a couple times even. But, you know, in 2007, I did an interview with Steve Wozniak about it.

I've talked to Al Korn about it, who is Atari's, one of the Atari's main engineers. I've talked to Nolan Bushnell about it. And the interesting thing is that, you know, Waz was under the impression that his design for breakout actually shipped until, like, even in 2007 when I interviewed him, he thought it was that. But Al-Alcorn told me no way we couldn't use it. It was too weird. Somebody else had to redesign it. Wasn't it like too elegant? He refined it so efficiently and got the number of chips down because that was the contest was like, how many chips can you remove from this and still make it a playable game?

Yeah. Yeah, it was just like he was thinking in that other dimension where his brain exists and the rest of us humans were like, uh, let's add some chips back because I don't get this. Yes. They couldn't teach the, they couldn't teach the same. service reps, how to troubleshoot the problems because he had made it so simple, they couldn't figure out how it actually worked. Well, you know, it's also, it's also funny because, like, they couldn't have used it anyway because he did not meet some of the specifications that a commercial game product needed.

So, like, the scoring wasn't really done in game. There was just, like, a little LED display or LCD display. That's what the score was on. And there was no sound for another reason. So, like, they met what Nolan Bushnell asked them to make, which was just a block-breaking game. But, you know, it was very much like, we followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. Yeah, I mean, technically correct is the best kind of correct. Yeah.

Yeah, I've heard Alcorn talk about this, and he said that, you know, that Bushnell directly gave this job to jobs, like right after Jobs was hired, completely ignorant of the fact that Steve had no idea how to design a video game or engineer it. I think I asked Nolan, like, who design breakout, and he said he did. So I think the game was Nolan Bushnell's idea, like for a single-player-pong-type game. Yeah, that'd be congruent with it outside, I think. Yeah, the Strong Museum has, like, some documentation from, I think, a 1973, 74 meeting of, you know, the engineers and everyone and Bushnell was there, too. And they didn't mark off who came up with that idea, but that does check out. Apparently, it was a rip-off of Ramtex Clean Sweep originally. Makes sense.

Wow, we got to put this information together into one piece. I think that would be useful for people. Anyway, that's great. You can rectify more history, binge. Rectify, yes, the rectifier. All right. So I'm going to skip over your point two in the interest of time and jump ahead to point three on your list, binge. And that would be... Because I feel like that's kind of relevant to what I was just talking about.

You don't want to talk about adventure coming up? No. Well, I'll just mention it briefly that William Crowther finished his honor and adventure. Shock collar. Let's keep things moving. Let's just keep it to two items. Do you want to talk about adventure or the A.Y.3.8500. I know one of them is a lot easier to say.

The A.Y. 38500 is much easier to say, but I know less about it. That sounds great for the interest of time, so please. Yeah, so, you're right. Yeah, I like time. So the general instrument, A.Y.3.8500 was the Pong on a chip. This is a very famous, you know, integrated circuit. Just a chip that would play a Pong game.

So entirely, you know, like, it takes inputs. It gives you video outputs and stuff. And so people could easily build it into a game console, a dedicated game console that would play Pong, plus six selectable games, hockey, soccer or squash, like practice mode against a flat wall. And I think some versions had like a rifle shooting game or something because it was designed. Didn't the Telstar have that too? Yeah, I think that's the, isn't this the chip that the Telstar, like, the Kaliko were the only ones that got their full order the first year?

Yeah. Sounds correct, yes. There's like, there's this whole web of connections like Ralph Bayer tipping off somebody. at Colico about this chip and Wallace Kershner and Haskell, the Alpex guys said they designed the Telstar or something. They told me, and

this is all vague memories. So they're all like connections. This is a small industry. The people who knew this, they knew each other. They talked to each other and stuff. And they're like, hey, that guy knows this. So let's get him. Anyway, so ultimately, over 500 different game consoles used

this chip, and it made like a huge pawn clone flood. From 76, 77, maybe into 78, and like one of the first video game crashes because there is like a huge market glut. Yeah, that's why breakout was such a big deal because people were like, oh, finally, it's not pong. Yeah, the only non-pong. And so the Telstar, I think, was the first one to use this unit, the Kaliko Telstar. It sold over one million units in 1976, one of the top selling Christmas toys that year. and that's the quick version.

So it was just a chip that made it easy to make Pong console. So everybody in their brother who could manufacture electronics and even those that didn't made a Pong console. So there you go. I'd say if you want to learn more about it, there's an interview that Nate Lockhart did with the Chips designer Gilbert Duncan Harrower. That's over on Gaming Alexandria.

It was a very important little piece of tech Because like you said, this really drove the home industry in 76, 77. They sold tons of these things. There was a huge amount of demand for these things. And then all of a sudden, you know, the fat ended and everyone was left holding the bag. So a lot of those chips were made, a lot of those chips. But Jared, why don't you wrap up 1976 for us by telling us about a chip that was manufactured in even greater quantities than the, hang on, let me look at a. up, A.Y. 380,500. Yeah, they made a few of these, boy. This one's a lot shorter and easier to

say. It is. But I have a question. I'm in Canada now. Is it the Z80 or the Z80 now? What do I say? That's between you and God, my friend. All right. Well, I'm going to say Z80 because Maraica. Yeah, the Z80, a cheap clone of the 8080, which was an Intel chip. This was an extraordinarily inexpensive processor, very much like the 6502, but with a different architecture. And it's really one of the two lynch pins

on which late 70s to late 80s gaming is founded at a hardware level across most of the world. What's the other one? The other one, the 6502 and the Z80. Yeah. The processor,

so the Z80s in just, these are just a few. The MSX. the Glico Vision, the Game Boy, the SG-1000, Jeremy knows that, the master system, checkout Seguiden, the K-Pro, the Osborne, the TRS-80 line, models one and four, the entire ZX series, including the Specky, and many, many more. There's one in the Sega Genesis also as a sub-processor. And they still make these things. Actually, Z-80s, I think, still go into work as, like, hardware-level controllers because they're very useful for simple tasks. And they must be like 10 cents to manufacture at this point.

Yeah. So the Z80 is very humble, but it is, along with the 6502, the chip that put enough power into the hands of a home programmer that you can actually do something useful on a home computer like play a game. Before that, hardware prevented you from doing that. After the Z80 and the 6502, that issue was laid aside. any other thoughts on the z80 it's kind of a kind of a giant wasn't it uh enrico was his name frederico fagin designed it and it was an 80 80 kind of an 8080 clone or something yeah it's what's called yeah totally with some extra instructions or something yeah so yeah fascinating very important chip and priced price to sell to hobbyists or at scale it was just

perfect for that. Yeah, that's really what sets the Z80 and the 6502, apart from all of these other processes at the time, is that they could be sold and produced in bulk at very low prices. So that made them perfect for the sort of consumer product stuff. Yeah, and they work very differently. Like, the 6502 and the Z80 are both similarly priced and similarly capable at their various, but they work in a very different way. Six502s are typically. the clock lower, but could do more for clock cycle. ZX80s are sped up, but they can't do as much per cycle. And you would get hard, you know, software that was written for one at assembly level

would make it like to a whole family of computers first. Like, you know, VisiCalc was written for 6502. So it was on Apple. It was on Atari. It took a long time to get to Z80 because it was a way harder to port. Likewise, electric pencil, the first word processor was a Z80 thing for a long, long time before. I just think that's very interesting, too, something we don't really deal with anymore. So I want to mention you said the Game Boy had a Z80.

