Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 387: The Atari 8-Bit Legacy

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

Retronauts East returns as Benj Edwards and Ben Elgin school Jeremy Parish about the history and greatness of Atari's 8-bit computer line, as well as its unloved console counterpart, the 5200. Art by John Pading. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, I was a teenage Atari rioter or something like that. Anyway, hi everyone. Welcome to Retronaut's episode. Whoa, I didn't look it up. It's got big numbers next to it. It's, it would actually... 800. No, it's not episode 800. But if this were an 8-bit podcast, we would definitely be way past the buffer overflow at this point. So this is, this is, this is, this is, this episode like negative 20. Okay, it's episode 389.9. That's

a lot of podcasts. I am Jeremy Parrish, counting beyond 255. And here, also incrementing with me, we have the locals from Retronauts East. Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Let's introduce ourselves. Let's see. We'll go with the guy who is the star of this episode,

the one who's going to be carrying us all on his back, kind of like Jesus and that, you know, that poem about the footprints. Exactly. Benj, carry us along the beach where there is only one set of tracks. Hi, I'm Benj Edwards. I am now associate editor of How To Geek.

Wow. Who do you associate with? Like, are you hobnobbing? Yeah, I'm the associate. All right. And next is. I'm Ben Elton. I'm along for the ride.

I was alive when this stuff was going on. That's my qualification. Yeah, me too. Yeah, this really is Binge's episode. But it's something he was insistent on talking about at some point. And I said, okay, binge, let's go for it. It's all on you now. No pressure or anything. But yes, this episode, we are talking about the Atari 8-bit family, which I've learned a great deal from about recently in researching for this episode, thanks to the work of one guy named to binge Edwards, who wrote a really great retrospective on the Atari Abit family for Fast Company. And you may not have heard of Fast Company, but it's like bad company, but faster. So the Atari Abid Family, when I say that, what I mean specifically are the

computer platforms, which were numbered all the way from 400 to like 1,600. There were 1,200. No, there was a 1,400 also. Well, that never came out. Oh, did it not? Okay, the 1400 XL. It's hard to keep track. They had so many numbers. It was kind of like Macintosh models back in the 90s. You're just like, what, like there's some logic to it, but it's confusing. But also, in addition to the computers, there's the hybrid XEGS. And we're going to talk about the Atari 5200 because it's almost a part of the Atari

Apid family of computers, but not quite, but close enough. And there's just not enough to the 5200 to really carry its own episode. So it's getting lumped in here because it was the little system that couldn't, but it almost could. So with that in mind, let's talk about very briefly our own experiences with the Atari Abid family. Ben, let's start with you, Mr. Elgin. So, yeah, I don't have a lot of direct experience. Definitely not with the 8-bit computers themselves. In that era, I had the Ti-99-4-A, which we already talked about in a different episode. So we didn't have an entire computer at home.

I didn't know people outside of Texas actually used TI-99-4-A. You learn something new every day. Well, you learned it like a year or two ago when we did. I know, but then coronavirus happened and I forgot everything. like life just reset a few months ago. But yeah, so that was the console computer hybrid that I had. But I did play some of this area's Atari games on a, gosh, I think it was the kids of a college friend of my parents had an Atari. And I think they may have actually had a 5200 because I remember playing some Atari games that looked like a little more than the earlier Atari's could do.

So, like in particular, it had a kind of vamped up version of centipede on it that had, I think, better graphics than actually both the 2,600 and the 8-bit version. Yeah, that would be 5200 version was different than the 800 version. Yeah. Yeah, okay, so for myself, I have, like, no experience with the Atari 8-bit family, almost no experience. My one meaningful experience was that when I was a kid, the Atari 400 system computer was one of those things that my father brought home, like, as a secondhand thing. I don't know exactly how this happened. You know, he worked in schools, and my grandparents were managers, like live-in resident managers at a dormitory at a men's dormitory at a locally college. So sometimes things that were just kind of left behind would trickle their way into our home.

That's how we got our Pong system, our, you know, Colico Telstar, Telstar. So like where other families would bring home lost puppies, your dad would bring home lost. Yeah, he's like, here's some electronics. Can you make it work? And the thing about the Atari 400 was that I could not make it work. And that's because, like, I could plug it in. I could hook it up to the TV. I could get a signal. but I couldn't make it do anything

and I was positive that it was just like defective but I was trying to use Atari 2,600 cartridges on it because that was when you could buy 2,600 cartridges for a buck or like five for a buck and a just like a bin full of games just piled up in a convenience store because they were just like, get this the hell out of our home or out of our store.

So of course a 2,600 cartridge would work on it. So I tried programming on it, but, you know, I didn't realize that it used its own version of, like, ProDos. So I couldn't get that to work. So I just thought it was, you know, defective. But it wasn't really possible to just, you know, go online and look up information on how to make this thing work at the time. So I was just a kid trying to figure out how to use a computer with no manual. So that was it.

That was my disappointment. I was so excited about, like, oh, I can do some stuff with this. But I couldn't even make, you know, like, you know, like, a hello world program work. So it was kind of pathetic. So basically my experience with the Atari 400 is a prompt, like a text prompt on the screen. What happened with you is that the 400 needed a basic cartridge to be programmable. Otherwise, it goes to the Atari computer memo pad right when you started up and you just type

random things on it. It doesn't do anything else. That would explain why nothing executed. Okay. Yeah. So you need the basic cartridge and that's what you didn't know. Programming memos to yourself. God damn it.

Yeah. So that was my sad experience. But like, how was I supposed to know any of that? I was, you know, probably like seven or eight years old. And again, there just wasn't the information out there. And I didn't have any money that I could go like buy a book or something. So that was it. So it was useless. And then, you know, the Atari 5200, I remember seeing like in stores and I had a friend who had it. And I just remember like there was something that felt more advanced about it beyond the graphics. Like he had. you know, boxed games for it on his, on his, you know, VHS tape shelf. And I was like, oh, wow, those just look more sophisticated. They look better than 2,600 games, like the, the silver packaging, you know, everything was just like very advanced. I always really loved the, the Atari computer lineups packaging for games. It just has this really super classy style with like the Optima typeface. And there's like, you know, kind of the bottom. box area that's flat and has like the title of the program or the game. And then there's a kind of a flat space at the top that has some of the branding in it. But then in the middle,

there's artwork. And it just, it just looks so good. It's so like quintessentially 80s classy. But I never actually got to own those things. So the closest I came was like typing some basic commands into the notepad. So that was, that's my story. And I probably could have said that in like 30 seconds, but we got to kill time. We got to fill time just in case, you know, just in case things don't work out this episode. Just in case I forgot everything about the Atari because I only got six hours of sleep less than. That's right. Yeah. So I'm giving you some padding here, Benj. Yeah, thanks. So all of that was just a vapid preamble to the real meat.

Not that your contribution was Vapid Ben, just mine. Mine was extremely drawn out. Okay, I'm going to stop digressing here and just let Benj talk about his own experiences with the Atari 8bit family because I know it's a platform that's near and dear to his heart and he has a lot of formative memories of it. So Benj, take it away. Yeah, the 8bit family is like part of my family. family in a way. My dad bought the first, his first Atari 800 for my brother in 1981, the year I was born, probably just before I was born or just after I was born. And so I've had an Atari in the house for 40 years. And the funny thing is I still have that Atari 800. And my brother still has one. We got another one later. And of course, I'm, you know, me collecting. I have tons of now. But so, uh, Anyway, the funny thing is, is I grew up watching my brother play the Atari 800.

We always called it the 800. I think the story was that my dad first bought an Atari 400 for my brother. But my brother was frustrated with it because of the keyboard. And my dad really wanted him to learn programming on it. So he returned that and got an Atari 800 and a disc drive. And it was a lot of money back then. I found the receipt for the disc drive somewhere. It's really cool.

I think it's one of my retro scans. But what was the total amount? Gosh, I don't remember. I could Google it real quick if you want. Okay, that's fine. Let's just say it was a few hundred bucks, and we're talking 40 years ago. All I did is I googled Atari receipt, and mine is the first result. Okay.

