Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 150: Atari: The 7800 and the raw deal

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

A two-parter from Midwest Gaming Classic 2018. First, Kevin Bunch and Brian Clark talk the history of Atari 7800 with Jeremy. Then, as a backup, Marty Goldberg (and Bob!) join Jeremy and Kevin to explain how the Atari Crash wasn't totally Atari's fault.

This week in Retronauts, it's like Atari 2,600, but three times over. I am Jeremy Parrish and with me here to follow up on our Midwest Gaming Classic or, yes, that's what it's called Midwest Gaming Classic panel. Atari got a raw deal. Here are two guys who are going to talk about the Atari 7800. Why don't you introduce yourselves? I'm Kevin Bunch. I do the YouTube series Atari Archive. And you were on the panel. You were a panelist. I was indeed a panelist. Yes. And as I said at the panel, the idea of your your Atari 7800 collecting inspired me to want to do a panel on Atari 7800, but then I realized that might not be the most exciting topic for a live panel at a show like this. So I changed it up, but I do want to talk about the 7800,

and that's why you're here. And also here is... I'm Brian Clark. I'm a translator who tries as often as he can to write about different game and game culture things, often Japanese related, so I may be a bit of a weird pick for a podcast about a tavern. We'll find out. Okay. That's good. Well, I'm sure both of you know more than I do about the 7,800. I have very little experience with the system. As I said to the panel, like, I had very little awareness of the 7800 back when it was alive. I never saw ads for it. I saw it in the stores, but not knowing the history of it or its provenance, I just assumed it was, you know, an Atari system from a long time ago that I'd never seen before.

And so, you know, when it came to buying video games, I was like, well, NES is new. What's the 7800? This must be ancient. But that's not really the case, is it? Is it now? No, not at all. So why don't you give us the history of the Atari 7800? You seem to know a lot about it. Yeah, it was actually one of the first game systems I had when I was a kid.

So it came out in May, 1986, or thereabouts, after being shelved for two years due to some legal issues that... Well, you're kind of burying the lead there. It was designed in 1984, or to be released in 1984, so it had been around for a while. That's true. Yeah. So this system has some heritage, and kind of the, one of the premises of our panel today was that Atari probably deserved for the 7,800, 2%. perform better, but it was just kind of buried. Yeah, so to talk about the 7,800, you have to jump back a bit, to talk about the 5,200 and

the Mattel Intellivision. Basically, Mattel released the Intellivision console in 1979, and they ran an ad campaign competing directly with the Atari 2,600, pointing out how much better their games were. at pretty much every respect, you know, they had better animation. As you said in the panel earlier, lifelike animation was their exact terminology. They had better graphics. It was a 16-bit console, had a more advanced controller with all sorts of buttons and a keypad. So when you say a 16-bit console, how did that manifest in the nature of the games and the stuff you saw? Because it seems really on par with the NES in terms of power.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's hamstrung elsewhere. I'm not too familiar with the Intellivision specs, but it was technically the first 16-bit console, so it's got that going for it. Oh, right. Sorry, you were talking about Intellivision. I spaced out. I thought you were talking about 7,800. Yeah, we're getting there. Intellision was 16-bit, but it was, you know, like there's only so much at a certain speed. Yeah, like, yeah. And you had stuff like the Ti-99-4-A, which was a 16-bit computer in the first of those, but, like, it had things. hamstringing it. It was no genesis, but, so Atari responded by developing the 5200 as sort of the

follow-up console, and then when that finally did launch in 1982, it came out against the Calico Vision, which had just gotten an ounce of that year and came out around the same time a little bit earlier, I think. And the Intellivision was the much more, or not the Intellivision, the Clico Vision was the much more popular console between the two. I think it outsold the 5200, like 2 to 1 or somewhere around there.

It's that power supply, man. Yeah, it has this giant power supply. You could kill someone with it. I used to own a Clecovision and I don't remember the power supply. How big was it? Yeah, it's... For those of us at home.

That was the size of a small dog, basically. It's sizable. But, so the Klecovision was out selling the 5,200 Atari kind of figured they'd screwed up here and they started polling people in 1983 like, well, what would you like to see

in a future Atari console? Well, we want to see backwards compatibility out of the box. We want better visuals. We want more in-depth experiences. You want better arcade ports. So they, you know, took all of this to General Computing Corporation,

which was sort of this weird little, I guess you'd call them like a Rebel studio. They released a ROMHack for Missile Command in the arcade, and they actually were the people who designed Ms. Pac-Man. Yeah, I mean, they had quite a legacy, and Ms. Pac-Man was definitely probably the biggest thing they did up until that point. It's interesting, though, that, you know, given Atari's kind of sideways relationship with Namco,

dating back into the 70s, that they would reach out to the company that basically hacked Namco and outdid Namco at their own game to design their game hardware. Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm just going to go purely anecdotal here, but I know Namco was also in with the yakuza in distributing bootlegs of Atari games in Japan, so while... No love lost, basically. No, no love lost. I don't know how familiar the U.S. Atari office was about that by 1983, but I would like to draw a line between the two. But, yeah, they apparently went to court with GCC about missile command,

and I think this led to them having this sort of development relationship. GCC did some Atari 2,600 ports for them that were actually really spectacular. Like, they did Ms. Pac-Man, they did Moon Patrol. They did a Galaxian Jr. Pac-Man. So I guess they just decided, you know, these folks can work on developing this next console. So they designed the system around the system shell that Atari had already put together for the Japanese Atari 2,600 release. You mean the 2,800? Yes, the 2,800, which came out in 1983 and was a spectacular failure.

Yeah, it took six years for that system to come out in Japan, and it came out concurrently with the Famicom, the NES, and the SG-1000, which was basically a Klico vision. So, like, why even bother? And Atari had a Japanese division for a long time. That's how they had a relationship with Namco. So there's all kinds of weird stuff that, you know, when you start looking back into history, you're like, I don't understand how these things happened like this. did they really not parlay their relationship with, you know, with Atari, Japan into bringing their console a lot sooner? But it is a nicely designed console. Like, Japanese console aesthetics tend to be really nice, less boxy and clunky than American console aesthetics.

So, yeah, the 7800 looks good. Yeah, it looks pretty sleek for mid-1980s design. And so they had to design the system to fit within this car. this system shell. So they only had so much room to work with. They crammed in a, let's see, they crammed in a TIA chip so that they could run Atari 2,600 hardware on there and controllers and all that fun stuff. By that point, the 2,600 internals had probably been miniaturized to the point that it was no big deal. I mean, it's a 6502 variant, so it had been around since the mid-70s.

Nothing new there. It had a custom graphics chip, the Maria. It had a pretty decent CPU. The interesting thing about the Maria chip is that it's clocked really fast. It's clocked to 7.16 megahertz, which I realize is not that fast

by contemporary standards. It's like a million times slower than, or no, yeah. No, or gigahertz, so like a thousand times slower than your current computer. But at the time, that was really fast. Yeah. And actually, much faster than the actual chip.

Yeah, and actually the TIA chip they put in there is actually interesting because, you know, it works as the 7800 and the 2,600 CPU. And because Atari had such issues with third parties just releasing whatever they wanted on the 2,600, they designed a security lockout code for the 7800. So if it didn't read that code, it would boot into 2,600 mode, and the CPU would be clocked down to run 2,600 games properly. But if it did find that code, it would run the 7,800 mode, and it would be faster, and you'd have full access to its capabilities. Was that backward compatibility completely enabled through CPU clocking? I think so.

I don't think they... Interesting. I don't think they did anything else. like, it's all internal right there. And so the 7600 or 7800 really is like just 3,2,600s, basically. Yeah, just tape them together. It's like a couple of whys, make a Wii U. I've heard that, yeah.

But it's pretty cool. And, you know, they advertise that the system could move around like almost 100 sprites independently. I think there's actually some limitations on that, but that's still a lot without having any flickering at all. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't have any limitations with scan lines or anything, right? I mean, it has a couple

resolution modes, if that's what you mean? No, so scan lines, you know, with the NES hardware, basically, you can only have eight sprites per line, like horizontal line on the

system, so on the screen. So that's what I mean by scanlines. Like when you get more than eight sprites on a line on the NES, that's when you get the flicker. But if it doesn't have the scan line issues, you said there's no flicker on 7,800. I've never noticed any on any of the real sprite-intensive games like Robotron or Food Fight or anything of that sort.

But it is a 6502 variant, right? Yes. So it's running on the same fundamental tech as the NES. So it's interesting. I guess that's where the graphics chip comes into play. you know, because it's clocked so fast, it probably can handle a lot more at a, you know, per instruction cycle. Right.

So that's actually really interesting. But the big weakness of the system is that they didn't have room to put in a specific sound chip in there. So it just has to use the TIA 2,600 chip as like it's on board audio. So what they did is they include a specific line on the cartridge port so that you could have, on cartridge sound chips like you could have Atari had their pokey chip

which is what they used in a lot of their arcade hardware it's what they used in their 5200 in their computer line um a GCC was developing a Gumby sound chip that

I don't know how far long that got but it never actually reached production it was supposed to be the low cost alternative um I want to say there's been some like recent homebrew activity looking at the possibility of having like a Yamaha FM synth chip on there so it's actually that'd be kind of amazing actually yeah and it'd be like my

7800 is suddenly a Sega genesis and it gets more interesting because they also designed the system to be expandable elsewhere like they had an expansion slot on their original design and you see it on the very first run of 7800s and that was intended to plug in a laser disc attachment for the machine and you know they had a keyboard component that they were going to release that would basically put it on par

with their 8-bit computer line you'd be able to use like a trackball or the joystick as your mouse basically and they had a high score cartridge too that never made it to production but there's a prototype and people have reproduced it

so what would the idea there be like you hot swap or something no it's even more interesting. It's a pass-through cartridge, like Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Lock-on technology. It's lock-on technology, and it's a battery-back save in 1984. And this would work with the first run of games that GCC was developing for the system. So you can plug that in to your 7,800, you plug the cartridge on top of that, and it'll save your high scores. Like, you type in your name and everything. There's so much wild tech that was being developed at Atari back in those days. Like, it's just, I always hear about stuff. And I'm just like, wow, that was so, so sophisticated,

so far ahead of its time. But, you know, it was kind of tied to the, the 2,600 hardware, which just wasn't, like, it was, you know, it did its thing in its time, but it aged pretty quickly in the 80s. So it's, it's kind of hard to look back, you know, go back and really enjoy a lot of these things that were, were created for the 2600. But there was so much innovation. It's interesting that that, you know, even carried forward into the 7800. Yeah. And it's, it's kind of interesting because, you know, a while back I was speaking with one of the engineers who designed the 2,600, and he talked about how when they were developing the system, they put together this cartridge port, and he said that they cut down the number of lines to save on money, but had they

had those extra connectors, you know, you could have had much more expansive cards, you could have included all this hardware without all the weird bank switching meddling that they ended up having to do in the early 80s just to keep expanding the capabilities in the machine

and he said it would have made it much easier to sort of make it forward looking. So it's another case of Atari got a raw deal where like just if things had turned out

a little differently, what could the 7800 have been? Like, could it have, you know, been a proper successor in terms of market share to the 2600? Could it have, you know, continued to carry forward Atari's mind share? It's, yeah, it's such an interesting piece of hardware that it really makes me wonder what might have been. Yeah, and it's really, it's kind of unfortunate because they had all of these plans for it. It was going to come out in 1984, I think in the summer was when they were advertising it first going on the market. And by that point, you had this, you know, major tech industry collapse.