It was actually like a variant on it. But that, you know, that backward compatibility was continued in the Game Boy Advance. There's not actually a Z80 in the Game Boy Advance, but it has a special hybrid chip in it that combines the Intel 80 and the Xilog Z80 called the SM83. I'm not sure if they included that in the DS, because there is a backward compatibility element to that, but that might just be the arm chip. But nevertheless, that means that, you know, there was a major game system being sold until, like, 2008, 2009 that had some variant of the Z80 in it. That is, that is, you know, that's 30 years of being included in video game consoles.

That is crazy. That's legs. Wow. Geez, I hadn't thought about it that way. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be able to be. I'm going to be.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. So that's the legacy of 1976. Some big heavy hitters there. Lots of things that would shake out and shape up over the following years and basically give us the video games space as we know it. It was still very sort of primal in 76, but I feel like we kind of touched on the big things that kind of paved the way for what we're going to talk about next, which is the year 1986, which was a totally different field of entertainment. Things had shaped up and shaken out in the ensuing decade. And so 1986 is a very different year in terms of video game stuff.

The challenge in 1986 is narrowing the same. significant events down to just a few little things. I asked everyone to include four items in their lists here. My thought is that we're probably not going to make it through all four for each of us, but there is some overlap. So I'm going to kick things off by saying the most significant thing about 1986, at least in the U.S., is that consoles were back, baby. after taking a break, much to Warner's dismay among, and Gulf and Westerns and many other

companies dismay, console games bounced back. Now, technically, console games never went away in the U.S., even in the U.S., but effectively they did. In 1985, I've mentioned this before, there were something like two dozen games released total throughout the entire year, most of which were holdovers from the Kaliko Vision that just kind of flooded the market at the beginning of the year. If you don't count the NES launch, which really you shouldn't, because if you did not live in the immediate, like, 50-mile diameter of Manhattan, you did not know about the NES. You never heard of it. It was only there. It wasn't until mid-1986 that distribution on the NES actually went fully nationwide, and you could go to a store and see Rob, staring out at you

saying, won't you buy me? And then you could try Jiramite and say, no, I don't think I will. But then there was Kung Fu next to it, and you would say, oh, yeah, okay, maybe I will. So the NES launched technically nationwide in 1986, but that's not all. There was also the Sega master system, which hit the stores a few months after the NES kind of went nationwide. And shortly, I guess, around the same time that the NES kind of promulgated across the U.S., you had Atari finally launching its 7,800 console, which was supposed to have shipped in 1984. But because there was no market in 1984, it did not. And now this was admittedly a different Atari entity than had intended to launch the 7800. But nevertheless, it said Atari.

It had the little Mount Fuji logo. For everyone who was buying video games, it just meant Atari. So those three systems were showing up on the market. In the meantime, INTV, INTV Corp had purchased Intellivision and had started a campaign to get television games back on the market. Atari also said, oh, we've got all this 2,600 software, and 2,600s are really cheap to manufacture. We can sell this as the budget line and undercut everyone else, including ourselves. Good strategy there. not so good at creating synergy, although they could have really parlayed that into something

amazing. But they didn't. Nevertheless, 2,600. Some of the best games for the 2,600 came out after the Atari crash. There's some really cool stuff that pushes the system in ways you would not have thought possible. So, yeah, all of a sudden, we went from no console releases to almost 100, and then the following year it was like 150, and then the year after that it was like 200, and then after that, it's just, it's impossible to keep up with, and nevertheless, I'm trying, and it's stupid. So really, 1986 is kind of a reset for console gaming and video gaming in the U.S. in general, and honestly, sort of the basis of what we know as video games today. It's evolved a lot since then, but really the standards were kind of laid down.

You know, the console wars between Nintendo and whoever, the idea of cartridge licensing and having official third parties, you know, these are all sort of standards for the video games industry now. And all of those things came about, really, and it kind of cemented in 1986. And I know this overlaps with some things on other people's lists. So, Kevin, it looks like maybe you would want to add something. Yeah, so I focused it on Atari's releases in particular because, of course, I did. You know, you really touched on a lot of what they got up to that year. I'll note, like, the 2,600 games in particular, like Doug Newbauer, the guy who came up with Star Raiders. His work Solaris came out in 86, and it is objectively, like, one of the best games on the system.

just graphically in terms of like what you're doing in that game just it's very much a follow-up to Star Raiders, which was also doing the same thing for their computer line. But like they finally got out the door these like Lucasfilm games, the first Lucas film games that had been developed for the 5200 and they'd been sitting on them for, you know, two years. They finally got those out the door. The 7,800, they finally worked out all of these weird licensing contract issues. with GCC and Warner to get that out the door. So, yeah, this was like a good time for Atari. My favorite thing is reading some of Ed Semrad's columns. He was like a games journalist at the time for a Milwaukee newspaper.

And he was really high on the 7800 and the Sega Master System. And just was like, oh, that's an NES. I don't think that's going to go anywhere. I don't think these games are very good. And, well, time makes fools of us all, huh? I have a question for all three of you. You're all real historians. When you talk about that late 85 sale in New York that you talked about, Jeremy, you know, the limited availability,

have any of the three of you ever talked with anybody who was actually, actually did buy an NES at FAA Schwartz or somewhere in Manhattan in late 1985? was ahead of the curve? No, I think they're all dead now. They're all old and dead. No, I've never actually met anyone. But I have seen posts, you know, from people who were like, oh, yeah, I had the system. But, you know, it had to have been tens of thousands of people because the system did fairly well. And it wasn't just being sold at F.A.O. Schwartz.

It was basically, if you were a retailer in the greater New York area, you had the opportunity to pick up the NES. And there were, you know, the video game history. Foundation, did a live presentation at Portland Retro Gaming this past fall, a couple of months ago now, where they had Gail Tilden, Lance Bar, and, oh, God, I just totally blinked on his name. Is it Bruce something? Yeah. Bruce Lowry.

Yeah. They were all there talking about the launch, and, you know, they debunked a lot of things and expanded on a lot of things, but it wasn't just FAA Schwartz. It's just, I think, F.A.O. Schwartz had the biggest visibility and did the biggest push. It was the coolest place to go. They have the big toy soldier. Wow, that's awesome. But, you know, any electronic shop or toy shop could carry the NES. And the ones that kind of pushed it did really well. And the ones that did not push it, it just kind of sat there. So it wasn't like some, you know, blowing out the doors. Everyone has to have an NES in 1985. It was a moderate success and enough, you know, as a proof of concept that, oh, kids and families do like video games, especially. if there's a little robot saying, play me. And you can't actually try a gyromat yourself. Then it's very compelling.

