Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 275: Pre-Atari Consoles

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

Jeremy Parish and vintage gaming expert Kevin Bunch turn back the hands of time to an era when the idea of the Atari 2600 was just a twinkle in someone's eyes, putting the focus on two pioneering consoles: RCA's Studio II and the Fairchild Channel F. The Retronauts is supported by listeners! Subscribe to us on Patreon and get early, higher-quality downloads, exclusive episodes, bonus features about gaming history, topic request opportunities, and more! Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, the hell with those upstarts Atari. Hi, everyone, welcome to another exciting episode of Retronauts featuring me, Jeremy Parrish. And also with me, Jeremy Parrish, this week here at Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, we have... This is Kevin Bunch, the creator of the Atari. archive video series. And for this week's episode, we decided to bring in Kevin to talk about

something that is actually not Atari. No, we're going older than Atari. What was the logic here in bringing you in for something that is not your specialization? So I have been doing a lot of research into the RCA Studio 2 and to a lesser degree, the Fairchild Channel F. Part of that is just geographic convenience in that all of the Fairchild documentation is, It's actually not that far from where I live, so. Oh, well, there you go. And yes, that is the topic of this week's episode. We are looking at game consoles before Atari 2,600, the Fairchild, and the RCA.

Not the Magnovacs, though. I noticed there's no Odyssey on here. No. I mean, the Odyssey, there's a lot of information. You can pull for that one from the Ralph Bayer's book, which is actually for sale at the Long Island RetroExpo, I saw copies. He goes into great detail on the development of the Magnovox Odyssey and how it got on the market. But we're going with something that's a little more obscure and a little harder to find information on. Yes. And when we say we're going, what we actually

mean is you're going. Because you have pulled this episode together. And this is really like, this is beyond my pay grade. I may be as old as these consoles, but that doesn't mean I have played them. I played Channel F actually a little bit here at Long Island. They've had it set up, I think, every year where you can check it out in the weird little hat controllers. And yeah, it was kind of an innovative little system, kind of groundbreaking, kind of impressive. But that doesn't mean, just because I farted around with the display unit, I know anything about it. So, you know, besides geographical convenience, what has gotten you interested in these systems? What is it about, you know, like 1970s vintage consoles that intrigued you so much?

Well, you know, they, uh, when you talk about 1970s gaming, generally people just sort of focus on Atari and they might talk about Pong and Tank until you get to space invaders. But there's just this rich history of, you know, video gaming and arcade gaming that took place through the 1970s. That's largely been forgotten. And part of that is because a lot of these games. games just, they don't run on microprocessor, so you can't just dump them and run them in maim. Yeah, I feel like that's kind of the biggest impediment not only to these consoles,

but also to arcade games from that era, because you can't, you can't just emulate those boards. They were, they were bespoke creations, like the, you know, the circuitry, the, everything on the board was kind of hand-assembled. And, you know, you hear talk about, um, like Steve Wozniak putting together Pong and trying to cut the number of chips involved below a certain threshold. And, like, that doesn't make any sense in the modern dynamic where you're working with a processor and everything is kind of defined, but that's not the case for these old systems. Yeah, I mean, with breakout, like you were talking about there. Yeah, he cut that down so far that they ended up having to redo the whole thing, in part just

because of his design and in part because he technically met their requirements but not actually met like something they could publish. Right. Yeah, it was, it's an interesting case in, you know, doing just what you were asked for. But, you know, that's the kind of stories from that area that you don't

really hear. And the other issue is a lot of these stories, a lot of this information is scattered because, you know, you didn't have gaming magazines at the time. And a lot of the press that was covering the video game. industry at the time was just really hard to come by. Yeah, it tended to mostly be, you know,

magazines focused around arcade distribution, which at the time was pinball. It was vending machines like jukeboxes and things like that. So, yeah, what game coverage exists is kind of scattered around other topics that are kind of like actually something else at this point. Yeah, like you might be able to find some information about these game systems in like a television periodical or you can find information about them in a merchandising magazine that was delivered to, you know, the people who buy material for their stores. So that's where I found a number of these things. And, you know, there's some fortunate happenstances for these two particular machines.

So the Studio 2 in particular, all of RCA's materials, they held on to their paperwork and their prototypes because RCA was a very, we'll say, litigious company, and they liked having a paper trail. So their engineers also got really good at it. So when all of the RCA papers went to archives after the company closed up shop, a lot of those former engineers also sent along their papers and you can find a pretty detailed history of the development of the studio too from 1971 all the way through its release in 77 and even beyond that even. But before we talk about the Studio 2, I think it makes sense to talk about the Channel F, since chronologically it came before the Studio 2, at least in terms of retail space, it was launched in, you know, let's say November 1976. That's right. Whereas the Studio 2 launched in February 77, missing that crucial Christmas.

holiday and putting it kind of within spitting distance of the Atari 2,600. So that couldn't have done it in any favors. No. In fact, they both kind of suffered. The FCC, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, they had extremely stringent requirements for game systems to get permission to be sold. You had to basically block all the radio frequency radiation coming out of the systems. Yeah, and that's something worth mentioning because, you know, with these analog systems, you know, before centralized processors and that sort of thing, you were getting a lot more EM electromagnetic interference. And, you know, at this point, you hooked up to a television through a radio frequency transmitter. That is what RF modulator stands for, right? Radio

frequency? Yeah. Yeah. And so basically, you were connecting a tiny radio station to your computer to your television and broadcasting along the wire to it. So, yeah, those RF modulators had to be very, very shielded and prevent leaks and that sort of thing. And I know that caused a lot of trouble for a lot of people because I know the TI994A system ran afoul of that also because it was putting out a lot of radio interference. Yeah, and actually Texas Instruments was the company that had enough clout that they were able to get that changed. to get those requirements loosened up. But before that, just all of these game systems had to suffer through delays upon delays.

The Apple 2, they just bypassed it completely by not including an RF modulator in the design. So basically you had to go out and buy your own? Yeah. So how did the video connect? It used basically a composite out cable. Okay. Just plugged it into your monitor because the Apple monitor was composite. So Composite Out, like that video standard existed at the time, but people weren't using it?