Businesses didn't want to really parlay video games anymore. So Atari was hemorrhaging money, like we talked about in the panel earlier. You know, Warner was thus leveraging or hemorrhaging money. And they ended up selling all of their consumer division. bits and pieces and IPs to the Jack Tramel. Yeah, Atari was in the middle of a massive restructuring and split at the time.

Warner was in no position to launch new hardware. The market was in no position to accept new hardware. Like, even if retailers have been like, yay, new video game hardware, like there was still so much unsold software in the channel that they just, they couldn't take it. There was no bandwidth for it, unless they just went out and destroyed all the,

carts that they had, which I'm sure eventually happened, but it took longer, and no one was really in a hurry to do that. So, yeah, there was just, like, things could have been so good for the 7800 if it had launched when it did, or when it was meant to, but it didn't work out. No, and not only... So Tremel bought all of the Satari materials, and he, like, picked up the debt of the consumer division, which he had to pay off over so many years. But that did not include the 7,800, as it turned out. He thought it did. GCC thought it did.

But Warner had a contract with GCC for the 7800. They refused to pay it. They said, nope, it's Tremel's problem now. Tremel was insistent that it was Warner's problem. GCC wanted Warner to pay, but eventually they're like, you know, as long as we get our money, you can have this. so in late 84 he finally just bit the bullet and paid for the 7800 hardware but then he didn't have any software because GCC had developed all of these like launch games so then they had to figure out terms to pick that up and it wasn't until around November 1985 or thereabouts when they finally had all that settled and they could finally release this system that he'd been sitting on and they knew that the video game market

was still there and it was still viable because I mean they had sold like a million 2,600 units in 1985 alone and that's including old video game stock on top of that so there was still an appetite for this stuff

so do you think they were aware of the NES soft launch in October of 1985 because that took place at like two retailers in New York City so it's not exactly like something that was making headlines but I feel like you know this is a pretty big deal like this is a big Japanese player making its test launch in America surely out in California the Tremales would be like hmm they were based in California right I think so not not Chicago I'm not 100% sure so I can't tell you for sure but still not New York not New York no and I mean wasn't there a story and I don't know how true this is but But wasn't there a story where during that soft launch, like one of the first people who came to buy all the NES stuff

was someone from Sega? So, I mean, if that's true, then it's not unfathomable that someone from Atari could have known about it at that point as well. Yeah, I mean, I had not heard that. It does sound like a slightly odd story since, you know, Sega being a Japanese company would have had easy access to, like, all those games. And, you know, several of them were a couple of years old at that point.

So I don't know why that would happen aside from just, you know, the general inability that Sega has always had for its U.S. and Japanese arms to work together and collaborate and, you know, try to win. So it's hard to say, who could say. But I definitely think Sega would probably have been, you know, had more of a pulse on what Nintendo was doing, especially since Sega was looking to do the same thing as Nintendo and enter the American market. But I don't know. It's speculation. And Nintendo did look into partnering with Atari to sell the Famicom in the U.S. in 1983. And it just kind of got lost in the shuffle when Warner was losing all their money. And Tramel was purchasing, or, well, purchasing, he's getting the consumer division.

So they just kind of lost track of that. And Nintendo just said, screw it, we're going to publish this ourselves. And I don't know if they would have shelved the Famicom or the 7800 or if they would have put them both out and just marketed them to different audiences, but either way, it probably didn't work out for them that Nintendo went on their own. Yeah, it's hard to imagine the Atari family computer being, you know, a runaway success. It just doesn't seem like Atari would have put their hearts into it. It wasn't something they created. And I think unless they could have completely owned it from top to bottom. I don't think it would have appealed to them. Yeah. So the 7,800 did finally make it out in 1986. Atari didn't really have that much money at the time,

but, you know, they launched it. The GCC games that they developed, they were mostly early arcade ports since, you know, was supposed to come out in 1984, so stuff like Gallagher and Zevius and Food Fight and Robitron, those would have been not quite contemporary, but they would have been new enough for that to be... It would have been relatively fresh, yeah.

Yeah, it would have been pretty good. In 1986, it's a little long in the tooth. That said, they did have the first U.S. releases of Gallagher and Zevius, and, well, Food Fight, I think, only ever came out on that and their computer line. Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting that if you look at Nintendo's launch lineup, when they did their soft launch in October of 1985, the games that they released

did not include any of their arcade hits. Popeye, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. Those didn't make it out until the following year, Mario Brothers also. Those didn't come until

mid-1986. Because I think they recognized like it's not really putting our best foot forward. These are games that, you know, people like, but they're not going to make the most amazing impression

because they are three or four years old or five years old in case of Donkey Kong. So they had that luxury because Nintendo had so, much first-party development in Japan, whereas Atari did not have that luxury. It was pretty much just like, well, here's Zevius. It's four years old, but what are you going to do? But if you are the type of person who cares about this sort of thing, in my opinion anyway, they were almost universally with one notable exception, pretty clearly superior to any of the

ports that have appeared on the Famicom or any other system up until that point. so what would the one exception be the one exception is double dragon um i i spent a not i spend a non uh insignificant time uh of my life playing and uh writing about games in the beatem up genre or whatever you want to call it and i think uh if you're if you're not including the 2600 version of double dragon which you almost shouldn't uh the 7800 version for when it came out is absolutely awful. It has a rendition of the Double Dragon theme that has played just slow enough

that makes me feel like I'm going insane. So I don't know that Double Dragons really germane to this conversation, though, because that was a 1987 arcade game, so it was a much later release on all systems. But, you know, looking back to the early 80s sort of Golden Age classics, that's kind of what 7,800 was leaning

on. Are you really sure that every one of those games was superior to the Famicom version, the NES version? Like, I think Gallagher and Zevius are pretty damn good on NES. I think Zevius on 7800 had less grading sound.

Huh. It was. It's, I don't know how to explain. It's very tinny on the NES. A lot of those are really NES arcade ports. No matter how good they felt in your hands, I feel like were had music that was slightly tinny. I feel like that

wasn't all that uncommon for like the 1984-era kind of Famicom arcade ports. And, you know, those didn't come out in the U.S. until 87, 88. Yeah. So maybe that's why Namcoe ended up creating its own sound chip for the Famicom. It couldn't

get the sound it wanted from Nintendo's built-in hardware. So who knows. Okay, so you're mostly going on audio quality as opposed to like the play mechanics or the visuals. I think the visuals you're kind of splitting hairs a little bit.

I feel like, with Zevius specifically, I feel like if you put them side by both of the versions side by side with the arcade, you might feel like the 7,800 looks a little bit closer, even though it's still not quite on the nose, but it's not so dramatic to say the 7800 version is unequivocally better, I suppose. Okay. Fair enough. And Gallagher, I mean, it doesn't look as good as the NES one, but it plays all right.

Yeah. And, yeah, like the, like you said, the NES version of that wouldn't ship until 88. So at the time, yeah, I guess I could see where the 7800 at launch would basically be like, hey, it's the Golden Age all over again, which I don't know that anyone was necessarily looking for at the time. But it does make it something kind of valuable in retrospect, you know, it's like, here are some really great arcade conversions, you know, contemporarily, which you normally, you really have to look to PCs to find that a lot in the 80s. And not all PCs, just some PCs, some PCs you wanted to avoid.

Oh, we're talking about the Z-X spectrum. I'm not naming any names. We're all friends here. 7,800, I think it actually sold reasonably well when it came out. Atari announced that they had shortages on their equipment, which they claimed they had going on with the links too, but it sounded like they sold through their initial supply of 7,800s, and they had to make more of them.

So it had that going for it, and they only had so many games available, and they had to sort of jumpstart development again and build their capability back up. So they kind of spaced out their first run of games. I mean, they were all finished in 85 when they got the rights to them. But, you know, they spaced them out over the year. Like, Zevius came out in November.

A couple of the other ones came out over the summer. But then you just had this, like, nine-month drought between Zevius and Choplifter in 87. And, you know, Atari didn't have the availability to get all these popular games. they couldn't license them because Nintendo had already snapped all that stuff up. So they were kind of stuck with whatever was still free for them, which was mostly computer games and whatever they came up with themselves. They certainly weren't the only occupants in that boat in the 80s. Sega had the same problem and found that it had a lot of problems with licensing.

And Sega solution was they would get the licenses, but the companies that made the games couldn't do the conversions. They couldn't, like they were committed. to create their games exclusively for Nintendo. So what they ended up doing was just Sega would go in and develop the conversions themselves, which is why you have Sega developing stuff like Strider and Super Goals and Ghosts and Ghosts.

What is it? Goals and Ghosts? It's not Super Goals and Ghosts, yeah. Like, those are Sega developed games because even into the early 90s, Nintendo still had that hammerlock on the market and on third parties. But it sounds like Atari didn't, have the bandwidth to do that.

Like, Sega was a development company, so that's what they did. They made video games, and Atari was a lot of things, and specifically Atari Inc. Or Atari Corporation was not a software company. It was very much a hardware company. And, you know, after the split of Atari's arcade division and their home division, they no longer had access to all the latest Atari arcade games and they could just bring those to their hardware. You know, they had to go and make licensing agreements,

which I think is what they did with the links mostly. Probably got stuff like Stun Runner on there. But they didn't have that option for the 7,800. Well, I guess they did have the option. They just didn't necessarily have the money to do it. Right. Yeah, there's, in some respects, there's a wider library of Atari games on NES. Like when you start looking at Tengen's,

stuff than there is on Atari's own platforms. And that's kind of rough. That's, that's got a sting. It's a little pitiful. Yeah. So you see a lot of computer ports like a one-on-one basketball, choplifter, some interminable flight simulators that were produced by third parties later on. And a lot of these, they had to outsource to other companies because they just didn't have the people in-house to be able to do this stuff at the time, which is why you get stuff like from Ibbid Corporation. They did shoplifter and Carotica, and they programmed these apparently in Fourth, which I guess is kind of an older programming language, even by that point. Is that related to Fortran? I'm not sure, but apparently, I can't target that as to why

their ports are kind of janky, but they're janky. Not exactly running on Unreal Engine 4. No. No. No. No. Engine 4th, maybe. Sorry.