So they were national based on that. That's kind of the counterpoint of that. But kind of building on this, binge point six on your list is related. So why don't you expand on this particular point of item, point of conversation, this item. You and your list. Okay. Number six, I've got to look this up. Sega Master System launch?

Yeah. Yeah. Because we talked about Nintendo and Atari. Now we've got to give some love to Sega. The Sega Master System is such a cool. system that was like so poorly marketed and handled in America, I think. That's my opinion. It was originally the Sega Mark 3 in Japan, completely redesigned, you know,

console, like industrial design, the shape of the console, the color scheme and all that stuff. And the box art was just horrible with like the gray, I mean, white with the grid lines and like the little cartoon people. The box style, the box style. Well, the box style outstayed its welcome. It should have been treated like the NES black box style, where it was like, here's the introduction, and then we're going to phase it out over, you know, after like a year or two.

But they just kept with that style, and it aged really badly. But at the time that it launched, I remember when the master system was new, and that was a really cool shelf display. It looked very, very modern. It looked very much of the time. I mean, they based their design style very much. on Apple marketing from that era, like with the Garamund font and everything. It was meant to be sophisticated, futuristic, cool, provocative. And I feel like it really was at the start.

And then, you know, everyone else's box art got better and better. And Sega was like, here's our little clip art wrestler holding his own head. Okay, that's not really doing much for me. I agree that it was very iconic and cool looking at first. I do remember seeing it at Toys R Us and thinking it was amazing. But, yeah, I don't think it sold the games very well with those little dinky, wrestler holding his head kind of thing. I think it was fine in the early days when it was like, it's outrun. What do you need to know?

It's got a little car on it. Okay, it's a racing game. Oh, it's a space shooter. You know, it's got a little spaceship on it. But, but, yeah, beyond that, once games got more granular and, you know, you started to get more than one game in a genre, didn't work out so well. So one of the biggest problems with the Sega Master System

was that, you know, Nintendo had this exclusive licensing practice that locked up a lot of the good third-party developers in America. So, Sega was left with not the best software they could have had in the American market. Although Sega released some cool things, like Fantasy Star, you know, eventually Sonic the Hedgehog got a release on the master system. That was sort of past its prime, though. Yeah, a bit. Zillion was cool. Well, I like Dillian. And Indira Racer is one of my favorite games of all time, the Master System Enduro Racer.

I've talked about that before. It's really fun. No, well, you can't. It's my favorite. I didn't say it was great. I just, I, you know, you want, you want a, yeah, you want a super scalar game to look like a super scalar game. And Enduror racer is, well, I don't know. It's more like Paperboy.

I prefer the $2,600 port myself. Always the contrarian. No, the master system, you know, it did have some disadvantages, like you said. The licensing, you know, the third-party scheme didn't help. But I think also Sega hadn't really opened up its mind, expanded its third-eye to include third-parties. So Sega self-published everything until I want to say late 1988. I'm trying to remember exactly. But, you know, then Activision showed up.

and a couple of other publishers, Parker Brothers. And Parker Brothers was actually first party because at that point, Master System was being distributed by Tonka, which was owned by the same company as Parker Brothers. So is that really a third party? No. It's like a one-half party. But also they had a big disadvantage against really all the competition at launch

in that when Nintendo launched the NES, they had a three-year backbench of Famicom software to pull from from third and first party. So the initial NES launch roster is like 25 games, and there's some really great stuff in there, and it's really diverse and varied, but it's, you know, pulling from three years of games. Likewise, the Atari 7800 had this huge pile of GCC programmed and other games that were supposed to have been launched in 1984 to pull from. The 2,600, you know, there was a backlog of games there. The master system had really only existed in Japan for like nine months by the time it got to the U.S. And, you know, there was the SG-1000.

And in Japan, the Mark 3 carried on from the SG-1,000, and you could still buy SG-1,000 games there. But Sega couldn't sell those in the U.S. Because they were basically Kaliko Vision games. And there was no way those were going to fly against, like, Super Mario Brothers in Kung Fu, or even, you know, something like Hang-on Safari Hunt. You can't, you can't, like, stick hang on as your packing game and then say, hey, guys, you want to play NSUB, this 1979 simple space invaders style shooter on the ocean with two-color graphics? No? Oh, okay.

So, yeah, they had to really compensate for that. I was excited that Master System had a port of altered beast on it. I remember wanting to play that. Oh, man. It's not the best. Like the Genesis version, I remember seeing that more in the store, but like when I actually got a master system, like in the early 90s, I think I got it at a used game store. I wanted to play Altered Beasts the most, and it was fun. It's not a great port, but by the way, I have an idea I can list the seven, my seven forgotten master system classics.

I don't have to say anything about them, but this is some cool games that people forget. Ninja Gaden had a port on there that was good. Ultima 4 port of master system is awesome. That wasn't in the U.S. though. No, that's As you're right. Okay, fine. Same with Ninja Guideon.

Okay. Fantasies zone the maze. Rocky. Rocky boxing. And, of course, Enduro racer who could forget that one. I try. Pit pot.

Which may be just Japanese. Also not a U.S. release. All right. It was in Europe also. Master of Darkness, which is sort of like a Castlevania clone. Europe. Game here only in the U.S.

Okay, fine. That's a terrible list. Forget it. So the story there, Binge, is that if you really want to have a great master experience, master system experience, live in Europe. Yeah. Imports. Yep.

Jeremy, I got a question for you about all this. Did Sega just, you studied the SG-1000 and master system more than any human I've ever met. Sorry about that. Did Sega just have like a Victorian workhouse full of junior programmers? My understanding. How did they do it? My understanding is that each game was made by, like, three people, and they had about three months to put each game together.

And if you look at the credits of games where the developers are known, that is about how it plays out. It's like every four months you see Rieko Kodama's name on a game, or Yuji Naka, or you're like, oh, they were just really cranking. And when, you know, that I think is a big, big issue with the master system is that the games have such great ideas and they look really good, but they just aren't refined. They just feel like they needed another couple of months in the oven, you know. And Sega just didn't have the bandwidth or the resources to allow that to happen. And I think that put, I think that put Sega at a huge

disadvantage because if you look at Nintendo's games from the same period, they were spending, you know, they would put a team on like Super Mario 3 or something, and they would work on it for a year. And it would be a bigger team. But then, they also had, you know, all those third-party games to fall back on. So, you know, the third-party has kind of carried the load. Whereas Sega, you know, they had their, they had their partners like compile and aspect and so forth. But really, they were just, yeah, it was just a sweat house, a sweatshop. Okay. So it really was just pushing people. Yeah. And when, you know, When developers, internal developers had time to really sit down and work on something, they would come up with a game like Fantasy Star, which is still a phenomenal RPG. It's still so good. But that game is such the exception, so much the exception to the rules of the master system. And it's a shame because I really feel like that system had a lot of unrealized potential. It could have stopped the competition just in terms of tech alone.