Atari 810, this drive was $449, Star Raiders for $32. He ordered a joystick for 15, but they're back ordered, so I will. Anyway, that was July 24th, 1981. That was when I was, you know, I don't know, three months old. A polywag. Yeah. So my first gaming experiences came on the Atari 800. We always had it set up somewhere where we could play it when I was little.

And the first house we lived in, it was either in my brother's room on a desk, which I've posted lots of pictures of that online in various places, or in our dining room on a special table in the corner. And it was always available, and my brother programmed a lot of games on it, and there was a lot of wizardry going on there. I was really impressed with it. My brother's five years older than me. Like literally the game wizardry?

I didn't know that made it to Apple. No, this figurative wizardry programming that really amazed me. And the first video games I ever remember playing were on that platform. So I think basketball, Atari basketball, and Donkey Kong, I remember my brother running around me in basketball. and frustrating me and kept dunking on me over and over again. But I was like, you know, very little. So it is a deep part of my life.

And whenever there's these games like Earthbound and some other games like now on Starry Valley, they ask you to list your favorite thing. And I always put Atari 800 in there. That's just, it's such a cultural, you know, a big cultural force in my life. And I love the games. I still keep an Atari out all the time and play it with the kids. and, you know, I've built joysticks for it. And I could talk hours about my history with it.

Well, we might ask you to, depending on how long this podcast run. Yeah. But yes, anyway, suffice to say that for you, the Atari 8-bit family is, I guess, sits in the same place for you that, like, the NES or something does for me. Yeah. The funny thing about it, though, is that I never stopped using the Atari 800. We never stopped. Never. I mean, it was always, you still file your stories on it, right?

Yeah. Wait, what's that mean? I mean, when you submit stories to How to Geek, you submit them, like, from an Atari 400, you type it on a 400 with a membrane keyboard and then send it up by, like, you know, 2,600 bond modem. Yeah, I just misunderstood what you said. I thought you said follow your stories like it was Twitter or something. Yeah, I filed stories on it. There's probably someone who has created a Twitter application. for Atari 800.

Yeah, probably. I think there, I've asked for that with this new Atari modem thing that we got the Fujinet cartridge. But that's the funny thing about it, is that since it came out, we always had it out, and if it wasn't out,

it was nearby, and we'd get it out once or twice a year and play it, and I literally never stopped, all through my teenage years, all through my early adult years, all through the present. So it's been a,

it has never really gone obsolete, the games are that good like Mule and Seven Cities of Gold and some things like Archon just were never bested on any other platform in my opinion so it's always been there even the NES was a huge

force of my life too but there were times when we just stopped playing it for a few years you know because it was kind of old and whatever but anyway I think that's remarkable about this platform that's why it's so special to me yeah I don't actually have anything equivalent to that in my life because

I guess, you know, when I was a polywag, there weren't really home computers. And that actually gets back to kind of the origins of the 400 and the 800, which debuted in 1979. But of course, they were in development for several years before that. And in the late 70s, home computers were starting to become a thing. Like they didn't really exist as anything beyond theories or like, you know, homes of the future drawings where people were like wearing, you know, polyester leisure suits while sitting in a hover chair, looking out over a vista of a gleaming futuristic city and typing like recipes or whatever into their terminal on their armchair. Like, you know, up until the mid-70s, that's just what home computers were, just kind of this

fanciful, imagined thing. But then, you know, in 1977-ish, the Apple II launched, Tandy launched its home computer line. What else was there? I feel like there was a... another. The Commodore pet. Yes, the Commodore pet. Okay. So all of those kind of debuted in the late 70s and made the idea of, you know, this thing that used to be like a room-sized machine that was used for calculating rocket trajectories. Like now it could be in your home and you could do stuff on it and play, including playing video games, but also like typing stories or kind of whatever you did on computers before there was an internet and or before there was a publicly accessible internet.

And so Atari, you know, around the same time had made its debut in the console space with the Atari 2,600, or VCS. And, you know, I don't think it took genius level intellect for them to say, well, you know, we've got a presence here and we're doing very well. Why don't we also, you know, have a presence over there and see how well we do there? And I think at the time, you know, the VCS was not designed for a long life. It was designed to be very, very cheap and, you know, like a consumer-friendly device that could basically play breakout or pong. And, you know, when people started to do other things with it and go beyond its creator's ambitions, it kind of caught everyone by surprise. But at the time that the Atari computer lineup was initiated, the development of it, Atari just assumed, you know, this is this, this 2600 is not going to be with us a long. long time, and we need something that's going to come in and replace it. And the Atari 400 and

800 were kind of part of that. I don't know, Benj, if you can shed more light into kind of the overall strategy, because I know they had a bunch of different, like, platform concepts in mind at different budget levels, and those didn't all shake out. Yeah, see, I talked to Joe DeCure, who is one of the designers of the 2,600, you know, the game console and the Atari computer line. And he told me that the 2600 was just like, just like Jeremy said, it was a basic bare bones thing. They designed it with basically 1975 technology in mine, 76 technology in mine, even though it came out in 77. And the progress of semiconductor chips, integrated circuits, they just got dramatically more complex at an exponential rate. So even within like a year

of designing that is already basically obsolete and they could create more. much more sophisticated things. So even while they were designing the 2600, they were thinking about its follow-up to be a computer, like a full computer, and or a more sophisticated game machine at the same time. And they were trying to decide, should it be backward compatible with the VCS,

which is the 260's other name, or should it be a new platform, or, you know, what should they do? And so originally they had three plans. They wanted to do one that was an enhanced game machine that had an optional keyboard and then they wanted to do one with an integrated keyboard and then they wanted to do

possibly a third one that had an integrated monitor and keyboard and I think those were the three options at first and eventually as things shook down they just went down to the game machine and the full computer and then what happened is that after the pokey chip was developed which is one of the chips

the you know it had the I think it did the sound and some of the input output stuff and the audio. The guy who did that, Doug Newbauer, started programming a game called Star Raiders on this developing platform, even before it was complete. And it was based on the Star Trek mainframe games

where you warp to different sectors and you fight Klingons and stuff, but it was a real-time 3D first-person space battle simulator. And it was so amazing. It blew everybody at Atari away. The thing is, it was so complicated you couldn't just play it with a one-button joystick like on the VCS.

You had to use the keyboard to push different commands like warp to sectors, use your shields, things like that. So they said, hey, we can't release this console with no keyboard because they won't be able to play Star Raiders on it. And so that's how the 400 was born

because they had to integrate a keyboard just for Star Raiders. And the funny thing is that that changed Atari's history completely, that one branch. And in my opinion, that's one of the weirdest, most pivotal decisions that probably sealed Atari's fate and crashing. Instead of moving on to the next game machine quickly and iterating, they split the market into two segments where they milked the VCS for all it was worth for many, many years. And then they kept the home computer system separate, and they didn't emphasize its gaming potential for about three or four years.

And it was weird. Because, you know, like, Nolan, one of the reasons Nolan Bushnell left Atari is, he wanted to this is what he told me is he wanted to um you know the first christmas the vcs was out something like that like 77 or something it did horribly and like the next year it didn't do very well and he's like this is uh you know not doing well let's let's go on and move on to the next thing something better now that's more sophisticated that we can do now with the better technology and warner thought he was nuts because they're like we invested all this into building this thing and everything and they argued about it and he that was just

one of the reasons it's not the only reason he left but that was one of the big things that brought it to a head and so he left Atari because you know he was disgusted with that and they were disgusted with him and so on and so forth but that was one of the key key things is he did have the foresight to see look we do need to keep iterating with the technology we can't just milk this out because we won't be ready when the next generation comes with the competition So I'll go back to the two machines. So the two machines became the 400 with the membrane keyboard. It's a flat keyboard that's really uncomfortable at

type on. It's not, yeah, like, you don't want to type more than two or three words at a time on it. It's really bad. Yeah, it's terrible. It looks really cool. The graphic design is awesome, like everything, Atari, but, um, yeah, and it's, you know, it's super kit-friendly because the membrane keyboard was, was, you know, watertight. You didn't have to worry about someone knocking a glass of orange juice into the system and, like, it leaking into the CPU through the keyboard because it was just going to just, you know, like water on a robotic duck just right off its back. Yeah. Joe DeCure told me that it was specifically designed to be spillproof for kids and stuff. But also it had an image problem because people didn't think of it as a fancy game console

of the keyboard because of the way Atari marketed it. They marketed it as a computer. So it was like a, it was a really, you know, crappy computer, basically. So it got sort of hamstrung by that reputation of having the keyboard. I mean, I don't think it's fair to call it a crappy computer. It definitely had less RAM than its counterpart to the 800 because it was called to the 400 because it had 4K of RAM, is that right? Well, it shipped with 8K. Well, by the time they shipped, it shipped with 8K RAM.

