Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 296: Trackball Games & The Art of Atari

Episode Date: May 4, 2020

Jeremy Parish, Bob Neal, and Benj Edwards sneak in a conversation about trackball games in a hidden cranny of PAX East, and Tim Lapetino talks about his work chronicling the artwork of the Atari 2600 for print.

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 jokes just right themselves. Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this is an impromptu, well, I say impromptu, but not really, because I spent the morning writing notes, but it is a guerrilla retronauts episode at Pax East, and I'm here with my future panelists. It sounds so formal. Introduce yourselves, guys.

I'm Benj Edwards. And who are you? I am a freelance journalist. Well, I was a freelancer. I just got fired at how-to geek as a staff writer, but I'm a game historian, and I run vintagecomcom. And I am Bob, the founder of Retro-RGB,

which is a website that teaches people how to use old consoles on new equipment, and there's news and guides and all that fun stuff. And I'm Jeremy Parrish. You've probably heard me before on this show, so I don't need to introduce myself again because I'd be boring. But what won't be boring is our discussion this week, which is trackball games. And I'm sure our resident comedian is going to make a lot of jokes about balls.

We've been through this before. So you can look forward to that. But in the meantime, we're also going to have a very meaningful discourse about the history behind trackball games because it's something we haven't really talked about. And the trackball genre, if you can call it that, kind of touches on some interesting and historically important games. Like, there's nothing really unifying any of these games, honestly, aside from the fact that they all use a trackball as an interface.

But why don't we begin by actually defining what the heck a track ball actually is? All right, so a track ball is an interface that involves a ball and a track. Very good. What kind of track are we talking about here? Yeah, I think it was tracking missiles originally, honestly. missile tracks and missile defense type things. That's why they're invented in the 40s or 50s or something. I didn't realize the technology went back that far.

Yeah. There was one, I don't know the specifics about it, but I know they were invented as an interface for early analog computers to, for sort of missile defense purposes where you could, or maybe airline tracking purposes where you could move a cursor on a screen easily with the ball. So I think you were tracking the trajectory of an airplane or a plane. missile or something. I think that's where the track comes from. Interesting. No, that's great.

I admit that I did not do any research into the origins of the track ball because I wanted to be surprised by the knowledge that you brought to the show. Oh, you're lucky I actually knew that. It was really, it was a good, very fortunate. But no, I always assumed they were called trackballs

because there is a sensor, an optical sensor or a physical sensor inside the mechanism that tracks the motion of the ball, but I guess that's not the case. Yeah, it could. I mean, it could be both like one of those things where they you know it became don't don't don't don't second guess yourself just say yes confidently even if it's wrong even if it's wrong that's the podcasting way well there's a lot of things where like a term will become back defined whatever the term

you know like redefined to mean something else later you know retconned yeah retcon so yeah track balls were retconned probably but yeah i mean you are tracking the ball as it moves usually with the two axes, you know, like an X and a Y, like a wheel on the X and a wheel on the Y, and as you move the ball, it keeps track of, you combine those coordinates to make a position in two-dimensional space. Right. It basically uses the motion of a ball to define the location of a cursor or something on screen.

And what happens when you turn a track ball upside down? What do you get? You get Douglas Engelbart's Amazing Adventure, The Mouse. Say it louder. for those in the back row. The old school of computer mouse. Yes. People listening might not remember that a mouse used to have essentially a job role.

Oh, right. Yeah. I don't even use mice these days. I'm a laptop track pad user. Oh, I can't. I can't switch over to my head. I can't go back to mice and not at this point. But yeah, like back in the olden days, you'd have to clean the mouse ball

because it would get filthy with all the caked on gunk from your hand on the track pad or the mouse pad and you'd have to. like take cotton squabs squabs and cotton squibs the rollers would get gunked up one of the coolest accessories Nintendo ever made was the official Nintendo mouse cleaner device like the I didn't realize they did that the super NES mouse came with a little cleaner a little white

kind of pick like thing to clean the tracking I did not know that. It's like a dental pick but for a mouse yeah the Nintendo pick I'll have to look one of those up I've got the super Famicom mouse that comes with Mario and Mario, just because it's like, wow, that didn't come to the U.S., that's neat. But I've never really used it that much, and certainly not enough for it to get gunky.

Do you never played Mario Paint? I've played it, but I don't have it. You don't have it. I don't have the Mario Paint set. I got Mario Paint back when it was kind of new, and so I loved that mouse. I thought it was so cool. In a sense, Mario Paint is a kind of trackball game, but it's an upside-down trackball game.

And so, therefore, it does not count for the purposes of this discussion. We were looking at arcade games, basically, that have trackballs mounted into the arcade console. And that's something that you actually still find these days because one of the biggest and most enduring game series in the world, Golden T Golf, is based around trackball and really gets into the sort of accessibility and physicality that makes trackball so appealing. And whoever the developer is, I can't remember their name, they really just leaned into that and they found kind of a goldmine, a golden tea gold mine. if it were, as it were. So, yeah, that's a great game. I guess we'll get to that as we walk through the history. We will.

But Bobby, you made a mention of some consoles and computers that have had trackballs as accessories. Yeah, so I didn't actually realize this back when it was released, but the Sega Master System had a sports pad, which was essentially a trackball with the two Sega Master System buttons. That was released in 1987, and it only worked with... three games, hockey, football, and soccer. To be honest, I don't think I've ever actually played those games because they generally weren't very good.

Right. But that controller can be switched out of trackball mode, or at least the U.S. version of the controller, not Japanese, and you can use that with other stuff. So I did recently try that with Marble Madness on the Genesis, and I thought it was pretty, it worked pretty cool. Really? That's actually very cool. Yeah, so it simulates a directional pad in a different mode?

Correct. So at that point, it's essentially, like pressing left right or down a whole bunch of times and you just have to keep spinning to do it. But it works for a game like Marble Madness that was originally released trackball. Yeah, you don't, you don't historically see a lot of trackball controllers for consoles and not a lot of games specifically for consoles designed around trackballs. And the master systems, very limited library of trackball games, kind of gets to what the majority of arcade trackball games were about, like you will overwhelmingly see sports games based around trackball

controls. I know of, I know the Famicom, somebody made a trackball controller for it. I don't know if it's just simulated at the pad or if it actually had analog proportional control, as they call it, but there's none for the NES in America that I know of, and, but, you know, I have one for the Atari 800 and one for the, there's one for the clique. One for the Atari 5200 that's as large as the console. Of course. Why not?

You can tell the future in it. Your future's bad. You bought a CalicoVision, sorry. Yeah, that's, I was going to say that, you know, the, I think probably the most successful home computer or, like, home version of a trackball for gaming purposes came from Atari. And it makes sense because they were really sort of the dominant force. in trackball and gaming in the arcades. So it kind of fits. They didn't make one for the 2,600,

but they did make one for their 8-bit computers, the 800 and 400. And I think you can use that on the 7,800, based on some stuff I read, although there aren't really that many games, if any, that use it. Yeah, there's one of those things that has different modes. So there is a mode on it where you can use it like a directional pad. And I think even on the 800,

there's only one or two games that actually support the proportional control. One is Centipede, a version of Centipede, and one is Missile Command, I think. Which makes sense, because those were their two biggest games. Yeah, it's disappointing, though, that more games don't actually support the actual proportionality of it. But, you know, we just ran the Weird Controller's episode for Retronauts patrons. If you subscribe for $5 a month or more, you can listen to that. But we talked about the Arkenoid Vouse controller, and, you know, that was a really cool controller that was used for exactly one game. Two in Japan.

You can also play Arkenoite 2, which didn't come to the U.S. and that's it. So, you know, there's... That changes the complete experience of the game. So for stuff that's designed for things like that, it really makes it total different and the human experience of it, you know, because you've got to think of a controller

as an extension of yourself into the game. So it completely changes the way some of the games are approached and everything. Yeah, I mean, I am not really a big fan of the arcade one-up cabinets, but I bought the one that they made that had like 12 Atari games in it with a trackball and a rotary dial.

The rotary dial is really bad, but the trackball is okay, and it's just like there aren't a lot of ways to play those games. You know, Crystal Castles and Missile Command and Centipede and Millipede with a proper trackball controller. So, you know, that does give the arcade one-up cabinet some value, just because it's such a rare experience to be able to have that arcade experience at home. Yeah, it makes it way more fun to actually be able to play that. And, who are they, Replicade, also made like a 12-inch, I think, yeah, 12-inch-tall centipede cabinet, which has a very tiny trackball. But that also works? It does, yeah.

It's pretty decent. But otherwise, you have to play Centipede with a D-pad or, you know, analog stick. And it's just not the same. You know, you can get the Atari classics collection, I think, for most modern consoles. And it has analog support, but, you know, an analog stick is still not a track. trackball. Yeah, it's not the same. It's just not the same. Right. And so that's what we really want to talk about this episode is, you know, what makes trackball games so unique and fun? And what are they exactly? Like, how do they take advantage of trackball? I'll say one thing that's general about

trackball balls that's not in any other control form is that they have momentum. You have the weight. So you throw a lot of weight to it and it keeps spinning. And that's something that isn't replicated with an analog stick or something. But in addition to the momentum and weight, you can also get incredible precision in 360 degrees of motion or you know as many as the computer is program for like really small movements are huge you know sweeps it's it's like gross actions and also very precise minute actions and that's that's a very unique combination and it does make the track ball really really accessible it's because balls are gross see there you go right in the jokes for us

All right. So let's go through the history of notable games. You know, I went online and looked for the best possible list I could find of trackball games. And it turned out to be Wikipedia. So everyone who hates Retronauts and says that we just quote Wikipedia, you're right. That's all we did this episode. Sorry, they were the best source. We're podcasting on the run today. Well, it's just like, you know, when something's comprehensive, that's what you got to go with. But I did a lot of looking into some of these games that I hadn't heard of. And the history of trackball games actually apparently goes back to 1973, although I have some doubts about that. I'm extremely skeptical about this.

So a 1973 game by Taito called Soccer, according to Giant Bomb, which is Wikipedia's source, it is the first ever trackball game. But I went on to Arcade Flyers, which is the only real decent source I could find of original material on this game. And the flyer is very low resolution, and it's in Japanese. But it does not appear to have a trackball in the cabinet. It looks like rotary dials. Yeah, it's a Palm clone. Yeah.