No, I'm trying to imagine what that would be. I'm sure it would be amazing. It's the greatest programming language that an engine that 1985 has to offer. Uh, so they had those, I mean, they were able to get some arcade ports up there. They got Hat-Trick, which is an arcade game, I don't think anybody cared about, so they were able to get that going. mistaken for Hattress.

No. No one could get Hattress yet. It was too good. Yeah, that's the problem. They had Hattrick. I'm not entirely sure how they finagled it, but they did publish their own version of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Brothers. That must have been some sort of holdover license or something from the previous Atari consoles. That's the only thing I can think of it.

Or they just said, the hell with it, Nintendo can't stop us. We're Atari, damn it. Who are these upstarts? But what's baffling about the Donkey Kong ports is that they didn't seem to base them off of the arcade game. They seem to have based them off the NES ports. Really? Yeah, so Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. basically look like the NES games.

They have the same, like, title screen songs. Just much worse, because they're using a 2,600 audio chip. Huh. And they don't have the missing level from Donkey Kong. NES. I think you're understating how off the music is and that Donkey Kong port, too. It's a little screechy.

So these are official releases, like license from Atari releases, not third party, or not like bootleg releases or aftermarket releases. Oh, they came out from Atari. We bought them at the store when I was a kid. Huh. That's, yeah, I can't begin

to explain that, but okay, stuff happens. I will say Mario Brothers, I think Atari did a better job with it. It's a more fun game because it's not as slippery. Well, even Nintendo went back and re-did. They took a molligan on Mario Brothers. There's a

version that was released in Japan and Europe called Mario Brothers Returns. Kayaketai. Yep. And it's a much better version. It's still slippery, but

looks more like the arcade game. Like the fighter flies aren't too sprites constantly flickering with every frame. It's impossible to get a good screenshot of the original Mario Brothers on NES because there is no frame in which all enemies are completely showing, even if they're not all in the same line. Like, they just flicker. It's crazy. Anyway, so, yeah, I would have to look into this. That's very interesting. So how did the, you said that they sold out their initial stock, but how do the 7,800 fare total? Like overall, how many units were sold? How well do the games do? Because

Like I said, I rarely saw the system at retail, and it just seemed like some relic from a bygone day. So I was over there, you know, buying Double Dragon or Fizanadoo or something, and then like, oh, what's this Atari? They're still around? Aren't they dead yet? So Atari's internal numbers for the sales, they did actually get salvaged out of a hard drive, apparently, and you can find them online. So the 7,800 through 1990s sold 1.2 million units in the U.S. and Canada. That's not very many. That's not many at all.

I know they released a press release in 1988 that they had just gotten over the $1 million mark. And that's, you know, when Nintendo had already sold, what, a couple million units in the U.S. alone. Yeah. Yeah, didn't the NES end up selling like $50 million worldwide? Something absurd like that. So, yeah, and even Sega with the master system sold a few million units. Yeah, it sort of floundered for a while, and, I mean, they sold games. From what I was reading through the sales numbers, 87 and 88 were their best years,

and then in 89 it just cratered, probably because then you had the turbographics and the Genesis on the market, and no one really cared about the 7800 at that point. Did the 7800 launch with the light gun? I know that they released a light gun peripheral for it. Was that something that came later? No, it did not. The light gun, I think, came along with the Atari XE game system. I don't know why Atari decided to put out a third console.

It was just... Why the hell not? It was just their Atari 800 XL computer, but mashed into a console. So it was like the next wave of the 5200. Yes, but unfortunately it wasn't backwards compatible with the 5200. Oh, my God. But it is compatible with the 8-bit computer line. So, you know, if you have your old cartridges from 1982,

you can still plop them into your X-E and run those. And you could get, like, the keyboard attachment. And, yeah, that did not do well as far as I can tell. Okay, because I have seen on YouTube, like, commercials for the 7800, like a promo video or something that had light guns. Yeah. So it was basically like the XE light gun was also compatible with the 7800, but not really released as a peripheral for the 7800. Right.

It was 7800 adjacent. It's actually also compatible with the one light gun game for the 2,600. Which one is that? Sentinel. It came out in 1991. Ah, yes. Wow, that's a deep cut in history right there. Yeah, the last couple 2,600 games are really.

interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's not so much that, oh, a 7,800, or 2,600 game in 1991, as it is like a 2,600 game in 1991, and by the way, it makes use of a technology that no other 2,600 game has incorporated.

That's wild. Yeah, I'm not sure who at their target market there was. Like, were they going after people who had an XE and were just really gung-ho about it, or what was happening there? I have no idea. I guess they figured Atari fans were in for a penny and for a pound, they were just going to buy one of everything. So you

have an XE and you have a 2,600, and you have a 7800, and you have a Lynx, and you're going to buy a Jaguar. So please just play everything altogether on the same system. And it's really funny that Atari kept publishing 2,600 games just through the whole life of the 7800. And I can understand it because it's backwards compatible. The 2600s was repositioned as sort of their low cost. Here's like a $50 game system. Here's some games that are super cheap. Go nuts.

And, oh, by the way, if you get the $7,800, you can also play these on that. It just seems odd to me, because if you have such limited funds, first off, why would you put out the XE? And secondly, why would you keep devoting so much time and effort into the $2,600? Like, the $2,600 has a Zelda-style game that came out in 89. why wouldn't you put that on the 7,800? Do you think that there was some sort of a significant difference in development cost that would have warranted that? I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say, but... I mean, it's the only thing that comes to mind.

Also, well, I mean, the 2,600 did have a much bigger user base. I don't know how many people were buying a Zelda clone by that point for it, but that happened. Man, it's a rough life. Okay, so we've pretty much gone through, I think, the life of the 7-800. You mentioned that Atari, here in the notes, formerly halted game development in May 93 and the games

canceled included Pit Fighter, Toki Rampart, Steel Talons and Road Riot four-wheel drive. The good news about Toki is that someone's swear to God is going to put it on Switch. That remake that was supposed to come

10 years ago for Xbox Live arcade, it's coming to Switch. So that game you can finally play again. But Pit Fighter, like it's crazy that 7800 was a live long enough for Pit Fighter to be relevant. Like, I guess that game was, what, 1990?

So, yeah, so maybe it's not that wild, but it's just hard to imagine Pit Fighter being a satisfactory experience on any 8-bit system. Well, really on any system, but on an 8-bit system especially. Like, the whole appeal of that game, such as it existed, was

the digitization of the graphics, and you can't do that on a 7,800. No, not in the slightest. There is a Pit Fighter prototype that made its way out. It's really early in development, but unrecognizable. Yeah, you can't tell it's pit fighter. It's just there. It looks like a, like you're going to brawl somebody. It looks like

a better double dragon than double dragon. Yes. Hmm. Toki looks pretty good. I know a prototype of that surfaced a couple years ago, which was sort of around the time people realized, wait, why were they still making 7,800 games when Atari canceled the system in late 91, like after Christmas, I don't know. I guess someone didn't get the memo and they just kept working on these things because they were going to get paid, but... That's always a good reason.

Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the software library. Now that you have all the games, and I'm sure you've played them all extensively, shrug. Okay, so I asked you for a list of the worst games, and you put just basically three. So Carotica. Why is Carotica so bad on 7800? Because I've played the Game Boy version, and it's okay. Like, it functions. It's very fluidly animated, and that's kind of what you want from Carotica. So, Carotica, you know, it's an Apple II game. That's a two-button control system. And Carotica had these controls that are all set up for two buttons. You know, this one lets you do punches. This one kicks. You push this way. You'll, like, break your stance and be able to run. uh they did not do that on the 7800 i actually brought the manual to it okay which has

the controls it has the controls in a whole like chart wow that's so you have instead of using both buttons as you would think the right button on the on the controller just changes your stance all the attacks are done by holding different directions on the stick and pushing the left button. That kind of reminds me of karate champ on NES, where, you know, you had like a twin stick setup on the arcades. So on NES, it's kind of like, well, you've got two buttons and a D-pad, so go for it, kids. And you think, okay, well, I can just learn these new controls. It'll be fine, right? Well, also, there's, for whatever reason, just this massive delay between hitting the button and you actually doing something. And the hit detection is...

is just really bad. Once that bird shows up, you're screwed. Because good luck hitting that bird. It'll hit you just fine, but it's pretty rough. Right. That, that, that, that, that, I'm sold. It sounds unplayable. That's kind of the issue with a lot of, like, the crumbier 7,800 games.

Like, they don't look bad if you're just looking at them in screenshots, but when you actually try to play them, they just, they went way off the rails. Yeah. All right, so tell me about Impossible Mission. Why is that so bad? So it's literally impossible is why it's bad. Isn't that a problem with all versions of that game? I think the PC ones are fine, but the U.S. version of Impossible Mission has a glitch in it

that one of the clues you have to find behind, like, couches and chairs and beds and whatnot, it's behind a computer terminal that you can't search. You can only access the computer terminal. So you can't actually finish the game. Or the 2,600 version that had that problem. It was 78? There's no 2,600 version of Impossible Mission.

I didn't realize that famous piece of video game lore was about the 7800. Yeah. I feel a little smarter now. They fixed it for the European release, but I think it, I don't think people were able to track down the glitch and fix it for, like, the U.S. file until recently. Huh. All right. And so pretty much all the flight simulators, F-18, Tomcat, Super Huey. That one I think is self-explanatory.

If you've ever played a flight simulator on an 8-bit console, no. Just D-pad buttons, even the stick that the 7-800 has. Just, no, no, it's not good. There's not enough going on with the hardware and the interface. Yeah, they're all unpleasant. Super Huey's the best of the bunch just because it has an arcade mode that just puts you in the air unless you start shooting down enemy helicopters. But I remember as a kid, I poured over that manual trying to do step-by-step

to launch the thing in the simulator mode, and it completely failing every time. Couldn't even get those rotors to spin. Damn. So that's the bad stuff. But otherwise, let's talk about the good stuff. So I want to talk about the best arcade ports first, because the 7-800 was an arcade, like a Golden Age arcade machine.

And, yeah, you have a list of seven games here that you pointed out as notable. So let's start with the... Okay, we talked about Zevius and Gallagher. So that's two off the list. Let's talk about joust. Joust is actually pretty close to the arcade. I don't know how many people have played the NES Joust in this particular audience.

Probably a fair few. You know, it was developed for NES by Hal. So we've mentioned it a few times on the show because it was one of those proof of concepts that Nintendo and Hal put together. Yeah, but if you'll notice on the NES one, like you, every time you flap, you don't really get a whole lot of height. You just sort of struggle to stay off the ground mashing the button.