And they later increased it to 16K and stuff like that. But, yeah, like the, so it was a little underpowered in terms of its memory capacity compared to the competition. And it had that bad keyboard. Like, internally, you know, the things it could do were really impressive. Yeah. Are you talking about, like, the chips and stuff? Yeah, like inside, it was not a crappy computer.

Like, it had, you know, it had a 6502B processor running at 1.79 megahertz. And there was another system, not a computer, but a system that came along later that had a 6502 variant running at 7.1.79 megahertz, which was Nintendo's NES and Famicom, which, you know, that did pretty well for itself. So that was impressive. It had the Poked Audio Chip, which powered the sound hardware. It was like the sound hardware for Atari's arcade machines. Games like Missile Command and Tempest, like those distinctive memorable sounds were from the Pokey chip. It had a graphical chip that took like the concepts of the 2600's TIA video chip and basically boosted it, you know, made it much more powerful and sophisticated. It had, it could display 256 colors.

It had 382 pixel maximum vertical resolution, which wasn't as good as some computers, but, you know, still, you know, you could get a pretty good text display on there and great for graphics. And it wasn't just like text rendering. It had object rendering capabilities, which a lot of computers at the time didn't have. Like, it could actually move sprites and things like that around. So, you know, there was a lot going on for the system in 19. 79. Like, it had a lot going for it.

It was an incredibly sophisticated game-playing machine. It had this incredible four-channel, I mean, four-voice audio. It had, you know, sprite capabilities. It had, it's basically graphical. It's like a GPU for the home computer at the time when no other, every other computer was using software techniques to plot things on the screen. This had assistance in terms of the GTIA chip and all that. So, yeah, it was amazing.

But that's, like, if you read my Fast Company article, it had a bit of an identity crisis because it's this really awesome game machine. But Atari was trying to market it as a really great productivity machine. But they also had this Atari image as a game company. And so it was sort of neither here nor there for a while and until the prices dropped dramatically later. Yeah, and you know, that's not like that was some unique conundrum to Atari. Apple had the same problem for a long time. When the Mac launched, the Mac was amazing for video games. It had high-resolution graphics.

It had a mouse-driven interface as well as a keyboard. Like, it could have done so much. But Steve Jobs was like, no, this can't be a video game machine. People will think it's a toy. It has to be presented as a, you know, a heavy-duty workstation. And so they kind of downplayed the games potential of Macintosh for a long time. And it wasn't until, like, what, 1998 or so when Steve Jobs came back to the company

and decided to kind of reinvent the Mac that he was like, yeah, look, we got John Carmack out here. You can play Quake 3 first on our grape machine. That was, you know, almost 15 years of the Mac like being this potentially great games machine and Apple being like, oh, games, we don't know about that. Just trying to, I guess, avoid deluding its appeal to the business market and the education market, but, like, you know,

at the same time, estranging itself from the home's market, the home computer market. Though it made for a great shareware library because there was nothing else on it, but that's a different podcast. Yeah. They, um, yeah, Steve, speaking of Steve Jobs, if you want to learn about Steve Jobs computer, like, I've, I've asked many people about why he didn't like video games and stuff. I did an interview with Tripp Hawkins once that I think it has republished on Vintage Computing.com where he talks about Steve Jobs' game, you know, propensity to like games or not like them and stuff like that because he worked for Apple for a little while. Anyway, that's an aside.

Yeah, Tripp Hawkins and Steve Jobs were both very early employees at Apple or Atari. Oh, yeah. So let's see. Where were we? I think the thread that... You're talking about why the 400. was a crappy computer and how there was the identity crisis. And I meant

by crappy computer I meant like not a very practical productivity machine, you know. That I can agree on. It was mostly meant to be used with their cassette interface. I don't even know, I guess it's possible to use the disk drive, but there wasn't a lot of RAMs so you couldn't load a lot of the games on disk.

But it was a really great game machine and it could run games off cartridge. And the 800 had the full stroke keyboard, and it had, you know, you could expand it up to 48K of RAM. I think the stock one may have shipped with 8 or 16K at first, and then you upgrade it over time by taking this panel off the back and you slide these modules in. And that was one of the coolest things

about the Atari 800 is because it was the first really consumer-friendly personal computer in terms of being idiot-proof. It didn't expose any electronics to the user, unlike the other things like in Apple 2 you open up the back you see all these circuits and capacitors and things you could break off and mess with you know if you didn't know what you're doing but Atari wanted to make it idiot proof where you could not plug the wrong thing into the wrong

slot or the wrong connector so reading about this I got the impression that this was also kind of forced on them by the FCC who were like well if you have an open box then there might be radio interference and they were really really strict about that because I think

they were still kind of in the minds set of like dealing with, you know, like ham radio operators and, you know, people who were broadcasting as opposed to these kind of home-based devices where they were sending out like a very small amount of radiation. But yeah, it took a long time for, I think your article said TI was the company that ultimately pushed back and got those things changed. But it meant that the 400 and 800 couldn't be open systems. So they were they were kind of limited by design. But I do think, you know, as you said, that kind of worked in a certain level to the system's favor, you know, to its benefit because it was idiot-proof, you know, if you wanted to upgrade,

you could buy like a simple plug-and-play module, which was, I think, pretty innovative back then. Yeah, but think of it this way, the FCC, the novelty of plugging a device into your TV set and simulating a broadcast signal, and I mean, that was, this was new. they're designing this in 1977 and the video game console had just come out five years before that. In

1972, the first game console, this is five. That's like, what is this, 2021? That's like in 2016. You know, this is the kind of thing we're talking about. So the FCC hadn't caught up with this innovation yet and they had really draconian rules about

devices that could emanate and interfere with a broadcast reception, TV reception. And so since it was designed to hook directly to a TV set with an RF modulator that created radio frequency to simulate the antenna input on a TV set, Atari had to build in all kinds of huge, thick shielding to shield the electronics that naturally emanate radio frequency just by running like every electronic circuit does. And that did stop them from doing the open slots, which Doja Kier said he really wanted to do to make an Apple 2-like system. But the funny thing is that because of that, they invented this SIO, the serial interface, the serial I.O bus that was sort of like a precursor to USB for the Atari 800 in the sense that each device was an intelligent peripheral with its own microprocessor and its own address. on a bus, and they could all, and you just plug it in, you don't have to install drivers. The drivers are sort of built into the device, and it's incredible how it works.

There's people still making devices that just plug in and can be installed as a, as just a new device with a, with a special letter on the, like a, each device has its own letter, like JKL, that kind of thing. And so it's very extensible, it's very flexible. It was a beautiful, elegant design, and unfortunately, it was very expensive to make things that way because the peripherals became more expensive if you have to install. If you have to put shielding in each peripheral, if you have to put the interface board, you have to put a microprocessor in it and all that stuff. Compared to like a bare bones where Woz is building the Apple 2 card with as few circuit chips as possible with this basic stripped-down floppy drive with barely any electronics in it. you know, to make it dirt cheap and fast and awesome compared to Atari has to build a whole computer into each floppy drive, basically.

I mean, there's a 6502 in each floppy drive, I'm pretty sure. Last time I took one apart. So that was a hamper, a commercial hamper on the system. It also played into, it really was a disadvantage later during the price wars when Commodore started driving the prices down. Atari couldn't quickly pivot to make a cheaper machine. because they're very expensive to manufacture, the 400, 800, as they were. And they tried redesigning them, but then they charged too much money for the redesigns and all that. Yeah, I mean, that's a really big factor.