Yeah. Was it just expensive? I think it was mostly just being used for computers at the time because, I mean, what were you going to plug into your TV? VCRs weren't really. True. They didn't exist. Yeah. They didn't exist.

You know, Betamax just started coming around in the late 70s and video games, obviously. You already had this standard of hooking it up through the cable jack. So, yeah. So that's where the Channel F. and the studio too just sort of came in. Yeah, do you think that the, we're getting a little sidetracked here, but I'm actually kind of curious. Like, do you think the FCC's stringent restrictions

were an attempt to kind of interfere with this new form of enterprise, like for them to say we need to kind of impede its progress while we sort of take stock and see what it's going to be? Or do you think they were just bureaucratic? I think it was more bureaucracy. Like, I don't think they realized just how stringent they would need to be, because this was pretty new technology at the time, and they wanted to make sure it wasn't going to mess with people's, you know, CB radios or their televisions.

Yeah, CB radios. Those were all the rage in the 70s. Oh, we'll be talking about CB radios a little bit. Cool. I remember that era. Keep on trucking. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, let's start with the Channel F. You've put together some really great notes here, so I'm going to let you take the lead on the stands, and I will just kind of follow. Okay. So the Channel F, you know, as we stated, it came out November 176 from Fairchild, but it actually was developed initially by a tiny computer company out of Connecticut called LPEX. they saw an opportunity after the success of Pong and the Odyssey

well relative success of the Pong and Odyssey and they thought okay well micro processors are starting to come together at this time like the Intel 4004 and the 8,08 and they thought you know why don't we try putting together our own a video game prototype system and maybe we can't sell it ourselves but we maybe we can't partner with someone else who could produce it and publish it. And what was Fairchild before the Channel F? Like, what kind of company was this?

You know, I think most people have heard of Magnavox of RCA, but maybe not so much Fairchild. So Fairchild was a semiconductor company that was spun out of basically a camera company, like a photography camera sort of thing. But, you know, their semiconductor operation was based out of Silicon Valley like Atari. and so many other companies at the time. You know, and for them, I guess we'd be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but they saw the Channel F as an opportunity to sort of use and sell their own processor, the F8. But, you know, that's, again, that's getting ahead of ourselves a little bit.

The LPEX prototype actually ran on an Intel 8008, which, as you can guess, is a bit different from a Fairchild's microprocessor. But yes, so the Channel F prototype, it was originally called Project Raven, which is an acronym for Remote Access Video Entertainment. And it was sort of... The end doesn't stand for anything. It's just, they were just like,

why couldn't they call it rave? Right? Gosh. Missed opportunity. They could have gotten a younger crowd in. Right. It's our favor rave. But, yeah, so they had a,

a fellow named Wallace Kershner, who designed the hardware for this Raven prototype. And he hired Lawrence Haskell, who did the software. So he wrote a couple prototype games. And Kershner put together this basically table-sized prototype of just circuit boards and wires. So not really a marketable project? No, not at this point. In fact, the controllers, based on some old. depositions that Fairchild engineer Jerry Lawson gave and some court cases.

The controls were literally just a series of buttons laid out on a piece of metal. So someone asked him in the court case how effective it was to play. And he said it was really intuitive if you had three hands. So kind of reaching out to a very specific demographic with that one. Yeah. Yeah, you need to get those Venusians in to play your own. Raven. But, so they put this prototype together.

It was sort of a black and white display, and it had eight kilobits of RAM. What can you do in eight kilobits? Not too much. They made a shooting gallery game, a tick-tac-toe game, and a version of Pong that was called hockey, because it had goals. And that one's actually pretty interesting, because you can move the goalies independent. of your actual player, and your player can move all over the screen and angle itself. So they actually used all of these absurd numbers of buttons that they had on their control display.

And they designed the games to come on at eProms that were attached to circuit boards and plastic containers, so essentially a cartridge. And their idea was that you would be able to swap out the cartridges, so you could have sort of a razor and razor blades design. Yeah, and I think Jerry Lawson is credited as kind of the inventor of the interchangeable cartridge. I don't know if that's 100% true, but he definitely is regarded as, you know, kind of a pivotal figure in gaming because of that. Yeah, so he was a Fairchild's guy that they sent in to LPEX to see if this was worth picking up as a product because they knew Jerry Lawson had worked on an arcade machine at his garage at one point. and he was just interested in the field so he went out and checked it out thought it was an interesting prototype he thought it had potential as a product so he went back to his bosses at fairchild and said yeah let's go for it so they sign an agreement with alpex that interestingly would allow elpex to sell their own version of the channel f a few years after fairchild's like exclusions

exclusivity ran out. I think it was something like five years, which, as you can probably guess from history, did not come up. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think the Fair, the Channel F tech would have really held up well against KlicoVision and television. No, probably not, although it was still on the market, if you can believe it. But, so yeah, that was Lawson sort of helped them turn this giant prototype into a relatively small, commercial game system they hired or they didn't hire

he was already on staff they got Nicholas Tails 4 from Fairchild to design I think he did the cartridge or the controller is one of them your notes say

a stick that could move in eight directions yes that's the controller in either direction and pushed down and pulled up yes so yeah the the controller is interesting because it's kind of it's like a

almost like a Nintendo Wii Nunchuk In a sense Like it's kind of like a stick Like literally a stick And that's what you're holding on to It doesn't have If I'm remembering right

It doesn't have the base mounted on the bottom That like Atari did right Right So you're holding the stick And then there's the mushroom top And that's sort of your joystick portion You can move in eight directions But you can also push it down

Or pull it up And twist it at 45 degree angles Left and right so you got a shocking amount of movement out of this really a simple design so i assume like the the hockey game where you had the goalies who moved independently like that was done with maybe a twisting motion while moving around the field with your normal like your main players was done with the joystick function pretty close uh you pushed down and up on the stick like pushing it down and pulling it up to uh move the goalie up and

down. And you would use the twisting to actually angle your player. So you could get bank shots and whatnot really easily. That's clever and complex. Yeah. Which you don't really see in a lot of control schemes from this era. Yeah, it's surprisingly forward thinking. And perhaps there's a thing or two I think of lying in bed I shouldn't have said And yeah So Lawrence Haskell ended up converting some of his games over to the F8

From the 8008 So like the built-in hockey game on the Channel F, he worked on that Along with a programmer named Villis Moonshee There was the shooting gallery game got put onto a cartridge, as did the Tick-Tac-Tow. And he also wrote a doodle game, which basically just an etch-a-skech that also ended up on a cartridge because it was the 1970s, and I guess they thought anything would sell.

