Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 85: Activision, the original third party

Episode Date: February 6, 2017

Steve Lin and Jaz Rignall join Jeremy and Bob again to look back at one of the most important game creators of all time: Activision, the company that established the concept of third parties.

This week in Retronauts, there ain't no party like a third party. Thanks, Steve for that one. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the latest episode of Retronauts. it right now in your ears because it exists. That's proof of a latest episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, QED, and I'm hosting this week. But with me here in the studio, we also have, as usual. I am Bob Coddick Mackie. No relation. Another Bob in gaming. Yeah. All right. But he's a villain. Oh, I don't know about that.

I have no opinion on this man. He's the hero of this story. He is. He is. I'm Jazz Rignall. I'm from U.S. Gamer on loan temporarily for the afternoon. Thanks for coming down. And finally, rounding out this panel. I'm Steve, member of the Bucket Brigade, Lynn. The Bucket Brigade. That is the patch for Kaboom. Yes, that's right.

I thought those are Crystal Chronicles reference or something. That's a different episode. We talked about that on another episode. We did. I've got buckets on the brain. Yes. And this week, we are talking about Activision. I know Activision is not necessarily the most popular name these days,

but in retronauts terms, it's important because Retronauts Activision was the first video game third party and they helped set the stage for basically the modern games industry as we know it. I mean, there were a few kind of pivotal players. There was Atari, there was Nintendo, but Activision had a huge role to play too. So I want to go back and look at sort of how they came to be

and also what kind of games they created. I think the quality of Activision's early work was instrumental in making the concept of third parties viable. Also, lawsuits helped. Lawsuits were very important there, but yeah, just like, I think video games would be a much poorer place without Activision, and we've never really given them proper tribute.

So this is the chance to do that. So to begin with, why don't we go around, go around the room and everyone tell their story. What has your experience been with those early Activision games? I actually don't have a lot of experience because I didn't own a 2600, but I'm definitely familiar. I've played some of the games, and I'm certainly familiar with many others and with the kind of people involved. But what about you, Bob? Well, the 2,600 was my first console, and coming from a poorish family who eventually became middle class,

we were poor at this time, so there was no system more appealing than the Atari 2,600, because it was like, oh, every game is $1, go to the flea market, even new, even new on like an encap at a store, just a bunch of games for a dollar. And as a kid, I knew how much a dollar was worth, and it seemed amazing. Like, this whole game is a dollar. It comes with a box and a book and everything. So I was buying a lot of these at the time at flea markets and stores and things like that for very, very cheap. So all of these names really mean a lot to me.

I mean, I played a ton of fishing derby, a ton of skiing. You don't have crackpots on here. I want to say that is Activision. I'm almost positive it is. That's a really cool game where you are dropping flower pots on spiders advancing up a building. It's very cool. But, yeah, like, all of these games you have listed here, Jeremy, are really, like, they're the foundation of my Atari life. Although I did miss out on the more famous games like Pitfall and River Raid.

I never played them. But I did play Grand Prix. I did play boxing. I did play, again, fishing, derby skiing. Enduro, I loved because it went through different, like, weather conditions and things like that. and day and night. Yeah, like these games, I played a great number of them, and I have very good memories of them.

And, of course, Ghostbusters and things like that. So, yeah, I played a lot of Activision games long after they were relevant on the Atari 2600. Jazz, how about you? Yeah, let's see. I mean, I kind of grew up reading the very, very earliest games magazines. And so, yeah, Activision were had a really good name for producing, you know, great console games, games like Hero and Deccathlon and Riverade.

But it wasn't until I bought myself an Atari home computer that actually started playing games like Kaboom, Ghostbusters, Pass Finder. And then when I finally made a jump to a working on magazines, that was Commodore 64 magazine. And that was when I really, you know, Activision became synonymous with quality, really. They had a lot of titles that were just brilliant and destroyed many joysticks playing decathlon. You know, that was a real joystick wrecker. For those that don't remember, it was a game where you had to wiggle the joystick as fast as possible to make your man run and throw javelins

and basically do things that you're doing in a decathlon. That was really good fun, but, yeah, it was an absolute destroyer of any kind of controller that you have to have. And gave everybody, like, Popeye-like forearms, moving the back and forth. Is that why video gamers are so misshapen these days? Yeah, exactly.

So, Steve, what about you? So, yeah, I had Atari 2,600, and I think the Activision titles really set themselves apart, as Jazz mentioned, in terms of quality. For me, as I mentioned, I got the Bucket Brigade Patch and Kaboom, which for a long time was my favorite game. And when Pitfall came out, I think everybody who had a 2600 knew you had to play Pitfall, at least in my school yard. This is well before the Internet. In fact, DeCathlone, I think I broke that out about a year ago at a party, and we had a bunch of people just saying this is murder on joysticks and arms. But yeah, it was both Activision and I Magic.

I think I personally sought out when I was looking for new games because the quality level generally was better than what I was getting from everything published by Atari. So I think for a long time I might have just purchased Activision games. I was the same way, actually. I mean, I could read. I didn't really know what a game publisher was, but seeing the rainbow, the Activision rainbow, like it spoke to me because, again, my mom would bring home a handful of games from someplace.

Either, you know, her friends, kids were getting rid of them or whatever. You could plug in a game be like, I don't know what this is. I'm already dead. I don't know what's happening. With Activision, there was a very clear line of quality that it had to meet for most of the games. So, yeah, I did associate that rainbow with a better game, I think. Right.

Yeah, branding is something that has kind of, largely disappeared in game packaging because everything is like the console branding. You've got, you know, your PlayStation 4 or Xbox 1 or whatever, like the stripe at the top or the side of the box. But up until maybe like the Super NES Genesis era, you really had kind of like corporate branding for different publishers. And Atari sort of kicked that off with, you know, their original set of games that had like the solid color box and the sort of round. window with the fake drawing of the game graphics. I guess, actually, they tended to have the airbrushed paintings actually. Yeah, like the painterly.

But there was still like that style and the typography. There's a book that just came out, The Art of Atari. That's beautiful. Yeah, I got that for Christmas, and it's just, it's like I look at that and I'm envious that I did not create that. Like, that is an amazing piece of archival work. Like, they went into the archives and found, you know, like source material, like paintings and everything and talked about the typography and everything. It's just a great book, and you should definitely check it out.

It's like 25 bucks. It's a great deal. But, yeah, like, Activision was, you know, kind of right up there with that. And they created this distinct look for their games. And, you know, you also had Eye Magic with its silver boxes and whatever. But, like, there was definitely a sign of quality. with the Activision logo and the branding

and I think that was important. Were most of their covers line arts like sort of an enhanced depiction? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I was thinking when I started to talk about Atari. But Atari did the fanciful, like, here's kind of what you should be thinking about

when you play this game that is two sticks and a ball. Whereas Activision was more like, nah, here's what the game actually looks like. Yeah, for the most part. Yeah, right. And their games were always so nice looking, you know, even on the extremely limited Atari 2,600, that they could do that.