Like people, you know, I think talk about how Pac-Man and ET for Atari 2,600 destroyed the company. But the computer line had so much more, I think, to do with the companies kind of fizzling out in the great video games crash of 1982-83 because they had so much invested in this platform. and as you said, they couldn't race to the bottom. And the Commodore 64 was definitely pushing the envelope and racing to the bottom. And they basically wiped out the competition. Ti couldn't keep up and bankrupted themselves basically doing that. Atari devastated Warner's bottom line trying to keep up. And eventually Atari was like, you know, actually we've made things too cheap and we are actually going to raise prices on this platform.

soon and kind of walked it back a little bit. But, yeah, the Commodore race to the bottom was really a huge part of what destroyed the console and computer market at the time and crashed the American games industry. So, you know, it's not fair to blame poor Howard Scott Warshaw for all of Atari's Ailes. Yeah, that's something I discovered while I was researching this article we're talking about, is that, you know, I did start digging into the actual press of the time reading all these articles about home computer crisis, home computer this and that and the drive to the bottom. And Chris Crawford, who was a famous game designer and he worked for Atari, he told me, when I

interviewed him for this article, he told me that Atari's computer division was never profitable. And I changed it to largely unprofitable because I couldn't, like, you know, in the the article because I couldn't back that up with anything other than what he was remembering, but it was basically never profitable. And so they were funding that completely on the boom of the 2,600, which was huge in 1981, 1982, and then things started 80, 81, and some of 82, and then as the market got oversaturated because of Activision and all that stuff, making the third parties floodgates open with poor quality content.

And then also, like Jeremy said, Commodore came in with the VIC-20 first in 1981, a very low-priced machine. And then with the Commodore 64, Jack Tremiel said, let's do an all-out war. And it was like a scorched earth war, dropping prices. And, yeah, Atari and T.I couldn't keep up. And then by the middle of 1983, computers that were selling for $500 were like $50. You know, so what I read in all those articles were everybody said, why buy a game console when you can get an awesome computer for 50 bucks, you know? So that, I think Jack Tremiel is more responsible for the crash than anybody else other than just like, I think it's probably 50, 50, okay, I'll say the glut of games for 2600, but also this thing, you know, crashing the industry. So anyway, you're right.

I mean, it sounds like Atari was kind of working with the the Razor and Blaine model where computers were going to be very inexpensive and, you know, a loss leader, basically. And then they would make it up with peripherals and software and so forth. And originally Atari didn't open up the platform to outside publishers. It was basically all first party publishing. And it wasn't until, I don't know, what did prompt them to say, hey, you know what?

Maybe we should have other people make games for the system, you know, in software. Because if you look at a list, there's a list at Atarimania.com of basically all official 800 and 400 software. And if you look at it, 1979, 1980, 1981, there's like nothing on the system. It's, you know, maybe like a dozen releases per year, if that. But then you look at 1982 when they open up the system and all of a sudden, it's like an explosion, you know, and it's kind of bad timing because that's right when, you know, the Atari 2,600 market started to explode because of the integration of or the involvement of third parties that were kind of, the door was open to them by the courts after Activision stepped away and Atari tried to sue them. But, yeah, 82, 83, it's just there's so many games and software applications. I can answer that.

for 400 and 800. Yeah, I can answer that, which is, you know, the time when they, historically, the time when Atari treated the 800 platform as a closed platform was pretty brief. I mean, it came out in late 79, and then Chris Crawford was telling me sometime in 1980, they changed their minds. And so it was like probably six months, really, but that six months did do a lot of damage because all the press was so slow. All the pre-release press probably says, this is a closed platform with Atari-only stuff, you know, and everybody got that message, and it takes a long time to update that message, you know, in the press in 1980. It wasn't like the Internet where you tweet out a new thing every 10 minutes or five seconds. So it did do a lot of damage.

There were people when this was previewed in early 79 were asking Chris Crawford, hey, can I write things for this? And he had to say, sorry, but no, you know. And so that message was out there for throughout most of 79, even before the computer came out. And so what I think happened is the Activision Exodus did a ton of damage to Atari. No one ever talks about this. This is me reading between the lines. But all of their star developers, most of them, not everybody, there's a bunch of people there. But their top talent left.

Their top talent also was responsible for developing the operating system for the Atari 800, and some of its applications, like David Crane and Al Miller. They did a lot of important things for the 400 and 800 and the OS and things like that. And so suddenly, if all the people who developed all your Atari computer software leave, like, where are you going to get that software? We have no choice but to open it up to third parties, right? And so they also were looking at Apple's success. Apple was a huge press and market success after VisiCalc.

and they were so open about third parties it became like people these third parties were making a gold mine on the Apple II platform and it was bringing such a lot of strength to the Apple II platform because everyone said hey this platform has all these applications you can buy and use

it's a very useful machine it's worth the money but people looked at Atari and said they barely have any applications so why would I buy an Atari and so Chris Crawford once they got it open the Atari 800 was open

he created a group called the Software Development Support Group within Atari and he wrote a development Bible called DeRay Atari, which means all about Atari in Latin. And it became the guide for

Atari computer programming. It unlocked all the secrets of how to program those special chips and do all that special stuff. And I can't remember if Day Ray was in 81 or so, but look, you've already lost a year and a half or so on sitting around with that. And then Dale Yocum, who was another Atari employee, invented this cool thing called the Atari Program Exchange, too,

which had a plan to solicit programs from the general public and then publish them in bare bones packaging and give the creators a royalty. So it was basically like an app store, but mail order at the time. And once the... Those two opened up. It took a year or two after that, but the floodgates really started to open with a lot of third-party developers, indie developers, making great games. But they lost some time there, you know. Hello, everyone. We're superhero stuff you should know. And if you think you know about superheroes and common books, think again.

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and hopefully make some new ones along the way, only on the Greenlit podcast network. So now that we've kind of made a case for the good and the bad of the platform. So now that we've kind of made a case for the good and the bad of the platform, and the logistical challenges. Benj, I was hoping you could kind of walk us through all the different variants that Atari attempted to create throughout the years. I mean, people think of the 400 and the 800 because those were the kind of primary platforms. Between the two of them, they sold several million units.

So really great market penetration for the time. Obviously, not on par with the 2,600, but, you know, considering it cost 10 times as much or five times as much, you know, it's, you know, respectable. So they created a bunch of variant models, which some of them never came to fruition. Some of them came to fruition and the market said, wow, these are really bad. Then some of them, I think, did okay for themselves. And that kind of kept them going until they replaced their 8-B computer line with the ST line, which is probably worth its own episode, because it was a really capable system that saw a lot of kind of definitive games. and I know especially people in Europe

have a lot of fondness for the ST and it competed kind of on the same the same level as the Mac and the Amiga. So good stuff. But, you know, that was 1985 and the system, the 8-bit stuff, was around for quite a while and kind of, you know,

had to keep the company going during its big changeover from Atari Inc to Atari Corp and Atari Games, the big split. Jack Tremiel coming in and saying, hey, I cratered Atari. Now I'm going to buy it up.

That was bitter. It made some Atari fans really bitter at the time. I can imagine. Like, when you really stop and think about it, it's, yeah, like someone basically wearing the hollowed out corpse of the man they killed. Terrible. Just brutal. Yeah, so let's see. The first, after the 400 to 800, the next one was the 1,200 XL, which was released in, I think, early 1983.

and it was it had 64k of RAM it was a simplified design in terms of less shielding less beef to it the funny thing the 400 and 800 have these huge cast aluminum inner shield slash heat sink things that are huge and heavy and the 1,200 probably has some thin aluminum shielding in it and it was cheaper and lighter and more integrated you know they needed fewer chips by that point because of the technology had improved, especially with RAM, things like that. So they could ship with 64K of RAM, but unfortunately they launched it with an $899 price,

and it was like, I think it was more expensive than the Atari 800 at the time. Yeah, I think they bumped the 800 price down because they were trying to, you know, compete. Yeah, so everybody started, from what I read, reports at the time, a lot of people went and raced and bought 800s, like because it was a little more flexible in terms of the biggest drawback of the

$1,200 was that it did have some incompatibilities with some $400 and $800 software. But it had a pretty nice keyboard. It's this flat sort of wedge shape with a new design language with cream and dark brown and slanted vents on the back of it. And it's a neat unit. But it was a dud because of its price, basically. And so after pressure from, you know, Commodore with a 64 and all that stuff, which had, I guess had already come out then, but the price wars had continued to drive things down. And so in the summer of 83, Atari released another iteration, which is what they should have done to begin with, the 600 XL and the 800 XL.

and the 600 xl is sort of like a replacement for the 400 but it had a full stroke keyboard and it had 16k of ram built into it and the 800 xl was like a replacement for the 800 and so it had 64k of ram and it had base the most of these had basic built into them and you didn't need a cartridge anymore which was nice so jeremy wouldn't have been left just typing on the memo pad god dang it these machines are really good really well designed they are I still use it. I prefer an 800 XL. I use it all the time just because it's small.