if the games had felt as complete and as polished as what you were seeing on NES and then turbographics and so forth. But unfortunately, SIGA just, you know, they were determined to go it alone. And, you know, even in Japan, there were only two third-party published games for Mark III. So they just, they were really locked into that first-party publishing only system until much, much too late. And yeah, it was really to the detriment of the system. So master's system, I feel, is one of the, you know, the great systems that shoulda-cuda-cuda, along with like NeoGeo Pocket Color, you know, like they just deserved better, but they didn't, you know, the finances and the reality

wasn't quite there. And I think it did learn its lesson. By like 1990 or so, you know, with Genesis, They were starting to, you know, they had a third-party licensing system, and also they were sinking a lot more time into their games, which they had to do because 16-bit games were more complex. But you start to see Genesis games really feel more complete, more robust than Master System games. I really appreciate that answer. Thank you. All right. So, Kevin, have we done? Yes, we did. You talked about the Atari stuff. I guess it's my turn again. So this one actually... That's true. Oh, Jared, okay. Why don't you go? Okay. My thought is not as exciting as y'alls because you picked really big things. But for me, this is very subjective. of 1986 was the year

I learned that all I wanted to do for the rest of my life was designed Taito arcade games. It was a good arcade year for Taito and up to that point arcade years for Tito had been a little more mixed.

These are just a few of the good samples. But this is the year we got Arcanoid, bubble, bobble, renegade, which they published, not designed, Darius, and of course, the classic violent shooting.

That's not actually a classic. But those other four are really important video games, each in their own right. And I think all four of them would be recognized as bona fide, like, arcade classics. You know, you walk into an arcade and you hear, you know what's going on. Like in each of these house that. No, no, sorry.

I never, that was a bad arcanaway. And what I like about them is that on the surface, they don't seem like these would be things we necessarily have a legacy. One's like a, we were talking about breakout earlier. One's a breakout clone. But God, what a breakout clone. One's a two-player single screen or action puzzler. We have had a jillion of those. But it's one of the best ever.

It's the best date game of all time. One creates the modern iteration of the brawler genre, or at least iterates on what Kung Fu and some others did. And Darius, if you've ever seen a Darias machine, holy shit. You know, that's just, that'll overwhelm you the moment you first play it. It's beautiful. That's why you go to Taito Hay when you're in Tokyo. You've got to. You've got to.

It's just fantastic. And then violent shooting, which is just a great video game name. That never came out in America, and it's a terrible game. But I love that it's called violent shooting. It sounds violent. Even better than violent fight. Violence fight. Sorry.

Violence fight, yeah. Yeah, Taito was on, onto something good. They were huge. I mean, they were, you know, carrying that momentum of space invaders into the mid-80s, And nothing was that big a deal as Space Invaders, but they still focused on quality. They had the resources, I think, to take the time and create cool stuff, get it right. And I love that. And I like to talk about the arcade because at this point in history, the arcade, while it had a bit of a downturn, was still very relevant.

And some of the things we were saying earlier when you were talking about, for example, the SG-1000 and not taking old games, one of the reasons you couldn't show a Kaliko Vision game at home anymore was that our Cades had become so colorful and high resolution and sophisticated relative to what had been available in them even a couple of years before. You've gone from Robitron to renegade or bubble-bobble or arcanoid in terms of color. Screens were splendorous now. They were, you know, and Nintendo emulated that effect very well in early NES games, that vibe of bright color. And I think that really helped. I mean, I'm not going to talk about this in its entirety because we don't have time, but one of the things on my list is Outrun. That was 1986. You can't compare

a Colico Vision game to Outrun. That was like, even now, that game is mind-blowingly fast and cool. It's so exciting to look at and play. Yeah, it just, it changed the perception of what video games should be. Totally agree. So speaking of changing the perception of what video games should be, how's that for a segue? way, my next point actually encompasses some things some other people want to talk about. So we're going to make a big old bucket here and talk about the Famicom Disc System. Because in the U.S., consoles were just coming back, baby. But in Japan, they never went away. They had gotten a great start in 1983, really, with the Famicom launch in S.U.000 and became really big in 84. And

Nintendo president at the time, Hiroshi Yamauchi, felt that businesses and entertainment functioned in three-year cycles. So if you look at Nintendo's patterns, they always revolved around these kind of three-year cycles. So by 1986, his idea was that the Famicom fat is going to fade, and we need to move on from that. But instead of launching a new console, what they did was update the way the console worked with an add-on, a peripheral called the disk system, which is one of the few peripherals in history that is genuinely successful. It never came out in the U.S. or Europe. But in Japan, the Famicom disk system sold very well. It had a really significant attach rate. Don't ask me the exact numbers. I don't know. But it survived for several

years, even after it became totally obsolete. The idea behind the Famicom disc system was multifold really. The Famicom hardware was built with the potential to expand through, really through the cartridge connector. There were a lot of extra pins in the cartridge connectors that kind of fed directly into some of the hardware systems, like the RAM and the sound. And eventually people realized, oh, we can make cartridges that have things built into them that take advantage of this. But it took a while to get there. And in the meantime, I don't know that people necessarily thought, hey, we should put, you know, a risk chip inside of a Famicom cartridge. Because that, that was like, you know, late, the 1990s somewhere along the way, late in the system's life.

So the Famicom disk system was designed to expand the potential of Famicom games, you know, from the original ROMs, which could be like, what, 64 kilobits or something, just some crazy small, very compact cartridges. If you look at Super Mario Brothers, that is basically the best a standalone basic Famicom or NES cartridge can be. Like, that is, that is the fundamental hardware explored to its maximum potential. The Famicom Disc System was designed to push beyond that. It included extra RAM. It included an extra sound channel. And then most of all, it included disc-based media that could be rewritten so people could save data to it instead of having to use an arcane tape recorder plugged in through an arcane keyboard that cost a lot of money and was

very slow and unreliable. This was just built right into the system. You could play a game and then save data, whether that was a custom stage or progress or whatever, right to the disk. And also, the disks held many times more memory, you know, data than a cartridge could at that point. So all of a sudden, you know, the disk system arrives and it just blows the doors off of what the Famicom hardware could do and greatly expands the potential of the system. And Nintendo and, you know, third parties began exploring that right away. in 1986, and so you have the true seeds of the Metroidvania zone, right there, games like Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Castlevania.

Well, actually, it's the MSX version of Castlevania, but never mind that. So all of a sudden, you know, console games don't have to be just arcade-type experiences. And, you know, people had tried to push beyond that. You had things like the Portopia Serial Murder case. You had things like Tower of Duraga in 1985, and those were big, expansive games, but still very limited, and still ultimately the kind of thing you had to play through in a single sitting. But when Zelda launched with the disk system, you no longer had to finish your game in a single session.