That doesn't really happen. Which is weird, because they did balloon fight right. Al came in and saved balloon fight. Yeah, I'm not sure what happened there. I don't know if Awada did joust first or if he just purposely made it kind of crummy. Saving it for balloon fight. Yeah, saving it for balloon fight. But joust on the 7800, they have much looser physics.

Like, it feels more like balloon fight to actually play it. You move a lot more gracefully, I guess. You don't wear your thumb out as badly, which is good because the 7,800 controller is incredibly painful to hold for long periods of time. And, you know, the sound chip doesn't really work against it. Like, they do pretty well with it. So on Commando, I recently, like, last year, did an NES, uh, NES works episode on the NES conversion of Commando and had good things to say about it. I feel like it's, you know, that was the first really ambitious arcade to NES port that

Capcom put together. And people came in and said, okay, that's good, but the 7800 version is actually better. And supposedly the 7800 version is based on the Capcom NES conversion to some degree. What can you tell me about that? Like, what makes this version better than the NES version? Well, first off, it doesn't have the flicker problem that you have on the the NES one. It still has the hidden caves and such that you can bomb open and then go in and rescue some prisoners, get some bonus points. They added power-ups. It's like when you start the game, you just have a, like, a pistol, you shoot one bullet per button press, and you can find a machine gun, and you can find a knife that lets you just touch enemies. You can find that stuff

in the NES game. Oh, can you? Yeah, when you go into the caves and rescue people, sometimes there's machine guns and stuff. It's very easy to lose them, though. They're hard to come by, but they are there. This one, it's a lot easier to come by. They're just hanging out. Oh, okay. Yeah, you have to go to the caves and the underground passages in the N.E.S. version. Interesting. Okay. And it uses the

expanded sound ship, the pokey. So it has really nice music, and then it uses the TIA for the sound effects, which is sort of an ideal way to handle that. It's actually really good. And, you know, they have like the interstitial cut scenes,

including the one with him smoking, that I'm pretty sure they cut from the NES one. I think that's in the NES one. Oh, is it? Yeah, I think so. It's been a while since I played the NES one. Maybe I'm hallucinating, but there's definitely the interstitials in there. I remember the first time I played that game, I picked up a copy in high school,

and my brother came in and was watching me, he remarks, wow, I didn't realize this was an Atari game. Graphically, I feel like it's pretty comparable to the Zavius comparison we made earlier where it's not leaps and bounds ahead of the NES. version, but it's just enough to where your average person would probably look at it and say, yeah, this probably looks a little bit closer to the arcade

version. Yeah, I could see that. All right, so asteroids, that's always a tough one to do on consoles. Would you say this is the best home conversion of asteroids? I would. Outside the Vectrex, maybe. I'm surprised it never showed up on Vectrix,

even as like an aftermarket thing. Yeah, you'd think. But, yeah, it's interesting because they don't use the vector graphics at all. They recognize that that's just not going to work. They don't have the resolution. Right. So they just focused on making really pretty raster effects. So the asteroids are spheres and they're spinning and it's a really beautiful animation. And the sound effects are really nice. Like they include like little space noises and little SOS signals going off. Uh, the UFOs have the

sort of metallic sound when they come flying out and start shooting at you. There's a really neat warp sound effect that I really love when you go to hyperspace and then promptly explode because you should never do that. And actually, if you can track down one of the aftermarket 2,600 Asteroids controllers that I think Starplex released, it plays just like the arcade one. So you're, it's like button. Yeah, it's all buttons. about, tell me about Ms. Pac-Man,

because Pac-Man and Atari systems have a tough existence, a tough relationship. That's an understatement. GCC did Ms. Pac-Man for the 7-800. Okay, well, hell, geez. So the original creators making the conversion. Yeah, and it has the same sort of speed as the arcade version.

I think they give you a couple more lives just because they're more generous, but it's got the speed. It looks pretty nice. It's got the cutscenes in there with music and everything. How's the music handled? Not too bad. Like, you heard it at some.

No, it was very good. It definitely is not. I mean, Ms. Pac-Man is not, you know, full of music, even to the extent that something like Double Dragon is. No, but it has a soundscape to it. It does. It has very distinctive music with a very specific sound. And then whenever you're playing, there's always a brum, blum, blum, blum, boom.

It does still have that going I noticed all of that there The little waka noises And when the fruits come in They have that meaty bump Two of them Which is funny because they're fruit Fair enough

Okay and then finally Robotron 2084 That's always a tough one to pull off On consoles because it's a twin stick shooter in arcades And Yeah the 7800 controller Not twin stick It is not

But you can use two of them To get a twin stick thing going. They never released like an official holder for the two but you can sort of man-mangle one together with some duct tape I guess and play it that way.

There's your next fan gamer project, Jeremy, after the switch stand is done. I don't know what you're talking about. Never mind. Yes. Okay, well we'll see about a 7,800 aftermarket conversion for Robotech. That's really going niche. And you know

can you can use the button but, I mean, why wouldn't you just use the twin sticks? And it's got the speed going of the arcade version and it moves all the sprites around pretty smoothly. There's not really any slowdown or flicker. It's a really good port, really. Okay. I might have to check that out someday.

All right, so let's wrap this up by talking about the original games, the best original games that people need to hunt down and play. So you gave me, what is this, eight games? which is, you know, not the world's biggest library, but it's a good start. I've never played any of these, actually, so this would be entirely fresh for me. Food Fight, which technically is an arcade port, but as you note here, it's the only time that game ever had a console release. Yeah, and it's a really cool little game.

The arcade version has this 32-way joystick, and basically the premise of the game is you're this kid, and you're trying to run across the screen to eat an ice cream cone before it melts. And these chefs are trying to stop you for some reason. So you have to throw food at them. Those monsters. Those monsters. They're coming out of manholes. They're getting pies thrown at them.

So, you know, on the arcade one, it's, yeah, you have more directions you can move. But at the same time, it's a lot easier to whiff when you're throwing stuff at the chefs. Whereas the 7800 conversion, it's an eight-way. joystick so you can only aim in eight directions which makes it a lot easier to hit things and it's it ramps up like just so smoothly on how fast it gets each round there's even little instant replays that pop up if you have a particularly cool round I'm not really sure what the criteria is but is this fun little ditty that plays I would say that if you aren't going to play anything on the system that's one to give a shot

all right ballblazer i'm actually familiar with this one by lucas arts uh or lucas film games i guess at the time um so it's kind of like a it's a 3d-ish game it's hard to describe tell tell us about like why is this a good version of it it's like future soccer right like one-on-one you're trying to shoot a ball into the goal on the other side and the other person's trying to do the same uh in the 7800 version just has this very smooth frame right it's a first-person game, so that's pretty impressive for 1984 technology. And it uses the pokey sound chip, so you have this nice, like, techno-electronica soundtrack that goes through all these different permutations, the longer you leave it running.

And it has this art style that's very, like, sort of flat shaded. Yeah. And it looks really cool. Hmm. Okay, that's good enough for me. But I'm curious about Desert Falcon, because that sounds like the, name of a flight sim, and yet you've said flight sims are no good on 7,800. So what gives? Well, in this one, your flight sim is an isometric shooter where you're a actual falcon.

Oh, okay. So this is more like, is this the game that's kind of like Zevius, but... It means Axon? Oh, Zaxon, yeah. So it's not so much like a jungle strike, desert strike kind of game. It's more like a traditional shooter. Yeah, and the idea is that you're this falcon, and for some reason you want treasure. So you're grading the desert and fighting sphinxes. And what makes this interesting and also kind of infuriating is the power-up system. So the way that works is you collect three hieroglyphs on the ground, and whatever combination of those are and what order you pick them up in will depend on what you get.

So you could pick up just points. You could pick up something like invincibility or warp to the boss or, or fast bullets or you can get a power down like oh now you can't fly or now you can't walk and just keeping track of all of those is kind of frustrating but the game is pretty fun so tell me about alien brigade what's that you likened it to Operation Wolf last night it was very Operation Wolf like it's a light gun game yeah okay but given the weird availability of the light gun I wonder how many people didn't actually play it like I heard

a lot of people of stories or people telling stories of playing Operation Wolf here is which is what they just used the controller. Yeah. But yeah, it's an Operation Wolf style game. You start off thinking you're fighting people and there's an actual narrative that runs through between each stage

and suddenly you're fighting aliens and you have to go to the alien mother base and shoot them up. I don't think that happened in Operation Wolf to be fair. I mean, I never made it that far in Operation Wolf. Okay, so basically a standard arcade shooter of the era, which again on 84 hardware is pretty impressive. Yeah, and it looks really good for what it is. So what is Dark Chambers? I don't, I've never heard of that game at all.

It's basically what they based Gauntlet off of. It's a dungeon crawler. Wait, so it predates Gauntlet? When did Gauntlet come out exactly? 86. 86. I think, I think it was in development before Gauntlet. I don't know that it came out before gauntlet but it's a it's a you're going through caverns uh looking for keys to go on uh it's a two-player game it's just there's no time limit you're not going to starve to death because they're not trying to steal your quarters right so gotlet but better in a way yeah and it has only two players yeah and it has a really cool title screen like if nothing else you can take a look at that so to gotlet though that's true yeah i guess if nothing else these games are good for title screens

okay so we're kind of winding down ninja golf he said people have been talking about a lot here at midwest gaming classic and just other places in general why is that is this like is it suddenly time for ninja golf to be recognized 30 years later is this a chance to shine i think it's probably the most unique game on the 7800 and you know when you get to itari's like original games they're getting really weird and that's the case here so the idea behind ninja golf is that you're a golf who's also a ninja. So you... With you so far. Yep. So you hit the ball. Golf is very popular in Japan. That is true.

So you hit the ball and then you have to fight your way to the ball. So it becomes a brawler, basically. Okay. That sounds like a pretty unusual interpretation of golf. Right. So what's the balance of like sports game to brawler gameplay? Oh, there's barely any sport game. You basically target where the ball is and then you time it.

right so it flies as far as you can and once you get to the green you fight a dragon and it's sort of like the Shinobi bonus stage where you're like Oh yeah you're like sequences Yeah Okay so it kind of sounds like

This game was totally ripped off by Battlegolfer Ui for Sigma Mega Drive But Battlegolfer Ui was just like Yeah there's no actual fight yeah Like it didn't have anything that made it Yeah like they heard about Ninja Golf and we're like oh, we could do that without actually knowing how it played.

Exactly. They blew it. They blew it. They did. Yeah, it's too bad Ninja Golf didn't have an ending where you accidentally blow up the city. Have you gotten to the end of it? No, but... So how do you not know?

That is true. Atari could have thrown me for a loop here. Is it just 18 holes? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So there should be an end. Yeah. Just have to get there.

I have to fight enough dragons. I feel like that is a game that is. due for, like, at least a concept that's due to be revisited. I know there's a flash remake of it, which is probably why everyone's heard of it compared to basically anything else on the system. And at least

for me, if you had to pick, like, one gem from that library, I really think this is it. And then there's Midnight Mutants, another game that I don't know that I, maybe I have heard of it, but it's got grandpa monster on it. Yes, it does. Yes.