Like, one of the common themes and the right-up side of the games here in the notes is that their animation was extraordinary for the 2600. You think of 2600 as being like a stick man walking with two frames of animation, but they always had like this really complex animation cycle. And that was actually the genesis of Pitfall, wasn't it? Was the animation cycle for the running man who would become Pitfall Harry? I think I went to David Crane's presentation like five years ago at Game Developers Conference, and he talked about, like, you know, the running man cycle that kind of

became Pitfall Harry and everything, like even, you know, the boxing game, which is this kind of weird, super abstract, top-down view that it's weird. It doesn't really look like boxers, but, like, the way the little boxers animate is just miles beyond what you really associate with 2600 games. Yeah, I mean, I played fishing derby a lot. This is the game I played a ton of. I don't know why. I still like fishing in video games, but you had the stick men saying.

on the pier, but you also had like the line going into the water and the fish actively, like struggling, looking like an abstract of a fish, but it was way different than the combat game or the Pong game. There was more of a representation on the screen than you would see in other games.

It looked more high resolution, right? You compared to Frogger to Freeway, right? It's like, oh, there's way more lines of traffic. I can see a beak on the chicken and things like that. Yeah, that actually became a point of contention, which is someone added to the notes. And we'll talk about that. Was that you?

Okay. But to really properly understand Activision's genesis, you need to look back to the early Atari days and kind of the situation of Atari. You know, the VCS, the 2,600, launched in 1977, and it took like a year to really take off, but pretty soon it was a big deal. And it was the cool thing to have, you know,

buy an Atari system. And Atari was making a ton of money. Warner bought them. and it was just, you know, like this money farm. But the creators were not making much money. They weren't really getting much in the way of, you know, percentages. The games that they were creating, they were just sort of like work-a-day drones in this corporate situation,

which is not how Atari started. Atari started as like this kind of small company, and it was, you know, everyone was really passionate. But then when Warner came in, it really changed the personality of the company. In that digital antiquarian piece you linked us to, which is a great retrospect of an Activision. That's at F-I-L-F-R-E dot net, Philfrid.net. Yeah.

It was explained that the engineers or the designers were making 30K a year, which was probably an okay salary at the time. That's a good salary. That's close to 100K. Not if you're selling hundreds of thousands of games that you're responsible for. You should be getting some. They were making tens of millions of dollars apiece for the company. So, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it was not good. Right, right.

It's like that Ray Kassar memo kind of kicked this off, right, where he listed off the top-selling games and the number of units sold. And the reason for the memo was more make more games like this. But then people realizing, wait, that's my game and how many millions of units to themselves? They really realized what they were worth from that memo. Yeah. And, you know, Atari didn't even want its engineers and designers to be known. And that's how you got things like Warren Robinette's Easter egg and adventure.

Like he had to sneak in his name to get any credit for his work. So that's just not a healthy environment for creative types. Like a decent salary, but you know, you're basically doing all the heavy lifting for this massive corporation that's making hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think in 1981, I want to say, Atari was the most, like the fastest growing company ever, the most profitable or something. There's some crazy statistic. Yeah, something like that. It set all kinds of records. And so obviously, you know, that's not a good combination, like a sort of impersonal corporate culture at work built around a lot of creativity and invention.

So, yeah, I think it's just kind of natural that some of it, the company's top designers would start to say, well, you know, we could do this on our own terms and do a lot better. and so that's what they did five people left or was it four several people left to found Activision it was four Atari engineers and they teamed up

with a guy named Jim Levy who basically kind of was the like the you know the suit and tie type who made the business work but there were four designers David Crane Larry Kaplan Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead

and if you're familiar at all with video game history these names should be familiar to you you because most of them went on to do great things outside, you know, even beyond Activision or, you know, to create memorable games to kind of sell games on their own name, especially David Crane. Like, there were lots of games that were David Crane's whatever. Amazing tennis.

Yes, exactly. He's a boy in his blob, too, correct? Yep. Yeah. He's been, he was a formidable presence in video games. And he was very young when he left Atari and became, I think, very wealthy. at a very young age, thanks to Pitfall. But, you know, I don't think anyone could say it wasn't deserved

because Pitfall was one of the high points of the Atari 2,600, and it's a game that still is pretty fun and pretty... It's quite a landmark, I think, in game design. It was very advanced and very sophisticated. And what it did in a tiny amount of storage space is remarkable. So Activision was kind of like the creme de la creme, basically. They were like Atari's top design. designers branched off to create their own company and create games on their own terms and, you know, actually make a solid, more than a solid living from it, but, you know, earn the, the royalties that they felt they deserved.

And, yeah, I believe these engineers did approach Ray Kassar at Atari with some sort of royalty proposition, right? It's like, okay, if we have some sort of royalties, just like musicians or other artists, then we'll stay, and then it was turned down, right? Yes, anybody can make cartridges was what they were told. Yeah, you're the same as the person who puts the game in the box. Pretty much, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what he said. I don't agree with him, obviously, but that's what he said. Yeah, and at the time they were doing absolutely everything, designing, coding, testing it themselves.

Yeah, yeah, I think when you look at, you know, we talk about, um, one person being responsible for the game, that was pretty much it. Yeah, I mean, even later in the industry, like 10 years later, I hear Ron Gilbert talking about actually stuffing the monkey island boxes himself. Like, the guy who designed the game, who wrote the dialogue, who created the game, he's in the place making the boxes full of games, essentially. So this would continue to happen for a while. Yeah. And this, you know, the formation of Activision did have an impact inside of Atari because, you know, the people, responsible for games like E.T. and Pac-Man that maybe are infamous for not being great or whatever for, you know, causing problems for the company, those game is sold really well and those guys took home big royalty checks. So eventually Atari did say, oh, wait, maybe we need to not treat our creative types like they're garbage.

So anyway, yeah, these four guys in, or five guys, in 1979, late 1979, established Activision, October 1st, 1979. It's really kind of the last big video games event of the 70s. The 70s was, there weren't that many games released throughout the 70s, and especially not that many different games. So many Pong clones, so many Space Invaders Clones. But, you know, there were some very pivotal moments, you know, from the release of Computer Space or Computer Space and Pong and Home Pong and, you know, the Odyssey and the Atari 2,600 and a few other notable events, Space Invaders.

And then this is kind of like the culmination of that early, formative, embryonic decade of video games with the formation of Activision and the creation of third-party games publishing. That's pretty much the beginning of video games as an industry that we see today. Obviously, things would change a lot in the coming years, thanks to the market crash and, you know, the Japanese invasion and so forth. But like all the pieces were here at this point. Home consoles, arcade games, computers. third parties. Yeah, and the concept of third parties was so far, and Atari didn't even think someone would make games for their platform or their system.

And I was reading those articles, and it was funny just to see them dealing with these concepts at the first time, for the first time, like, you can't be sued for taking knowledge with you somewhere else, you know, because they made sure when we leave to make this, we can't take any equipment, any patents, but we know how to make video games because of our brains, because we've done this before.