And they were probably right. Probably. To a certain degree. The Channel F itself, was that the first, sorry, was that the first video game console creativity application? Like in the style of Mario Paint or? I don't know, Minecraft. I think it might be at least something that's not on a computer anyway.

I mean, every other console before this was something closer to Tauri's like standalone Pong. There were no doodle consoles, doodle Pong? Not that I'm aware of. So, yeah, this was showed off at the June CES show in 1976. They made a big deal that this was a huge leap over all these, other systems that were on the market at the time, all the dedicated machines. The downside is that they got hung up by the FCC, so even though they hoped to start selling the machine in late August, early September, they ended up only getting approval

and starting to get it to market in late November. So close to Thanksgiving in the U.S. Just about. Lawson only estimated that they sold 15,000 units. that year. And that was all of them that they had produced. Okay. So, I mean, they sold what they had. They just didn't have enough. Right. So they kind of got screwed over on that case from the FCC. Is there any indication for what they did to conform to FCC rules?

Nothing that I found in the bits of paperwork that are still around. Okay. I think they just had to add more and more shielding and it drove up the price of the machine. and the weight and the weight and the shipping costs yes yeah so knockout effect yeah it's not a lightweight machine and if you want to try and disassemble one today it's just a nightmare because of all the shielding there's just tabs and screws and things you have to pull all apart and it's just a hot mess i can say that from personal experience so you know it came out it was reasonably successful for as much as they had produced anyway.

But, you know, Fairchild was kind of paranoid about overproducing this games machine because, you know, the general thinking at the time was video games are a fad, just like CB radio was a fad and digital watches and calculators. Pet rocks. Like all these electronics, you know, Fairchild made some of them, but a lot of companies were producing them and then they were taking a bath on them because the prices would just drop so precipitously and the interest would drop. So Fairchild was paranoid about making too many channel Fs and then not being able to sell

them. So even though they had something that was kind of redefining what video games were, like redefining the market, they were still afraid that the issues that play dedicated systems would affect them. Yeah. So that is exactly what happened. And, you know, they ended up, you know, if you look through old newspapers and product lines from 1977 and into 1978, you know, they talk a lot about the Fairchild as being one of the more advanced machines on the market. You know, it got a lot of visibility.

It's just you couldn't find the thing, even if you wanted to buy it. So their caution kind of undermined them. Yeah, completely. I mean, and also it's the Atari 2,600. came out and kind of ate its lunch. Yeah, I mean, that was a year later. And a year later, didn't the 2,600 sell something like 100,000 units in its first Christmas? So the latest figures I saw were an estimated 340,000.

340,000 units. Yeah. Despite the fact that it was like a, it was a serious exclusive, wasn't it? Or was that something else? Oh, that was the original Pong. Oh, okay, okay. That was in 75. Yeah, 75.

Okay. No, no, the 2,600. I mean, they sold it through Sears, but they also sold it through other retailers under their own name. And, yeah, they sold all they made. So basically, I think what we can see here is that Fairchild Conservatism really kind of, I think, scuttled their chances. Like, if they had launched Strong that first Christmas, they would have kind of had the market sewn up. They would have had the exclusive lock on, you know, interchangeable cartridge consoles. That's, they invent the space.

That's not nothing at the time. So, yeah, it's interesting to think what could have happened if they had taken a more aggressive approach. If they had said, you know what, let's do 100,000 of these. Let's do a quarter million. Let's see what happens. Yeah. And, you know, so they lost it in his depositions estimated. They sold, you know, less than 250,000 channel Fs in 77, which was all the ones they produced.

And then in 1978, they may, they sold less than 50,000, he estimated. which is a huge drop-off and a lot of that is just because Fairchild thought the market was just not really there and they just didn't have faith in themselves or their product. So it's not that people didn't want them, it's that they didn't make enough for the people who did want them. Yeah, and, you know, even the games, like Fairchild pioneered the idea of selling the cartridges year round because, well, the Channel F was so expensive to produce. You know, you have to make your money where you can. And you look at Atari in the first two years of its life, it's just backloaded all of its new games right around Christmas. And, you know, they wouldn't sell anything new until the next Christmas.

And that didn't change until Nolan Bushnell got ousted and Ray Kassar came in as the new head of the company. Because he saw what Fairchild had been doing because he was friends with some of the executives over there and just decided to rip them off. As friends often do. Oh, yeah. All right. about, I see you've got this broken down to the systems themselves, but it kind of seems like that covers both consoles. So maybe we should talk about the studio two. Yeah, we can head back to the studio two here. Okay. So yeah, let's talk about the studio two now. We've kind of laid down

the foundation of the channel F, but what about this other thing from a company people may have heard of? I mean, these connectors are called RCA connectors. They're a part of life. Yeah, RCA was huge through most of the 20th century. You know, they were a major. television manufacturer, major radio producer, they were involved in the computer space in the 60s. They had, again, a very litigious legal department that got them a lot of money from patents ensuing. So, but come 1970s, RCA was kind of in a rougher spot because their longtime, you know,

head of the company, David Sarnoff, had stepped down and passed away at his son. Dunn was running the place now, and he was not very effective. So in all of this is when you have RCA choosing to get out of the mainframe computer business entirely in 1971, which, as you can guess, was very concerning to the computer engineers they were employing at the time. Came as a complete shock to all of them. None of them had any idea this was coming. One of them, a man named Joe Weisbecker, he had designed his own personal computer in his basement using just off-the-shelf parts from Radio Shack and whatnot. And he saw this as something that had potential.

You know, he was very forward thinking. He was convinced that computers were going to be in the home and a part of everyday life, that you could do all sorts of neat stuff with him. so he wanted to turn this into a product eventually. So about what year was this? Because I know kit computing was kind of big in the mid-70s, and that's actually where Apple got its start. The Apple One was a kit. The people could buy, it was made out of wood,

and they would have to assemble it themselves. And that was 76, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so. This was around 1970, 71 when he built this. Okay, so this was, he was maybe one of the innovators in the space who helped make that happen in the first place. Yeah, he built this all out of a like TTL like transistor, transistor logic parts.