In fact, you really couldn't. Like, you're not going to tell me that anyone sat down and finished The Legend of Zelda without help, you know, just raw-dogging it on their first try. That's a lie. It's a, it's a fallacy. That game was confusing and vast and enigmatic and full of secrets and full of cryptic ways to advance. And, you know, you would spend weeks, months trying to work your way through Zelda. You'd have to trade tips with people. You waited for the bestselling how to beat Legend of Zelda to come out from Tokuma Shoten. And, you know, it's a lot. It just, it really, it changed fundamentally what a console game could be.

The disk system made that happen. And then, like six months later, maybe not even that long, people started making memory management chips. I think beginning with Ghost and Goblins, maybe there was another one that came before it. But that made more storage space available for the game data. And, you know, eventually they started to get it getting battery add-ons that allowed games. games to be saved directly to S-RAM within a cartridge. He started getting co-processors. You know, 1987, Konami started putting out their VRC chips with add-on processors and all kinds of expansion. So the disk system became obsolete, and that's probably why it never shipped

in the U.S. because by the time it would have come here, you could just put things on an MMC1 with a battery backup, and you're good. Why release a peripheral when you can just put all that cool stuff in a cartridge that is gold. So cool. So that was Nintendo's marketing in the U.S. And it was very successful. But those things would not, I think, have been possible without the disc system because so many of the innovations that we saw in NES cartridges and software slash hardware, it's kind of a combination of both at that point, we're just trying to transport the innovations and the capabilities of the disk system to cartridges. And there were some limitations in the U.S. version because some of the pins that the disc

system and those expansions relied on were moved to the underside of the system for a port that no one ever used. Really great idea there. Thank you so much, Nintendo of America. Good job, Lance Barr. Geez. But, you know, nevertheless, nevertheless, that was kind of, you know, Those cartridges were playing catch-up with the disk system, and the disc system gave us, gave those creators a target to aim for, those engineers and programmers and designers. So to me, disk system is a major, epical moment in console video game design. Tell me I'm wrong. No, no. What a lovely, what a lovely essay on the importance of the disc system to all of us.

Thanks. That was my obligatory five-minute retroactive. or not's monologue. So that's out of the way for this episode. You guys carry on. No shot color for you. Well done. I love that you mentioned the gold cartridge there at the end. I always get it. I'm a God help me. I'm a marketer, which is a loathsome profession. But my favorite piece of video game marketing of all time is that little cut out in this Zelda gold box. So you could see the cartridge itself was gold. I think I think they sold a million cartridges. on that window alone. Yeah, I mean, I'm sitting here in my office and looking across the room at my analog in T-mini that I use for recording NESWorks footage. And when I don't have a game in there that I'm working on or recording from, it has a

Zelda cartridge popping out of the top because it just looks so good, so good. It matches your solid gold wall. That's gold accents and gold filigree. He's living in the White House now. I'm the Atlantic Mitt Mar-a-Lago. No, no, Apple. By the way, speaking of Zelda, it ties into my, my thesis, just my thesis about Zelda being extremely important and pivotal in the game market that ties into everything Jeremy was saying, which is that this is something I realized, I don't know, 20 years ago, I was going to write a post to my blog about it, but like I realized that Zelda was really a break, like a branch design, game design branch branch. away from arcade-style video games dominating home consoles.

You know, obviously there were computer games with more sophistication, like Ultimas and things like that. But as far as console video games, a lot of them chased the arcade style where you are frantically trying to raise a score and you're being punished so that you put more quarters into a machine. And it's like short, fast, furious gameplay, action-oriented. And it's, you know, to me, those kind of games aren't that fun, like, personally. But Zelda was like, oh, we have a, like, you have a game console in your house that's always there. You don't put any money in it to play. Let's make a game where you just sit down and enjoy the experience and you explore a world and have an adventure that's last more than one session, you know.

And that is like, just like Jeremy said, like opens up brand new. dimensions of gameplay potential, including eventually Metroidvania's, you know, things where you are exploring branching worlds and going back and just enjoying being there. Like, Metroid was also like you're just there exploring this place. You're not being like killed nonstop so you put quarters into a machine, you know? I mean, Metroid is really just the legend of Zelda as a side scroller without menus. All of all of the functions that you need to get link around the world are just built into Samus's suit as powers. And, you know, keys become missiles. But it's still effectively the same thing. Yeah. It's fascinating. So Zelda, I'm sure you've, you know, everybody's played

Zelda. They know what it's about. So, but I just think that it was an important branch away from coin apps. You know, obviously the coin up stuff stayed in coinops. And there were still arcade style games being made and whatever, but it just opened up a whole new world of game design on consoles. I agree. So, Bernie, do you want me to talk about the other cool thing about 1986? It doesn't take long. Is this your points four and five that you just covered?

No, 5.5 is just that, you know, 86. Because I feel like it builds on from this, for sure. Yeah, I'll just mention it briefly, which is just that 86 was like a crazy year for video game releases that happened to be the start of franchises that lasted decades of decades. so we talked about Zelda Metroid also came out that year some version of Castlevania came out that year Was it the Famicom Disc System

came out first? The system and the MSX version both showed up around the same time In 86, okay. Kid Icarus which wasn't a monster a monster franchise but I love it. Adventure Island first came out in 86

Alex Kid in a Miracle World on the Sega Master System or the Mark 3 I don't remember which one it was but it came out first that year which led to a bunch of Alex Kidd games. And Dragon Quest, geez, that's a huge thing, came out first in 86. On the on the PC side, the home computer side, Might and Magic book one.

So Might and Magic was a series that lasted a long time on computers. So it's just like a crazy year. It's one of the most important viewers of video games, 86. So there you go. Dragon Quest is interesting because it was Enix and Chunsoft attempting to do Famicom Disc System. stuff without the disk system. The original cartridge was just a cartridge. And all of the niceties that we expect, you know, such as they are from the original game that we got in the U.S., they didn't exist. Like, it had much more basic graphics. You could not save your data

to the cartridge. You had to go to the king and get a poem to write down. It was pretty minimalistic, pretty ragged. That game would have been much more impressive, I think, on disk system, but I don't know that it would have sold as well, because not everyone had a disk system, whereas everyone did have a Famicom. So they kind of made a choice there, and eventually the technology for cartridge is cut up, and you could save Dragon Quest 3 on your cartridge, and that's why everyone lined up at Yodabashi camera for miles and miles.

That's awesome. And also, just briefly, I'm probably not going to talk about this in full, but just Labyrinth, the computer game, which was Lucasfilm's first adventure game came out in 86 as well. So it was another, it was a pivotal year for a lot of things. So you're not talking about the pack-in video labyrinth for Famicom, correct? The maze shooter? We were talking about, yeah, I think we've discussed this on another podcast, Labyrinth, but it was, you know, it was... Like a decade ago. became the prototype for the Lucasfilm adventure games.

You know, borrowing from the Sierra point-and-click style where you're seeing little people walk around in a semi-three-dimensional space that's actually 2D. And it set the stage for Maniac Mansion and in the Habitat, like multiplayer online thing too, which is cool. So, yeah. All right. So that's a lot of stuff revolving around Nintendo, mainly.