And I think there was a struggle between Atari's, and them, like, figuring this out, like, can you patent knowledge of how to make something? Can you patent this? Can you patent that? It was interesting to read. Yeah, it's a little bit weird because, I mean, okay, so it caught Atari off guard. Sure, fine, whatever. Like, they created a closed system, but personal computers at the time were pretty much closed systems. Like, it was lots of little boutique platforms, and the IBM clone had not yet been created.

So the idea of, you know, proprietary systems existed, but third parties were still making software. for personal computers at that point. So it's not that much of a stretch to think, okay, people do that for computers. Why couldn't they do it for a computer-like game console? But for whatever reason, the thought just never occurred to Atari. And they were very unhappy and immediately or very quickly established a lawsuit to try to halt Activision from being able to create and sell games.

But like you said, they didn't steal documents with them. It's not like they snuck out lots of manila file folders. Yeah. It would be like if U.S. gamers... Development systems or whatever. It would be like if U.S. Gamer sued you for writing about video games somewhere else. Like, you can't do that. That's our knowledge.

But I already know about Donkey Kong. Yeah, exactly. It was a great area. And there was the knowledge issue. And then there was also like the question of, you know, we created this hardware. So do we own the rights to interface with it? Do we own all software that comes across? And ultimately, the courts decided no.

And it was settled pretty quickly within like a couple of years. And, you know, as American legal cases go, especially with large corporations, that's pretty quick. At this point, we should probably mention Jim Levy because he basically bankrolled the company during these lawsuits. He had enough money, according to, you know, the research we did, that he was able to keep Activision going and fend off the Atari lawsuit because I think Atari would have been happy not to have won the lawsuit, but just to have bankrupted Activision. Yeah, exactly. That's a very usual approach. Like, we just want to ruin you. We don't need to win this.

We just want to drain you of money and it's fine. We're going to be spiteful. So, yeah, I've seen these kind of lawsuits all the time. Yeah, I mean, that's a standard business tactic for large corporations who feel things. threatened by smaller companies is just sue them out of existence, even if they don't win, the bigger company can afford to absorb much more legal costs. But Jim Levy, you know, provided the backbone for Activision and allowed the company to survive and not have to worry about the cost of the lawsuit.

So ultimately, Activision prevailed and won the right to do this. And that was the beginning of the end of the Atari market because then lots of other third parties spring into existence, and they weren't necessarily the crim-de-l-l-crim of Atari. They didn't have intimate knowledge of the techniques of the Atari-2600. They weren't necessarily motivated by quality. So, yeah, that caused all kinds of problems.

But you can't blame Activision for that. It's not their fault. You mentioned that because as a kid, having just a ton of Atari carts, I would know it's like, this one is made up a different material. This one is a different shape. It's like there was no standard there. They just made, as long as it fit into the machine,

it was fine. So, yeah, I guess the quality control wasn't. there, obviously. Yeah, I remember when that third-party flood started to happen just because the number of titles on the shelves started increasing so fast so quickly that you couldn't keep up. Yeah. And then things were moving to the bargain bin, you know, a week or two after they showed up on the shelf.

So, you know, this, obviously, we talk about the video game crash. Now, this is, you know, third-party quality, well, even Atari first party quality, not being so great either. So, yeah, one other thing on the lawsuit, there's kind of the cheeky Venetian blinds. That's a great story. Yes. So there's a technique that I guess maybe Alan Miller had come up with, for putting eight sprites on a line rather than the standard six, and he called it the Venetian blinds. Yeah, that showed up in one of Activision's launch games checkers, which had eight, you know, pieces per line.

as opposed to six, which was important to make the game authentic. Right. And then the Atari lawyers talking to Activision is like, oh, you stole this Venetian blinds is one of the intellectual property things that they've stolen. And David Crane had a demonstration cartridge that's called Venetian blinds, and literally it's a window where you move the Venetian blinds up and down. You can buy that or you could have. Remember when Xbox 360 had that virtual arcade?

Yeah, you could buy that for $3. I don't know why it just wasn't free just to mess with, But if you want to pay $3 or whatever, you could play with fake Venetian blinds at that resolution. He's like, is this what you're talking about? And obviously, that made Atari's lawyers. It's an amazing graphical demo for the $2,600. There's a lot going on there,

and the animation of the Venetian blinds is really smooth. You're like, wow, could the $2,600 do that? Apparently, when it didn't have to worry about game logic or anything like that, the system could do some pretty cool-looking stuff. Yeah, and that background, when the blinds are all the way open, is used in barnstorming. So it's like the sunrise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mentioned that in the notes. Interesting. So, let's talk about the Atari or the Activision lineup for Atari because these kind of early games that they released in 1980, which was what, six games? Not very many, but, you know, the library was still pretty small at that point. I think these were maybe not the most ambitious and amazingly inventive games, but they definitely kind of staked out Activision's intentions. They were all very much the sort of, like, the name of this thing that you're doing is the name of the game, which was pretty common at that point, at that point. But they were all done with such a high degree of quality that they kind of stood out from your typical Atari release.

Right. I mean, they don't look amazing now, but considering what was available for the 2,600 at the time, you know, boxing was like those characters are huge, like dragster, right? they take up, it seems like, half the screen. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those, one of those kind of like, something you would see sort of throughout the history of 2D games is all of a sudden someone would come up with a technique for making bigger characters on screen.

And even though you look back now and you're like, oh, those sprites aren't that big, at the time, it felt like, wow, everything's huge, like the boxers and punchout, you know? Like they just seem so enormous, even though now you're kind of like, oh, yeah, okay, they're like a third of the screen, but at the time it was like, there is this massive

guy trying to punch me and I have to punch him in the belly to make his pants fall down. China Warrior on the turbographics, right? Oh, yeah. That was too big, right? It interfered with the game. Sometimes, yeah, it hurt the games, but Activision was good game quality plus

impressive visuals, and that was a big deal. Yeah, and all four of the founders had launch titles. Bob White had Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and David Crane. Although you'll see David Crane's name pop up a lot in these games. He was quite prolific. So do you guys have any personal experience with these early games?

I can't say that I do. I checked out all of them and watched videos of them. Some of them are really weird. Like, Dragster is a really bizarre racing game. It's not really a racing game. It's like a head-to-head contest. And, I mean, you're literally racing from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen and trying to get there as quickly as possible

and you're like wiggling the joystick, like pressing it to the left to shift gears at just the right time. There's like a little meter that you watch to make sure you don't stall out. But it's a strange kind of game. I think you had to get like under six seconds to get a patch

for the whatever equivalent to the Bucket Brigade, the Dragster Demo team, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, If you think about it, right, when, like, the funny car in dragster racing, it's really all about the shifting, right? You don't steer at all. You just go, yeah. So it's kind of taking that core element and just making the game. I didn't know that's how you drove a dragster when I was a kid when I saw the game, but it was like, those cars are racing and they're big.