Is it actually a monster's game or? It is not. They did not have the... They just said, forget like this, right? It's screw it. They had the rights to Al Lewis's face, but they did not have the rights to Munsters. So they just call him Grandpa and he's supposed to be your grandfather in an Al Lewis Munster's costume for Halloween. But he does continue to make very Grandpa Munster style jokes throughout the entire game. Yeah, and it's sort of this Zelda style game where you're wandering through with this town. You have to rescue him and stop the resurrection of Dr. Evil. This is the 7,800's equivalent to Fester's quest, isn't it? But much better. Oh, okay. Because when you die, you don't, well,

I guess you technically do start back over, but it's kind of hard to do. Does it feel as punitive? No, it's not as punitive. You don't have as long a road to recline. Huh. You've got me intrigued. I might have to check this game out. And, you know, there's items in there that you pick up, like you can find a knife, and that's your first weapon. You can find a cross that will make bats like a leave you alone. It's a weird little game. I think it was the last one to come out in the U.S. in 1991. So it's kind of hard to find.

It didn't really sell very well. A really timely opportunity to bring out a Munster's game, right? As the Adams family is relaunched. Yeah. That's really weird. Well, you know, NES had the Adams family locked down with Fester, so they had to go with the knockoff. I guess so. I guess so. That doesn't speak well

of the 7,800, though. It makes me feel kind of bad for it. It's a little All right, and we'll wrap this up by talking about the last game on your best of list Scrapyard Dog. What is that? So it's a Mario-style platformer

on a system that didn't have any other Mario-style platformers. Well, no wonder it only sold 1.2 million units. If it didn't have Mario-style platformers in the age of Mario, like, they were just asking for And I think it's worth noting that like Midnight Mutants and Ninja Golf and the Scrapyard Dog, these all came out sort of around 1990, 91, so that they did eventually sort of pivot to NES style experiences when people care about at that point in time. They just did it after the Genesis had already launched.

Right. These games, how common are they in the market? I feel like they must have sold, you know, tens of thousands of units, not hundreds of thousands. Out of the last allotment of games, they're not really easy to come by. Some of the third-party games are harder to find, and they didn't come out as late that I'm aware of. Like, Tank Command is this weird little tank-driving shooter, and it's really hard to come by. Even these last few are pretty, they're pretty tricky to find. I remember, so after Atari dropped the 7,800, they just liquidated everything to Big Lots and other

clearance stores, which is where I ended up buying most of my games for it. And I never saw any of these. Okay. So I don't know how many copies they had, but they certainly weren't there. So they're not that common. Are they expensive? Or are they pretty reasonably priced still? I mean, you can get them probably around 40, 50 bucks if you're patient. Okay. Yeah, I'm prepared to collecting for Game Boy and NES and Super NES. So that's very reasonable. Wow. what a bargain. Yeah, you can get through most of this library for under 100 bucks. All right. And that is the main determinant on anyone's desire to play. How many 7,800 games were there at total? I want to say 59 thereabouts. Okay, so not even as many as for links.

No, there's not even as many for the master system. Oh, well, a master system had quite a life, actually. It did. Links, though, like, I feel like that was always an Alswell ran, but it had, I think, 70 games. So kind of rough for the 7,800. But I suppose if you are looking to build a complete collection, if you're one of those people who's like, I need to own everything for a system, that might be a good place to start. What's the most expensive game on the system? Like, how much does it cost? It'd probably be Tank Command. I think I picked that one up last year for $120, which, you know, compared to, again, NES and Game Boys, Peanuts, right? But, I mean, it's,

It's expensive for this system anyway. And after that, I'd say the most expensive, like, first-party game is Mean 18 Golf, which is, it's an NES-style golf game. I think it's based off of a computer game by Accolade. Okay. They always did good stuff. And that one was, like, 60 or 70 bucks. Hmm.

It's not terrible. Okay, so any final thoughts on the 7-800? Like I said, I haven't had much experience with it, but honestly, like talking about it and just kind of looking at the library, especially the arcade ports, makes me really want to go back and investigate it. And I suppose I don't have any excuse not to since the analog NT does have a jailbroken core for the 7800. So those games are all right there beckoning me. I have no excuses. Yeah, it's just this weird little corner of that 8-bit market where you weren't getting the, the Japanese, all the refined Japanese releases from the

Famicom or the Mark 3. And there's a lot more, I guess you could say, experimental games on there. Like, I don't know who would be putting out something like Ninja Golf necessarily on the NES. I don't know. You had weird stuff from companies like Meldac, like Zombie Nation. Okay, granted. Yeah, like Mindel Palace and stuff.

Like, there were certainly some weirdo games on NES. But it's good that there was another system out there that had like these super bizarre, like, where did this come from kind of things? Yeah, I'm not sure what they were thinking for some of these games. Like, there's a basketball game that's basically arch rivals, but it's... Is it basketball? Yes. Okay.

I think that's on Links, too. I think so, yeah. Too bad there wasn't, like, a connection between Links and 7800, like with Dreamcast and NeoGeo Pocket. Yeah, that would have been kind of cool. It's kind of funny because some of these late 7800 games also came out on the Links, but they were really different. Like Scrapyard Dog got a Links version that I've heard is not as good as the 7,800 one.

I've never actually tried it. And basket brawl it's sort of the other way around. Apparently the Lynx one's much better. Huh. Interesting. But it's an interesting little console. I mean, if you have an afternoon and want to just check out some of the weird stuff

that was coming out of the U.S. in the late 80s, it's worth a while little journey. All right. Well, thank you for sharing your expertise on a system that I couldn't have done an episode on by myself, for sure. Yeah, well, glad to be here. So we'll wrap this Retronauts here, and I will go through the usual banter. I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and at Retronauts.com, et cetera, et cetera, on YouTube. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on iTunes, et cetera, and podcast one. And, of course, we are supported through Patreon.

Patreon.com slash Retronauts. which is how we feed our babies. So please support us for $3 a month or more. If you want to do more, that's cool. But $3 a month gets you one week, access to our episodes, one week ahead of time, all episodes. And they're in higher bit quality, audio quality, like using the onboard cartridge chips as opposed to the TIA.

That's the difference right there. And there's no ads. So it's a pretty cool deal. and it keeps us from starving, and that's always awesome. You guys go ahead and give your spiels, too. Okay, I'm on Twitter at Ubersaurus. I also have a YouTube channel, Atari Archive, which is a chronological slog through the Atari VCS library.

It's more fun than that, but the first couple of years are kind of rough. And I have a Patreon for that, Patreon.com slash Atari Archive. and since we're in beautiful Milwaukee where it's raining and gray and you have Lake Michigan right there if you care about the Great Lakes you can check out some of my science writing at IJC.org All right and Brian you can find me on Twitter at B Clark OMP and also please check out One Million Power.com which is just my own site that I like to write for from anything to weird old Japanese Japanese games to Japanese music to translating Famitsu features about game creators, cats.

I didn't realize one million power was you. Okay. That's awesome. Wow. I didn't realize we had a celebrity in our Miss. Damn. No, but yeah, there's some great stuff on that site. It's a great site. Oh, thank you. So yeah, thank you also for coming on to the show, although, as you said at the beginning, you're not as versed in the 7800 as Kevin, but I just came to complain about double direct. Yeah, no, that's great. I always appreciate people complaining about bad games. Someone had to trouble. But yeah, that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts,

and I'm sure we'll do some more stuff at next year's Midwest Gaming Classic. So look forward to it. And now, an ad from dad. All right. Save money on car insurance when you bundle, home, and auto with Progressive. Can I take these off? All right. What is this?

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sure you check out the big podcast with shack every monday exclusively on apple podcast the podcast one app and podcast one.com This week in Retronauts, Atari got a raw deal. Hi, everyone, and welcome to, what is this, the third time Retronauts has been live at Midwest Gaming Classic. It is number three. It is the year 2018, and we're, where in our third go. And it's a much bigger crowd than usual. And even with the door open at the back, it's much quieter and saner in here than it's been in the past.

So I have a good feeling about this presentation. Presumably, I won't be harassed by drunks after this panel. Actually, Bob, I have plans tonight. Oh, God. So, yes, hello, if you are not familiar with the Retronauts podcast, my name is Jeremy Parrish, and that's my co-host down there. Hey, it's Bob Mackie. Hello. Wow.

Thank you. Thank you. And we were talking about Atari this week. So we have a few experts with us. To my left, why don't you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Marty Goldberg. I'm a partner in the Atari Museum and a co-author of Atari Inc. Businesses Fund and two other forthcoming books on the same subject of two companies that came after that Atari Corp and Atari Games.

So we brought in the heavy hitters this time, which wasn't hard since he's always here at the show. And also, to my right is, oh, you don't have a mic? No, I get to steal a mic. I'm Kevin Bunch. I do the Atari archives videos on YouTube. I enjoy Atari history, so I'm something of an amateur historian. Well, actually, this panel is kind of your fault, Kevin. I bumped into you last year on the vendor floor,

and you were trying to complete your Atari 7800 collection. Are you done with that now? Yep. All right. So this is a man who owns all the 7,800 games. And so I was originally thinking it would be cool to have a panel on the Atari 7800, but then I thought that might be kind of dry. Why don't we find something with a little more drama to it? And so that's what this panel is about.

It's about looking back at the history of Atari and saying, you know, the Atari crash, the video games crash in 1982, 83, did a number on Atari, but was that entirely their fault and did they really deserve the sort of fallout that happened to them? And personally, I say no. I think it's kind of in vogue to say, well, if they hadn't published ET and Pac-Man, you know, done such bad jobs with those Atari 2,600 games, nothing bad would have happened to the games industry. But I don't think that's true. And I think everyone else here on the panel with me kind of agrees with that point of view. So we are going to look back and reconsider Atari and maybe try to rewrite history a little bit. and give them a fair shake. So without further ado, why don't we roll into this conversation?

So, yeah, the Atari crash is, I guess, a good place to kind of start the video games crash. Or I think in Japan it's called the Atari shock. Basically, it has to do with Atari, and it has to do with a lot of people losing money, hand over fist. And I think we're all familiar with the idea behind that, but I don't know if someone else wants to jump in and kind of give a top-down view of what that was all about. So what specifically do you want me to start out with with it? Let's just talk about what the Atari crash was.