It's compact. It doesn't make a lot of heat. It doesn't, you know, it's reliable. It has an accessible cartridge slot on the top. You just plug it in and it works great. The video quality is good, output and all that stuff. And it has the RAM you need. And I think the 800XL is a great choice for anyone who wants to buy one of these systems now

and get started with it because most of them still work without any modifications. which is pretty impressive 30 years later. Oh, yeah, definitely. Compared to, like, Max from the 90s that all need new capacitors and stuff, this is a really good, reliable design. So where, in your opinion, does the XE line fall in here? Like, do you think it's good, bad, stupid? XE's kind of cool.

The thing about that is that's the, those are the first from the Tremiel era, Atari Corp era, Atari. So in 1985, they announced the Atari ST and these XE machines. So there's the 65XE and the 130 XE. And the 65XE is basically a replacement for the Atari 800 XL. So it has 64K of RAM. But these two machines have the design language of the Atari ST line. So they match it visually.

and they have a slightly different keyboard and the slanted look to the buttons on the top the start buttons and things and they're pretty neat. 130XE is really popular because it's the only machine with 128 kilobytes of RAM and it's got good compatibility, good video output and stuff like that.

So a lot of people who want the maximum Atari experience without upgrading the RAM or anything will get a 130XE. I think they're kind of expensive now on the used market but they were more popular in Europe so if you play a lot of European games they will require 128k of RAM and you'll need a 130 XE or something like that

but they were you know moderately popular not not incredibly well selling but not failures either they sold really well in Europe especially the XZ line and those were supported up until 1992 when they pulled the plug on the whole thing. But then there's one more thing. There's one more. Yes. I love this

one. The XE. Yeah. The XE game system. The XEGS. It's my favorite, I think it might be my favorite 80s console design outside of the Sega Mark 3, which, like, you can't touch that. But the XEGS is like the

opposite of the Mark 3, where the Mark 3 is like super sleek and sophisticated all like angle and sharp lines and just so streamlined. The XEGS is, it's also streamlined, but it has a lot of, it has a lot of goofiness to it. It's got four pastel colored huge buttons

on the front of the console. It just, like, no one else made a game console that looks like this, and it's so, it's so weird and yet so, like, divinely 80s. It's just, it's a gorgeous piece of hardware. I love it. Yeah. Yeah, I looked up a picture of it.

It is pretty amazing looking. Oh, yeah. In 1987, Atari releases in response to Nintendo, basically, and the success of the NES and the Sega Master System, things like that. So they repackage all this Atari 8-bit computer technology into the X-E game system. It's basically a 65XE with some new, with a different ROM, and it has a missile command built in. It has basic built-in that boots up if you plug in this keyboard. And so the way it was sold is in several packages. There was one that just had the basic console with no keyboard and a

joystick. And that was like basically supposed to be a game machine by itself. But you could get one with a keyboard, this modular keyboard with a cable that plugged in. And when you plug that in, you get basic. And you can also use the Atari disk drives, the same peripherals from the XE line and all that stuff. So it is a hybrid computer game console, and I think it's really neat. I'm using one right now as my desktop weather terminal. I wrote an article about that for Hatigke last year,

but with the Fujinet modem, this device that people have made that lets you hook it to the internet, and someone made this weather application that always will update the weather from the internet and put it on a screen. I put a little CRT on my desk, And I have the XEGS driving that all the time. I just leave it on 24 hours a day.

It sips power with this new power supply I got. And it's cool. I just turn on the monitor. I want to see, like, right now it's 60 degrees outside, clear sky. I get the weather forecast right here. Nice. So your XEGS is now your Internet of Things device. That's pretty amazing.

It's reliable and beautiful. I do love the pastel buttons, too. Some of my friends in the Atari community don't like them, but I like it. They're pretty great. don't know anything. But the thing is, the XEGS was such a boneheaded concept because Atari had just launched the year before a console to compete with Nintendo and Sega Master System, the Atari 7800, which of course was held over from 1984, but it was a very capable system. It was, you know, really kind of the next step evolution beyond the 5200 and the 2,600. And, you know, the 5200 is basically

compatible almost with the 8-bit computer line, which we'll talk about momentarily. But the 7800, you know, took it to the next level. It had some really fantastic arcade ports. I've been covering it a lot on NES Works Guidon on my my YouTube channel. And, you know, I realize now I need to, you know, for to be proper, I need to stick XEGS coverage in there too, which, uh, anyway, but the thing is, so you had the XEGS. You had the XEGS. You had, The 7,800, at the same time, Atari was still supporting, to some degree, the 2,600, which saw games released for it until, like, 1991. Wow. And the 5200 was still getting some kind of flagging support. So, so you...

What were they thinking? Were they thinking? You also had the Atari ST. And then you had, you know, various other computer lines, the XC-65-130, et cetera. All of these were Atari products on the market. there wasn't that much cross-compatibility between them. You could play 2,600 games on 7,800, okay? And you could play XE games on XEGS.

And I think there was some cross-compatibility between 5200 and XEGS. Am I right? No. No. Oh, God. Why? And, of course, the ST couldn't do anything with any of that. No, yeah.

And then, you know, in 1989, you got the links. So I feel Atari from 1983, on everything they did was reactive it was a reactive product to some kind of perceived market need and I think that's why they did such a scatter shot approach that didn't have any overall strategy. The

redesigns to begin with the 1,800-600-XL 600 X-L those are all reactions to the price wars and Commodore and all that stuff and the XE line was I don't know just to make a new design language the ST was a reaction to

the McIntosh. The 78 800 was, you know, held over, but they only released it later because it's a reaction to Nintendo and things like that. And the XE game system, God knows what that's reaction to. It's part of the Nintendo thing. Maybe it's a second stab at it. Like the 7800 not doing that well in market. Let's take this technology again and put it in the game console again after the 5200, which we haven't talked about. Yeah, I mean, the 7800, like it didn't do well initially because it was just like old, old new stock, basically, that they, they pumped out into the marketplace. And they didn't even release all the launch games for it for like two years.

Like, it was two years later that Desert Falcon, which was, you know, an original creation for the system that was designed for 1984, came to the market. Like, yeah. If they had released the 7,884, it would have been a much smarter move. Well, I mean, the market at that point was, retailers would have said, no, no thanks. a game system? Yeah, go to hell. Yeah, sorry, in an alternate universe, had things been better that it would have been a good...

Not for Jack Tremille. Yeah, 84 was super dead. In fact, there's funny thread on Twitter. I was talking to, like, we were trying to discover games released in 1984. Console games? Yeah. Because there were lots of PC games, but yeah, like, if you look at Computer Entertainer magazine

and the video game update newsletter, that was contemporary, like the contemporaneous publication, there were entire months where no new console games were published for any system. Even though there were all these platforms on the market that you could still buy at retail, like people were just not making new games. It was all just, you know, clearing out stock. We should probably jump back and talk about the 5200. Yes, that is next on the agenda because it is basically the Atari 400 as a console with a cut down ROM.