I need to play that game. I think the only ones that I played initially were probably boxing and fishing derby. Yeah. I remember seeing skiing, but I mean, why would I buy Bridge that there's no chance that's going to happen? Yeah, Bridge is probably the least impressive of these games because it's literally just a field, like a white field with numbers and letters on it. And if you don't understand how to play Bridge, then what are you doing? Like, it's impossible to understand. I don't understand Bridge, so I just watched demos of this and was like, but I guess if you're like, if you were in 1980, the kind of person who would open the comics page,

and go down to that little bridge corner section and get those strategies. You were like, yes, finally, my time to shine has come. Bridge the video game. Yeah. Yeah, again, fishing derby is great. It looks really good because you have like the sky. You have two people sitting on a pier.

Then you have the water. Then you have the sandy bottom. And the point of the game is to catch as many fish as you can. But there's a shark patrolling the top of the water who will eat your fish if you don't avoid that. And skiing is just a very, very relaxing skiing game. There's some really nice sound effects in this game. that sound effects can go one of two ways

on the Atari 2,600. As a kid, sometimes they scared me. But this game was very soothing. Pac-Man sound effects were pretty scary. Yeah, yeah. This game, just, like, the fush of your skis was very well replicated with the Atari 2,600, however they made it happen.

It was nice. The thing that I find most impressive about skiing is just how varied the player sprite is. Because you're skiing downhill, but you can turn, and you have like 16 angles that you can turn through. Maybe it's, you can't, like, aim up, but, you know, in that lower arc. It's very smooth. Yeah, and you have a lot of different angles.

So, you know, analog controls wouldn't come into being until the 5200, but there definitely was that sense of, like, you're doing more than just going, you know, in cardinal directions with this game. Yeah. Which was a really impressive effect. Yeah. It's like closer to skiing where you're probably doing S-curves-ish, right. But fishing derby was David Crane, which, really.

probably shouldn't be surprising because he seemed to have like the greatest technical mastery and also a pretty good artistic sense of what made an interesting looking game. And yeah, the animation of the line, you know, you cast your line down into the water to try to catch fish and it's very smooth. Like it moves in these sweeping arcs. Sorry, that was out skiing, making the swish noises. I didn't mean for it to play during the podcast. It's like ASMR.

So, yeah, so like the line, and then once you actually catch the fish, they move around a lot. So there's a lot of animation and then the shark moving around at the top. I feel the line actually going from your rod to the fish and staying attached to it and moving with it seems very advanced for the 2,600, just keeping track of all that information. Yeah, especially for 1980. I mean, the system was like two, three years old at that point, so people were still kind of getting a handle on all the advanced techniques. And I mentioned something about the Venetian blinds, you know, like how it could look great when you didn't have to have game logic. It's important to understand, you know, a basic feature of the Atari 2,600 was that, like, processing had to happen in between the game drawing lines of pixels, basically. Racing the beam?

Yeah, every, you know, every 60th of a second, the system would reset how it was drawing the phosphor beam. and that's when the game logic happened. So there was kind of like this push and pull between making the video game happen, keeping track of all the stuff on the screen, and also creating the graphics. So it was extremely limited and extremely complicated, and it took someone who really understood

the system inside and out to make a game that could be as sophisticated in terms of play and animation as well as as nice looking as fishing derby. So it really, like, it's a very, simple game in hindsight, and you're not doing much. You're just catching fish, but it's like a head-to-head contest, but that's a lot happening for two players on a single screen for a 1980 Atari 2600 game. Yeah, two players, two lines, lots of fish moving, the shark. A lot is happening in this game, for sure. And we didn't really talk too much about boxing, but, you know,

that, like I said, it's a sort of strange top-down take on boxing, but that sort of became its own little genre, like its own style, the top-down view, the lightsaber arena, Star Wars game, had that style. And there were a few other boxing games and hockey games and even fighting games through the years that would try to do that

direct, like, overhead, bird's-eye view. I don't think it ever worked very well, but, you know, the idea was there, and it was a different take on you know, pugilism and combat. Yeah, like Warrior the vector arcade game has

that top-down view, and you can see the sword swinging. Yeah, that's right. And they played with perspective on that as well, where they made it smaller or larger if you're climbing up or down the stairs. That's what I call the Bill Lambier's Combat Basketball perspective. Sorry, we just talked about that an hour ago.

I would say that that style maybe reached its creative apex with one of my personal favorite games, brandish, where you, it's like the total top-down perspective on a guy going through the dungeon, and when you rotate, or when you turn, the screen, like the dungeon rotates around you.

So it's like your character is sort of the anchor on the screen. And it's very, very disorienting when you first play it. But it's a pretty cool take on the dungeon crawler if you give it a chance. So that's one worth checking out. All right, so we kind of set down the basic facts here for Activision, sort of, you know, set the stage for everything. I think now we can actually have a little more fun with the show, because once you get into 1981, you start to get into some of the more creative games where they really start to break away from, you know, just kind of like the rudimentary, here's a video game experiences and more like, hey, let's do something different. Let's create worlds. Let's create ideas. And so, you know, starting with 1981, you really start to get, I think, the games that people associate most with

Activision, you know, the more creative ones, the ones that really set a new standard for Atari 2,600 software. I mean, the biggest one, probably in 1981 would be Kaboom by Larry Kaplan, which is kind of like a backwards take on space invaders or breakout. It's kind of in that same mold of like you're moving a thing back and forth at the bottom of the screen. But, you know, what you're actually doing is a little bit different. So there's like the mad bomber who hangs out at the top of the screen, kind of looks like the hamburger. And, you know, he drops bombs and you have buckets and you're trying to catch the bombs as they fall in the buckets. And every time you miss, then you lose a bucket.

and when you run out of buckets, the game's over. But it's, you know, a very simple concept for the game, but it gets really quick, really fast, and very challenging. And that was a paddle controller game, right? Yeah, yeah, it used the... That explains everything. I tried to play this on a collection or something. I'm like, this is too hard.

Yeah, I didn't realize it was a paddle game. That makes so much sense now. That's why Taito made an arcanoid controller. Yeah, you could play it with the joystick. I used to play it with the joystick on the Atari, and that was really difficult. Yeah, especially those later levels. I mean, basically it's dropping bombs in a, you know,

Mad Bombers dropping in a zigzag pattern. So you basically have to go back and forth so fast that I don't know if you can play it with a joystick. I watched a video of like a world record attempt. And if you go past like the five minute mark out of this like hour long video, it's just like how can you keep up with this? Yeah, well, I think there's some like pattern memorization. It could be. It could sort of like a muscle memory.

It's like, okay, here's the one where he's going to make like an ass. and then, you know, left right and left right, whatever. Yeah, I mean, this had kind of all the hallmarks of a video game classic of that era because, one, a very simple concept, very easy to pick up and play, a distinct control style, a really, really steadily ramping up difficulty level. So it becomes really difficult to master and get a high score. And also, there's a character. You've got the Mad Bomber.