So this was nothing with microprocessors. He basically built his own, you know, box-sized processor. And he really wanted to do something with this. So we talked with some of his coworkers. This was before RCA left the computer space and he asked them for advice. And one told him, well, you know, wait for the right opportunity. You can pitch this as a microprocessor design. and they'd probably pick it up.

So when they got out of the mainframe computer space, Weisbecker had his opportunity, and he proposed that this be designed into a product that could be used for education, you could use it in industrial applications, and most important to him, you could use it for games. Because he was something of a game designer. Most of his games were not successful or good,

but he had a couple that were... When you say a game designer, you mean, like, board games, arcade games? Board games and, like, book games. Oh, so, like, fighting fantasy, that kind of thing? Sort of like... Like, my mental puzzles, I guess, using books, but they'd be all themed on computers

because he really wanted to teach people about computers and how cool they are. Okay. So kind of a missionary, almost, for technology, an evangelist. Yeah, you could say that. So, you know, he pitched this in late 71. I want to say it was around October. And they ended up going for it.

His group of people all thought that was a good idea. They went to their boss who signed off on it, provided they didn't tell his bosses what they were doing. Just never mentioned the word computer, because that was now a dirty word around the RCA labs. So they set to work on turning this prototype into something that you could use to play games and do other stuff

and they did some fun stuff with it someone had to develop sort of a hex keyboard for it because prior to that the only way you could do any inputs was just flicking a bunch of switches and I think it had eight switches so you could program eight bytes at a time really slow

yeah and throwing switches was how Space War was controlled right? You like flipped buttons, basically, or flipped switches? Yeah, it had little switches, and then eventually they built their own controllers because they were wearing out all the switches. I don't know that that was a huge issue with the Fred here. Oh, yeah, that's what he called his computer prototype. It was Fred for a flexible, recreational, and educational device.

How charming. Right? The little logo is even cute. It's got a little smiley face. It's, you feel for the man, just looking through some of this stuff. It sounds like he was really invested in this and really had a lot of thoughts about how to, you know, bringing computers and games to the masses. Yeah, he was a huge proponent of this stuff. Out of this Fred project, he eventually designed like a little hobbyist computer called the elf.

And he had instructions and how to build that that he wrote out and published in popular mechanics, I think, or popular electronics is one of them. you know, it still has a following. There are people who love the elf even today. But getting back to Fred, so, you know, they did all sorts of really interesting prototyping with this thing. On the hardware side, they built an adapter to be able to load programs and save them to tape. So you're not just stuck using punch cards. They developed, oh, they also developed a way to read them off of records, because RCA sold records

and they thought, hey, here's some synergy. Right. Not exactly, man, I feel like that would make a tape drive feel lightning fast by comparison. How would you even save to it?

I guess you'd have to buy your own like wax cylinder cutter or something. Yeah, team up with Edison. I mean, you know, I guess that would be the same space as like CD-ROMs where it's read-only, you're not meant to save to it. Yeah, pretty much.

They also developed a light gun, which is really interesting because, you know, the original Odyssey had a light gun, but it was just looking for a light source. So you could just cheat it and point it to a light bulb. This one, they worked a way to defeat that, and it would look for a specific, like, flashing frequency on the screen for the target. And if it doesn't find that, then the light gun wouldn't register a hit. So it's really cool, like some of the stuff they ended up doing with this. thing. So it's kind of like how Nintendo's

a light gun, there has to be like a black frame and then the light source and then a black frame for it to say, oh, right, that's a code. Yeah, something similar. So, as far as I know, they're the first company that did anything of that sort with a light gun. I don't think

they ever went anywhere with it, but apparently they had a prototype. And Leisbecker had some other ideas. Like, I found the script to a old Fred demo. Or he was talking about how you could use it to connect to your phone line and you could get sports scores or look up the prices of things or order them.

Check your stocks. Yeah, check your stocks. You could order items online and have them shipped right to you. Wow. So he invented Amazon.com. Pretty much, yeah. He invented Dash button. So, you know, this went on for a couple of years.

They developed a bunch of games for it. There was a bowling game, which is also pretty neat because we found one of the demo tapes for all of these games. I think there ended up being some 136 tapes or so that turned up in these two archives. And they've all been preserved and dumped and you can actually mess with the ROMs now.

But so this bowling game, they also had a bunch of bowling sound effects. Like someone went to an alley and just recorded audio of people playing 10 frames of bowling. So when you're playing the game, it would, as soon as you're throw the ball, it would link up with

the audio, and it would play the sound of someone throwing a ball. How was the audio saved? It was just on the tape. Oh, okay, on the tape. Got it. Got it. Yeah. So, you know, first you have the data to load up the game on the tape, and then it would have all this audio track of bowling sounds. And they did

this for a couple other games, too. Like, I think the sort of a racing maze type game, and I'm pretty sure that also had audio cues to it. There was a slot machine game that was written by Joe's daughter, Joyce, who went down. Did he really name his daughter after himself? Joyce?

Yeah. I mean, his wife's name was Gene, so I think they just had a trend. Okay. But she actually ended up being the first woman to write commercial video game software. So she's a pioneer in her own right. She only worked on stuff for the studio, too, before she went on to. a career in other realms, but she still got

in there first, I suppose. But she liked messing around with his prototypes at home, so he'd bring them back with him, and she would try her hand at programming, and she put together a little slot machine game while she was in high school. So ultimately, uh, they

started developing this into a couple of microprocessors. The first rendition of this was the 1801, which was two chips, didn't really get too much traction, but RCA used it for one really interesting project. They tried turning Fred into an arcade machine. Yeah, this sounds really interesting.

I had never heard of this. I love how every time you think you discover the origin of something in video games, it turns out there's something that predates it. Because, you know, a few years back, I did research and was writing about how Nintendo's their versus arcade system, like the plug and play kind of replaceable arcade component system, you know, kind of predated the NeoGeo, but that was predated by Data East's Deco system. But then it turns out there's also S&K's Micom system, and now there's this. Yeah, so they called it Fredotronic.