So if, like, this is like, rewriting the history of video. games. If you went back in time and made a trackball game in 1973 that wasn't a pawn clone, it's like rewriting the whole history of arcade machines because most games in 73 were pawn clunes. To 74, 75. This was a pong clone. It was basically

like your soccer guys were two pong paddles. So I'm skeptical about this. I'd give it like a 5% chance of actually being true. Yeah, I mean, I tried to read the Japanese flyer and my Japanese literacy is very limited, but I looked very carefully and did not see any mention

of trackball, which I think, or like spinner or anything like that, like any English loanwords that would be used on the Japanese flyer. And none of those appeared. It really, like, even in those tiny, low-resolution images, it really looks like it was a rotary dial game. Yeah, I think so.

But it is notable because it was designed by the creator of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikato, and he claims it was Japan's very first ever original video game. So that's notable. I mean, what if it's, it could be real and extremely rare, and they made like a of them and no one has a picture of it and that would be amazing but it's sort of undiscovered game

yeah yeah i mean there are some cases further down this chronology where you'll find games that were made in variant versions with trackballs but i don't think that's the case here so we jump ahead to 1978 and the midway game called shuffleboard so immediately you're going after the 60-year-old like cruise ship demographic yeah it's a good application for the trackball because I mean I haven't played real shuffleboard but I could imagine shuffling like tossing and I

I well in shovel board you have like a stick it's kind of like curling yeah so you have basically like a triangle at the other end of the field or whatever it's called the lane and the triangle is segmented and basically wherever you land the shuffle puck

I guess is what you call it wherever you land the puck you get points based on the point value of that segment into the triangle, but you take turns pushing the puck, and if someone knocks your puck out of that space, then you don't get points for being in that space. They do, because they landed in that space. So the game actually replicates that pretty well. I watched some videos of this. Like, I've never seen this game before in real life, but... Probably extremely rare. I imagine, yeah. It's 1978, so black and white, like, kind of pre-vector

graphics. Very primitive, but, you know, it had this kind of analog control interface. So that's, you know, kind of impressive and forward-thinking. Did this predate football? It does. To your knowledge? Yes. Cool. But that is the next big one is Atari's football from 1979.

Have you guys played this game? No. I almost feel like I have. I mean, there was actually a guy who used to work with my first job who had a football machine, and he said I could have it or something. I was like, holy crap. And this was in the 90s. So he said he's going to give it to me, but he got fired.

Oh. And you didn't, like, show up at it. house I was like hey sorry about your job but um can I have that football game the problem was I was a teenager and I couldn't just show up at his house and pick it up kind of thing you know I think I had a six speed Mazda 626 with a tiny trunk and I you know I didn't my parents might have helped me but it wasn't let me tell you about the time my now wife and I drove across the San Francisco Bay Bridge to Oakland some little suburb and bought a light table you know those big metal light tables that have

illumination built in with a Honda Civic and somehow got that back across the bridge. That was the scariest ride of my life. You could have done that, man. Did you strap it into the trunk? No, we strapped it to the top of the car with a blanket underneath. And I was like holding it as we crossed back across the bridge thinking, Dear God, please don't let us slow down or like break suddenly. But what I'm saying is that if there is a will and a need for football, there is a way.

Yeah. Well, let's go back in time and help my 16-year-old. Let's do that. Go get it. We can also check on that shuffleboard game, or not a shuffleboard soccer game while we're back there. But now I'm actually surprised that you guys don't seem to have encountered football. Is it just because you're younger than me? Yeah.

I mean, it's a rare game, and it wasn't in there. Is it rare? Yes. Now it is, yeah. I mean, there were arcades when I was a kid probably that still had it, some classic type arcades. But we usually see in those arcades the classic era of color games that starts in 81. to the mid to late 80s, you know, that kind of, and everything before those black and white sort got decommissioned. They probably didn't earn quarters. You know what happened is I grew up in

Texas and football is everything there. So I remember when I was in like junior high, high school and, you know, it was like the age of Street Fighter 2. I still would find Atari football in arcades or even at like skating rinks. Like it was just this perennial game. And the game itself is incredibly basic. It's a top-down cocktail cabinet, two-person. You get like an overhead view of half the field, and the field scrolls as you play. And the players, it's black and white, like a black field with white stripes, and the players are depicted as X's and O's, depending on the team. But, like, it was, I really think, you know, not having played shovel board or quote-unquote tennis, I really feel like it was the first game that really took advantage of the

physicality of track balls because to make your running back run, basically you were just rolling the ball as hard as you could, spinning it and really putting your body into it. So you have basically people taking turns, or not even taking turns, like they were playing simultaneously

one trying to intercept the other and just like breaking a sweat to get their team to score a touchdown or even the other team from doing that. I've seen it. I've seen videos of it, and I've heard that it was popular.

I guess the guy who was going to give me that machine said his machine had been in a sports bar and was really popular or something. I bet it smelled like beer. Yeah. I probably smelled it. And balls. I don't know about that, Benj.

Track balls, man. Oh, okay. Did it? Yeah, no. It smelled exactly like track balls. Okay. multiplies and divides and comes after you of every side

faster and faster roll by row he slides through the rocks to be chew from below oh Santa feet you can't run away you can't run away

You can't run away You can cut that part out No no we're keeping it But then Atari, the same year, used the same technology, the same setup to make a soccer game and a baseball game, which seems a little more difficult to do with the trackball. But I guess you fielded with the trackball. I haven't seen that one. I haven't either. I mean, I know it exists, but I haven't seen video.

I did not know it existed. Soccer and baseball are new on me. But football, I feel, was a big hit. It was everywhere. I've seen it Midwest Gaming Classic, actually. You need to go to Midwest Gaming Classic sometimes. Yeah, I still haven't been to that one. You've got to go.

I've seen the Atari Football. I just haven't played it. Oh, okay. Isn't it? The first arcade experience, I remember, I was really, really young, but I was still, it was the late 80s. So, you know, I wanted all that new technology, not, you know, not something. Right.

Give me something with color things. Right. Maybe more than two kids. I don't think it's too much bad for a kid. I'm just like a new color. I understand. I mean, even at the time, when I saw it, I was like, oh, this game is ancient. This is like 12 years old.

What the hell? Wasn't it only a cocktail form factor with, yeah, because it was head to head to head. Hand to hand. Yeah. So it was only available in that format. But that's, you know, perfect for bars because you stick your beer down. And then you start spinning really fast and you bump your beer over and the bartender kicks you out and you never come back again. So the next big game is Centipede, which came the following year, also from Atari.

I feel like you guys both have to have played this. Definitely. All right. Bobby, you've been a little shut out of the conversation so far. So why don't you take the lead here? Well, I mean, it's just the trackball games that I've interacted with came a little bit later. but for me I do remember seeing centipede but I think I've played it more later on in life

on more of these like arcade style places just to appreciate it but I think everybody's played some form of centipede at some point in their life on something whether it's their cell phone track ball anything else and it's definitely a game that that different interaction of it

certainly changes the feel of the game as opposed to playing it with an arcade stick but I have actually seen arcade stick versions of it but it could have just been a half-up I think it was one of those like the arcade machines that came out in the early

2000s that were basically like early maim machine style of things. It probably was. Yeah, I've never seen a stick version of centipede. That sounds atrocious. I mean the whole appeal of Centipede was that it was incredibly accessible to anyone. Like

that is my mother's favorite game. She loves Centipede and she's not a video game person at all. But it was just so intuitive like you you have this bug coming down from the top of the screen and you're a little thing at the bottom that's trying to shoot the bug before it gets to you and you use the trackball

and it moves your gun guy, gnome, whatever he is, around the screen, and then you fire upward at the centipede and it's very direct and it gives you great, fine, precise control over the movement of your gnome, we'll call it. But you can zip all the way across

screen instantaneously or you can just make incredibly fine maneuvers to adjust your aim and it's great and it's a it's a really well-designed game too was designed by donna bailey one of it's actually tarry's second female game developer i think and that probably explains why it was popular with women because she's tapping into something that well it's a really it's a really it's a really it's a really colorful game it's very accessible it's intuitive it's basically space invaders or Gallagher, but even though it's a game about shooting stuff, it doesn't feel violent. It feels frantic, though. It does.

Yeah, there's a lot happening. Yeah, there's a lot happening because the centipede comes down from the top of the screen, and it consists of balls, actually. And each time you shoot a segment, the segment turns into a mushroom, and then the centipede splits into other pieces. So you actually have to be really careful about how you attack the centipede, because if you fire up and hit the middle of it, it's going to break into two pieces, and, you know, it can break off all these little bits

that'll come at you independently. Plus, it's laying down mushrooms as you destroy it, and other mushrooms are popping up on the field, and they block your shots. And then there's also fleas that fall down after you get to the second stage, and they create mushrooms in their wake. And the spider.

And then there's the spider who jumps in. And there's also the slug that crawls across the top, kind of as like the UFO from Space Invaders, but it has a little theme, do-do-do-do-do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- And it creates mushrooms also, Also, as it crawls across, there's mushrooms everywhere. And you get score based on the number of mushrooms you don't shoot at the end of the stage, yeah. I didn't know that.

So you try to shoot as few mushrooms than you can and many centipedes as you can. Is it the mushrooms you don't shoot or mushrooms that are partly destroyed? Because mushrooms take like three or four hits to destroy it. Every mushroom left on the screen, it counts them up at the end of each round when you destroy the centipede. Okay, I thought it was like, I thought that do-do-d-d-d-dun was the mushrooms regenerating. It's actually counting it up for the score. No kidding. Wow, so many specifics I did not know about it.

Well, it's a cool game. I mean, this is one game where my grandpa was a barber in Texas in a very small town. He probably played football. He was a cattle rancher and a barber, and a World War II generation, and right next to his barbershop was a little laundromat that had a centipede machine in it.

So when we went to Texas to visit him, we'd go play centipede, and that's one of my cool memories of that game. The other big game of 1980 that used a track ball was Missile Command, which you've already mentioned, but that's another one that I feel like you guys must have played. Well, no, maybe I did play the arcade version of this one time. It was also sort of, unlike Centipede, which I've seen around a lot,

because it was a popular game. I haven't seen many Missile Command machines. Missile Command stopped being relevant in, like, 1989, once the Soviet Union fell, and we were no longer afraid of nuclear attacks. It is very much a game-inspired, by mutual assured destruction. It is a game that you cannot win, and that's by design.