So it's like all the little pieces. that you need to have a successful video game in 1981, and there you go. So I would definitely say Kaboom is the best known of Activision's 1981 games. It was not one that I ever got to play as a kid, but I still knew what Kaboom was, which, you know, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Frogger, Cuba, like he had those games. But for this one, a game specifically made for the Atari 2,600 by a third party, to, for whatever reason, stick in my memory that, that, That, to me, says, like, they did a good job with us and kind of stood out from the crowd.

I don't know. Do you guys have any memories of this game, or is that just something unique to me? I didn't encounter this. It's just, it's weird that, again, I was born in 82, and I encountered all of these games far after they were relevant. So what I actually found had nothing to do with how well it did or the quality. I just encountered random Activision games, and that was not one of them, but it's one I did play later, and I was like, why is this so hard?

But then I just learned now, there's a reason why. So, yeah. Yeah, it was the, uh, actually. the only Activision patch I got. Oh, right, right. We kind of alluded to it earlier for... Oh, yeah, can you talk about that? Yeah, they had an Activision, you could write into them, and they basically set different

scores, like, for instance, you mentioned Dragstore, getting under six seconds. Bucket Brigade for Kaboom was scoring over 3,000 points, and each game had these different levels. In fact, DeCathlon, I think had bronze, silver, and gold medal. So you would take a photograph of your screen and mail it into Activision, and then they would send back a patch, you know, it's like Save the Chickens was the freeway one and things like that. So they'd send you a letter and a patch sort of signifying that you had accomplished this.

And in their Activision's newsletter, on the side, they tell you how to take a picture of your television screen, right? They're like, don't use a flash. If you're using like a flash cube, you know, use a burnt out one. Yeah, so it's really funny to listen to those. It's like, if you have a Polaroid, like, this is how you should do it. Hold still. So, yeah, I just sent in a Polaroid of my screen, and then I got my patch, and that's the only one I ever did it with.

I'm not sure why I didn't do more. Maybe I just wasn't as good at games, except for Kaboom. So, yeah, Kaboom is probably one of my, well, it's definitely one of my favorite Activision games. So, yeah, you mentioned Freeway, which was basically their take on Frogger, David Crane's take on Frogger, which is not that exciting a game in artistic terms. It's basically, you know, like, why did the chicken cross the road? You take that joke and turn it into a Frogger clone and you've got freeway. But technically it's impressive because there's, what, like 10 lanes of traffic on the freeway,

and there's cars moving, multiple cars moving along each lane at different speeds. And it's really, really challenging just to get the chicken from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen, moving through those lanes and it doesn't have the moving scenery where you have to jump on logs and stuff like Frogger did but just dodging all those cars

is pretty tough. Yeah, yeah, it looks great. One last thing on the patch is I had to look this up. I remember getting a letter along with the patch congratulating me and I guess it was Jan Marcella

who was basically their kind of head of customer she did like the Activision's magazine as well but if you got the high score on pitfall the letter came from Pitfall Harry. Oh, wow. First person, like, writing to you.

It's like, congratulations, explorer or something like that. That's really cute. Probably the most visually impressive game of 1981 was Laser Blast, which is a pretty simplistic game. You probably wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was developed by David Crane. He was, like, the guy who made everything look cool and pretty. He actually did the bombs and kaboom as well. Oh, did he?

Yeah. Okay. because there are going to be a lot of those bombs on the screen at a time, like in the higher levels. So that kind of makes sense. But laser blast, basically you have a UFO. It's kind of a reverse space invaders almost or missile command. You have a UFO and it moves along the top of the screen,

and you can move back and forth. Basically, you go from scenario to scenario, and there will be three tanks on the ground, and you have to either stand above them or at a 45-degree angle and fire a laser blast at them to destroy them. And sometimes the tanks raise their own cannons at you and will fire back. So that makes it extremely difficult.

But the visual effect on the laser beam is really, really impressive because it kind of does that almost like, you know, the Akira effect where there's like this kind of like a dim laser for just one frame. And then the laser, you know, shines brightly and then kind of fades away a little like Defender did that. a little bit with kind of like the pixel decay on some of the beams that you fire. But it's like a really subtle effect, but it really like it's very fast and really adds a lot to

this extremely simple game. It just it's such a cool like sci-fi animation effect. I don't know. It's just a sign of the extra love and care that Crane put into his games, I think. And like I said, it's very simple and very challenging, but

just you know, the kind of speed of it and the gracefulness of the graphics make it a really fun and cool game. You know, probably the most influential game of 1981 would be

tennis, which was developed by Alan Miller. And this was a big step forward in tennis games because up until that point, you know, Tari had published a tennis game that I think was just called like tennis also. But isn't Pong tennis of the future? Why would you make a tennis game? Come on.

So to this point, tennis games either were like the side-on view like Pong or they had like a very bird's-eye top-down view and were kind of loose and a little awkward. Tennis did two really, Alan Miller's tennis did two very important things. First, it tilted the perspective on the field or the court. So the four-court is larger than the back court. And you have two characters, you know, one in each court. you know, there's like the perspective on the sidelines. And so that kind of creates a sense of depth. You know, the field is or the net is in the middle.

And the other important thing is that the ball casts a shadow, which is like a very simple thing, but no one had done that before. And it makes a huge difference because, you know, tennis is about aiming the ball and hitting it into the right places, not hitting it outside the boundaries. And without that shadow, it's really hard to tell exactly what you're doing. So before this, tennis was kind of like a, kind of like flailing at the sport, but it wasn't really more advanced than Pong.

But with the advent to the shadow and the perspective, then all of a sudden it became like a more immersive, more convincing, more realistic take on tennis. And that would be very influential in later tennis games, like I can't remember what it's called, but the one Data East made in like 1983. and then Nintendo's Tennis for Famicom in 1984. Those basically took this concept and ran with it. But without this game, I don't know if those ever would have happened. Yeah. I mean, if you look at NES tennis versus this, and it's basically, yeah, there's a lot of influence there.

Then a few other games, Stampede by Bob Whitehead, which is kind of like a scrolling shooter, side-scrolling shooter, except instead of shooting things, your roping little doggies. So basically sending out your lasso straight ahead of your your horse

and catching a steer and then you pull it back and it disappears. I guess you put it into your satchel or something. Your inventory. Ice hockey, which is a two-on-two hockey game and it has as is kind of par for for Activision.

Really nice animation. That was also by Alan Miller. I guess he was kind of the sports guy. So that was it for 1981, but that's, you know, six games, all of which are more impressive and, you know, deeper, more substantial than the 1980 games. So then we get into 1982, and this is, you know, where things get really great because you have pitfall, you have River Raid, you have Mega Mania, you have Chopper Command, Barnstorming, and Grand Prix, like all of these, another six games, but they're all just all-time classics, some of the greats of the Atari 2600. I have one to add to that, but it's only because I played it. It's Activision. It's Spider Fighter, 1982.

Larry Miller, I think, made it. It is basically Activision's version of Galaxian. It's just a shooter where you're stuck to the ground. Things are swooping in at you, but there's, like, a lot of different enemies. It's very colorful. Some things that scared me a lot as a kid, but it's very creative. I like it. I don't know if it's a notable Activision game, but it's one that I played a lot, and it's an 82 release.