Like it doesn't have as much operating system ROM because it doesn't run programs. It's just games. And yet, despite the common technology and the fact that you can pretty easily tweak, you know, hack programs from one platform to run another, kind of like you can do with Sega S-GGG. 1,000, CalicoVision, MSX, they didn't talk to each other. They didn't work with each other. You can't play a 5,200 game on an 800 and likewise. I think that was probably smart at the time because they would have had to put a keyboard

on the 5200 then, you know, because most of the games relied on. But, you know, Sega's solution for that with the SG-1000, they also released the SC-3 000 at the same time, which was an SG-1,000 with, you know, like basically a keyboard. board, they included a ribbon cable connector on the SG 1000, and you could just buy a keyboard externally and stick it on that ribbon cable. And all of a sudden, your console was a computer. And they even, they even talked about doing that with the original design for the 8-bit computers, of having a console that had an optional add-on keyboard. I don't know why they didn't do that. I feel like that would have made the 5200 so much more compelling. And the 5200 had

ended up with this weird compromise where you just had a controller that had a whole bunch of buttons on it, had a little mini keypad, but not a full keyboard. You're right. There's the start. There's like basically the start option sort of buttons on the controller instead of on the console. This is the way I see the 5200. Okay, so they're doing really well with Atari 800. I mean, sorry, Atari 2,600 and 8081. And then 82, they're starting to say, uh-oh, that we know things are starting to slip. We haven't announced it yet we better rush this damn thing to market the sequel the successor let's take our technology the architecture from the eight-bit computer line now it's cheap enough to put in a console

by this time let's redesign it put it into a console let's add some really horrible analog joysticks that still i have no idea whose idea that was because i'd never investigated that i mean the the idea of analog joysticks is a good impulse an analog joystick that does not read center on its own is a very bad implementation of a good idea. That was the problem. It wasn't like, oh, they created analog joysticks. How stupid. It was, oh, they created an analog joystick where, like, the controller doesn't know that you've stopped pressing in a direction. So it just keeps going in that direction. And there's like a lot of games. Hackman, great, great times with that one. Yeah. So, yeah, and the freaking Pac-Man was the packing game was Pac-Man with this horrible

controller that doesn't do four directions very well. It does every single direction. It was such a more impressive, it was so much more impressive than the 2,600 version of Pac-Man. But in terms of playability, like I have played 5200 Pac-Man, and it looks great, and then you play it, and it doesn't play well at all, because the controller just feels mushy and off, and Pac-Man's always doing stuff you don't want them to do. It's the opposite of how it should have been. Yeah, there's so many reviews of 5200 games. It's like, this is a great game, if only it weren't for this crappy controller that I'm playing it on. And it's especially sad because there's a lot of games on it that actually take advantage of the analog controller in interesting ways.

It's just this particular analog controller is bad, which makes it not so fun to play because you're wrestling with the fact that it doesn't re-center. Yeah, I'd say a couple of problems with the analog thing. One is that I think it was Kurt Vendell, may he rest in peace, told me that they had wanted to make an, a centering controller, but they wanted to save money and took a spring out or something that would have, you know, did self-centering, you know, to save a couple cents per controller. And that was a really dumb decision, if that's true. Also, the games were not designed with an analog controller of mind. They were ports of the Atari 800 games, almost all of them, except for a few, like, there

was a good version of centipede, things like that. And so there were only, I think, like, there's one called Space. dungeon or something. I think that takes advantage of the analog controller, but I don't remember any others. I looked up that one. I want to talk about that. It looks really cool. Yeah, so you've got all these games that do not need an analog controller, and you give them this

mushy, imprecise, analog controller that doesn't re-center, and it's just the worst of all possible worlds. And that, in addition to, I don't know, the 5200 console, the first one was a four-port one was gigantic. It's like

I still want someone to put it by a PS5 and see which is bigger, but it's like, until recently it was the biggest console ever released. It had slots in the back to store the consoles in. And it's just a huge honking piece of plastic. Yeah, it definitely falls into that period of time where home console makers were trying to figure out how to make a better controller than the 2,600 and the Apple 2 sticks, which were, you know, very simple, one button kind of things. And everyone arrived at the same solution of make it a telephone and put some sort of weird, horrible control stick at the top. So, you know, you had Intellivision's disc, you had the KalikoVision mushroom, and you had the non-centering

analog joystick of the 5200. All of them, good ideas in theory, bad ideas in execution. So bad. Yeah, the Super Breakout. I think the first launch title was Super Breakout, like you put in the notes. And that could use the analog thing because of the paddle game. and that was pretty neat. But they started putting Pac-Man in it pretty soon after as a pack-in,

and that was just a terrible decision. There were several games that were, like, basically twin-stick shooters or variations on that concept, which took advantage of multiple directional sticks. But again, the actual sticks so clunky, like, makes it tough to pull off. Yeah. One of the essential accessories is one of these converter boxes. like I have that lets you use an Atari 2,600 joystick on the 5200.

But at that point, you're playing all the same games as you'd play on the 800 computer, basically. So you're like, might as well just play them on the 800, which is why I never touched my 5200. And I feel, I look at it in shame. I just don't like that. The shame is not yours, though, so don't feel bad. No, we've been just bagging on 3200, but there were some things that were appealing about it. I mean, it was a home console that basically had a home computer inside of it in 1982. That's very impressive.

Like, you know, compared to the Intelivision or even the Colico Vision, it really, like, it was a very capable machine, even with the smaller ROM. It had, you know, much more capable graphics than the 2600, but it's still, you know, because it used that same sort of by scanline object-based drawing system as the 2600 but advanced. It still had the Atari look, which is something I can't put my finger on exactly. But it's even there on the 7,800. There's just a look about these systems. And you're like, that is an Atari console. Hell yes. Yeah.

The, you know, it had great arcade conversions. The interface, you know, the control stick issue aside, you know, by far some of the best conversions of arcade games to be found in the era. Like, you know, Colico Vision had. some really great conversions too, but Colico could only really get the second stringers aside from Donkey Kong. So they were like, you know, kind of the B-tier games, whereas the 5200 was on par with the Kaliko Vision in terms of power and in terms of, you know, how it expressed that for arcade conversions. But, you know, they were dealing with A-tier games like Missile Command, breakout, Pac-Man, Miss Pac-Man, you know, Frogger, that sort of thing, stuff that

Calico just couldn't get because Atari had locked up the rights. And also, it looked great. Yes, it was a very big system, but it was so sleek. You know, the 2,600 is this kind of comfortable piece of 1970s wood grain home stereo equipment. You put it there, you know, on your deep shag orange rug. And it's just like, yeah, it belongs. But the 2600 says, no, baby, the 80s are here. We are in a new decade. It's time for some cocaine. You can just do lines right off this sleek flat surface, just snort it up, my friend, you and John DeLore and you're going to have a great time tonight. And, you know, it just, it looks great. It's a great looking system. It's very powerful. It has some really cool tech innovations kind of running behind

the scenes. You can run the system off, like power it from the RF switch on your TV. So you don't have to have this bulky separate brick. Yeah, I didn't even know that was possible. And it had automatic switching from the TV when you turned it on. Like, That's so cool. You didn't have to fuss around and, like, go to the back of your TV and switch that little RF converter from TV to game. Like, you know, they really put a lot of thought into many of the elements of the system. They just really miss the ball in some big, seemingly in retrospect, obvious ways. And it's frustrating because I think there is a potential for something really amazing here that just didn't happen.

Yeah, I agree. That's my impassioned rant. Yeah. It also was released at the absolute wrong time because of the market crash, it killed it, too. You know, it didn't have any, it didn't have the chance to come into its own as a platform with really dedicated 5,200 games that took advantage of the controller or any unique properties of the system. So that's what I think about it. It has this, we didn't mention, I don't know, the controller has a numeric keypad, and they did use that as a stand-in for extra input from Atari 800 games. and it has a pause button on the controller, which is neat.

That was pretty innovative at the time. Yeah, and I would say the nicest thing about the 5200 is that it ultimately received, in terms of official software support, 69 games. Yeah, so it's a very sexual console. So it's your John DeLorean cocaine orgy. That's the important part. So, yeah, well, like most of its games were ports either from arcade or from the 800.

I did try to look up real quick like what games were unique to the 5200 and yeah there's there's very very few the only one I found that seems like it was actually developed originally for the 5200 is this weird game called Countermeasure you're in this this

kind of clunky tank that drives very slowly and even slowly over different kinds of terrain and it's this big vertical play field and you're driving up around there's like villages and forests and stuff, and you're countering these terrorists who have, like, gun emplacements and stuff.