You even said Adventure Island, not Wonder Boy. So there's that Sega erasure happening, even without intention. Kevin, why don't you jump in here and tell us about something cool that happened in 86? I'm going to jump ahead to point five for me, which is that in June, Famitsu started its publication run in Japan. And it's still going. I think it might be one of the longest running video game-centric magazines anywhere in the globe. No, I think it is the longest running at this point. It would have to be.

Everyone else has shut down. Wow. Yeah. So this was spun off of a Famicom specific column that ran in Log-in magazine. That started in 85, ran through a good chunk of 86 before just fully giving way to Famitsu. But, yeah, this is very ubiquitous. They started off just covering the Famicom. branched out to basically every other gaming platform they could get their hands on.

Really well known for their reviewers being kind of harsh. They're not really willing to give, or at least they used to not be really willing to give away perfect scores. I think when something gets a 40 in Famitsu, it's still kind of momentous. And it's like, there's like 15 games that have ever gotten a 40 in Famitsu. One of which is Nintendo Dogs. I mean, who can argue? I like Mitz Ducks. But like Favitsu is a really great resource if you want to like dig into Japanese gaming history and, you know, what was going on in the country at the time.

I remember some couple of years ago at this point when I was doing my episode about, you know, game company house bands. We went through Fomitsu and pulled out some items from there that I had. hadn't really found online, really. So it's really great that it's still going, that it's still got a strong readership and that you can dig up the first like 10 years of issues almost online if you know where to look. And if you can read Japanese too. Yeah, so you have to be able to read Japanese or at least, you know, figure out a way

to get that into a legible state. The shenanigans of it all. And you can't even just like use a. a text-scanning tool because so many of those layouts were like not quite game fan level, but they're over pretty busy backgrounds. So it's a little tricky. Early Nintendo Power definitely is pulling from the layouts you see in Famitsu. Absolutely.

And also early EGM was just like taking everything from Famitsu. Yeah. Let's see. Jared, do you want to tell us about something cool that happened in 1986? before we begin our final round? Yeah, just briefly here. This is the year Atlas was founded. And Atlas is my favorite console game developer, console and handheld game developers.

So this is kind of a personal one. I think obviously their contributions to kind of helping their part of Sega's Great Resurrection that's taken place over the last few years, along with Yakuza. But Atlas is a company that started inauspiciously, And we've seen some of their work, you know, for LJN, etc. But they would go on to create many, many, many beautiful things.

You know, we get Megatan out of them. Then we get Persona out of that. But we also get all that wonderful software that created for the DS, like contact and strange journey and Etrion Odyssey. And it's just a company that really does its thing well most of the time. And they found themselves a delightful niche. for story-based RPGs now that are stylish and colorful, but often mechanically, very simple. That's one of the things I really like about Atlas games

is they still feel like they have tons of style, but they still feel like they have Dragon Quest Heritage at heart, a kind of a weird branch of that. So, yeah, Atlas is a big deal, in my opinion, and this is when they began. They've been making great stuff ever since. Bring back Rockin' Cats, Atlas. Let's see.

So, binge, let's enter our final round here, final lap, floor it. What other things do you have to talk about? Or have you tapped out? I've mostly tapped out, but, I mean, we could briefly talk about Metroid, maybe, which I think was such a major event in 86. I mean, that's basically the video game that defined my brain, sure. Yeah, it is the most important video game to Jeremy Parrish. other than Hayanko Alien, of course.

No, even more than that. Yeah, so I... So what is bombing through the floor with the morph ball? Sorry, the Marumari and the bomb, but digging in Hayanko Alien. Yeah, exactly. It's all the same. The same. It all goes back.

That's the master thesis. It's like poetry. It rhymes. Metroid was the most mysterious and fun game I had ever experienced when I was a kid. I watched my brother play it, you know, and the bombing stuff, the fact that they had secrets hidden in there that you could discover just absolutely blew my mind. Because I came from the Atari 800 style games where we had, you know, we didn't get an NES until 1988. So we were playing Atari 800 as our main console until like 88, basically. And the sophistication, you know, there were RPGs and stuff, but it wasn't like the kind of action.

sophistication as a Zelda or a Metroid. And so, our Super Mari brothers. And, man, just the sense of discovery and being in a place in the mysterious world of Metroid, the music, and the aliens is just, it blew my little, my tiny little mind. So that's, I'm just, I'll give you some personal color since I'm not, like, a historian of Metroid. But I do know someone who is, whose name starts with Jeremy and ends with Parrish. Jeremy Piven

He's on the podcast too, yeah He's going to tell us about Metroid and Top Gear now that it's got a motorcycle And Castlevania is important We mentioned that Have you ever considered combining those two games together?

What would that be like? That'd be pretty cool And it never occurred to me that while it will never happen Like Konami and Nintendo could just get together and make a game called Metroidvania

Yeah, that could happen. Yeah. They'd have to buy the domain name from me. That would be, that'd be okay. It's available, guys. They'll ruin the $50,000. Million dollars. They'd ruin the SEO for your work for years.

Can we give Sammas Grant, Grant Da Nasty powers, and she can walk on the ceiling and, yeah. Maybe. But she can roll with the spider ball, the Grant ball. The Grant ball. The Danasty ball. The nasty ball. Anyway Oh, you turn me off

That's right I let me tell you nasty nasty boys Don't be a thing Oh you nasty boys Nasty Nasty boys I don't ever change

Oh you nasty boys Anyway We actually ran out of things to talk about. We're going to get it too fast. There's a couple, there's a couple more things on here. Jared, I think you have. Oh, you have a couple of things actually, but let's talk about the bigger of the two, which one is up to you. Which of these two is the bigger? Well, one of them's ridiculous and stupid, so I'll skip that. What's this one I put on there because I think it's funny? We'll go to the other. Yeah. So this one is a small thing that I think is really important. This is the year. So a year, so a year before, or a few months before the beginning of 1986, Intel announces something called the 386, a new generation processor built on the 8086 architecture. The 286 has been available in the IBM AT and its clones for some time. It's a high-level business-oriented chip. The 386 doesn't premiere on an IBM PC. It premieres on a clone. Compact beats IBM to market on the newest technology for the first

time. And at this point in history, PCs are still kind of a semi-locked market. This is when the doors get kicked off. And now pretty much anybody can make any kind of PC as possible. This computer ships standard with at least a meg of RAM, an integrated hard drive, Most of the time with EGA, 16 color graphics, at a 16 megahertz 386 in 1986, it is twice as powerful as any other home computer on the face of the earth the day it is released. It is the first beast in PC history. And it is kind of the archetype for the four components that would go on to create gaming PCs as we understand them today. powerful video card hard drive because that speeds

uploading and allows you to play much more complex and larger games which is what always held the Amiga back and had a floppy drive and that that is what broke its back ultimately large amount of RAM and a processor that at the time was so screamingly powerful

they couldn't figure out how to use all of it this is the genesis of the DOS gaming revolution that will follow is this particular computer and DOS gaming really did for a lot of people in the 486 era kind of define the very late 80s to mid-90s.