How does that compare to Megamania? Because Mega Mania is also kind of like a Galaxian Space Invaders game. I'll have to look up a video on my phone. So Mega Mania, you have, you have, you know, basically like a Klingon bird of prey at the bottom of the screen and you're shooting up and then you have enemy formations above and you know like in Space Invaders

they move across the screen but instead of moving to the side of the screen and then lowering one level and then moving back in the other direction they wrap and so they kind of move at a diagonal like an angle and so they're constantly getting closer to the ground but you can't sort of box

them in the way you do in Space Invaders so it's a lot more challenging and also the enemy patterns are a lot more varied. Spider-fighter's a bit different. It's a bit more colorful, but I think there are some similar things in common with Megamania

now than looking at a video of it, but Spider-Fiter is really just a lot of things swooping down at you and firing projectiles at you. I think it's based off that galaxian, the galaxian mold or the galaxian formula, but it seems a little more fast-paced to me. Yeah. Yeah, Megamania was

Activision's version of Astroblaster, basically. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, so something else. that's kind of happening alongside obviously the years creeping up is the number of employees working at Activision, right? So now we're starting to see

games from designers that were not the original for. I think, like you're saying, Steve Cartwright, right, and Carol Shaw with River Raid, so. Yeah, and another important thing to consider is, one, we're getting close to the Atari crash, like

that happened at the end of 1982, but, you know, kind of hand in hand with that, But 1988 is also when you're starting to see third-party games from other third parties. And the quality of these Activision games is really important because it really sets Activision's work apart from, you know, a dozen totally crappy companies whose names I can't even think of. So, you know, there is this kind of like seal of quality. You've got the Activision Rainbow on there. You know it's going to be good.

Who knows about this other game? like apparently it's pornographic what's going on there I don't understand but you know I think that only took them so far because when you have people shoveling out games at much lower prices than Activision

and much lower quality you can't necessarily judge quality just by looking at the package looking at the name looking at the box you have to kind of say well here's a game I like the rainbow on it but it's 40 bucks. What about this other one that's only 15? Maybe I should get the $15

game. And then it's terrible and you hate video games forever at the end. Well, there's no reviews, right? I mean, maybe something in the newspaper or a magazine, but nothing to where now if I want to know what a game is like, I can just look it up. And so, yeah, you had a lot of third parties kind of dumping things onto the market. And while Activision quality was there, you know, there's that decision of do I spend $30 on an Activision game or I can buy $15, $2 games, right?

Right. So there's just like the sort of quantity over quality that was very difficult to overcome, especially at this time, because, you know, video games is still relatively new. Right. And, you know, the answer is to buy the more expensive game, not the $215 games, but it's hard to necessarily convince people of that, which is why you see things like blowback against Super Mario Run. Like, it's a premium-priced app, but, you know, I want my free apps, so screw this game.

It's always been the push and pull of the video games industry, I think, or really, probably any industry. Americans are a bunch of cheapskates. That's basically what it boils down to. You really are. I had, I think, more awareness about what was coming out for the Activision because of Activision's newsletter. You know, when I got that patch, I basically effectively signed up for the newsletter as well. And I think they didn't send out many issues, but they would always say, you know, here's this hot new game, here's the designer, and here's maybe some things that they were working on.

So there was at least a, well, maybe I can't afford it. I'm still going to buy cheap games because I'm still a kid, but at least I know what's coming from Activision. Yeah, we were really lucky in the UK. I mean, computer and video games magazine launched in 1980. And, you know, that really did cover all of the main cartridges that came out at the time. So even though I didn't have a 2,600 at the time, I knew all about pitfall because, you know, they'd reviewed it and gone on and on about how amazing it was. And I just, you know, really wanted to play it. So we had a pretty good, you know, combination of the sort of the playground jungle drums and, you know, just a couple of magazines that were out of the time that people were buying.

And so there was a pretty good awareness of what was good and what was bad. And I think part of that sort of helps maybe a little bit to the market didn't crash in the UK, basically. It's a very different history out there. Yeah. I'm trying to think about, I mean, everybody knew about pitfall when pitfall came out or within probably the first six months to one year, which is a short time period at this time. And I'm kind of wondering, I think, I mean, I probably heard about it on the playground. and then everybody just, it was sort of the must-have game for the 2,600.

I mean, I remember seeing store kiosks with it. This was before you saw a lot of store kiosks, but I remember, like, going to a grocery store, and they just had, like, sort of their video game section, and they just had an Atari 2,600 setup and showing off pitfall. And, you know, I would go places and see pitfall being shown off. Like, it was the game that you showed off to sell people 2,600s, because it was that impressive.

It was like, you know, a few years later, you had Super Mario Brothers to sell people NES. It was just such a huge leap in terms of game design and in terms of presentation over anything that had come before that, you know, it was like, wow, I can't believe I can do this on my home television. That's crazy. You know, the novelty of Pong had worn off a long time before that

so people had gotten used to doing stuff with computer games on their TVs, but nothing quite like this. So, yeah, Pitfall, let's talk about Pitfall, actually. Jazz, you've been pretty quiet, but I'm sure you're familiar with Pitfall. Yeah, absolutely. You want to talk about, like, what made this game so amazing and impressive? Yeah, I didn't play it for a while, and the first time I actually encountered it was, I think it was, it must have been on the, it wasn't on the 2,600, that's for sure.

It was probably on the Commodore 64 or the Atari computer, and it was just, it was a proper adventure. You know, it was flick screen as far as I recall, and, you know, each screen had its own set of challenges. He leapt over crocodiles and had to sort of swing on vines. And so it had a variety and a progression that was just very unusual at the time. It had 256 screens, I think. Was it 128 or 256? I think it was 256. I believe so.

I can't remember. But, yeah. I mean, it went on and on. And it was just a sort of a fabulous experience of the Tomb Raider of its day, if you will. Well, it was more like the Indiana Jones of its day. Yes, absolutely. Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark was huge in 1981. So coming a year later, I mean, I think the influence was pretty obvious

with maybe a little bit of Roger Moore jumping on crocodile heads and live and let die in there. But, yeah, like swinging on vines, jumping over scorpions, collecting treasures, and then there was the sort of secret element of the game where the bottom half of the screen, like it was a tiered game. There was the overground and the underground, and the underground screens connected in a different way. It was like it kind of let you warp forward several screens every time you flick from one screen to another. And, you know, there were different pathways that would allow you to get underground. There were brick walls that would block your progress underground. So you had to kind of of learn, even though it was, you know, like a linear screen, one screen to another that infinitely looped, it still became a labyrinth because the question was, how can you navigate the space and get around the barriers, get through the, you know, the pits and climb the ladders and so forth, and collect all the treasures within 20 minutes. Right. I think one of the things I remember about pitfall that was mind-blowing at the time,

and it sounds ridiculous now is the fact that I could run the other direction. Oh, yeah, that's true. Even Mario didn't let you do that Right, yeah, it's like, wait, I can go the other way I can go through this backwards basically So that It's kind of one of those things Now you think about it

Yeah, of course, you should be able to explore But at the time, everything was like moved to the right And there was an element of needing to backtrack To be able to get, you know, the treasures efficiently And get past all the barriers and everything And it's the kind of game where you can sit down and through meticulous study and replay figure out what is the optimal route through this game

and it's one that I'm sure someone has mapped that out and put it on the internet but at the time like that's challenging that is a test in itself and it wasn't necessarily a challenge like a score challenge like Pac-Man or a shoot-em-up or something where you were just trying to survive as long as possible it was really about like how efficiently could you explore how well could you learn this jungle

and remember where you need to go while also navigating the hazard. So it was challenging you on multiple levels, which action games at the time didn't really do. Yeah, I mean, most of the time to figure out the end objective was to read the manual. And this one, I mean, when I played pitfall, I didn't know really there was an end.