Okay. And kind of what happened after it. Well, very loosely to cover, because we're going to go over details after this. Basically, what you had was an environment of an explosion of demand in the early 80s in video games and the consumer industry. Now, it's a very important point to make. At that point in time, there was not what you would call now. a video, video game industry. You had various industries with video games in them. You had very few companies, Atari was one of them, that actually straddled multiple industries and could be

considered what you would consider now a video game company in those respects. They were in other things. They were the Apple of that day. I mean, how you think of Apple today, they were involved not just in entertainment, they were also involved in medical equipment research, telephones, modern telephones, a lot of the features that you have in, that you had in your phones today, were actually pioneered back them, they were going in holography, they were going in all sorts of different consumer and advanced areas. They even had Alan Kay, who is legendary from Xerox Park, who created partially responsible for the team that created the modern Windows, mouse, and everything else environment, they had him there

researching the office of the future for 10 years like he had been doing at Xerox. So they were far ahead of things in that. So Atari was one of the few companies that straddled that. But at that point in time, you did not have an industry like you had now. You had other industries that happen to have video games in them. So it was pretty much the Wild West. And that demand just spiked across 81 through 82. And then you had... basically a perfect storm going on into 82 and 83 where you had all these third party companies come in too and you had the issues with the already established companies that we're going to discuss in a bit and they came together to basically not just flood the industry but create this perfect

storm of loss of demand is what it is because they you know again it was a new environment for a lot of these companies to operate in. And within another year, a lot of them were already exiting doing any sort of video games. So that what you had was you had an industry going away. You still had a demand in the market, but that was rapidly shrinking to over 83 and 84 then so that by the time, you know, there was still plenty of product,

but the companies that were behind it weren't necessarily there anymore. And, you know, because that's another thing, too. there's this thing that there's this idea that before Nintendo came in, there was nothing there. There was like a gap. There was still a market. It was a lot smaller, but there were still thing, there were still video games being so consumer video games. And that's an important point too. This was a consumer crash. Right. Not coin. The coin industry, you know, we've got a ton of the old arcade games here, as I'm sure as a lot of you've seen. That's a completely different industry. They run on their own market. They run on their own resources separate from

what the consumer was. And even then, it was a North American crash because it didn't necessarily have to affect worldwide. Europe was more, their video game market was mainly on computers during that time. So they weren't as affected. Same for Asia around there too. They had a different market as well. It was mainly the North American consumer market, consumer video games that crashed. Yeah, while the American market was crashing in 1983, Japan was just getting its first homegrown consoles. You know, the Famicom, Nintendo's made it, made its entry, the Sega SG-1000, the MSX standard, like all of these things were starting over there and beginning to take off right as America's market was cratering. So it was really the American console market.

So when people talk about the video games crash and tend to think of it, you know, like, oh, video games went away everywhere for a few years. That's absolutely not true. But, you know, it was definitely the American console industry. And it affected more than just Atari when when the big crash happened, in addition to taking Atari with it, it also affected Mattel, who had the Intellivision. It affected Colico, who had the Colico vision. There were lots of other companies, whoever made the Vectrix. What was the company there?

GCE. GCE. GCE, okay. So, like, all of them were affected. And, of course, Atari had been acquired by Warner Communications in 1976, and it was, I think, at that point, the largest corporate merger that had ever happened in the world. So they were a huge company, and the biggest symbol of the crash that happened in 83 was that Warner lost, I think, 60 or 65 percent of its stock value.

So Atari managed to take down with the collapse of the 2,600 market, one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world. So it was very localized and specific, but there were a lot of side effects and a lot of detrimental. effects. And, you know, the name Atari has been sort of attached to this, like it is the Atari crash, the Atari shock. And so they tend to get the blame for it. But again, I don't think that's all entirely fair. Like some, they made some poor choices, but there were lots of other people out there making equally bad decisions, if not worse. And so it was a whole lot of, I don't know, I would say it was people kind of finding this new form of entertainment, this new space in the market, this new industry, and not really having a sense of what was sustainable while they

were, you know, sort of freewheeling and spitballing and trying to figure out, like, what works in video games? They were also discovering the hardware, the hard way, what does not work in video games. I like the positive one thing. I think the crash had a positive effect, actually, in some ways, not for the companies who made the games, obviously, but I think the crash actually opened up a whole new demographic to console gaming, people that couldn't have previously afford the systems. Growing up in a poor family, it was like, yes, an Atari is $50. All of the cartridges are like $1

everywhere, so you could easily stock up on every game you wanted if you had a small budget. Yeah, I mean, that's like from the consumer side, that seems good, but that's definitely not, you know, sustainable as a business. I'm pro-consumer, Jeremy. It's, I am too, but there is, you know, kind of the reality that if no one's making money,

then no one's going to be making more of these things that we love. So there is the kind of push. poll of capitalism, like there's got to be some upside for people so that they can devote their lives to making video games to entertain the rest of us. And, you know, this is cyclical. Like, we see this all the time. We see it on Steam. We see it. It's probably going to happen with, you know, Nintendo Switch as that's gone from being like this very profitable place to suddenly, you know, in just the past few months flooded with all kinds of software. And it's really, it's getting hard to say like, hmm, I want a switch game, but which switch game do I want? There's, you know, 30 coming out

this week, which of the 30 do I want? I think, you know, that's just the gold rush effect. Anytime there's money to be made, there's profit to be made, people jump in and things get crowded. And that definitely is what happened with the Atari 2,600, for sure.

Do we want to talk about some of the causes of the crash beyond, you know, E.T. and Pac-Man. Sure. I think Kevin was... Yeah, there's a There's a lot of things that were going on at the time.

So, you know, everyone looks at Atari and they blame Atari's quality control at the time. But the fact of the matter is they were putting out a lot of pretty good games in 82 and 83. Like 82, you had Berserk, you had Yar's Revenge, you had Defender, 83, you had games like Ms. Pac-Man and Gravatar that people consider to be pretty darn good games. But everyone just looks at Pac-Man and they look at ET and they're like, oh, these are, these must be the problem. Well, the problem really goes beyond Atari because you also had this massive glut of third parties that hit the market in late 82 and into 83. That was just releasing wave after wave of games that, you know, some of them were good, some of them were mediocre, but it was just so many. you wouldn't really be able to tell which is which. They're all full price.

The magazines couldn't really keep up with it. Like they might get around to reviewing a game months after it came out and might have been discounted by that point. Yeah, you couldn't jump on Twitter in 1982 and say, hey, friends, which game should I buy for Atari? Like that form of, you know, feedback and critical analysis just wasn't there. I think there was one video game magazine running at the time. No, there were, I'd say 82 is when you had more of the explosion of video games.

There were a bunch of them. But, yeah, to that point. They were mostly focused on computers, though, weren't they? No, arcade. Oh, okay. Arcade was where it was at in that time period, because that's where most of the original games were being generated, and then people wanted to be able to play those at home.

I'd say around 82, like when you start seeing Yars, or 81, 82, when you start seeing Yars Revenge and some of the original titles coming out, that's really when you started having the beginnings of a shift in the home industry. where people wanted new games that weren't available in the arcades. They were specific to a platform that were something that they could go and they could just play at home. But before that, they were mainly taking their lead from coin because that's where all the money was.

That's where all the development was being done. And that's where people were still socializing. Before your Xbox Live and everything else that you have now, that's what you would do. You would go to the arcade and play with your friends and hang out there for the day and play your games and visit and stuff like that too. I think you mentioned, Kevin, third parties, and I think that really does have a huge impact. I don't know if you can really point at one thing about the Atari crash

and say that's it, but, man, third parties were really part of the problem. And there were some third parties, which is to say, companies making games for Atari that were not Atari themselves. There were some very good third parties. But if you have ever, you know, just kind of done a random trawl of the $2,600, library and once you start getting into the games that were not made made by Atari or made by Activision, which was a company formed by people who left Atari, you get into some pretty dire stuff and it stops being fun really quickly. And you can really understand why people would go to the store

paid $30, which was a lot in 1983 money, you know, in the middle of a recession, and bring home something that was incomprehensible, unplayable, just not fun at all. They would say, well, I don't want to buy more of these games because I just got burned. Yeah, I'm not sure when the price drop started happening, but when the VCS launched, the 2,600 launched, it was the equivalent of like $800 today or maybe $900 today. So it was pretty expensive. It was like the price of a PC gaming rig almost. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was an investment. And, you know, there were always, in my experience, as a kid living back then who did not have a $2,600, you know, you always kind of knew who your

classmates were and who the kids in the neighborhood were who had a 2,600 because it was kind of a luxury item. And so the kids who had it, like everyone kind of somehow ended up at their house to play video games. It was a strange phenomenon. Yeah, with regards to the third parties too. And as far as, you know, with your point with Activision, too, the co-founder of that company is going to be here tomorrow. David Crane, he will be speaking tomorrow too. But in relation to that, I mean, Activision is really what opened that up. Because, you know, people say, well, why didn't Atari lock out the $2,600, or why didn't they keep other people from manufacturing for it?

Well, because before Activision came around and those employees left and started that company, that wasn't a concept, okay? There was no such thing as third party. These were all, they not sell the propriety platforms, but this was such a new industry that you needed so much money to get into and to develop, or it was never thought that somebody else was going to come along

and just start developing games because they didn't even know how long video games and home games were going to last because they were constantly being called at that time a fad. So the idea that somebody would come along and start making games were it wasn't fathomable. There was also a lot of protectionism happening in the market. You know, Calico came out with the expansion module for the Colico vision that basically stuck in Atari 2,600 on your Colico vision. So you put in this adapter and all of a sudden you could play Atari 2600 games. And of course, Atari took that to court. They weren't happy about that at all.

Yeah, yeah, very much so. I mean, you have that with hardware as far as patents and even games, the games themselves, like you had Atari once they got the license for Pac-Man suing Magnavox for Casey Munchkin. Because, again, this whole concept of protection in this field wasn't necessarily there beyond the hardware. And once the hardware were done, I mean, Colico had claimed that they had clean room reverse engineered everything. What happened is they wound up settling out of court licensing and then paying royalty, on everything that was sold, so Atari actually made money off of that. But, you know, getting back to that with that third-party thing, people that I've interviewed that were there at CES, the summer of 82,

you had Atari doing the 5200 coming out with that. You had Calico, surprisingly, because everybody thought they had exited video games, also coming out with the Calico Vision and showing it off there. You had all sorts of things going on, but the thing that staggered most people was all of a sudden you had these third-party companies, a ton of them, show up at the Consumer Electronics Show. It was a summer one down south of New York at that time, at McCormick, when they used to have it.