That's so 70s. It is super 70s. So this was a microprocessor-based arcade platform. So the idea was that you would have the arcade board, which is the 1801 CPU, and all the other, you know, RAM and whatnot. And then you would have a plug-in board, you know, essentially like a cartridge sort of thing. That's how it was described in an old oral history with one of the designers, a Billy Joe call. And you would just plug that on, and that cartridge would have a different game on it. So once a game stopped making money, you could just swap it out and be cheaper.

than replacing the whole machine. And at the time, there weren't really any microprocessor-based arcade machines, period. You know, the first ones didn't pop up until that November of 1975. And that was Midway's gunfight and Murko's PT-109. So this was sort of on the cusp of that. And had this actually got turned into a full commercial product, it probably would have beaten them to an actual market. place. But they got a little unlucky with this.

So they produced six arcade cabinets, and we know of five games that they produced because we found the ROMs on those data tapes. And those were swords, which is a sword fighting game, which apparently Joe Weisbecker wrote because his daughter was really into fencing. There was a bowling game because there's just a billion bowling games. There's always a bowling game. That I think this is the first commercial bowl. game. So go, Joe.

There was a chase, which, I mean, it's a tag game. That's what it is. Mines, which is really interesting. It's sort of an early take on surround, like the Atari game. Serpent. Yeah, or the light cycles on Tron. Oh, yes, that one.

Yeah. So it's that kind of game. Like you're laying down mines behind you when you want to get the other person to run into them. And then the last game that we found was, was a scramble split second, which is sort of a reaction-based game. It would pop up a symbol on screen, and you have to, like, push the buttons to match it before your opponent. And, yeah, there's nothing super exciting, but for 1975, they're all pretty interesting. So they decided to put these out for location tests.

Two of them went to the Bucks County Mall in Pennsylvania, right near Philadelphia. There was an arcade there called The Cave. Two of them went to an arcade in southern New Jersey. We're not really sure where. And the last two, they kept at the RCA Sarnoff Labs for the internal staff to sort of test with. Well, when they went to check on the machines in the outside locations, like a week or two later, they found they were just unplugged. The arcade operators claimed it was because, you know, they said, voltage on them inside.

And, well, the internal thinking was that maybe the mob was involved with the arcades in that area. And this was a machine that wasn't getting them any money, so they weren't going to let the arcade operators keep it going. So these all ended up just being brought back in-house, and they sat around in the Sarnoff Labs for staff to play for years and years. And no one's really sure where any of these have ended up. Um, the least one of them still existed up until the early 90s, but I don't appear to still be around in any of the archives that have the rest of this prototype gear. So who knows? Hey, Benito. I've been reading the Bible lately, and nobody ever told me how many talking dogs in wizard battles were in this thing. Well, Chris, you know what I always say. If you can understand Star Wars, you can understand the Bible. Apocrypal's, part of the Greenlit podcast network.

Come on in, what can I get you? Sure I've heard of Hair of the Dogcast. They're that podcast about video games and beer. From the latest gaming headlines to diving deep into the games of yesterday to sampling and reviewing craft beer from all over the world, Hair of the Dogcast is here for the gamer and beer lover in all of us. Available weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hey, do you enjoy your commute but want to make it a little worse?

It's real dumb. We hate ourselves. Hey guys, you ever like something? Well, you won't in this case. Men Like That, a podcast. So this has all been kind of a A little bit of a sidebar to the main topic, actually. Like, we're not really talking about the studio two yet.

So how does Fredotronic lead in to the studio two? So the Fredotronic did not go into production other than the six units they built. But the people who worked on them, like Joe Weisbecker and a couple of other engineers, they thought, you know, we could turn this technology into a home console, especially now that a single chip microprocessor, the 1802, had gotten developed, you know, in the interim period. So in early 1976, they started turning their arcade machine into a home console. They hired some programming staff.

They contracted Joyce Weisbecker to write a couple of game software titles. And, you know, they also got hung up by the FCC. they wanted to get it out for that Christmas season like you noted at the top of the show. Seems to happen a lot. Yep. Happens a lot with these early machines.

I mean, look at how the Intellivision got delayed by, what, a year and a half? Or how badly the Bally Professional Arcade got botched coming out to market. It was a constant issue up until like 79 or so. So, they finally did get the Channel F out, or not the Channel F. I'm getting mixed up.

Studio 2. Yes, they finally got the Studio 2 out. What was the Studio 1? It's got to be asked. I wish I knew. Apparently, the marketing department came up with the name, and I haven't been able to track down anybody who was involved there. That's still alive. Was this kind of like a Leonard Part 6 thing? Like, we'll just pretend there were others and it seems more advanced this way. You know, Microsoft did that with Xbox Xbox 360 because PlayStation was already up to PlayStation 3, and they were like, well, if we're Xbox 2,

their PlayStation 3, they seem more advanced than us. We can't do that. Yeah, they should have gone with split Xbox 720. They could add a tie into the Atari game. Exactly. Yeah, missed opportunities. But yeah, so it was called the Studio 2 for some reason, unknown to all. And it's got a really weird design. Like, you've ever physically seen this thing. It doesn't have separate controllers. Instead, it has two keypads. built into the system. And those are your controls. It has one cable that comes out of the system, and that's your RF cable, which plugs into a switchbox.

And that's also where your power supply plugs in. And to turn the thing on and off, you just switch the switchbox to game mode. So that was something that apparently they weren't sure the FCC was going to clear, but they ended up getting it through. So you said it was a switchbox. Because, I mean, it was powered through that as well as connecting to the television? Yes. So you couldn't plug the studio to directly do an outlet. You had to plug the power supply into the switchbox, and the RF cable would run that power back up into the machine.

That's so weird. It's a weird design. Sort of like the Atari 5200, but a lot more 70s. Hmm. And the system, it was black and white, which was a problem because the Channel F came out with color. Apparently, the black and white thing was one of Joe Weisbecker's things that he preferred. His thinking was that, well, you don't need color to make a good video game, so we don't need color here. Well, you know, once the Channel F came along and they kind of realized, oh, we actually do need color,

and we also need, like, breakout controllers. So they started developing a Studio 3 that would incorporate these features. didn't really work out quite how they wanted. Oh, and the other big issue the Studio 2 faced was that RCA's Consumer Division passed on the product. They didn't think video games were also anything more than a fad, so they didn't want to spend their time and energy. Okay.