When a lot of folks were playing S&S and a lot of folks were playing Genesis, a lot of people were simultaneously or exclusively playing Master of Orion and Siv on their home PCs, this computer is kind of the reason why. By the way, I have something to add about the Compact Desk Pro, which I've written about it before, which this is a fascinating point. You're like setting, you're saying you're setting up like the, the 386 era of gaming, which is really cool. But, you know, at the time in 86, this was an extremely expensive machine.

It's like $6,000 to $8,000 in $1986, which is, oh, yeah, no game. 20,000. Yeah, so that's like $20,000 today or something, you know, insane. I'm just eyeballing this price. You can look up to actual inflation, but it's pretty close. People, you know, like the average person who bought a PC in 86, like IBM PC clone, still were buying like 8088s, you know, like, you know. But this was like a power machine and it was in the press, it was pitted against like the Mac 2 when that came out, like the next, I think it was in 87. So it was an extremely powerful computer.

And I just want to say it wasn't typical of 86. But it did, like Jared say, like it's, we'll set the stage. And it did embarrass IBM a lot just, you know, for being such a powerful machine released by Compact first. Anyway, they beat. And it hits the ground like a bomb, like a Moore's Law bomb. Because, you know, really kind of before this, computers were accelerating, but not at home at quite the pace that Moore's Law would indicate. In this case, it's just a quantum leap. And because it was Compact, you knew it was going to get copied quickly and done cheap.

and the price would plummet, which is exactly what happened. Price went down, processor power went up. And that cycle that we got used to for decades that made PC gaming so compelling for a while, this is the beginning of it. And it had to do it with CPU power, too, because it didn't have, this is before graphics accelerator chips on PCs. Right, it had an EGA card, which allowed it to output 16 colors at 320 by 200. That's all you need, as the PC 98 has shown us.

That in 16K of RAM Or 64K Yeah, anyway Yeah, so I had a mega RAM I could have up to 16 megs I think Wow So Kevin, do you want to Take us through your final talking point

Whichever you decide to select Oh man, yeah, I've been going back and forth on this But I think I'll go with my first one here So 1986 electronic arts Releases Star Flight which game, this game actually absolutely kicks ass. It's basically the Star Trek game that people, you know, were wanting at the time and probably still want, honestly, if you want to go back and try it out.

So this is an, I guess the best way to describe it is like it's an open-world RPG, but in space. You are sort of exploring space. You're landing on planets to get minerals that you can use to sell and improve your ship. You're encountering alien species of different attitudes, and you have to, like, improve your crew members' skills to be able to even communicate with them properly, which is a really fun little aspect of the game. And there is an overarching story that you kind of piece together just from talking to aliens

and from visiting different planets and finding ruins. I feel like notably this was designed by Greg. Johnson of Toadjam and Earl fame. And I feel like you can see some of those sort of aspects of letting the player kind of play the game how they want in his work here and on

that one. He had some input from Paul Reich III, who was I think one of his office mates and not technically on the staff for this one, but he had a lot of input and he pulled a lot from Star Flight when he went down to work on the Star Control games

which I believe he has new one coming out either next year or 2026 or whatever in that series. It was also notably the developers for the first Mass Effect game pointed to Star Flight as one of their major influences when they were putting that together. So this was critically acclaimed even through the 90s. It was considered one of the best computer games ever made, sold over a million copies, which is a lot for a computer game and had a really solid

like Genesis home port that was one of the first games EA put out on the platform as I remember. It's just a really cool game. Folks should try it out. Yeah, I believe it's one of the best selling computer games of the decade, right?

Like I, only like a very few games ever got to a million during the 80s on PC and Apple. Yeah. I want to add to that everything Kevin said is awesome. about this game. It's amazing.

It's one of these few RPGs of that era I can actually go back and play and have fun with it. And one of the reasons why is it feels a lot like no man sky

but in like 2D in 1986 because it's procedurally generated each universe is different and I think if I recall correctly don't they try to make unique alien names

or types or something with each universe? So they have They have a set number of aliens, and I believe the layout is set, but it's all like algorithmically generated. Yeah. So that's how he was able to. Kind of like Diablo, there are chunks that are going to be there, but they're not always in the same place or the same way or same order. So it has some diversity to it in a similar, like seven cities of gold really set the template, which is also an EA game, you know, just a few years before this, really, where you could create your own continent and expect.

explore it. So I made each gameplay, each play-through unique. And Star Flight has that element, too, which is really fun, which is very unusual at the time for games like this. And it was really, it's incredible. I am, the thing about Star Flight that bugs me the most is a personal thing, which is, for some reason, my brother and I completely missed on this game at the time. And I didn't play it till, like, 2006 or something, you know. It's wild. My brother was into these space games and Sims. We played Sunda. on that Atari ST and stuff. We would have loved this game if we had it back then, but we just didn't. So I wish we had played it. But yeah, great game. It's like if Elite were an RPG.

Yeah. That's what I like about it. It's got all the strengths of Elite, but the pacing of an RPG largely. And that's fun. And like the Galaxy map on this is huge. There's a lot of areas to explore. Like, if you don't know what you're looking for

to move the story along, you can kind of get lost, just poking around, seeing what's out there. It packs an entire universe on a single floppy disk. It's like one of the deepest gameplay experiences you can have on a computer game made in 1986, in my opinion. And the twist at the end is really good and holds up really well even now. I'm just going to throw that out there for anyone who's thinking about trying it. Oh, God.

Now I just want to go play Star Control, too. So your pilot is Kaiser Soze? Sorry, was that a spoiler? It's probably for the best that I did not play this game back in the day because it seems like it would have changed the course of my life. And who knows where we would be now. So, good thing. Wow. Lucky break.

Another woulda coulda shoulda. So to wrap this up, I do want to talk about one kind of downbeat point. It's all been pretty optimistic about 1986 so far. And why not? It was a good time. Business was booming. Video games were also booming. But over in Japan, there was the prospect of a bust.