And they were like, this isn't good, because nobody was prepared for it. And the market's just, you know, it was already starting to get crowded with the companies that were there all competing with all these different consoles. And now you have all these third parties. And it's insane that in a year, 1982, a year that the actual overall, earnings of video games were huge, we actually had a lot of companies starting to lose a lot of

money because of that, because of fighting for all that market share and because of all their own issues, too. Yeah, the pie was getting bigger, but the number of people wanting a piece of the pie were exploding, you know, exponentially compared to the size of the pie's growth. So that just wasn't sustainable. So I think you can, you can kind of make a case that the existence and the proliferation of third parties kind of was Atari's fault because Activision, like the people who formed that company left because they weren't happy to Tari. And I think that ultimately goes back to the point that in 1976, Warner Communications bought Atari. And it went from being this kind of freewheeling hippie company out in California to a more buttoned down corporation

that had to, you know, it was a division of a larger, very established firm. And it didn't treat its talent as talent. It treated them like commodities. Like you are creating these game ideas and programming games and making art and music or sound effects. But, you know, there's nothing special about you. Anyone can do that. You're just, you know, assembling products for us. And obviously, we know that's not true. Video games are not just assembly line products or they shouldn't be. And the best games come with a lot of heart, a lot of creativity, a lot of vision. And I think, you know, the people who went off to form Activision felt that way very strongly and resented being treated like, you know, assembly line people. And, you know,

And so they went off and formed their own company, and that started this chain effect that, or, you know, a chain of events that, that ended up kind of destroying the market just because once, you know, once Activision was out there making games without a license from Atari, everyone said, oh, we can do that too. But again, they weren't Activision. They didn't have years of experience working with the Atari 2600 hardware. They weren't people from Atari who understood, you know, not only consumer research, like, like, what do people want, but how do you make a good game? How do you come up to a good idea? So, yeah, that was really kind of, I guess if you wanted to point to an ultimate cause and effect here,

it would be the Warner Acquisition, in my opinion. You guys may disagree. I think you're right. I mean, it's a tale as old as time when a company is bought out by people who don't understand the product and are consumers of the product and then proceed to ruin the product. So it happens all the time. Well, I'd be talking about too.

You could say Atari and the people at that time in 1970s, didn't understand a product either because they were just getting into it as far as a consumer market. That's part of why the acquisition happened. I mean, they had been in dire financial straits a number of years before that because there's some bad decisions made and some poor management brought in. So that thing they were looking for investors. They got a few of their eyes, been out enough, and then they went and basically got

hooked up through a mutual investment firm with Warner. Now, Warner did, I mean, keep in mind, Atari at that time was an engineering research firm. That was really how they were run. They were not run as a gaming company in those regards. They were there purely to go after all the different ideas that no one would come up with that he wanted to pursue. And they were run as an engineering firm, a startup. Warner is the one that came in and brought in the big boy pants for that. And a lot of the oversight that was actually needed.

Unfortunately, they were also big boys that needed to film. bigger pockets. So they also were chiefly responsible for a lot of the issues and a lot of dual manager, like what you talked about with the guys, how they were treated, the ones that left for Activision and the other ones too, because it was an Exodus across 78 and 79. That had a lot to do with what's called Hollywood accounting, which you hear about in movies and films. These guys were promised a lot of different profit shares and things like that. They were seeing earnings happen for the company, but yet they weren't getting what they had. been promised. And what had happened was that

people that Warner would bring in, or Warner themselves, would shift stuff around to show losses. You know, things like that. You know, we can't give you what you're asking for you type of thing. And then you had these guys leave. Ray, Cesar, who just passed away,

you know, it's, he is chiefly responsible for the golden age of what we all think of with Atari. He's also responsible for its downfall as is Warner. And manager art in that group there. You know, they were the ones that put the pressure on to keep earnings piling up and piling

up when that started happening in the early 80s. They were the ones that wanted to inflate their own earnings. They were the ones that would go in and there were projects that were almost ready to be released and they were like, why are we doing this? You know, we shouldn't be doing this and nix them. You know, they were the ones chiefly responsible. They were the ones responsible for ET. they were because it was basically the head of Warner was our party with Spielberg

going to be trying to get him to come over to release his films through Warner and hammered out a deal at the home at his home in the Hamptons over the weekend to do this game and that was already the beginning of the summer and Spiel was like what's got to be out in time for Christmas oh yeah yeah no problem they thrust it on Atari and then they have to go and negotiate it takes more time And then by that time, you know, it's going over and, you know, it's finally Howard's brought on board. He's got very little time left because in order to make it for that time period for the Christmas season, it's got to be into manufacturing by the beginning of September.

So, you know, they were the ones that were doing a lot of this stuff. They were responsible for its golden age and they were responsible for its downfall and a lot of that too. Some of it was a necessary evil. And, you know, if you want to come up with some of the same thing, other things that maybe Atari shouldn't have done. I would say the other big one would be the 5200. What even was that? Why did they do that? Kevin, do you know? Well, my understanding is they really wanted to compete with Mattel's Intellivision, which came out around 79 in test markets, and then they released it nationally in 1980. And Mattel just kept running all these ads after

ads, just directly comparing their games and their system to the 2,600. And like, look, we have way better sports games. We have better animation. We have better visual. I think, I think George Plimpton's claim was life-like graphics. They have life-like graphics. They were much more convincing stickman than Atari had. You can see He-Man sword fight, Skeletor eventually. But, so, you know, they're running all these ads. They've got this controller that has like this six-way disc control pad and all these buttons and this keypad. And Atari says, well, you know what, we can, we can one-up them. We'll just repackage this. Atari 400 computer will make this weird controller that has this analog stick that doesn't

re-center on its own and has these buttons that'll turn to mush even if you don't use it, which is my favorite thing about the 5200s. The controllers will just go out on you without you even touching them. And we're going to sell all of these games that we've already been working on for our computer line. Right. And that's the important thing is that it was based on the Atari computer line and therefore had no compatibility with the 2600. So they had two effectively competing consoles in the market. And it's not like, you know, when Nintendo has Switch and 3DS on the market, and they're kind of in the same space, but not really. This was like two consoles that were very much, you know, just one had a huge library of games and the other

had a smaller library, but looked a little nicer. So it was very confusing for consumers. And like you said, there were a lot of sort of downsides to the 5,200 hardware. So it wasn't an obvious case where, oh, you know, like Nintendo to Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis to Sega Saturn, like there's going to be a huge leap. No, it's like

which would you rather invest in? So that didn't do them any favors, I would say. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that this was also really the first time any company had been releasing a sort of successor console. Well, there was the Odyssey, too, but that might be so far back in the primal ooze that it doesn't really count.

I mean, the Odyssey was a dedicated machine from 71. Odyssey II was from, what, 79? Yeah, so that's a pretty wide gap at that point. And there was a lot of years between the two. But this is like, okay, you've got the $2,600 on the market. Here's our new system. Well, what do we do with the $2,600? It's still making us money.

Let's just try and support them both. and see what happens. And then, you know, CalicoVision came along. Like, oh, no, this is better than what we've got. May I do that? Go ahead. Sure. So a couple things in regards to that.

They actually, the 5200 development, what was called System X-Max, actually started before anybody knew about ColicoVision with that. It, like you said, started this television thing. There was a console before that called 3200 that was originally going to be the successor. that actually went out because it had a, I can't remember right now, I think a 12-bit graphics chip that was very hard to program. It was an 8-bit CPU and a 12-bit graphics chip,

and it didn't get far. The design carried through, though, into what became the 5200 as far as the case design. When they started the 5200, there were three projects at that time. There was, they were basically doing the cost-reduced $2,600, because in relation to what you were saying earlier, they understood the market as far as the need for more having lower cost items on it so people could afford it easier.

So they were actually moving towards that at that time. So $2,600 is going to reposition as a lower end. Then you had what became the $5,200 as a meeting. They were going to work on a higher-end council as well. And then what happened is Warner basically is like $2,600 is our cash cow. You can't do anything to jeopardize that. So the plan changed, and they did the 5,200, and it was positioned as a higher-end, as the higher-end gaming system, so it wouldn't affect the $2,600 market.

And it was supposed to, it was designed from the beginning to have the $3,600-compatible cartridge thing as well, to help some people wouldn't have to get rid of that and would continue to buy, hopefully, 2,600 games as well. But that wasn't ready in time for the release, so then it got the myth involved that, oh, 5200 was not designed to be backwards compatible. It actually was. It just wasn't ready in time. So that was the idea. That's how the 5200 came about. It was supposed to be a three-pronged

approach for that. But yeah, obviously that didn't happen. And, you know, I think it's good that Kevin mentioned the computer line because that is sort of the other big thing that was happening in video games right around this time. Like the 2, the 2nd launched the same year as the Apple 2,

and the Apple 2 was sort of the introduction of like, hey, you know, computers for the masses. But, you know, the 2,600 was a lot less expensive than the Apple 2. But in 1981, Commodore brought out the Commodore 64. And suddenly there was a computer that could do a lot, had very great, you know, audio and video effects, and really didn't cost that much more than a console. So all of a sudden, you had something that was far more versatile than a video game system that also played video games. And, you know, I think it was, it became harder for people to make a case for keeping a console in the home when instead they could invest that money into

the C-64 and some of the other computers that came along around the same time like the T-I-99-4A and what else like the VIC-20 and so forth so yeah all of a sudden you know the consoles weren't sort of existing in this space by themselves there were other devices that suddenly could you know affordably play video games in the home and they could also you know do your recipes or whatever they tried to pitch people on for computers back then. And I think that these are just all the things that kind of came together to cause the video game crash. And that took down Atari and Intellivision and Calico Vision and so on and so forth and made retailers specifically very, very gun-shy about buying video games, you know, console video games and trying to sell

them because they had these bins of the $1 video games that Bob mentioned. And it wasn't until Nintendo came along three or four years later and said, hey, but what if we pretend these weren't video games? It was an entertainment system with a video robot and a gun, and you buy game packs instead of cartridges. Like, that's totally different. That's not video games at all, guys. Like retailers went for it, but consumers knew what was up.

They were like, oh, yes, video games. We actually still like those. It's just, you know, no one wants to get into that business anymore. So there was that kind of like three or four year sort of, trough, a lacuna in the U.S. console market where a lot of it had to do with retailers just getting burned and not wanting to get back into that space again. I do want to point out that not only were there all these computers on the market, but there was also a glut of hardware consoles on the market in 82 and 83.