So it ended up getting dumped off in the special products division, which is like the group that made TV antennas and little accessories like that that you might want for your equipment. that you already bought. So they had, you know, crumbier distribution. They had less of a budget. And I think it really suffered for that. I mean, I don't know that it would have done all that well anyway, but it certainly did not do well.

I mean, I guess we can talk a little bit about the hardware aspects of the machines. So they both had built in speakers rather than putting the sound through the television. so it had a built-in controller and built-in the speakers so the TV was just kind of there TV was just there for the video Okay So the Channel F had I mean it could actually make sound effects

They're painful to listen to but it tries Studio 2 Are we talking like PC speaker or sound effects here? But a lot crumbier Like lower fidelity Yeah The Studio 2 just has a beeper so it'll beep at you

in a couple different tones real impressive hardware there and then anyone tried to do jingles with that or were they sensible enough to say let's not try to make music out of this well so there are a couple

of games that were programmed for the studio three which did have like an actual audio chip that came through the speaker but they're all backwards compatible with the studio too. And if you play them on the studio two, it just beeps. So you lose all of your little jingles. You might try to listen to, you know, this tune from Bingo, but really you'll just get

just a bunch of beeps. Okay. Yeah. So what was good about these systems? I mean, it sounds like they're very limited and primitive. Is it just the fact that there wasn't anything like them at the time? Yeah. Or do they have, you know, merits that, that, you know, stand up now. If you go back and play these games, you're like, oh, yeah, I can see the joy here. So they're both really products of their time, which is to say if you think that video games from the late 1970s are pretty cool, you'd probably enjoy them. There's a few that I think hold up pretty well now, mostly on the Channel F. There's a game called Dodge It for the Channel

F, where you're stuck in an arena and parts of the wall will just start coming loose and bouncing around and you just have to try and avoid them for as long as you can. It gets pretty hectic. It's a neat little game. And there's also a video whizball, which is this really bizarre game. I don't know how, I don't think there's much of anything like it. Yeah, the name doesn't really explain itself. So if you've ever played the indie game video ball, it's very similar to the game.

that. Okay. So the idea is that each player has a little character on either end. I think in the game design documents, you're a wizard and you're shooting bolts at a boulders. You're trying to get these boulders in through the other person's goal. And it's sort of got like a momentum base to it. Like you shoot these rocks and the more times you shoot them, the more momentum they get built up and the opponent will have to shoot them, you know, however many times to get them to. change direction or angle. So it's actually a really neat little game and a lot more complex than you'd expect for a channel F.

And actually the channel F, including that game, has some of the first Easter eggs in its games. Oh, yeah? Like what? So there's a one in the demo cart that was written by a... Oh, I thought you misspelled Democrat here. Okay, demo cart is one. Okay, sorry, go ahead. Yes, so the demo card, which, you know, you have and displays at, you know, the stores trying to sell these things.

The guy who wrote it snuck his name in there, Michael Glass. He also snuck his name into an early dog fighting game that had actually a pretty decent computer opponent called Spitfire. He apparently wrote the arcade version of the game the previous year and then the game, the company that published it went under. so he just went to Fairchild and wrote the game all over again and he snuck his name into that that Easter egg just got found like a week ago. Really?

Yeah. Who found it? Like how do you find an Easter egg in a Channel F game? Like who's out there or Studio 2? Who's out there looking for these things? He, I think it was a he. I don't know. Someone on a forum, but they went digging into the game's code

and they noticed that he had his name written into it. And then there was just a series of like random inputs, and they figured out the sequence of inputs. You actually just use the buttons on the game system that you used to pause the game or pick which game type you're going to use and that sort of thing. It doesn't seem to work on actual retail cartridges because they were designed differently from the programming cart, but, you know, it runs on emulator, it runs on

the multi-cart that you can get for Channel F. So as far as I'm aware, that is the first Easter egg. Anyone snuck into a video game program commercially? And then his other fellow Brad Reed Selt, he snuck his name into video whizball. Okay. So, yeah, you know, you hear the claim that Warren Robinette was the first to put his name in a game in an Easter egg. And then you'll often see a footnote that says that's not true, but people don't ever really explain it. So now I've had it explained.

Yeah. Who did that first? Yeah, Michael Glass. Who apparently passed away in 2005, so we'll probably never find out what drove him to do that, but. A desire to get credit for his work? Yeah, that makes sense to me. The Spitfire one's really funny because breaking down the code, apparently his Easter egg accounts for something like a third of the space on the cartridge. It's like he just really wanted to make it.

sure it was in there. So those are some of the interesting things on the Channel F. It's got a neat little Space Invaders clone. It's got a breakout clone that actually lets you do two-player versus where like one person is trying to stop

the ball from hitting the wall. You know, they did some interesting game programs on the system. I mean, it's playing it. It's not as smooth as Atari 2,600. like there's a little bit of a stutter to it

just from the technology they used to draw the screen, but, you know, it's a decent little machine. And then the Studio 2, I mean, a lot of the games for that are hard to recommend today. A couple of them are kind of fun. You know, systems not really built for action games, as you can probably guess, from having two keypads for your controls. Right.

But I remember I brought it to Magfest this past January, and did like a little demonstration in the museum space and people really enjoying like the Speedway game that Joyce Weisbecker wrote or some of the homebrew games people have developed. There's pretty good renditions of Pac-Man on both of these machines now. So, you know, there's a Star Wars game that only came out in Europe for this goofy machine.

Like an officially licensed game? No, but it's called Star Wars. And the manual directly says that this is based on the movie. So, you know. So not licensed, but it is actually an official, like, a game that was released to retail, not home. It was a game that RCA wrote, a fellow who wrote it was a Hoytsen Wanderwall. And it was not published by them because, you know, the market went under for the studio two by the time it was ready. But it got published overseas as Star Wars.

also overseas they published a pinball game which is one of the earliest renditions of a video game pinball it's actually pretty good and it has decent physics so you know it was a first for a couple different things like it had a really early baseball game and had a early bowling game

and these are decent games they're not they're hard to go back to but they're all right and there's some like puzzle games was the uh the pinball game was that like proper pinball, because a lot of video pinball games around this time were things like Namco's Gibi, or Gibi, how do you pronounce it, where it's kind of pinball in that you have like a paddle, but it's more like breakout where you're trying to break bricks.