And ultimately, what you're trying to do is take out these missile silos, which are going to rain nuclear death on Washington, D.C. That's the plot. And so you can drive through trying to take out these missile silos, but also as you go through, you get pieces of a disarm code that you can use to disarm the missiles. So you're on this strict time limit, and evidently it's extremely difficult to actually make it to all the missile silos and blow it up. So what you eventually do once you have enough pieces of the code is get out of your tank into one of the missile silos and then you have

a few seconds to put in the right code and disarm the missiles and win the game. So it's kind of a weird concept. But it's a pretty cool looking game. It's a very busy playfield. I don't know. I watched some play-throughs. Obviously, I haven't actually played it. I'm not sure how much fun it actually is, but it's certainly doing some interesting things. I've not played it, but it makes You make me want to play it Yeah, and it's using And it's using the sticks Because you're driving the tank in every direction

And you can shoot in a different direction From where you're driving Are you using twin sticks, you're saying? I think you are, yeah, I'm pretty sure Space Dungeon will let you do that too I think it had like a mount You could stick the two sticks in And you do twin stick shooting

Right, right, use two controllers like a twin stick Space Dungeon is another one I want to talk about Because it was originally arcade But I think the 5200 was its only port unlike most of these other arcade ports that were also ported to like everything else in the day space dungeon looks really cool

so at first it looks kind of like Robotron because it's a twin stick thing you're driving around and shooting in whatever direction but it's also kind of a dungeon crawler so you've got this ship but you're in like this six by six grid of rooms and you're going from room to room

to room shooting enemies and trying to pick up treasures and then get to the like exit room and there's actually a little mini map in the corner that shows you what rooms you've been in and where the exit is. And it's even got like persistence like a dungeon crawler. If you die, you drop all your treasure and then you come back and that room where you died is marked with an X in your map and all that treasure you had is still there. You can go pick it back up. And then you get out of this six by six grid and there's like a hundred more levels of the same thing. So it's this huge dungeon crawler that's also a twin state shooter, which is not

something I've seen very much of and sounds pretty damn cool. Yeah. This is a really cool. I've never actually played it on the 5200 either. I've been meaning to. The other impression it really gave me when I was watching this is it really reminds me of, I think it was called Crystal Quest, old Mac OS shareware. Oh, yeah. It really had that feel to it, like the same of driving around shooting things, twin stick-wise, and then going between rooms. I wouldn't be surprised if this was an inspiration for that. Yeah. All right. So we've got like 10 minutes left. So I think we do need to talk about the most important or, you know, significant games on Atari 8-bit home computers really quickly.

You know, Benj has already mentioned Star Riders, which was. those, you know, early 3D space combat sim with 3D graphics and stuff. But, you know, you look at the other games that debuted on the system. You had Lucasfilm Games begin its legacy. They got a huge cash infusion from Atari and were told to make some cool games because they made cool computer graphics for movies. So those are the same thing, right? And they said, okay, we'll take the challenge.

And they came up with Ballblazer and amazing for the time, first person perspective, sports game, split screen, very kind of confusing at first, but very technically impressive. And rescue on Frectalis, a procedurally generated first person like space, or not space shooter, but Canyon Shooter. Yeah, Canyon Shooter, basically, right. So you're like flying around and it's all generated on the fly. So very impressive. It kind of seems like a first person defender because you're going around rescuing your

rescuing troops off the ground while flying through this. But they've got, yeah, as the name implies, you've got this fractally generated landscape, which is really cool. The Idle-on was like the same thing, but inverted. So they took the technology from rescue and fractalus, and they turned it upside down. And instead of being, flying through a cavern, you're going through caves. And it's like a first-person dungeon crawler, basically. And it's insanely technically impressive. And for some reason, I did not have those games back in the day.

But if I had had them, I would have really loved them. They're so amazing. I think they came out later. Yeah. So, you know, by that point, the market had kind of shifted. So that might have been why you missed it. But you also had, this is where Spalunker came from, a game that kind of took on a life of its own in Japan when it made it to Famicom. But, you know, it had a pretty good following here in the West.

And then, you know, kind of came back and became notorious decades later when Derek Yu and Mossmouth, adapted the concepts into a basically an action roguelike Spalunky. Yep. You had, was this the platform that Mule was originally created for, not Apple II? Yep. Mule is the greatest. Tell us about it, Binge. Well, Danny Buntanberry created Mule and it's a strategy game for four players that's

about a battle for resources on a planet you colonize. You land on a planet in the beginning, and each colonist has their own character that looks like a robot, and then you battle over squares on a map, and each square has its own properties, like a mountainous square has its own sort of resource on it, and water-based square has another one, things like that. And you harvest them by using mules, multiple-use labor elements, which are these donkey-looking robots that you buy at a store in the middle of the map, and you place them on these grids, squares to mine chrystite and all those different things. And so it's the coolest thing about it is that four people can play at one time. and the 400 was notable for having and the 800 for having four joystick ports on the front and even though Mule is a turn-based game there's this one mode of the game

where you do this real-time trading where all four people are moving their characters up and down to set a price to buy and sell goods in real time and there's a time limit and with the sound effects in the background and ticking down it's really high-stakes kind of stressful and fun and exciting And so there's a lot of depth to this game.

It's timeless, it's just a timeless strategy. It's sort of like a board game with some action elements just in terms of the trading to it. And it's a classic. It's one of the greatest games of all time, in my opinion. I think I rated it as number like two or three or something in my greatest PC games of all time when I did that a long time ago. And another game done by...

Well, actually, I have a question before about Mule. Was the original version of that for Atari systems? Was that modem capable, or did that come later? No. No, it's never been modem capable. You're thinking of modem wars, which was a different game done by Danny Berry. But it also starts with an M, so that was just her thing, I guess, was like multiplayer competitive stuff. Okay.

Yeah, well, I mean, she was a very innovative designer, obviously. And this was under the Electronic Arts label back when they were like artists, electronic arts we should celebrate our creators and do amazing things yeah electronic arts was really cool back in the day they don't have a great reputation now but when they first started um they published a string of really amazing games like mule arcan one-on-one seven cities of gold one-on-one the pinball construction set and various other things and they treated you know it was trip hawkins vision to treat the artists like musicians and so each one would look like an album each game is in this flat pack like a square like a record sleeve and they have their the names of the designer prominently

on the label and um which which was a big departure for back then yeah it was a big departure and i think that started in gosh 84 i don't know i did a big thing about trip hawkins once and that's what I mentioned earlier. Didn't Activision do that with like David Crane and that sort of thing? Yeah, they did. They did that. So that was, it was riffing off of Activision's thing, but taking it a little bit further with artsy label designs and things like that. Got it. So another thing they did, another Ozark Associates, which is Ozark Associates developed Mule. And they developed also the Seven Cities of Gold, which originated on 800, which is another one of my favorite games all time where you are a Christopher

Columbus-type explorer coming from Europe to the new world. And you explore, you interact with native tribes, you trade, you do things like that. But the coolest thing about it at the time was that you could generate a completely new continent every game if you

wanted to. It would be procedurally generated. So you could play one version as like the real Americas as they are on the map. Or you could create a whole new one and then you play through the whole game making little forts and things like that and trading and it's a strategy game with some action elements

and it's really deep and fun and it was just so mind-blowingly it's mind-blowingly deep for the time just the depth of it you didn't get any kind of you know depth like that on a 2,600 or even in Nintendo games for a while they weren't that deep and so we we loved that, I've played that more than anything

And Arcon is another electronic associate's system by Free Fall, Free Fall Associates. This is my brother's favorite game. He still loves Arcon. So it's like an action chess game. So you see a board that looks like a chess board. And every piece, there's a dark side and a light side, and every piece is some sort of monster. There's like, you know, manticors and basilisks and genies and wizards, things like that. And you try to control these powerpoints on the grid, this chess board thing, and it shifts over time from light to dark.