And it really taps into the Cold War paranoia and fear, you know, duck and cover under your school desk to protect yourself from a nuclear bomb kind of thing and turns that into a video game. Yeah, I don't ever remember playing that as a kid, but I certainly have some of the adult when I've been to some places that have it. And again, it's just another unique experience

that's, you know, that's a simpler game, of course. It's not like some of the more advanced games out there, but I think games like that have a certain appeal because there's no learning curve, really. You just kind of figure it out right when you put your quarter in, pretty much. And I do think that's another game that just wouldn't be the same at all without the track ball. I did play it as a kid with a joystick on Atari 800,

and it was still kind of fun, but it's nowhere near as fun without the trackball. Yeah, it's also a very frantic game, but in a different way than Centipede. So the idea of missile command is you have, I think, three or four missile bases at the bottom, like, cities, basically. Is it five? Okay. You have multiple, like, cities at the bottom of the screen that you're trying to defend from missile attacks that are coming from the top of the screen, and they come from sort of all angles. And basically, if a missile makes it all the way down to your city, it destroys your city, and when you lose all five cities, that's it. And each missile is basically just a tracked line. It's a vector game, right?

No, it's not. It's not, okay. No, it says right, because the explosions are filled. But it has that kind of vector look to it. Sort of like Defender or, you know, Robotron 2084. It has that like really crisp, almost kind of Williams style to it. The single pixel lines. There must have been enough resolution to make those tiny little lines. It's pretty sharp, yeah.

So basically what you do is you use the trackball to control a targeting reticle that you move across the screen. And when you hit the fire button, a missile will launch from your bases. toward the point that your cursor is at and when it hits that point then it explodes into a circle and anything that hits the circle then explodes it detonates into another circle you can create these really cool chain reactions but basically you're just trying to like lay down a field of fire

to prevent the enemy missiles from coming through and you have a limited number of missiles too you do and also the missiles grow faster and faster and much more numerous as you advance the game it's terrifying I've heard that people were terrified by this game because of that, obviously the Cold War paranoia about, it wasn't paranoia, it was the real threat of nuclear annihilation. And there's, at the end of that game, it says the end. Yeah, it's not game over, it's the end. Like the screen explodes. So, yeah. Mr. Gorbachev,

please empty that coin bucket. So, yeah, those are kind of the big ones. Missile Command and Centipede. Those are, I would say timeless games that, you know, maybe, Missile Command is not quite so much, but it's still very playable even now. But they're games that grew larger in the collective conscience than most other video games of the era. Like they weren't quite up there with Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, but they were pretty close. Like in 1982, 83, if you said Missile Command, like, someone would know what that was in addition to Space Invaders.

Yeah, Missile Command was a huge hit. In fact, General Computer Corporation, who went on to hack Pac-Man and to Miss Pac-Man and designed the Target at 7800, got their start. making a missile command, an unauthorized missile command hackboard or something like that, to make it more difficult. Oh, yeah, because that's what we needed was a harder missile command. It just means there was a big enough market out there of machines to sell it to arcade operators to extend the lifespan. So it must have been a pretty big hit at that time.

I mean, they're games that are still sold today, and the touchscreen cell phone versions of them, I think, do a pretty good job of mimicking the different kind of control scheme. You know, use your finger to scroll across the touchscreen in the same way. So obviously, they're important enough games in history that they're still being told today. Yeah, and Replicate has been showing off a replica 12-inch mini missile command cabinet. They also had one last year at Portland Retro Gaming Expo that was a reproduction of the sit-down cabinet, although it wouldn't actually be playable because you have to, like, reach inside and spin the spinner, like, inside the tiny sit-down cabinet. But it's cool that they're like, hey, remember this thing?

Probably not, but it existed, and we made a fake version of it. So I'm looking forward to that coming out, the real Missile Command mock-up. I'm looking forward to trying it. I think those companies, up until now, really just wanted to give as affordable of an experience for those old games as possible, but didn't put a lot of time and effort into quality or accuracy or anything. But I've heard at least one of those companies is really trying to make strides to go in the opposite direction. And while keeping them affordable, not having a clunky spinner, you know,

not requiring... Yeah, that's more like Replicate, right? Yeah. Yeah, like, Arcade 1-Up is doing better, but I feel like Replicade, you know, considering the form factor, the size of those machines, I think they're very good for what they are. Like, they're made of very good materials,

and they run, quote-unquote, bespoke emulators, whatever that is. But the games seem faithful and accurate, and they're very playable, they'll save your high score and so forth. So, like, it's good quality stuff. You know, they've got light-up marquees, and the little, they've got the little accurate Atari buttons, the little cones with the red lights on the end, and those light up when you turn on the machine.

So they even come with tiny little quarters, like one-sixth replica scale quarters that you can put in the change bucket. They have a USB charger that just came out from a Kickstarter, and the USB charger that you can plug all the machines into is designed to look like a 1980s change machine with the wood grain and everything. Like they really, like there's a lot of love put into those.

So that's one of the reasons I'm looking, forward to Missile Command from them because I feel like it'll be fun to play even when it's tiny. You can assemble your entire Barbie-sized arcade. Yeah, absolutely. Was Barbie one-sixth scale? Yeah, sure.

Okay. I mean, I've seen that thing. Oh, yeah, she made out with G.I. Joe's. Right, sure. Okay. Basic. Maybe a little small. So the next game on the list.

Moving on, the next game is Kik. Have you guys ever played this? I had never heard of this before today. You have it? I love Kikman. Really? Yeah, so I mostly know Kikman from a third-party clone on the Atari 800 called Pinhead. Okay.

I forgot who developed it, but it's a really fun game. And I learned later that it was a clone of Kickman. And when I was a teenager and I wanted to buy an arcade machine, somebody was selling a Kickman arcade machine, I almost convinced my parents to buy it for me for 200 books or something. Man, I really wish I got it. Yeah, that would have been a good deal at this point. And I was going to get, like, going on with Miss Pac-Man for a couple hundred bucks.

It would have been a great idea. But we didn't have the room to store that stuff. That is the problem with big arcade cabinets. That's why I like the foot-tall times. But Kickman, the premise is that there's rows of balloons at the top of the screen and they fall down one or two at a time and you're a guy on a unicycle who has to either pop them with your head, like a pin on the top of your head, helmet or pat or whatever it is, or you can kick as they come down

and catch them and kick them back up to try to pop them when they come back down. And so it's challenging, but we played pinhead like crazy and the arcade is basically the same premise. Yeah, the kickman, instead of popping them with your head, they just stack up on their head. So it gets harder and harder to catch more and more stack up. Okay. But this is interesting to me because it's one of,

I think it might be Midway's first unauthorized use of Pac-Man. Like, when I say unauthorized, they mean they licensed Pac-Man from Namco, but Namco definitely did not sign off on this because some of the balloons are Pac-Man ghosts, and then there's one that is Pac-Man. And when the Pac-Man balloon comes down, down he'll like eat everything on your on your head yeah that was in pinhead too there was a mode in pinhead where the balloons would stack up real high and you then they'd go do you do do and stuff so I don't know maybe they didn't have the pin in the arcade one but I had

no idea that was a trackball game that's interesting yeah apparently I looked it up and I found photos of the arcade cabinet and it does have a trackball cool but I feel like most of the games that came out following these were pretty much derivative like laser base from Amstar in 1981 is basically a mix of space invaders and missile command. Yeah, I don't know anything about this. Yeah, it's not that interesting looking. It's just like, oh, yeah, they basically took two very popular games and combined them and used a trackpad. There's a trackball.

There is a weird game called Beezer from a developer called Tong. I've never heard of. Yeah. And it's a very complicated game because you have this screen full of these like three-sided gates and you rotate them around by like basically, moving a little character who is your icon, and he spins them. And your goal is to rotate the gates to the point that they all form a hexagon. And you're trying to trap bees in those hexagons to destroy them

while the bees are chasing you and trying to destroy you. Seems very complicated and not very fun. But what do I know? Well, bees always try to destroy me, so I hate this game. Yeah, I mean, since I haven't heard of Beezer, I'm going to assume it was not very successful at doing what it did. Yeah. More successful was Milipede, the sequel to Sinipede,

which just basically added more stuff to the mix, including DDT bombs, which kind of worked like the missile explosions in Missile Command. Like when you hit a DDT bomb, it will create like a little puff of gas and anything that runs into it will be destroyed. So it's kind of like the missiles and missile command. Yeah, we're talking about Milipede?

Yeah. I remember the DDT bombs. There was a game called Liberator, which was based on DC's Atari Force Comics, which was by Atari, and it's kind of like Missile Command that you're controlling a cursor, but you're like above a planet, and there's a very cool effect of the planet rotating beneath you, but it doesn't look that remarkable otherwise. So one of the more interesting games that I came across,

which actually I have on that Arcade One Up cabinet, but I've never tried, is called Quantum, which kind of reminds me of quix, in that you use the trackball to basically draw lines around these moving objects, and you're trying to avoid the, like, the, look, the lead point of the line from being hit by the moving objects, some of which are just there to be dangerous and some of which are there to be captured. But it seems kind of cool, okay-ish. There was also a reactor from Gottlieb, the Kubert people.

It has a little Kubert voices in it. It seems very complicated as you're circling a nuclear reactor core that is melting down and expanding while trying to avoid the reactor walls and, like, bump things into the coolant cores, the carbon, you know, rods. Totally lighthearted game here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, really leaning into the three-mile island thing. No pressure.

Very good escapism. There was a game called Slither, which is basically centipede, except instead of killing centipedes, in a garden, you're killing snakes in the Wild West. Video games in the early 80s were very mean to wildlife. Wildlife. Yes. Bees and snakes.

In 1983, in 83, brought us Birdie King and Birdie King 2, which despite the names, you're not killing birds. These are golf games. And I think this is one of the places where the, kind of like Atari's football, the trackball sort of found its natural inclination towards sports games. This was before Sega and Nintendo

basically invented the swing meter for golf games. So instead of using a swing meter, you basically just use the track ball to determine the direction and the force of the ball when you hit it. So that seems good. It seems like an intuitive way down. standard. Anyway, the next big game was Crystal Castles. The game's so big, they named a band after it. So you guys have any experience with Crystal Castles? I vaguely remember seeing

at some arcades at some museums or stuff like the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo that has a lot of the old collections, but I definitely don't remember this as a kid. I've played it in the arcade, I'm pretty sure. What do you think? Fun. It's frantic and fast. It's sort of like Pac-Man, you're collecting dots, right? But you go up and down, isometric kind of... It's like Pac-Man meets Congo Bongo. It's got the isometric viewpoint and the raised elevations. So it's kind of doing a lot. And you basically control a bear who is a wizard, apparently.