And I've actually, you know, doesn't work with older pinball games and tried to trace the history before Nintendo's pinball in 1984, like what existed out there, 83 maybe. and it's been hard to find games that actually simulated pinball before 1983. So I'm curious, does this actually try to be like a table of pinball as opposed to here is a breakout game where you have flippers? Yeah, it is straight up a rendition of pinball. You know, it's got the flippers. It's got a button you can push to tilt them, or not tilt, but like nudge the machine. Functionally, it just reverses the direction of the ball.

But you have your little targets. you have ways to build up your score. So it's actually a version of pinball. Well, that's good to know. Yeah, when I talked to the guy who programmed it, he programmed most of the games on the studio two, and he said that was the one he was the most proud of because he got the physics just how he wanted them.

So it looks here like the So it looks here like the Channel F stuck around for six years and had a total of 26 cards officially released for it, whereas the Studio 2 basically got 14 games, four of which were not released in America over the course of two years. Yeah, that's about right. So the writing on the wall was, the writing was there on the wall pretty quickly for the studio too. Like, they launched it and realized, nope. And even though Fairchild was like, ah, video games or who knows if these are going to be around very long, like they still stuck it out for a while. Uh, sort of.

So Fairchild, uh, they ran into some difficulties in 1979, ended up liquidating their whole video game operation to Zircon, which is still around. They make those stud finders. Uh, and in fact, if you go on their website, they even mentioned that they had the, a role in the video game market back in the day. So they ended up selling, uh, the channel F from what, 1979 through 1982 or so. Um, It was not a huge moneymaker, but they still put out, I think, six more games for it that, you know, Fairchild didn't publish.

Most of them were just Fairchild games that they just sat on and put out later. But Alien Invasion was the one that was written by Brad Reed South. It's a Space Invaders clone that, I guess, Zircon commissioned him to do because Space Invaders was a huge hit for Atari, and why not get in on that? it was not a huge hit for Zircon but what year did that come out like 8081 I think that one was 82 oh man by yeah by then like space invaders was dead yeah it was old news but you know they still

paid him to do it uh apparently he ended up spending more money than he ended up making on it so that was his last role in the video game industry that's rough yeah uh so with the studio two uh even up to the end of 77, they, if you look through their internal documents, they're really positive on this machine. They think that they're going to just sell a number of them and they're going to have a foothold in this new market and they're going to expand this out. You know, we talked about how they have had designs on a Studio 3 that had color and separate controllers that did get finished, the development of that.

As I mentioned, RCA never sold it themselves. What happened was that come February 1978, they took stock of how the machine sold the Studio 2. And based on their returned, you know, customer cards, they sold roughly 53,000 to 64,000 of these things. having produced about 200,000. Yeah. So that was about the time that they thought, okay, you know what? Video games are not for us.

Joe Wisebecker was not happy. He thought that they did a real bad job marketing this machine. Because, again, he thought it would really have the strength in puzzle games, like number guessing and educational programs and that sort of thing. But, you know, he was overruled. The Studio 3, they just halted work on that. They ended up licensing out the technology in all the games to a company out of Hong Kong named Connick. And Connick published it in Europe and Asia.

I've heard of Connick because they almost produced the Super System, which was going to be crazy. I don't even remember the details on the Connick Super System, but it was... I've never even heard of the Connick Super System. I'm thinking the same company, right? K-O-N-I-K. This one was C-O-N-I-C. Oh. This one was basically like a stereo equipment developer or producer. I don't know if that's the same Connick you're thinking of,

and maybe they just have their name localized differently. Sorry, it was Connix. Connix multi-system. Never mind. Totally unrelated, similar names. But ships passing in the night or something. Okay. My bad.

Oh, well. I mean, the point is the Studio 3 did get out there after a fashion. I don't have any idea how well it's sold in any of these locales. Finding information on when it was published, and for how long that's a lot more difficult because I can't speak European languages or read them. You know English. Okay, I know English, but the rest are, yeah. Yeah, the British press is not forthcoming on details for their version of this Studio 3 machine.

No, it wasn't locally made, and the UK really got into UK-made computers. Oh, yeah. And actually, RCA was working on a Studio 4 machine, which was going to be sort of a computer. Let me guess. The market crashed, and they said no. After they canceled the Studio 2, all work stopped on the Studio 4. It actually has been emulated because some of the surviving documents were the designs for the system and a test program that just sort of through a color demo.

So those are the last remnants of the Studio 4 that have been preserved online. And, you know, all of this RCA stuff, there's an emulator called Emma 02, and that runs all these versions of Fred. It runs the arcade machine, the Studio 2, 3 and 4, a bunch of computers that are based off of the 1802. So if you're interested in any of these things, you know, give that a look. And actually, if you're on the Eastern Seaboard, you can see some of the prototypes at the College of New Jersey in the Sarnoff collection. And RCA's documents, they're all at the Hagueley Library and Museum in Delaware, where I've been spending my time digging through old papers.

It's great that this stuff is, you know, archived, some of it in places. Being able to do that firsthand research is really valuable. Like, I don't really get to do that very much. So it's kind of, you know, if I get to talk to a developer, then I get some new, information. Otherwise, I'm just kind of going on what other people have dug up. Yeah. I'm glad you're digging this stuff up. Yeah, I mean, for the studio too,

I mean, that stuff is practically a requirement. I mean, there's a few people that are still alive that were involved with it, but it's really hard tracking them down and, let alone getting them to talk. Well, I know Jerry Lawson passed away like 15 years ago.