There was a lot of concern that the Japanese console industry was going to experience an Atari-style crash. And that's something you see mentioned in publications, such as weekly Femitsu, people looking at, you know, the fact that there was kind of a downturn in, not a downturn in quality, but all of a sudden a glut of games. and it was hard to tell which were good and which were bad, Nintendo did not establish a licensing system on Famicom until kind of late in the game. And, you know, the manufacturing system they used in the U.S., where you had to be a licensed publisher in order to publish on NES,

and Nintendo would manufacture your games. That didn't exist in Japan until later. And so there are, you know, some companies that are famous for their special memory management chips like Konami, Sunsoft, etc. They got in on the business early and retained the rights to publish and manufacture their own games. But everyone who came along later had to kind of go through Nintendo's channels. But there was this period where they hadn't really, like there wasn't a lockout chip on the Famicom. There weren't really protections. And you know, there's, you can debate whether or not the licensing schemes and the licensing system that Nintendo came up with

is good or bad. But certainly it helped in the U.S. to avoid another reprise with the Atari crash because it limited the amount of software that made it into the market. And even though some NES games were absolute dog shit, I would say they are considerably less dog shitty than some of the worst stuff that made it out for Famicom where there were fewer regulations. And this was a point of concern. I think that's a big part of why the Famicom disc system launched was to kind of steer everyone back under Nintendo's kind of control. They established more of a limitation with publications for the disc system. There was a very, very advanced security system on the disk system.

if you did not know the security system, you could not publish on disk system because your disk would not operate in the machine. It turns out there were like little holes in the Nintendo logo that prongs dropped into when you inserted a disc. So it was actually pretty easy to circumvent. But, you know, the idea was to install a U.S. and European-style licensing system, licensing scheme back in Japan. And so that happened. I think also there were just a lot of good games. There was a better media infrastructure to make people aware of like, hey, what's a good game? This one's coming out. It's going to be good. This one's coming out. It's not going to be good. Don't bother with looking at it. And also in 1987, we're getting a little bit ahead,

but NEC and Hudson launched the PC engine, which kind of gave video games, a much-needed next-generation vibe. It really kind of pushed things to a new level in a way that you didn't quite get here. I mean, you had like the Colico Vision, the Atari 5200, but they were troubled and messy, and the PC engine was very confident. So I think that also helped. And also, you know, it had more of that sort of protectionist licensing scheme attached to it. So Japan managed to avoid. that crash, but there was real hand-wringing and real cause for concern that the Famicom and console market in Japan were going to implode. So this was something that, you know, people here

were certainly not aware of, but did press kind of heavily on the minds of the press, gamers, and publishers in Japan, and certainly Nintendo. So anyway, just a little, a little peek into another woulda coulda shoulda, like what might have happened if they actually had crashed. I think video games would still look very different today than they do now.

There would be no Mega Man. What would we do? God damn it. Thank you, China Warrior. Thank you for saving video games. Yes, it's all China Warrior. If we didn't have giant Bruce Lee unlicensed

sprites, what would video games be today? All right, so I think that's it for 1976 and 1980. Thanks, everyone for listening. Thanks, everyone who is on this call for contributing to this call. We are going to jump soon into 1996, a crazy year. Hopefully we can get Chris Sims on that one.

He was supposed to be here today, but he was having problems with mice. And I don't mean the computer mice. No, sir. So that's always a disaster. Didn't just don't say something like, did you know mice can chew through a refrigerator? Raider? Was that what he said, I believe? Yes. That's a problem. And as someone who had

a bit of a mouse scare or rat scare possibly in this house pretty recently, that is something that should be nipped in the bud. Those little guys are cute, but full of disease and destructive. So, please stay out of the house. Thank you. Thank you, rats,

and mice. Anyway, hopefully, you can look forward to that soon. So I think we're going in a mixed-up order. Bob's already, by this point, published, 2006 episode, but we still got 96 to go. And that was a big old honking year for video games. It's going to be a slobber knocker. That's right. Look forward to us knocking your slobber. Wow, that sounds extremely bad. We're not going to do that. So anyway, here, doing nothing with your slobber in this episode, we have been me, Jeremy Parrish. But instead of telling you about

where to find me on the internet, which is pretty easy, just use Google. Even though it sucks now. It's still effective for finding me. You can find Retronauts. Retronauts, your favorite podcast about old video games. Maybe your favorite podcast in general. I don't want to presume, but it's probably true. You can find us on many, many forms of distribution media except Spotify because they're evil and bad and we don't do them. But the rest, yeah, we're out there. You can download Retronauts. It's like astronaut, not like zero. Also, If you enjoyed this episode enough that you're like, these people should be paid to make great content like this. I agree. And you can make that happen by going to patreon.com slash retronauts. Again, like astronauts, not like the number zero in England. Yeah.

So that's Retronauts for a few bucks a month. You get every episode ad free at a high bit rate quality, a week ahead of the public feed. and also for like $2 more than that, you get bi-weekly bonus episodes, weekly columns, and mini-podcasts by Diamond Fight, Discord access, and just the warm glow of knowing that you're doing something good for the world. And by the world, I mean the people who make retronauts, which is us. We are part of the world. Thank you for your contribution to our existence. Anyway, that's the retronauts pitch. I like how I changed my

pitch when I said pitch. That was pretty good. I was very impressed. How about thanks? I've been practicing that one for a while. Finge, where can we find you on the internet? I let's see, what do I do these days?

Yeah, I work for Ars Technica. I write about AI stuff, but you know what? Recently I've been writing more history stuff and ironically the history stuff, tech history stuff is like triple the traffic of my AI coverage recently. I did something about Steve Jobs twiddling with some things to make the calculator design on the original macOS.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That was you. And the smiley emojis being created from a flame war discussion and recently, Netscape, JavaScript being created in a 10-day hackathon thing. So those have been really cool. It explains a lot about JavaScript, actually. Yeah, it does. It does. I'm calling those Tales of Tech lore.

It's sort of a new series. I just sort of made up myself I'm doing even though my boss I haven't even talked to my boss about it they just let me do what I want. So that's fun. So you can find me there plus at vintagecom has my classic

Vintage Computing just turned 20 on November 1st or 2nd. Yeah, it's really vintage now. It's very retro. And my last thing to add is that the best laid plans of mice and men off to go astray. So that's my mice tie-in

That's Chris's hope, certainly. Kevin, what about yourself? You can find me on blue sky at Atari Archive.org. That's also my website where I post things about Atari old video games. I have a companion YouTube series that actually pre-dates the website. It's under Atari Archive, where I've been going through the 2,600 library in chronological order, digging into the history of the video game industry through that lens. And, yeah, I also have a book, Atari Archive, Volume 1, which covers 77, 78, available

through limited run games. And Jared. Yeah, I'm Jared Petty, your favorite friend who's fun to follow. I do marketing at OtherOcean. We make Project Winter, which is a lovely get-together and Murder Your Friends video game that you can find on pretty much every platform under the sun. And we just launched Cabin Fever, which is a very easy, hey, learn how to play this without too much friction mode for the game.

I encourage people to try it. We also just announced our new shooter, Scrap Daddies, and we'll be having a beta for that soon. You can go to Steam, look for Scrap Daddies, and sign up for that beta if you want to. We would like that. If you wishlisted, we'd like that even more. Imagine liking that. That's Scrap Daddies. Yeah, I got to love that title.

And then, yeah, I finally got off my ass and started podcasting again. So I'm back to doing the Top 100 Games podcast. I went through a long, sad, depressed episode of life that is now, thankfully, passed me here in the magical land of Canada. And now I'm making fun stuff again and really enjoying it. Top 100 games podcast can be found most of the places. Just type it in and you'll find it. Yeah. Sounds like the oysters are doing their trick.

Oh, God, the shot caller again. No. you've been shocked more than me this episode that's a good, it's a new record, new record. You're learning, I can't be taught. All right, all right, we'll be back talking about 1996. That's right, in the Latin, that's more sex. I'm going to be able to be.

Thank you.