Bentley Bear. Bentley Bear. He's named after a car, but he's a wizard. And he moves around on these pathways collecting gyms. And your goal is, just like in Pac-Man, to collect all the gyms, clear out the maze. But it is really fast. And, you know, because it's a trackball game, it can afford to be fast. but it seems really stressful to me.

I never really played it. I've seen it, you know, many times through the years. It's fast. I've only played it a little bit, yeah. It's really hard to do precise when you're going so fast. Right, and then you get into areas where, like, you're just surrounded by enemies and these platforms that move up and down, like little elevators.

And that's great, but you have to wait for the elevator to come down before you can step on it and take you to safety. And some areas are, like, guarded by trees. And occasionally you can get honey or a wizard hat that will, you know, give you special powers and briefly let you destroy the enemies. But otherwise, it's very challenging. Yeah, glorified 3D isometric peckmate. Not really 3D.

I mean, to me, it kind of reminds me of a lot of the games that were really popular in the UK around this time on microcomputers, like the stuff by Ultimate Play the Game that became rare. You know, that isometric style. I don't know who inspired whom or if it was just like both groups of people just kind of stumbling on to an idea simultaneously, but Yeah, what was the game you said was like Pac-Man plus what?

The isometric? Pac-Man plus, what did I say? Good Lord. It was like, yeah, I was right. Congo, Congo, yeah. Sega's Donkey Kong clone. I think that game invented the isometric viewpoint,

or so close to it, you know? True, yeah, yeah. I think that was 82, right? Yeah, probably. Yeah, so this was 83, so that would make sense. I will say about Crystal Castle's, the Bentley Bear became a weird mascot for Atari Corporation after the split. Did it? You know, when Jack Tremil and bought the company.

For some reason, I think they retained the rights to Bentley Bear while the other arcade properties were owned by the arcade division. And so they had these Bentley Bear spelling games and stuff for Atari ST in the 80s. And when they made Atari carts for the Jaguar, Bentley Bear is one of the controllable characters. It's like the only Atari character. Oh, yeah. I totally forgot all about that. What system was Atari carts on? Jaguar

I've never heard of this one Oh it's super late It's at the end yeah Yeah It's a pretty bad Mario Car Clowns are pretty bad The funny thing is still one of the best Jaguar games Because there aren't very many great Jaguar

Even though it's not a good Great game I wanted it so bad when it came out Yeah it's way better in Trevor How come Bentley Bear wasn't in Trevor McFur Was Trevor McFur in Atari cards No I don't know why

That started as a Panther game and one of their 32-bit console that they're working on. Anyway, that's the whole other thing. We can do an episode on Jaguar someday. It'll be 10 minutes long, but it'll be very informative. Yeah, I know lots. Well, the Jaguar one is new, so I got lots to say about that. So earlier I mentioned that there were some games that came in variants that had track balls,

and one of those is Konami's track and field. I think most people know this game, but you probably know it from the original version, which had buttons that you hammered or used a spoon or, you used a spoon, or, you use some sort of makeshift mechanism to cheat. And apparently that was really, really hard on the consoles, the arcade cabinets. And after a certain point, Konami was like, you know, arcade runners are getting really angry because we're selling them to these game systems

and they're being destroyed by overenthusiastic users. So they replaced the buttons with a trackball. And from what I read about this, it makes the game way easier so people don't like it as much. I've only seen the button one There's a box car in Raleigh Classic Barcade thing They have a track and feel with buttons

I do remember seeing both versions Okay I just I can't I can't place where or when I just do remember seeing Both versions And I can't remember which I saw first But I remember seeing the second

And going Hey wasn't that game You know a trackball game Or you know It wasn't the stick game Why was this a trackball But it's pretty interesting Yeah I

I honestly had never heard of this before I started doing research on this, but I took some time and read forum posts by people who are like, yeah, I've played it, it's real, it's a thing. So they, you know, it existed, but generally people's opinion was not favorable. They were like, I'd rather play the button version and get calluses or, you know, mess up the machine somehow. But it is a fun little quirk of history, I guess. So one of the other big trackball games throughout history is Marble Madness from 1984. which was, wasn't that the very first Atari Games game?

Could be, yeah. Once Atari Games and Atari Inc. split after the sell-off from Warner. Yeah, it was Atari Corporation and Atari Games. Yeah, Atari Inc. was before they split. Right, right, Atari, Corp. Yeah, I think you're right. Marble Maness may have been the first, or Gauntlet. No, Gauntlet was 85.

Okay, 85, yeah. And Marble Madness was 84, so... Marble Madness is a cool game. It is. I used to play it at the movie theater. I remember playing it first. I'm 99% sure I owned the Ness version of it. Okay.

We're absolutely loving it. And I don't think any of the arcades in there where I lived had an arcade version. Or if it did, maybe I was just young and passed by it because I owned the Ness version and just figured I could play that at home when we go to Afterburner or something crazy. But I remember maybe four or five years ago seeing a marble madness cabinet with the trackball in it, and it blew my mind. as much as I really enjoyed the Ness version and I tried my hardest to get as many levels in as I could

it completely changed the dynamic of the game and I think it's one of the games that truly demonstrates the difference between a trackball and a controller and the fact that your character in Marble Madness is a barbel and you're spinning a track ball gives you that sensation that you really are kind of controlling the ball on the screen even though it obviously doesn't match exactly to how it's rolling

and one would argue it's not nearly as accurate as even like centipede, but I just thought that was a game that completely changed when I found the trackball version. I just, I don't think I could go back. I think I'd have to get a track ball and use it through emulation or maybe, you know, find an original arcade board or something. But I just found the game so much more enjoyable when you're actually rolling a ball, mimicking a ball rolling on the screen.

Yeah, we haven't really talked about what Marvel Madness is. Like what, you roll a marble, but what's so interesting about that? You try to reach a goal, I think, and you have to not fall off the screen or fall into bits and traps and stuff, I don't know. Right, yeah, I mean, there's obstacles in the way. So, yeah, the thing that makes it interesting is that it has, like, the way Crystal Castles was isometric or, you know, force projection or whatever, it takes that idea and then creates even more topographic variance in the field. So in addition to, like, going down ramps and moving across platforms, there's also gaps that you have to roll really fast to get across and then kind of stop yourself so you don't go off the other side.

In Crystal Castles, the edges of the platforms are safe. Like, you never have to worry about falling into a pit. But here you do. Like, the marble can go right off the edge. And even within, like, flat areas, there will be depressions or little rises. So your marble is basically never still. Like, there's not really any flat ground in this game. Yeah.

And when there is flat ground, probably not safe because there's probably like objects rising out of the ground that'll knock you into the hole or like little hammers that'll you know send you flying in other direction so it's basically an obstacle course with tons of geometry that affects the movement of your marble. The terrain. Yeah the geometry or the terrain is the other factor that I thought was really neat because like even in the first level it's like um it's almost goes into a track like imagine like a bowling you know if you get your ball in the gutter that's kind of what the start the first level is like, but you start at the top of a hill, if you will, and go down this.

And, you know, the speed of the ball makes a big difference for certain things. Like you're saying, the jump going over certain areas are slowing down. And when you have the track ball control, you know, you get that sensation of, like, okay, let me slowly roll this ball, you know, both literally and figuratively, let's roll this ball across the screen. And then you get to the jumps and you got to go, you know, really fast and spin it up. And you get the sensation of both, you know, that the marble is. really moving down this track of geometry

and that you get to have to control the aspects around it. Yeah, it's a great game, and it's notably, was designed by Mark Sernie, who went on to design the hardware for PlayStation 4 and I guess 5. He's a big guy at Sony now. So there's kind of a legacy there. She's a nice guy, too.

Is he? For some reason, I've emailed him before and we talked about something, and he was nice. That's good. Thanks, Mark. It's nice when our heroes are nice. Yeah, cool game. Another game that is kind of a came as a surprise,

to me when I was researching is Blades of Steel, the Konami hockey game. I've only ever played that on NES, so I had no idea that in the arcades, you controlled your hockey dudes with the trackball. I didn't know it had a trackball until we were researching this episode, actually, because

you know, it was really famous on the NES. I bet it was a blast on the arcade of the trackball. Probably. It looks really fun. The characters were so big, too. Yeah. It was a very lively looking game. Yeah, and fight sequence looks really

graphically cool brutal man yeah I also don't think I've ever tried the trackball version but now because I have played the Ness version a lot as a kid I didn't own it but I had a friend that was a big fan that loved it so now I've got to go try that on me and see what that's like

yeah I love the NES version but they should make a street fighter two hockey game or if you start fighting street hockey yeah it turns into combat so another one that is one of those very very

variant versions is the game Kabbal, which I think was Konami, right? Came before Devastators, or was that some other company? I can't remember. But in any case, it's one of those like into the screen fixed shooters where you're running around at the bottom of the screen and basically moving a cursor around but also moving your guy around along with a cursor, trying to avoid bullets while shooting things in the field. And apparently the original version of that was trackball based and they replaced it with a joystick. That's the only version I've ever seen. 100 a lot just costs.

I don't know. It's a mystery. It's a mystery. Yeah, I don't know. Around the same time, Capcom shipped Capcom bowling, which as far as I can tell is the first trackball-based bowling game. And it's surprising that it took 10 years for anyone to create a trackball-based bowling game because it seems perfect. Again, it's like Marble Madness. You have a ball and you're controlling it.

And the speed and force of which you roll determines your throw in the lane. It makes sense for a perfect. bowling, the interface. Yeah. Yeah, there would be lots of other trackball-based bowling games to come, including probably most famously the Simpsons bowling, which came in the year 2000. Even, you know, like the Simpsons were still a thing back then. Simpsons were always a thing. Oh, that's right. That's right. So, yeah, we're kind of wrapping up the history of notable trackball games here. In 1990, Atari made what was, I would argue, the last great trackball game, Rampart.