Like, you know, you had the Kaleecovision and you had the 2,600, and the 5200, and the Intellivision, and the Odyssey 2, and the Vectrix, and the Articles. and the Arcadia 2001 and the Astrocade. And there's the, still the Channel F was still on the market. You could still buy that. So, like I said, Warner's stock crashed hard in 1982, 83 as a result of this. And they said, we need to get rid of this dead weight around our necks. So they spun off Atari and Atari went in basically.

two directions like yeah they actually uh the head of warner couldn't get rid of atari nobody would buy it off of him they had just come off of a hostile if you i'm sure the guys are familiar with rupert murdock uh in the recent years he tried to take over warner during that time period when it was very vulnerable they fended him off but it hurt them and they brought in a company to basically evaluate what they could get rid of so that they weren't as uh as exposed one of the things obviously was Atari. So he tried, Steve Ross, the head of Warner, tried to get rid of it. Nobody wanted the company as a whole. So then he came up with the idea, okay, I'll just split it up. So basically what happened was he cold called Jack Trammell, who had left Commodore earlier and had

come back and started his own company, Trammell Technology, to see if you'd be interested in buying the consumer division, the consumer assets. And they negotiated and that actually happened. Now, to keep in mind, he did not sell Tremel Atari. Atari Corporation, the company that came out there was a completely separate company, completely different company. He sold, Ross and Warner sold them the assets. Assets purchases are basically their IP buildings, things like that. They don't include the employees and basically hire over employees to help maintain those assets that you are purchasing. So what he did was he, uh, those assets into a new company he formed called Atari Corporation. Now the other part of the rest

of the company actually continued on as Atari Inc. 4-Day and then was renamed Atari Games Inc. And with, what's his name still at the head at that time? I'm trying to remember who was brought in and try and save Atari at that time. I don't remember. From the tobacco industry. Anyway, so what happened was, it was renamed Atari Games Inc. And they solely pared that down until. It was just the arcade part. And then that was, had majority ownership sold to Namco. And Namco renamed it Atari Games Court. And then that survived a number of years.

It was actually the last vestiges of the original Atari left. I think it went out in 2003. It was when it was fun. Something like that. But there were, didn't it get absorbed by Midway or something? They went back and forth. They got employee bought, well, there was a three, it was basically a three-way for a time.

It was a third employee, a third, Namco, and third Warner, Warner still kept stake in it. And then they wound up and the employees sold out to Warner and they became Time Warner Interactive. And then that was sold to Midway and then it got renamed to Atari Games again. And then eventually Midway Games West and then it was gone in 2003. Right. So that's what happened with that.

And what a mess. Yes. But, you know, the Atari Games itself, the company that existed, you know, and carried forward that sort of tradition under Namco's watch, they made some amazing arcade games. They made stuff like Gauntlet and Rampart, 720, Stunrunner. Yeah, like there's Paperboy, yeah,

there is some great stuff that came out from this company. So they continued on, but it still feels like they were kind of a shadow of what they had been. They had been synonymous with video games. You know, you played Atari. You didn't play video games. Even if you were playing in television,

you were playing Atari, kind of like Nintendo would be in the 80, like late 80s. it would be playing Nintendo, playing Atari. Those were like just, you know, nothing was more symbolic of the transfer of power, I think, between the two halves of the decade than how kids played video games,

what they were playing. But, you know, there were still some really interesting things that came out of Atari Inc as well, or Atari Corp. I keep getting the names all mixed up. It's a lot to keep track of. And I do kind of want to talk about those things because those pieces of hardware,

like some of them were really great. And so this brings us back around to the Atari 7800, which was a really strong piece of hardware and was supposed to launch in 1984, where it would have beaten the Nintendo Entertainment System to the market by a good two years, Sega Master System by two years. Like it would have been sort of the first console of that sort of, I guess, you know, second or third wave, however you want to designate that. and you know like the hardware itself was very competitive and like comparable to the NES but it would have been here a couple of years in advance instead of launching around the same time that the NES went nationwide with a much stronger campaign behind it I feel like Atari really didn't push the 7800 that that hard they were just kind of like here's a console that just came out doesn't have Mario but it's Atari you want that right I mean Atari corporation didn't have the kind of, it didn't have Warner money behind it especially after the whole process of Jack Tremel having to

basically buy the 7,800 separately and he had to pay off General Computing Corporation who designed it, he had to pay them off again to actually have games for it and then he had to start rebuilding the development team because they ended up

getting laid off during that whole period of time So, yeah, it got delayed until around May, 1986, when they started releasing it. And then by the time it got nationwide, the NES was being sold nationally. And I think the master system was too. So suddenly you had all this competition, and Nintendo definitely had more advertising dollars behind it. And even Sega, that was being distributed by Tonka, who, you know, it's a pretty big company. So they pushed it pretty hard.

I saw ads. I don't think I ever saw a 7,800 commercial on television ever. I saw ads for Nintendo, for Sega, but not for Atari 7800. I know they had commercials. I never remember. I found them on YouTube, and I'm like, where did you people find this stuff? Like, did you go to the Atari archives and find videos that never broadcast? What happened here?

Yeah. Bob says public access. Yeah, I don't recall ever seeing any on television. We ended up getting our 7,800, when we just went to a store and needed a, new system to play 2,600 games on, which I think might have been one of their key selling points at the time. Yeah, the 7,800 was a good piece of hardware, and this is kind of why I say Atari got a raw deal, because I feel like that system could have done a lot more. It could have, it could have thrived even. It could have been a really strong competitor to the NES, but because

of the crash, it ended up being pushed from 1984 to 1986, and there were all those, you know, political and financial maneuverings that went on with it. And by the time it launched, the exclusives were just really old games, though, right? Yeah, I mean, it launched with some really, really, like, high-quality conversions of arcade games, but a lot of them were games that people already played on 2,600. Whereas, you know, you looked at Nintendo and Sega,

and Nintendo, you know, they had Mario, they had stuff like Excite Bike, like games that people hadn't played before, balloon fight, you know, things like that. Sega had really great. conversions for the for a bit hardware of great Sega arcade games like arcade games is what Sega did and now you could play those games on a home console from the company that made those games so you know stuff like hang on that was that was like really impressive looking uh and yeah so it was really hard for a 7800 and it's it's uh kind of aging ports of zevius or galiga or whatever to sort of stand out like those games would come to nes later but it was just kind of

of like, here, flesh out your library with these popular arcade games from bygone days, whereas with 7,800, the proposition was, here's what you got, it's these popular arcade games from bygone days. Yeah, I mean, that's true. But when you think about it, the console was in development in 83 into 84. So those games were actually top tier at that time. Absolutely. They were meant to be just introductory games, and it would still have the full development team, you know, library and IP.

of Atari, the continuing evolving library of Atari, including the arcade games that they had and the, you know, any ones that they would license or the new ones that they, the games that they develop. And then all of a sudden, that wasn't there. You know, like you mentioned before, it didn't come with the, with the IP purchase because GCC, the company that developed it, its contract was with Warner. That's what I said before about this dual manager. Warner would go and make deals and then have Atari execute them. They didn't necessarily order. That was including the Amiga deal that it happened too. That was with Warner as well. So those did not come with the purchase that Tremel made. He had to negotiate for him, like you said, he had to, as far as

to 7,800, he had to go and he had to pay those things off. By that time, we're talking about the summer of 85, he's looking to start relaunching the 7,800. So NES wasn't on any radar yet at that time and he basically had nothing so then he's got to get somebody over to start up a games division again you got mike cats who we interviewed for this show in the past he came over from epics he was over there and all of a sudden he saw you know it's it's about september into october and he's going to license games and he can't because they're all snapped up by this company called nintendo that's going to be coming up with this console so he came up that they were, okay, I'm going to start licensing titles from, that haven't been on

consoles before, that had just been on home computers. And so he started bringing those in, but you know, even then, he didn't really have a home development team to really speak of. He would outsource a lot of the development for any of the original games that they did or any of the license games like that, too. So there really wasn't anything there. As far as the commercial is the marketing, yeah, they had that. I, I ate myself, I saw back in the day the national video game team commercial one that they had. But I didn't see much else. Most of their ads were in like magazines and things like that for the 7,800. But again, it was, there was no budget. When Tremel took over the IP and started his new company, he also took over a lot of

the debt from the consumer division as well. That came with it. Plus, he had to pay on losses. Nintendo actually strong-armed Tremel that summer of 84 because all the games of Mario for the 5,200 and the $2,600, the unsold games that came as part of the assets that he was going to sell, they considered that a sale. So they wanted their cut for that. So they strong arm room for that. You know, just all sorts of stuff that people don't realize that he, it was a couple years before we could actually have his company in the black and have both of that Warner Debt, the old Warner Debt paid off, which was insane. I mean, he had to renegotiate with Warner several times, you know, for a better and a better deal because he just couldn't

make it on the terms that they had with it. So there wasn't much to speak of until I'd say around 87, and by that time, yeah, Nintendo was pretty much the king of it all. Yeah, it sounds like kind of a raw deal. And I'm glad you mentioned epics because they also are responsible for another really, I think, remarkable piece of hardware that Atari brought out, the Atari Links, which began as the epics handy, and development on that began in 1986, and Atari ended up taking, you know, kind of possession of that. There were some shenanigans there. It wasn't all necessarily in good faith, I think, just based on different stories that have come out. But, you know, eventually they released this really great handheld system, full color screen, backlit.

Apparently, from what I've read, the sprite blitter could process infinite sprites. I'm sure there was some sort of upward limit on it, but basically like the system would basically kind of scale and just draw more power to make all these sprites happen on screen. So very impressive and completely demolished by Nintendo's Game Boy, which launched about the same time as the links, even though it hadn't been in development as long, or at least not known to have been in development. And again, I feel like, you know, had things, the situation been better for Atari and they had been in a better, better space and had better finances, they could have gotten the links out, say, in 1988 instead of 89. And who can say what would have happened if the Atari Links had had a year's lead on Nintendo's Game Boy? Like, yeah, Game Boy had Mario and it had Tetris, and those were great. But, you know, if that came out after people had been playing links with its full-color

screen and really impressive almost like 16-bit quality visuals in a handheld system for a year, I think Game Boy would have been a much harder sell. But unfortunately, that's not how it worked out for Atari. Well, it was a cost, too, because it was a full-color LCD screen in 1989. It was expensive. So it drove up the cost. They had actually tried to negotiate. The battery costs also have the cost, too, yes. They went up there. Yeah, they had batteries added half the way to the system. But it was, you know, they had been in negotiations or they had deals with their suppliers that was supposed to drive the cost down further, even after the links too. And it never came. They actually wound up suing them. But then you had basically Nintendo come in with their

Game Boy with display technology that was maybe a step above the old calculator technology that handheld games were using before that. And they were able to keep the cost down. And then they had the games people want to play. So, I mean, that was pretty much it. And I seem to recall reading that there was a parts shortage that Atari claimed was going on with the links two around the time it came out. So even if you wanted to get a lynx in 89, you wouldn't be able to find one until sometime next year. Hey, may as well check out this Game Boy thing. I can find it everywhere on the store shelves. Yeah. And it looks like we are out of time. And I think we kind of hit all the points we wanted to. There is still like the Atari Jaguar, but I don't know if anyone

necessarily wants to try to make a case for that one. So I think we will wrap. What the? Oh, there are some fans. Okay. You can You can talk to Bob about that, you know, back after the panel. But yeah, anyway, thanks everyone for coming to this panel. Thank you to Marty and Kevin for your very informed opinions. Hopefully, we have shed a little light into your hearts and made you think, you know, maybe Atari deserved a little better in the late 80s. Maybe they'd still be around if things had gone a little differently.

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