It's been quite a while. Yeah, and his papers all went to the strong Museum of Play, which is where I was able to pull a lot of this information from Fairchild from. And the rest of it, you know, it's just coming from going to research libraries, like the Library of Congress or ones at universities and digging through their old periodicals to see what people were saying about these companies at the time. And, of course, you know, Ben Jedd's words, he's done interviews with some former

Fairchild folks and LPEC folks. So he's been doing good work there, too. so slowly but surely we're piecing together as much together of these old machines as we can find that's good this is foundational information exactly without this stuff games as we know them now would they'd exist but they'd be different it'd be a different industry yeah uh and the studio two itself once uh fairchild got out they just liquidated all of this to radio shack uh radio shack ended up selling them through 78 and I think 79. Joe Weisbecker actually wrote up a guide on how to build your own programming cartridge for the machine

because he thought maybe, you know, teachers could buy these things for pennies on the dollar and teach kids out of program with them. I don't know how many actually did that, but it's nice that he put that information out there. And, you know, it just sort of drifted off into that good news. night. After that, he himself continued pushing the 1802-based computer that RCA was selling, the VIP, up until they decided to drop that unceremoniously in 1980. He argued very vehemently against it, but again, was overruled.

He retired a couple years later. Apparently, he was really into video games until he passed away in the early 90s. So he's apparently a big fan of Legend of Zelda. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It's a good game. Yeah. I like it.

Fits his sort of puzzle leanings, I guess. Yeah, I can see that. Although, you know, it's got all this color. I don't know. And action. So to kind of wind up, like, what's the legacy of these systems? I mean, we talked a little bit about it, but, you know, it's one thing to say, like, without these video games, we never would have existed.

But what does that actually mean? So I think they're good examples of how things, could have gone differently for Atari if Atari hadn't been so focused on getting this $2,600 market and making sure it succeeded, because, you know, you had Fairchild, which was way too conservative and way too worried about losing money. And you had RCA, which never had the sort of backing it needed to really get out there and the, to the degree that it probably could have. again, I don't know that it would have succeeded in the marketplace, but it probably would have sold more units than it did.

And, you know, Atari, they, yeah, they overproduced their systems in 1978, like, they made something like 800,000, 2600s, and only 550 or so got actually picked up by stores. Because in 78, the stores were also sort of trying to get away from video games because they thought they were fads. they were moving more towards like handheld games and board games that used microprocessors. Right. But I mean,

they moved all those units, right? Like the stores sold through what they picked up. They still sold through. I mean, it ended up with Nolan Bushnell getting the boot, but,

you know, Atari still hung on. They kept selling their stuff and they ended up being the biggest player of the pre-NES US market. And you can't really say that about these other two.

They just didn't have the sort of support. No. I mean, RCA, you know, they're one of those companies. Kind of like, I feel like Sony, you know, if they didn't have gaming or Microsoft actually would be a better comparison. If they didn't have their video games division, they'd be fine. Actually, Microsoft would probably be better off without their games division at this point. But, yeah, like RCA, I'm sure, kept on trucking.

But it does seem like it was a big blow for Fairchild, because, again, you never hear about them anymore. Yeah, Fairchild went under pretty shortly afterwards. I found some old documentation and some old periodicals talking about how they were dropping out of all these different markets in like 1979. And they were going to focus all of their efforts on their video game division. And as you can see, they sold that off pretty shortly afterwards. And I'm pretty sure that was the end of Fairchild Semiconductor. RCA, they held on until about 1986. they took a huge bath on this video disc project that they were trying to work on

where you basically had records that played movies and yeah they sunk a ton of money into it when they discontinued that around 82, 83 their stock just... Yeah, it was an attempt to do laser discs before laser discs and I just don't know that vinyl was really made for video. Yeah, I mean, it was a good idea. It's just that then VHS tapes and Betamax came along and did everything they did better. And also didn't weigh like 10 pounds each.

So, you know, things went down pretty poorly for RCA eventually, but that wasn't really related to their video game division. You know, that was probably more of a blip for them than anything. As much as, you know, Joe Weisbecker might consider that to be a personal affront. I mean, they just didn't put. enough into it to really stick around long enough. Yeah. It seemed like well-intended ideas, but, you know, other people had ideas around the same time

that eclipse them. Yeah. And that's sometimes just how it goes. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you're there too early for the market, which I think you mentioned in your talk earlier today. And that's definitely the case for, you know, Joe Wisebecker's work with the Studio 2. Yes, to a lesser extent, the Channel F.

I mean, they were doing the best they could with 1976 technology. Right. Yeah, but, you know, I think if anyone ever comes across a Channel F or Studio 2, they should definitely check it out just to get a sense of what were things like before the 2600. I think everyone is pretty familiar with Atari 2,600 at this point. Like, if you're not, pick up Atari flashback on any console or Steam that is available right now. Like, you can play 150 games. Yeah.

And you'll get a good sense of what the Atari was like. But, you know, there's stuff that happened before that, and that's a lot harder to come by. So, yeah, information like this is really valuable. So again, Kevin, I'm really glad you're digging up this info. And hopefully this podcast is not the only place that info is going to live. Yeah, I mean, eventually I would like to put together this RCA stuff into a book. We'll see if I can get those last few interviews I just desperately want for it. But you also are working on a video series.

So why don't you tell us where we can find your work online and, you know, where people can follow you, stock you, support you on Patreon, et cetera. Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at UberSaurus. That's U-B-E-R-S-A-U-S. I'm on YouTube under the title of Atari Archive. It's sort of a

chronological look at the Atari 2,600 library, plus some excursions every so often into these other lesser-known consoles. And I have a Patreon for that too, Patreon.com slash Atari archive. All right. And as for myself, you can find me at Retronauts. Retronauts.com. Retronauts is on

iTunes and other podcasting services. So you can look it up there. Remember, that's R-E-T-R-O-N-A-U-T-S, not N-U-G-H-T-S. Don't get it wrong. And you can, of course, support Retronauts on Patreon by going to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you subscribe to us for $3 a month, you get a week early with a higher bit rate quality and no advertisements, and that's cool. So please do consider that. And if not, you can still listen to the show for free. We'll keep making it. You'll keep listening.

It'll be awesome. And until then, until next time, until whenever, I'm Jeremy Parrish. This has been Retronauts episode, whatever. We don't number them in advance. Sorry about that. Thanks again, Kevin. This has been great info. And we will be back soon with another episode, mini episodes.

It was a name from all day from all, when they told us the name from all, when they told his sweet. you know And as I came to you, you smiled at me I could he say no Hi, everyone, welcome to an episode of Retronauts starring your good friend, your good buddy, your guy who can't form sentences, even though he hasn't even started drinking yet.

Okay.