Oh, yeah. Have you guys played this one? Yeah. It's like a turn-based strategy game turned into a three-minute arcade experience. It's really amazing. Yeah, me and my brother used to play this in Gatlinburg, as I always mentioned. Ah, yes, Gatlinburg. I've heard of that place.

Yeah, the arcades in Gatlinburg. You can play, I think, up to three people at the same time. Yep. So you have a phase where you're building your castle, and you're positioning the pieces on the screen, like Tetris pieces of castle walls. Yeah, so basically there's like a shoreline, and then there's a body of water.

And, yeah, so there are like five possible castles you can fortify? Yeah, I guess you, do you pick one? You pick one, yeah. And then you, yeah, there's a fortification phase, and then there's a place your cannon. phase, I think, where you place them inside your walls. And you can only place them where you complete an entire wall and enclose

polygon. If you don't enclose your castle, then in the time, like the 20 seconds you get, then it's game over. Yeah. Kind of like SimCity for Castle to live almost. Kind of. And then, well, do you want me to keep describing your gameplay? Go for it. Just the next phase is that it switches

to an action phase where you are positioning your cannon, aiming your cannon, I think with a reticle probably toward your enemy's walls to destroy them and destroy the cannon as fast as you can't. Anyway. Yeah, the first time I discovered that game was only a few years ago and I was, at first I didn't like

it because I was like, this is an arcade game, but like this feels more like something I would want to sit home and play. And a friend of mine was with me who was not normally into that style of game when she was just like, no, let's keep playing. This is kind of fun. And then we got sucked into it and pumped a couple quarters in it. It was neat, too, that it was such a long

experience, especially at a time where, you know, arcades were meant to be like a two-minute experience to get more quarters unless you were really good at the game. And I just thought it was neat that one, you know, one credit each had, well, it was essentially a very long arcade experience for each. I felt that way, too. It did seem like a lot of gameplay for a quarter or whatever credit.

But, you know, because it was up to three people at a time, they could afford to be generous, I think. So you're putting... And it also gets really challenging once you get to, like, the third phase. Like, before long, you have just a fleet of ships coming at you. And then if the ships managed to make land... landfall, then they send little tanks out, and those will keep, yeah, those will keep you from putting down your fortifications.

I thought that was just in the single-player game, there's ships. Otherwise, I thought it was just player versus player. Oh, is it? It's been a while since I've played player versus player. Yeah, there's a single player that has ships or something, I think. But I've also played the Tension version on the NES. It's okay, you know, nowhere as cool as the arcade one. Yeah, it's a, it's a great game, you know.

Like I said, it's basically a turn-based strategy game condensed into a five-minute arcade experience, which is, that's a remarkable feat, I think. Yeah. So also the same year was probably the most successful latter-day trackball game of all time, a series that is still around 30 years later, and that is Golden T Golf, which kind of takes that older golf game, which was by, who was that by? Sega? Birdie King.

Yes, Bertie King. Yeah, it was not a Sega game. I can't remember who it was by. took that concept and basically turned it into a more realistic golf sim with more contemporary graphics. And it's become a monster, like a perennial presence in bars because drunk dudes go and they can maybe not control a video game so well and play Street Fighter, but they can spin a track ball by God. So, yeah, they keep making sequels and there was an arcade one-up, like Golden T Golf Collection that came out, I think, last year.

I believe so. Yeah, it's like got four different versions on it, I think. They also made a plug-and-play TV games, one that was fun. I have it, that you just plug into a, it takes batteries, and you plug it into a TV. So the neat thing is you pull the ball back to sort of, you know, pull back your swing, and then you push it forward as fast you can, plus the angle of direction influences how you, whether you slice the ball or how you, you know, how far you hit it. Yeah, it makes for a really fast-paced golf experience,

faster than using swing meters and stuff. So it's just, like, super immediate, super physical, tactile, very, very satisfying. Yep. In a game that you absolutely could just walk up and learn immediately, and you don't have to be a gamer to enjoy it. Yeah. I definitely think Golden T. Gulliff could probably go down as the best trackball game ever, just because of its longevity and because of its how many people have played it.

And while it might not actually be the best game ever made around a track ball, it's something that so many people have experienced. I have distinct memories of, it must have been. If this is 1990 when it was released, it must have been right when it came out. But I definitely have memories of going to a family-friendly sports bar with my dad on Sundays to watch football on the big projection screens and playing Golden T-Golp. And I also remember the original. Whenever you'd pull back and you'd go forward, it didn't, for whatever reason,

usually the hole cut in the arcade machine was just a little bit too big, and your skin would kind of get caught in there and pinch. So you'd have to make sure to, like, swoop over the trackball and then pull your hand up at the same time because if you let it go around, you'd always get, like, I'd get my little hand squished in the side there. It was never damaging, but, like, it pinched and stuff. It's not, no one wanted to do that.

All right, so Golden T. Golf may be the best trackball game, but you know what isn't? That's Sega Sonic the Hedgehog. From 1993, that's not a bad game. It's just kind of weird. It's basically thought like the Hedgehog is an infinite runner,

sort of, before there was such a thing. It's not really an infinite runner, but... It's a finite runner. It is. It's a finite runner. Yeah.

For up to three people, which is interesting, you can play as Sonic and Ray and Knuckles and probably some other people. Kylo Rinn? No, Kylo Rinn yet. Nope.

You're thinking of the Sonic sequel trilogy. But basically, it's a series of Isometric levels where there's always something chasing after you, and you're using the track ball to go as quickly as you can, trying not to fall off platform edges, evading traps, getting onto these spinning tracks that open doors. Wow. It seems very busy, very complicated, very stressful.

Yeah, I've never played it. I've seen it. It's been such an obscure thing. I think it is only Japan. I think so, yeah. I think I played it when I was going through. I had built a maim machine a while ago and made sure to add different

the ability to add different controllers to it. And I think I went through and went, oh, Sonic, I don't know. There was another Sonic arcade game. I know there was a few, but we were playing it for about five minutes and that, no, no, never mind. Did you play it with a trackball?

I think I may have. I think I probably did because I did have a trackball hooked up to this one machine. Yeah, there was a little sidebar you added to the notes about Maine trackball. I don't know if you wanted to talk about that at all. Yeah, I mean, anybody that's ever used MAME on any platform knows it's pretty much an excellent way to experience all of these older arcade games, especially when you don't have the ability to find original arcade boards, you know, build them up, add the controls, and a few different times in my life I've built MAME machines, and as with my usual OCD of making sure it's as accurate as you can get.

And one of the things that I had done was adding a trackball to a controller I had, and I ended up. up using that even for driving games like Outrun. That's one of my favorite racing games of all time. And I even tried using it with Tempest, which while, you know, I really want an original Tempest machine because of vector graphics and a cool spinner, it was a

better way to play both of those games than a stick. Right. So it's not nearly as good as the wheel or that, or a keyword or anything, but being able to use those definitely improved the experience. And I think anybody that's really going through and build in a main machine, or I guess even just wants to

try and maim on a computer. If it's just on your PC, maybe pick up a trackball from Amazon and see. But if you're actually building a controller, they're less than $100, but you can actually have one so you could build it right into something. And I believe the outputs are USB or PS2, so depending on how you want to interface it. But I found it really to add a lot to the experience. So even just for things that, you know, were 100% accurate to the original, it's still infinitely better than trying to use a stick for it. So you're a big proponent of Mr. How is Mr. for trackball support? Does it have it yet?

Because there are some arcade cores. I know Jiris, I guess that's not a trackball game, but that's a spinner game. I believe it does because Mr. It supports keyboard and mouse, and it also supports a spinner controller. Because I believe Argonoid was ported to the Mr. And it's apparently an incredibly accurate port as well. So I imagine a trackball has, I should talk to the team to double check and maybe give that a try. As long as we USB-based, it should work perfectly.

But that's the short version for anyone that's not aware of MISTERs. It's basically a way of emulating these games that's similar to MAME, but emulating on a hardware level. So, while it doesn't have the thousands of games, MAME does, the games it does have are pretty darn accurate to the original. You know, no lag added, good output, analog and digital signals and all that stuff. So anytime there's a new game on MISTER, a new game that I've played before had interest in. and I tried to give it a try. Arranoid was a very cool port. Mr. is amazing.

I just got a Mr. Board a few months ago, and it's an incredible project. It's one of the best things that's ever happened to video game preservation, in my opinion. I think the best would probably have to be MAME. And then hopefully, you know, MAME is, what, 20-plus years old? Yeah, it's really old. Hopefully 20-plus years from now, Mr. Rold will have been the root of all this.

Yeah, I mean, Mr. is basically, like I said in the Mr. episode we did, It's basically kind of following the track of maim, but as a hardware solution. So, yeah, I can see that happening. That's awesome. All right. Finally, we'll end up with a game that really kind of describes my life, and that is The Irritating Maze. Yeah, so I don't know if you guys are familiar with the irritating phenomenon franchise,

whatever it was from the late 90s. Not at all, no. There was basically a Japanese TV show, I think, a game show, where people had to maneuver through a maze that was electrified, and they turned this into video games, and there was irritating stick for PlayStation. And then there was also this arcade game, which I don't know if it was based on the show,

or it was just kind of inspired by it. But it was a trackball game with a spinner, and you had to maneuver a marble through a maze, avoiding obstacles, avoiding the electrical walls, and so forth. and uh kind of like operation but you're rolling a ball through it rather than putting your uh trackball operation yeah pretty much yeah anyway so that's that's pretty much it like there haven't been really any significant new trackball games that i can think up in the past 20 odd years now just more versions of golden tea golf yeah which isn't new it's the same thing and it's nice that they're still making it

but yeah no one's really innovated with that concept in a long time at least that i'm aware of If I'm mistaken, please, inform us by social media so we can know more about it. But, you know, this is retronaut, so it's fine to talk about old stuff. Is it a new stuff? Anyway, thanks, guys, for taking time to Brave TedMed and all the noise behind us. Hopefully, it's still a tolerable episode and isn't too messy. I feel bad for our editor. But, you know, that's the breaks.