I was just thinking I need to get all the treasure and make it through the obstacles, right? Yeah, and the fact that it had an ending is, in fact, like, that video games didn't really do that too often. You know, action games did, and it was just on Atari, it was keep shooting stuff until you, you know, it gets so fast you can't survive. Right. For 82, barnstorming. That's like basically, it's not a runner because you're not running, but, I mean, its design is basically Flappy Bird.

You're either going high or low. You're trying to fly through barns, so you have to lower your plane to fly, like, at a low level through the barns. And then there will be obstacles like windmills and stuff, and birds up high. So you have to constantly alter your height in order to advance as far as you can. I remember seeing this, someone trying to set the high score at a classic gaming expo on barnsforming. And one of the funny things they did to practice was they stuck pieces of tape on the screen to the different heights of, you know, the windmill and everything else. So it's sort of like a practice exactly how much you need to move even if, you know, that obstacle isn't there. It has that nice Atari 2,600 sunset where it's just like three colors in the background, but it still added a lot of atmosphere to a system.

You didn't see many touches like that on. It's the Venetian blind sunset. Yeah. Yeah. And Chopper Command also had that sunset, or a sunset similar to that. Chopper Command's kind of like a Defender Parsec-style game. I remember playing that. Yeah, I'm sure you're a big fan of that one, actually.

Love that, yeah. As home consoles go, it was miles better than the official defender. And I didn't play it too long, but I just remember it being pretty tight. tough, but it had a radar, which was very sophisticated for its time, and, you know, different things to shoot at. So it was a good little game. And let's see, what else? Grand Prix, another David Crane game. Not really that impressive looking, but it's an interesting take-on racing. It's, again, top-down, kind of like boxing, and you're moving from left to right. It's not like dragster. You're actually, you know, the screen scrolls, and so you're constantly moving.

forward. But there are tons of cars. The sprites are actually pretty big and you're basically moving from lane to lane trying to avoid the cars and the longer you avoid cars the faster you go but as soon as you hit another car you don't explode but you lose your momentum. So the trick is to move

and avoid cars for as long as possible to get as far as possible and earn extra points. I had this and there's the sound of the cars crashing is great. I don't know how they did it but it's a really great car crash sound. Again Activision is really, they really knew how work that hardware in the way that no one could.

And the fact that it can convincingly display speed, which is something I don't think Atari 2600 games are necessarily good at. But it really made you give you that sense of speed with like cars kind of just like slowly pulling by you and like you're slowly passing them while the side objects are just whizzing by you. I feel like it really gives a convincing sense of speed. And then finally the other kind of big impressive game for 1982 was River Raid, which is notable because it was developed by a woman, which

it wasn't really that common back then. You know, you had, what's her name, Donna Bailey, who developed designed Centipede around the same time. But Carol Shaw, designed Riverade, and interestingly, it's a shooter, kind of like Centipede. People, you know, have

their stereotypes about women in video games, but this is a blistering action game, and it's actually pretty complicated. There's a lot happening. Yeah, the fuel thing. Yeah. So, you know, I think... playing up the screen, collect fuel to stay alive, basically, stay aloft and shoot things. But I think the thing that really stood out for it was the fact that it had a procedurally generated landscape, which kind of, you know, kept, rather than having it all bitmaps, it was very unusual in having that procedural generation, which kept a challenge very high.

Yeah, so the levels changed every time. Yeah. Yeah, the fuel concept was something that was kind of a showing up in games. around this time. You had a Konami Scramble in 1981 where you had to bomb fuel tanks. You had Xaxon in 1982 where you had to shoot out fuel tanks. This is when you don't shoot them, you just pass over them, which makes a little more sense in terms of like logistics.

But basically, it's a top-down shooter scrolling vertically up the screen. And as it's called River Raid, you're basically within a channel. And the channel narrows and sometimes there will be like bar. in the middle of the river. So you have to avoid hitting land, but you're in like a plane and you're blowing up tanks, or not tanks, but boats and other planes

that, you know, initially are just static and sitting still, but as you advance further in, they start to move around and then they start to shoot back. And you have to pass over these fuel depots to refuel your jet. And just passing over, it won't completely refill you. So it's kind of like the longer you linger over a fuel spot, the more fuel you'll get. So you have to adjust your speed while not making yourself too vulnerable.

There are gates that appear in the river that you have to blow up in advance. So there's a lot happening. It's a really, really involved game and very fast-paced for a 2,600 game and has been considered like one of the grades and definitely very influential in terms of shooter design. Yeah, I think what's interesting is, you know, at this time, Activision was running a lot of ads with its creators sort of starring in the ad, and River Rates does have Carol Shaw on, I think, on a racing bike, and saying, like, this is Carol Shaw's game, so I don't know if that's a precedent at all. Yeah, they were doing, like, the rock star designer thing back before it was cool. Yeah, really, the pre-EA days. Yeah, like barnstorming had Steve Cartwright, like, all dressed, you know, like the Red Baron or whatever.

on a biplane. So definitely like showing off, hey, our designers make cool games and they are cool. You should buy cool games by cool people. Yes. Yeah, River Raid was the first game to be banned

by it for minors in West Germany by the wonderfully sounding federal department of writing harmful to young persons. Wow. Why is that? Violent. Because you're shooting stuff? You're shooting stuff.

Germany took a while to be okay. with violent video games. Especially ones involving airplanes, dropping bombs, or shooting at things on the ground. Too soon. So then we get to 1983, which everything in the games industry

kind of fizzles out about this point, and that kind of is active vision to a certain degree, too. This is where they start to encounter some troubles, and also where they start to release some games where you're kind of like, eh, like Space Shuttle. Steve Kitchen tried to do a lot with Space Shuttle,

but did I put Steve Kitchen? I think Gary Kitchen, sorry. It's like really ambitious. Oh, no, it is Steve Kitchens. It's Gary's brother. Oh, his brother? Okay, okay. So you're like, the view is the cockpit windowed view of the space shuttle

and you have to like take it through launch and then up into orbit and you can like watch the curvature of the earth beneath you and you have to dock with things, deploy things. It's really complicated. It's a lot to do with a single joystick and a bug. button, and it seems really abstract. Have you guys ever played this? I mean, I've seen the box.