So if it's darker on one side, the dark side is favored. If it's lighter at one time, the light side is favored, they're more powerful. So like Dark Souls tendencies? I don't know. I never played that. Okay. I just felt like we needed some sort of Dark Souls reference. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. The point is, is you battle each other in a real-time action. combat so instead of you know like capturing a piece when the pieces interact then you go to this new screen and the two creatures fight each other each player with a joystick in an action you know sometimes some of them shoot things some of them club each other and it's really intense and fun so it's action and strategy mixed into one and it's really great and um it's that holo chest that they had on the millennium falcon basically yeah pretty much yeah i think it was inspired by that or

something like that so probably and there was also battle chess i don't know if that can before or after Arkhawn? No, that was after. Okay. Battle chess doesn't have action elements. It's just chess with animations. Yeah, I know. I know.

It still made an impression. Like, I saw it as a kid on computers. It was like, man, that's so cool. They're just, like, beat the crap out of each other. It was cool. It's so cool. Yeah. Yeah, you know, closer to my heart, a game I haven't played on the original Atari platform

since, like, seeing a store demo 100 years ago. But Montezuma's Revenge, which was ported to a few other platforms, including Master System, that was an early. take on open world exploration as in Metroidvania. You know, kind of single screen hunt for treasures, but sort of in the same vein as Spalunker,

but more exploratory and a bit less hateful. Still challenging, but not totally kick you in the teeth like Spalunker is. Temple of Upshire and the whole Upshire trilogy were influential

RPGs. It's been a long time since I've looked into these games and refresh my memory and what they were, but I believe they were first-person dungeon crawlers, or were they more like top-down? Overhead. They're more kind of rogue-like, but not exactly. They were very deep, too. You had real stats, real equipment, and you're exploring a dungeon that I can't remember if it's procedurally generated or not, but it was my brother loved Temple of Afshai and the others.

so yeah very cool very innovative and kind of in the in the same vein there was dandy which is kind of widely regarded as the precursor to gauntlet a lot of people have said gauntlet is just a big dandy rip-off yeah that's it's true uh ed log has admitted that uh he was inspired by dandy on designing gauntlet so dandy is you can play four players at a time which is really cool so it's sort of like a dungeon crawler action game where you have four characters and you can shoot. And there are monsters with generators and you just get through the level. You try to kill everything, get to food, get to health, get through to the exit.

And it is basically like gauntlet, but with less character to it because it doesn't have the fantasy designs of gauntlet. It's just like a bunch of shapes and stuff. So it's like if everyone were the nerd from Gauntlet, the third encounter, that's what it would be. It's more like everyone's a square. Everyone's like a triangle. There's not a lot of detail there. So it's not as exciting as the gauntlet with the monsters and all the... Got it.

But it's still a fun game. You can play four players on it. I see. All right. We need to wrap this. But one more, one last game. I'd like for you to tell us about Salmon Run because it seems to be a personal favorite binge. Yeah, Salmon Run is cool.

It's underrated because I don't think other people would place it high on their list. But the coolest thing about salmon run is, well, it was one of the first games I ever played, and it was playable for me as a kid, and it was really fun. You're playing as a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, you know, so you try to find your girlfriend at the end of every stage, and you are avoiding bears that try to catch you out of the water, and fishermen that try to net you, and later birds that try to get you and stuff. And so you're swimming up, avoiding obstacles, jumping up over rocks, and upstream. And the coolest thing is the sound effects are so good. It sounds like real rushing water and splashing and stuff. I don't know how they did it, but it's incredible, like the sound effects. And just mixed together, it's a really fun, simple game

because all you're doing is swimming and jumping and avoiding, but it becomes a deeper experience because of that. So, you know, I'm actually really regretting my opening filibuster now because this turns out to be a really fertile topic. I was, you know, kind of worried about our ability to help binge give a full in-depth discussion. But, yeah, this has been, I think, a great conversation. And really, there's probably enough about the Atari 800 line or the Atari 8-bit line that we can revisit the topic someday and go into further depth and explore other facets of it. But for now, I think it's a pretty good overview. So Ben, thank you so much for bringing all this expertise and personal experience into it.

And Ben, for the color commentary on the side. I'm glad we have, you know, one more Atari topic under our belts. It's an area that's often weak on retronauts. So it's good to get that bit of history. And I don't know, like I really, I'm really thinking I need to tackle X-E-G-S. as part of the post-NES launch console coverage because it is a console that launched after the NES in America, so technically...

The question is, do you cover the 800, 400 games before it, or do you just, you know, because there's thousands of games for the 800? Absolutely not. I am not made of infinite time. And most of them reports, a whole lot of them anyways. The coolest thing about the 800 is the more you dig into it, the more you find just incredible games.

an amazing library full of titles that have so many neat concepts that could be redone today if more people knew the history. There's just endless fountain of game design ideas out there. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of cool stuff in there looking through the lists. Yeah, I think the Atari 8-bit line tends to be overlooked in favor of Commodore 64 and Apple 2 because they were much bigger and more successful platforms. But yeah, just reading about this this platform and doing some research for this episode, I was really impressed by just the wealth of content there is behind this platform. And, you know, Atari really, I think, mismanaged it in a lot of ways, you know, just talking about the ridiculous traffic jam of products they had

in the market in the late 80s. It's really, as you said, Benj, they were very reactive and didn't have a, you know, a plan going forward after a certain point. And it's really a shame because I think get really undercut the long-term legacy of a very rich and successful platform. So I'm glad we were able to at least kind of give it, you know, a passing glance here on the show. And hopefully, again, we'll be able to go back someday and talk more about it. But, but that's it for now. We've all got day jobs and mouths to feed and sort of that sort of thing.

Like, I've got my mouth to feed. I don't know about you guys. Yeah, I got some. Yeah. So we need to call it a. podcast here, but thanks everyone for listening. And thanks again, binge and bin. Before we go, we should do our outroes. So let me just say that if you, a human being, enjoyed this, a podcast, well, good news. We do these every week and then some. Go to retronauts.com and you can find more,

or you can support the show at patreon.com. And by supporting the show, that means you get access to every episode a week in advance and a higher bit rate quality with no ads or cross-promotions. And if you put in an extra two bucks a month, pay $5 a month, you get all of that plus two additional, maybe sometimes three additional full-length podcasts per month on alternating Fridays, plus many podcasts every weekend, courtesy of Diamond Fight and columns. They go along with those. And occasionally there's some other stuff we throw in the mix. So, you know, it's a whole smorgas smorgasbord of of goodness and content and things to put inside of your ears. So that's our pitch. Check us out.

Patreon.com slash retronauts. Keep the show alive. We are crowdfunded entirely. So you, the crowd, keep the show alive and support conversations about video game history, such as this. And bringing on people to talk about game history who are experts such as binge. Ben's, what's your pitch? I am Benj Edwards.

and I am available on Twitter at Ben Jedwards. I'm currently at How Too Geek as an associate editor and writing history articles that come out every Monday, I think, at the moment, which is cool. And I want to add by, there's a piece of trivia about the Atari 800. I just remembered is it played host to the first four-player simultaneous platform game ever created. And I'm not going to tell you what it is, because I want you to do the research. It was created by a very famous game designer before he was famous. So if you find out, message me on Twitter, and I want to hear the answer.

Okay. And also, not to downplay your expertise, Ben, but Benj was the pro here. But you were also an important part of Retronauts East. And where can we find you on the internet? Yeah, my name is Ben Elgin. You can find me on Twitter at Kieran, K-I-N-N. And I'm sure someday we'll do another podcast on something I'm actually an expert on. I promise we will.

Yes. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish on the internet, doing stuff at Limited Run Games, which is my day job, doing stuff at Retronauts. That's this. And also doing my weekly YouTube video series where I don't talk about the Atari 800 or 2600, but I have been covering the 7800. And I feel like I'm barely scratching the surface on that as well.

But, you know, the longer I research and read and study, the more I learn. and the better my videos get. So please join me for that learning experience. And finally, you can follow me on Twitter as GameSpite also. But anyway, that's it. That's this episode of Retronauts. Thanks again for listening. Thanks for your support.

Thank you gentlemen for joining to talk about Atari's old game consoles. And with that, we shall go away and probably play some more video games at some point. I'm going to be able to be a bit of a bit of a good. I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm gonna'a'a-hae-hae-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a.

Thank you.