That's the life you live. well thanks so much for having me on absolutely an honor to join you guys in this so yeah to wrap up why don't you introduce yourself we can all introduce ourselves and tell people where to find us i am bob the founder of retro rgb and you can find anything to do with the website at retro rgb everywhere and of course just retro rgb dot com do you have like a patreon or anything i do i'm on both float plane and patreon i've never heard of float plane Floop plane is like Patreon, but by the line is Tech Tips crew. So buy tech nerds for tech nerds. I see. But yeah, just anywhere at Retro-R-GB you can find us. And any support you give keeps all of the research and development

and, of course, articles and podcasts that we have going. Awesome. That's awesome. And I'm Benj Edwards. You can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards. And now I'm writing for How Togeek. You can read HowTogeek.com and support my work there. I'm just starting to do some history.

things there that have done really well, like about the zip drive and a Konami code the other day. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very sad about, what was his name, Hashimoto? Yeah, something like that. Passed away, yeah, the creator of the Konami Code and many other video games. Yeah, gorgie. But yes, and then finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You know me from Retronauts. You'll also find me at Limited Run Games, making things, media, and stuff like that, and being serenaded by probably lovely ladies in the background, because that's just the life that I lead, an exciting life of podcasts and shantuses. Anyway, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite,

and you can support Retronauts at patreon.com slash Retronauts for three bucks a month. You get the podcast early every Monday, a week early, ahead of everyone else, the Hoy-Polloy using their iTunes feeds. And for five bucks a month, you get bonus Friday episodes every other Friday, plus weekly articles written by Diamond Fight that are very informative and very personal. So check that out. It's worth it, in my opinion. And you know that I am not biased because I am no longer a journalist. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening, and we'll be back again in a week with a podcast because that's how we roll.

Running Diagnostics in three, two, men like that is a podcast. Good so far? That really sucks. Oh, no. Shut her down. They thought they could make something. funny, they can't do anything. They can't.

We're born fishing. Listen to men like that. How does Bloodborn stack up against, say, Oregon Trail? And is Bomberman just loadrunner from a different point of view? Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's top games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically rank the games you nominate for our ever-growing list. HG 101's top games.

Twice a week, every week, right here on Greenlit. Hunter Hunter, Yu-Hakasho, literary analysis, comparative localization, Jojo references. The works of Yoshihiro Togashi hold a specific kind of magic, and the people who seek to examine their roots and spiritual descendants are known as The Spirit Hunters, available on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right. So for this segment, I am talking to another author of classic gaming books, one that I'm actually a little

envious of because he's put together some really amazing stuff. Go ahead and introduce yourself and I can talk more about how I envy your access and your work. Well, my name's Tim Lapitno, and I am a writer and also really creative director, and I've worked on and written the Art of Atari book and also worked on the Undisputed Street Fighter book for Dynamite. Yeah, I haven't actually seen the Street Fighter book, but I own Art of Atari, and it's just an amazing piece. It's a, like, the access you got there and the quality of

the reproduction, the, the interviews with artists and illustrators is really some amazing stuff. I'd love to just, you know, talk to you. Maybe it's kind of inside pool for most people listening to this, inside baseball, whatever you call it. But, like, just the, you know, the process of creating something like that

and curating such, you know, important, but also such old video game history. Seems like a daunting task. It was, and I think if I knew how much work it was going to be at the beginning, I don't know if I would have undertaken as much of it. But, you know, it came about in a really, really unusual way, you know, because my day job is that I'm a creative director and a designer.

You know, I do packaging work. I do logos and brand identity in addition to writing. And the, you know, I grew up with Atari, the Atari 2,600, and the Atari logo, was always one that really interested me. And, you know, as a logo designer, there's this pantheon of logos, the Nike logo, the Apple, the rainbow apple logo with a bite taken out of it. You know, the logos of that era are well known, and their origin stories are kind of almost mythical, you know, in the logo design circles. But I realized that the Atari logo, no one was talking about it. There wasn't really much written about it.

there wasn't really much known about it. And so I started looking around on my own, trying to figure out who was this guy who designed the Atari logo. And his name was Jopperman. And he was, you know, one of the creative forces at Atari. And so all of my research really started there.

Yeah. So how did you get into, you know, writing about video games in the first place? I mean, it's kind of a, you talked a little bit about, you know, sort of your background, but to go for, from creative design to saying I'm going to make a book about video game history. That's a big step. I had been writing about video games online myself for probably 20 years before I

said, oh, I should, I should do a book. Yeah, you know, I think if I thought about it that way and sort of the way actual professional video game writers do things, I, you know, I might not have done it. But I think, you know, for me it was really, I didn't set out to write, you know, about video game history, I was really writing about the intersection of the things that I knew and the things I liked, right? So I wanted to write about art and design, because that's what I do, right? But I was also really interested in the history of Atari. So, you know, that sort of led me into this very specific, you know, sort of shoot, you know, that I slid down of video game history, which was, you know, there's many, many people who know way more about the history of video games,

but really even the history of Atari. But what I found myself doing and sort of starting to look into the marketing and the design and the artwork in the historical Atari company, I realized that those were things that I knew about and no one else had gone there. So, you know, I was sort of treading new ground and that was a place where I could actually, you know, carve out a little space, but not trying to be the expert at those other things that already sort of, you know, had been covered. somewhat extensively, you know, in a couple other books. So I really looked at it as saying, you know what? I'm finding the intersection of art and design and creativity.

So, you know, if someone, if you sort of held me into the floor, I would say it is video game history, but I really saw it as a, you know, an art and design history about Atari. Yeah. And, you know, I think specifically with that generation of consoles, the, you know, people talk about like the, the technology and the game design, but the marketing, the packaging design was so essential to the experience because the games themselves were so abstract that you kind of relied on, you know, like seeing, oh, I've got a stick and there's a square that I'm hitting back and forth. Well, you know, you see like a painting of an astronaut like guiding a paddle through

space and all of a sudden breakout becomes like this science fiction odyssey as opposed to just like, you know, some blocks moving around on the screen. No, absolutely. And I think the way you even, you know, framed it right there was exactly my thesis going in. You know, that was my experience as a kid. You know, super breakout was a mind-bending, you know, sort of transformative experience for me. I mean, I love the breakout games on an Atari 2600, but this picture of this astronaut in space with this rainbow wall sort of reflected on the curve of his helmet, it just, it took

it to another place for me. It added this level of story to it. And I was fascinated by that because like you, I just, you know, those games are simple enough, but just the mere suggestion, just the sort of the sketch of story sort of imbued the whole gameplay with totally, you know, additional meaning. And those are the only really, that generation of games is the only generation where I think that is really true and that art, you know, is not purely marketing here. It's actually part of the storytelling. So I wanted to explore that as well. I wanted, you know, I wanted to talk to the artists and say, you know, was that 100% intentional? Was it, you know, a happy accident? Like, what was the thinking behind that? And it was really fun digging these people up. And I think

that was actually, that also helped me as well. You know, I have a journalism background, but, you know, I'm a creative director. And so it was actually very comfortable for me to interview people who had some of them had never been interviewed. And also some of them, you know, I literally had people say, are you serious? You really want to talk to me? You think anyone? I remember this is, I forget who told me this, but when I was interviewing people, one guy basically almost laughed me off the phone and said, do you really think someone's going to want to read about this? Like, he wasn't even being mean about it. He was literally, he was confounded. He just, he didn't believe it. But I think that really, that helped me in this interview process because I got to explore that.

I got to explore that with these creative people. Yeah, I mean, I experience that too. And I, when I kind of go after interviewing people who made a game, you know, they live in Japan and, you know, created something for Famicom like 25, 30 years ago. And I'm like, hey, I'd like to interview you. And they're like, really? an American wants to talk to me about this game that hardly anyone has heard of in the States. Like, why would you want to do that? But there are people out there who are hungry to know more about this, who, you know, maybe they played the games or maybe they're just curious about video game history,

but they do want to know. So it's always great to be able to get those, you know, those firsthand resources, especially as, you know, the people who worked on those first and second generation video games are getting up there in age. And, you know, they're not going to be around forever. It's a kind of a bleak reality, but it's something that we're increasingly facing as crucial video game creators and, you know, people who worked in not necessarily video games, but like musicians that I love, uh, film stars or film autores that I admire. Like, more and more of them are, we're losing them. And so it's, it's great to be able to get those accounts before it's too late. Yeah. No, it really, I mean, not to be morbid about it, but it does feel a little bit like the clock is ticking, you know, and I don't want. wants those stories not to be captured. And I think for me, it's always been interesting about the creative process and understanding how people think about what they do and how they articulate that,

whether that's in logo design or here. And I think for me, I looked at all these Atari programmers who had made some of the, these iconic games of my childhood and really in video game history. And I just felt like it was very well-covered ground. And I wanted to talk to the people who no one really thought to talk to them about this stuff and really get their fresh ideas about it. And it was actually really fun. It was very satisfying to talk to some of these people.

I mean, one artist, when we initially started talking, and this is over the course of several years, didn't want to talk to me at all. And he was sort of embarrassed by this early work. And then by the end of it, he felt like this had sort of caused a sort of a renaissance in interest in his early work, but also what he was doing then, and just a reminder of how fun that time in life was. So it was pretty cool. I happened to be in the right place, even where talking with some of these early Atari artists and some of the creative people there, bringing them together. We did some group interviews, and some of these people hadn't seen

each other for decades. So I was sort of, you know, incidentally forcing these little reunions, And it was wonderful. You know, it was really fun to be a, to be part of that, just even tangentially. It was a lot of fun to see sort of those reconnections happening just because of my interest in this and wanting to write about it. Yeah, you know, the work that they did is really a vanished art sometime around the late 90s. You really stop seeing hand-drawn art and hand-painted art in video game covers outside of indie games or, like, anime-based games from Japan. and it's pretty much just, you know, CG renders now.

And that's fine. It's very literal. It's very like, this is, you know, like a beautified version of what you're going to see in the game. But it really lacks that sort of, I don't know,

the sense of, like the spirit of the thing. Like, you, video game covers used to be about, like, capturing the essence of a game experience and, you know, building something around it,

whereas you just, you really don't get that anymore outside of indie games. So you're kind of curating something that is no longer a part of video game, something that already has been lost. Yeah, no, it is. And it's about capturing that emotion because it's not a literal depiction. It's not even like an airbrushed, idealized version of game graphics the way in some ways, you know, it's being done digitally now. And it really was capturing that.

You know, and I take umbrage a little bit, you know, when I read things on the internet, people saying, oh, that early art was, it was a bait and switch. the graphics were never that good and that's a sort of a retconning of that thinking because everybody knew that those were not the game graphics. It served a different function to it was about capturing the emotion.

You know, when you're introducing an audience to playing games on their televisions for maybe the first time, you want to get the emotion and the energy in playing tennis because tennis on the Atari 2600 is not going to look the same as real-life

tennis. So they're, they're creating this, you know, sort of emotional bridge to those things. And that's really what it was about. Yeah, I feel like that, that sort of retroactive opinion about old video game covers is, is not giving audiences of 40 years ago a whole lot of credit. Like, I don't think anyone looked at the 2,600 version of Space Invaders and said, oh, I bet this game is actually going to have these very detailed flying saucers zapping, you know, humans as they run away, like very realistic looking humans. Like, this is exactly what I'm going to see on my screen. Everyone knew what the limitations of video games were at that point. We didn't expect, you know, pick up Frogger thinking, oh, there's actually going to be a frog in like a,

you know, a hat and a suit coat dashing across a highway as a realistic looking car runs them down. Like, we knew. But it was basically, you know, sort of like, here's the sort of the aspirational concept of what this game would like to be. Here's, you know, something to put into your mind as you're playing this incredibly simplistic looking abstraction of a game. Like this, you know, kind of grounds your experience in imagery that you recognize and gives kind of some definition to what ultimately amount to, you know, some pixel blobs on the screen. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I think those things worked in tandem, right? And, you know, that was. part of this, you know, if we're going to use it in modern terms, it's like this 360 degree experience of playing those games. It was everything from the moment you walked up to that

game box in the, you know, the video store on your corner of your street and to getting it home, plugging it in. And all of those pieces were parts of this whole game experience, which is much more than looking at a review on YouTube and then, you know, ordering the download now and, you know, and letting it load on your console. It's a different experience. with different pieces, and I think it's hard to totally describe in a way that makes sense if you did not quite live through it. Yeah, so one of the art on me work hard and try to do what's right. Yeah, so one of the great things about the art of Atari book is that it does have so many high-quality reproductions of, you know, the original artwork and the pieces and packaging and so forth. I assuming there's no central repository for that sort of thing.

So how did you go about sourcing that material? Yeah, you know, it was funny because, you know, obviously it's a license book, you know, my publisher, Dynamite Entertainment, you know, had this license for Atari. And Atari, for their parts, they were great. And they're like, we don't really have anything, but we're happy to help. Yeah, Atari has been like three or four companies since the 2600 days. So I just assume there's no, there's no, like, archive there. No, no. So, I mean, it really, you know, it was really, I felt like Indiana Jones, right? It was very much. much about tracking this stuff down. And a big part of this really started, there was two aspects of it when I was in the early days as before

I had a book contract, really when this thing was just still, you know, germinating as an idea. One was, I just totally randomly got a chance to interview Cliff Spahn who was one of the original Atari artists, you know, and that's a

longer story I can talk about in a minute. But the other one was, another collector was selling a bunch of slides and negatives of Atari artwork, and I was able to get my hands on the stuff, I was able to buy this, and it wasn't a ton, but it was like, you know, 30, 40, 50 pieces, but it was this nugget that I could start building around. And then when I reached out to artists and I said, hey, I want to interview you. I'm also looking for, you know, artwork that you still have, I could point to, you know, I have this piece, I have that piece. You know, I brought something that I

actually could put in the book, you know, once you scan the stuff and, you know, high resolution, and that's the awesome thing about photographic negatives and transparencies is they really yield super, super detailed imagery. So some of these things are four inches by five inches, but they're photographic, you know, negatives. So they're really, really, really high quality. So you could blow them up really large. But then, you know, once I was, you know, able to talk with these artists, some of whom, you know, had their portfolios. There was an occasional original piece here and there, you know, usually in the hands of collectors, but also a lot of these artists still had their portfolios,

you know, in quotes, you know, in the form of little boxes of these four by five transparencies because that's how you did it, right, in the 70s and 80s. And so I would reach out to one artist and they'd say, oh, well, you know, I have this and this that I did? And have you talked to this person? And it started spiraling, and it was like a snowball rolling down the hill. And I got to the point where I was like, okay, I have about 50, 60% of what I wanted, talking to collectors who I knew who had original art, reaching out to all the artists, asking them if they knew people.

And it was really sort of like just using the network to find this stuff. Some of it was a couple of museums had a couple pieces. But I mean, I did everything. We photographed original artwork. We scanned transparencies and slides. We went back to, like, large printed posters, and we used those. We photographed game boxes. And then I remember at one point, one of the graphic designers, Evelyn Cito, who I interviewed for the book.

And she was super helpful because she was one of those people at Atari. Being a graphic designer, she interfaced with the illustrators. She talked with the designers and the writers and the creative directors. So she knew everybody. And she said, hey, you know, I reached out to the photographer. who shot all this flat artwork that we use. So, you know, you'd have a painting and then you'd have somebody shoot it and that negative would become the thing, right?

And she said, oh, I think he might have some pieces. So I reached out to this guy. He's like, oh, I think I might have something in my attic. And at this point, I would have driven 50 miles, 100 miles, to get one piece of art, right? And I had done that. And he's like, oh, I might have a couple. And he comes back. And he's like, I have 45 of these.

And I was just like, like the heavens opened and it was like, oh, And I was like, that's amazing. And it was all this stuff that I did not have accounted for in the book. And he was, you know, everyone I talked to was very generous about sharing this stuff, sending it to me to scan it. And I mean, so everything, I touched literally every single piece of artwork, both digitally and physically, that ended up in that book. So you mentioned that this whole project was kind of started by a quest to learn more about

the Atari logo. Were you satisfied by what you dug up about that? I'd say, you know, I would always like to know more. But, you know, learning about George Opperman, who was, you know, the art director and creative director at Atari who designed this logo, you know, he

passed away in the mid-80s. So, you know, he wasn't there to talk. And so the closest thing I was able to do was talk to Evelyn, who I mentioned, who was basically, you know, did a lot of the production work and really was a right-hand person. for George. She had worked with him

even before he came on Atari. She actually inked the original logo. So she did the production work on the original logo to make sure that it looked great. So like getting to talk to her, she was one of the closest people to George. I had to

sort of triangulate and sort of talk to all the people who worked closely with him and get a sense of what he was like. But I'd love to see more. I mean, it was, this was, I mean, if you picture this, I feel like it was a Warner Bros. cartoon of me just like stumbling along and finding things and asking and reaching out to people in every way, shape, and form. I mean, I think

we were getting ready to put the finishing touches on the design of the book, and someone who knew someone who knew somebody else that I had reached out to over a year earlier had said, hey, you know, I just found this thread that we were talking about. And I talked to my friend who has, he says he has the original logo concepts of the Atari logo. Is that interesting to you? And I'm just like, what, what? You know, so we had to make space. I mean, like, literally the pages were already designed. And if you actually go to the, you know, the art of Atari, you open the book about the logo, there is a little space where we see some of the early logo concepts. And they're in there because literally the pages were already designed. We had to find some place to put those. But it was just

stuff like that. I felt like my approach here, and I don't know that it's very systematic. I had all these things I wanted to do, but then every step of the process, even before I had a book contract, I was talking about the work that I was doing. You know, and people found out about it through the internet, through

message boards like Atari Age, and then all that was sort of circulating out there, so people would find me and reach out to me and I would continue to talk to people and there were some kind of, you know, harmonic vibration frequency where people were just coming back to me and said, hey, is this interesting to you?

Hey, I heard you were working on this. And it was this amazing, like, sort of love from the, you know, the larger community of people who were interested in this book and wanted to help. And I was the beneficiary of so much of that. I mean, there's so many people, like, that if I, if they weren't sort of jumping in to be like, hey, how can I help that, you know, a lot of this wouldn't, it could never have happened. and it's probably why there wasn't a book already

because I'm not I'm not the most connected person or the most knowledgeable necessarily but I was putting in the time and I was able to connect so many of the right people. Yeah, I mean that's kind of the two parts you need right there is someone who is interested in willing and able to take on the task of documenting this stuff

and then also able to make those connections because you have a lot of both, one or the other, but it's rare that, you know, they both come together like that. So it's, it's great you were able to make the book happen. You know, looking over all the work that you collected, all the, all the artwork you compiled, do you have a single favorite piece? Is there one that really stands out and makes you say, like, this, this is just amazing. It is like such a magnificent piece of artwork. Yeah, you know, I have my favorites. I mean, I think when I was able to get my hands on the

missile command artwork and hold that that 4 by 5 transparency in my hands I just felt like great like that is that is the iconic piece and that's the thing that I want to lead with and that says so much about what I want to say it's beautifully rendered

and it has that sort of 70s Buck Rogers sci-fi feel so like when I when I held that in my hands and I knew it was going in the book I just felt great about it but I think the my favorite piece and not just from a craft perspective you know quality art perspective but was just this simultaneously it's a beautiful ridiculous piece of art but also the fact that I was able to unearth it was the Pac-Man uh the Atari 2600 Pac-Man uh that

hero Kimura did for yeah yeah the crazy one that wasn't ever used and to my knowledge other than in, you know, a brief sort of Passover video in an Atari promotional video that was not widely circulated. Like, this was the very first time that that art had ever been seen in public. And so I just felt like this is

an iconic piece. It's never been seen. It's part of a, you know, larger story of Pac-Man on 2600. So when I saw that, I literally felt like I was holding, you know, Indiana Jones in the Lost Crusade and I'm holding the grail. It's right there. Now, which one is that? That's not the one where it's

Pac-Man, like, running through the maze, grabbing wafers, and he's kind of got a buck-tooth, right? It's another one. Right. It's similar to that one where Pac-Man's all metallic, right? And he's shiny and, you know, airbrush, and he's running through almost like a forest. And the ghost monsters, quote-unquote, you know, are chasing him. And they look very monstrous and they've got these teeth and drool. And, you know, it was very much this, like, you know, far-off sort of take on Pac-Man.

And clearly they kind of rained it back in for the other versions. But, you know, I just love that it just captured this weird energy. If you were like, hey, you know what, I'm just going to describe the idea of Pac-Man and paint that. That's how I felt that that piece was. And I just, there's something about it that's, it's not a naivete, but it's just like this sort of unfettered fantasy version of Pac-Man. Okay, yeah, I'm looking at that now. And it's, like, Pac-Man looks like a Hajime Sorayama, like, robot woman, kind of like super chrome. except of course not erotic

but yeah he's definitely got that kind of look to him like very metallic and shiny and the monsters are wild it's like something from you know Sesame Street or the Muppets show like one of those really big ungainly Muppets that takes like four people to act

yeah totally that's really interesting huh so you mentioned that you had a story about crap I forgot his name someone spawn I think yeah Cliff Spawn Yeah, Cliffsbone, that's it.

Yeah, I mean, and that was really the genesis of this project. You know, this was basically like 2011, I think. You know, I was running a design firm with a friend of mine who actually, incidentally, was the chief designer. He's the one who designed the Art of Atari book. We were working on a blog post. You know, we had a firm, we had an office here in Chicago, and his office was out in L.A. And I said, hey, let's write a blog post for Thanksgiving about the, you know, the artists and the design. that we're thankful for, right?

And so one of those people I wrote was Cliff Spawn. You know, and there's all kinds of people. There's Cliff Spawn, you know, Sid Mead, the conceptual designer. And, you know, I wrote this blog post. There were some images. Great. You know, we're this little bitty design firm. You know, we didn't have a huge reach or anything like that.

But, you know, months and months, months later, I got a comment on that story. And this woman writes and said, hey, this is really cool. I'm a graphic designer too, so it was neat to see this. But I grew up down the street from Cliff Spawn, and I still see him. He's a family friend. Would you like to meet him? Would you like to talk to him? And I was just like, of course, that sounds amazing.

You know, because all these questions that I had that we've already been talking about, about making the art for, you know, Atari were just there in my head. So she connected us. And, you know, Cliff has done, you know, did almost 20 pieces for the 2,600. And he did a lot of other artwork for Atari. he also did some work for Apple interesting enough Steve Jobs actually offered him a job

and he said hey come work for Apple don't bother with his video game stuff you can be salaried you know you can have stock options you know come work for me and he had done like some manual illustrations and he's like I don't know if this Apple thing's going anywhere and he turned it down he's like I like the freelance life and you know I think he

regretted that a little bit later but in any case we talked you know I got on the phone with him. I had a yellow pad sitting there. I was like, oh, maybe he'll say something interesting. I'll learn a couple things. I hang up the phone like two and a half hours later. We have this amazing conversation and he remembered every piece that he did in such exquisite detail. He wasn't even looking at this stuff, you know, because again, it only existed in those boxes. But he had such great recall over all these pieces and they were so interesting in terms of

creative process. And I hung up the phone and I looked at just the pages of scribble. that I had, you know, written down. I didn't plan on this to being some sort of official interview, but I realize I'm like, if anyone else has stories like this, there's a book here. You know, and that was the first time that,

you know, and I just fell into it. And I feel like, then where I tell you these stories, it's just me like bumbling around, like, and then I have, you know, I feel like Forrest Gump. You know, it's like a bumbling around, oh, I bumped into this guy,

and I met this person. I mean, and that's really, that was sort of the first step of this book. You know, and then I said, oh, this could be a book. And then I, you know, as it gained momentum, I'd talk to more people. And they'd say, what are you doing?

Who have you talked to? And, you know, one person would introduce me to this person. And then, you know, suddenly someone else would come, say, hey, I know you've talked to those people. Let's talk. And then, you know, I was working on it. And I had just started down the road of looking for a publisher. And it even pitched it to a couple places myself. And then I kind of heard through the grapevine that Dynamite Entertainment, you know, who became the publisher of the book,

we're planning on doing an art, you know, an Atari art book. And I was like, well, that's weird. And but we connected and, you know, lo and behold, it was amazing for them because they connected with me and I had already had, you know, a good chunk of this book sort of plotted out. And, you know, so they were able to just, you know, they said, hey, you're doing this. Go for it. You know, and they really, they said, this is kind of what we want, but we see that you

have a vision and they let me run with it. I mean, it was, I mean, it was unbelievable, the amount of rope they gave me, you know, for good or for bad, you know, I stand by the decisions, you know, there was minimal sort of interference about, like, you know, little things here and there, what they wanted, but they were able to say, hey, you've got a vision, you know, go for it. And that was an, you know, it was an unbelievable part of the process. So, you know, I don't want to take too much time, but I did want to talk a little bit about some of your other work. You mentioned you've put together a Street Fighter book.

You know, you said with the art of Atari, you felt like the game design, the creators, the corporate, side, like, that's all well-trodden ground and you wanted to cover something new. Did you, did you take the same direction, the same angle with Street Fighter? Because that's also a very well kind of established, like the history of the game and the design of the game and the character biographies and things like that. So, you know, what approach did you take to tackling the Street Fighter franchise? Yeah, that was a little different. I mean, like I felt like Art of Atari was very, you know, it's kind of virgin territory. No one was really talking about the arts and the you know the marketing side of it so like we were kind of

I was kind of free to do whatever with Street Fighter you know it was one of several books that we were looking at you know and I knew I you know it really wasn't that long after Art of Atari I knew I didn't want to write that book but you know we were looking at Street Fighter as a franchise not just the you know the first game when we were saying like how is this impacted games how is it touched on you know media how to what part of the art play you know we were really trying to sort of thread the needle. And so I didn't write this book. Steve Hendershott, who is a friend of mine and a phenomenal journalist. I mean, a real, like an actual working journalist, unlike myself,

wrote this book and, you know, comes out of his childhood, arcade childhood of Street Fighter 2. And we really looked at what are the stories out there, you know, in the Street Fighter fan community, in the sort of nascent e-sports community of the 90s? Like, what were those moments? And he really dug in to like sort of dig into those. And we knew we wanted to talk to the artists and we wanted to talk about how moving a game from one part of the world to another, how the art had to be different, you know, and talked about some of the biases in there and sort of the, you know, especially in the 80s and 90s, the Western ideas of what was going to sell and how games should be packaged and what the characters should sort of look like. And then we wanted to talk about that sort of east-west kind of thing that really,

you know, only sort of, I feel like, exists now. Now we're, you know, it's a much more visually global culture. And so those were all the ideas that we had. But it was very much like, okay, what has been done and we wanted to sort of find our own path over there. All right. So can you talk about what you're working on now, like current products you have and kind of where you see yourself going from there?

Yeah. Right now, you know, I continue to do package design, logo design and all that. That's still like my bread and butter, but I've done more and more at this place sort of in video games, pop culture, and art. So I sort of took on this project myself this year, you know, being the 40th and, you know, I'm, you know, just a tick older than Pac-Man, but it's, you know, Pac-Man's a game and even like a pop culture property that I grew up with. And I just think it's an interesting thing. This sort of started in my head a couple years back. I went to my daughter's school, you know, when she was in, like, first grade or maybe it was kindergarten. And, you know, it was like career day, and you come in, you talk about what you do, right?

You know, and I said, well, I make books about video games, and these little kids are all sitting on the floor. And I said, how many people know who Pac-Man is? And all of these, like, five- and six-year-olds raised their hand. And it kind of blew me away. Like, I mean, they all knew who Pac-Man was, which just absolutely confounded me. And I was just like, wow, this really seems like Pac-Man continues to, you know, persist, you know, continues to be somewhat relevant in pop culture. You know, I love the original Pac-Man. You know, I played many of those games on many different platforms.

You know, and you see, you know, there are even more modern versions of the cartoons and, you know, the new games. And it just got me thinking, what is it about Pac-Man that, you know, why does Pac-Man persist after 40 years and not just sort of hanging on as this cultural icon? There really is, there's something there. And I wanted to figure that out. And so I said, well, is that a book? Is that, you know, a series of articles? You know, is it an examination of the visuals? You know, and I've sort of attempted all those things.

But what I decided, I want to do something that was sort of encapsulate all those things. So this year, starting in January 1st, I basically am trying to experience Pac-Man every day for the entire year. So I've had this thing called 365 of PAC that I'm doing on social media on Instagram and Twitter and a little, bit on Facebook, and I'm basically trying to play my way through every version of Pac-Man on every platform and looking at all of these sort of pop culture instances. So, you know, looking at the lunchboxes and the artwork and, you know, the jackets and the erasers and the raviolis and all of these weird things that come, you know, the board games and the video games about board games and the board games that are supposed to be like the

video games and playing all these different versions and all these platforms and trying to understand what is it about the sort of soul of the Pac-Man as a pop culture, you know, character, but also as a game that why does it persist? And so it's sort of this exercise in sort of crazy binging Pac-Man as I'm documenting every single day. My eventual goal is to write a book about that. You know, and I don't know if it'll be like my life of one year with Pac-Man or something along those lines. You know, I sort of envision it as a little bit of a memoir slash video game history, but it's more like experience history. You know, I'm not necessarily just trying to tell the history of Pac-Man, although I think that's part of it. I'm really trying to have an experience,

sort of an experience, and I want to write about that. All right. So that sounds actually very ambitious and interesting. So I'm going to wrap here, but if people wanted to read, about your 365 days of Pac-Man project or, you know, pick up a copy of Art of Atari. Where can they find you and your work online? Yeah, so I'm on Twitter and Instagram as Tim Lapitino and Lappatino. And I'm also doing the 365 of Pac-Man at 365 of Pack. So I also, you know, on my website, tim Lapitino.com, I'm kind of, you know, it's sort of the clearinghouse for all the work that I do.

So, yeah, I'm just trying to make my way through this. of where pop culture and video games and art and design sort of all intersect. And that's the place where I just kind of parked myself for now. All right. Awesome. And again, if you listening to this have not seen the book Art of Atari, definitely pick it up. It is an essential coffee book table. Just some amazing reproductions and like firsthand accounts in there. Really great stuff. So Tim, thanks very much for your time. And good luck with your Pac-Man endeavors. It Sounds. Still got a ways to go. Still got like nine months of that to go. Totally. Well, thanks. Yeah. I'm trying to pace myself. But, uh, no, it's been really fun. Thanks so much.

Yeah, absolutely. I got a pocket full of quarters and I'm headed to the arcade. I don't have a lot of money, but I'm bringing everything of me. I got a can of some of my finger and my shoulders hurting too. I'm going to eat them all up just as soon as they time grew Because I got Pac-Man fever It's driving me crazy

I got Pac-Man fever I'm going out of my mind I'm going out of my mind I got Pac-Man fever I'm going out of my mind I don't know.