I owned it when I was collecting Atari 2,600 games, but I don't think I've actually ever played it. I've never played it now. Yeah, I played the Atari version, I think it was. Was it on Atari? Yes, it was on Atari. Vaguely remember it taking 20 minutes to load and about three minutes for me to stop actually playing it

because it just was just a series of screens that didn't seem to make any sense, and I didn't have an instruction manual with it. Yeah, it's got meters and stuff, and if you don't have the instructions, then what is it even doing? Interpretive flight simulation, basically, which is just not what you wanted to play.

Not at all. Nobody had River Raid and things like that. Right. Yeah. So this was also the year that Activision started to license games from other, like, arcade games. So they started taking Sega games.

You had Enduro. Oh, that was a Sega game, yeah. That's right. That was a racing game, kind of like a, you know, proto-outrun pole position type game. I think Atari 2,600 had Knight Driver, which had sort of the same, like, you know, you're kind of behind the car looking forward into the road. That was a tricky thing for the Atari 2,600 to do. And I will say that Larry Miller programmed this version, and, you know, within the limitations of the 2,600, it looks really impressive. You know, night driver kind of simulated that road effect by making everything black and giving you very little visual information.

So it kind of, you know, relied on you filling in the blanks a lot to create the sense of driving at night. Whereas this game actually does have, you know, like a sort of scrolling line that, you know, constantly moves around and shifts to show the direction of the road. And it has kind of a gradient effect on it. So it fades away as it gets further into the distance. So that's pretty impressive. It's really cool. I mean, all these effects it has. Like, it goes from day to night.

There's weather, like snow. Again, that sunset appears. It is very technically advanced for what the Atari could do. I mean, it's like every racing game where there's a horizon and things are convincingly moving towards it. You would not expect that on the 2,600. Yeah, and this is what, 83, so 82, you had a pole position come out in the arcades, right? And people have an expectation of what a driving game is.

should be after that. Yeah, I don't know what Pulposition looked like on 2,600 or even if it came out on 2,600. I'm sure it did.

It was a 5,200 games game? I could be totally wrong with that. I apologize. That is okay. Another license game, Keystone Capers. Wasn't that license? Wasn't that an arcade game?

Or maybe it was an original game? Pretty sure it was an original game. Okay. Yeah. So that was kind of like, you would see this kind of game in like Bonanza Brothers or something. I'm, Jazz, I'm sure you saw a ton of games similar to Keystone Capers on, you know, the British microcomputers.

That's sort of like you're in sort of like a small space where you can explore sort of screen by screen. There's a, there's a radar at the bottom. It's like a building and it has multiple levels and you're moving up and down between levels as you run and try to collect treasures and avoid policemen. I don't know. it kind of has that same vibe as like a jet set Willie or something. Oh, okay, yeah. I was just trying to make the connection there.

But yes, sort of manic mired a jet set would he yeah, 2049 of that kind of thing. Like it definitely has that kind of vibe. But this is, I guess, you know, the American take on that concept. Yeah, oddly enough, what I remember most about Keystone Capers is the television ad that ran and it's, you know, cops chasing the robbers around.

And maybe it was also used in the print ads, but I still remember seeing that. that TV ad and probably pulled it up on YouTube. I'm trying to think, isn't that the box art that has a dude who looks like Gallagher on it? Houston Capers?

Yeah, we just talked about Gallagher in the last episode we recorded. We did. Try to figure out why. Because we hate ourselves. Laserdisc games? Yes. Yes, good call.

All right. Okay, no, I'm thinking of some other game. Never mind. I blew it. My bad. I bet Gallagher played it at some point in his life. Probably.

What you're missing on this, again, this is not a standout Activision game. It's a really good game. I think I mentioned it earlier, it's called crackpots. You play a person at the top of the screen, and there are, like, six flower pots, and there are spiders going up towards windows, and they're zigging and zagging.

And if you drop a flower pot, it'll take a few seconds for it to recharge and pop back up. So if you don't kill enough spiders in every wave, at the end of the wave, a termite will come across the screen and eat through a level of the building. The building will fall down a level. It's a very interesting, like, graphical effect for an Atari game. And again, that sunset is behind you, and there's like a cityscape and a sunset. It's a very nice-looking Atari game. and it is an 83 game.

This is also the second game you brought up with spiders. Spider-fighter and crackpots, yeah. Interesting. A trend as a kid. My mom just got me spider-based games for some reason. I don't know why.

Do you have Spider-Man on 2600? You know what, no. I never played it. Never played it in cartridge form, at least. The missing spider game. All right. Let's wrap this puppy up. We've been through Activision's golden age, the golden age of Atari 2,600. But in 1983, everything went to hell, and the Atari 2,600 became not a place where you could make money.

and Activision continued to make 2,600 games, but they also had to diversify and began to look to computers. And they still made good games there, but there is kind of this sense that as they move away from sort of the incubator where their business got started, that something essential was lost.

And the company would have a lot of troubles in the following years. The PC market is where people began to focus, but it would take a while for PCs to become as big and as popular as the 2,600 was in its prime. And, you know, there was more competition on PC. Besides games, there were also productivity apps and things like that.

And it was a more open architecture. And there were also a lot of PCs to worry about. You couldn't just make, you know, like games for PC. There were, oh, God, there was Apple, there was Atari. There were the various, like, you know, Tandy and VIC-20 and Commodore 64 and just like a dozen platforms that they had to worry about. Even though some of them had similar architecture, they each still required special consideration. I also think the PC, the many versions of that, was not as populist as a platform as the Atari because I believe it was the mid-90s when it became like, oh, it's a family thing.

Any family could buy a PC. But in the 80s, it was like, all this luxury, this guy's got a computer. Yeah, I mean, you had like the TRS 80 and the Commodore 64 that were really priced affordably, and that's how they competed. The TI 994A, although I don't think Activision made anything for the TI because it was dead by that point. But I do look at prices of computers in the 80s, and I think I would not pay that much for a computer now with 2017 money in some cases. Yeah, I mean, we had a PC because my father did economic forecasting, but that was the only reason. Yeah, if it was for your job, really. Yeah, everyone else was like, wow, you have a computer.

in your house? That's crazy. Yeah, all the kids I knew that had computers, it was like, my dad uses it for work, but I can also sneak games onto it. It wasn't like, we bought this for multimedia and fun and games. It's like, no, I got this through the office, and I have to do work on it. Right, yeah. Yeah, it's so funny. In the UK, it was completely the opposite.

Oh, yeah, for sure, yeah, it's spectrum. Consoles were luxury items. You know, you only play games. Well, that's rubbish. What you really need is a computer that you can, you know, justify paying, you know, paying quite a lot of money for it, but actually also it plays games. but it does other things, not that anybody... Recipes and checkbooks.

Ever did those other things, the kids ended up playing games on them all the time. But we had Bill Gates here, not Sir Clive. So pricing was not as much of a consideration. Like, you know, in the UK, the microcomputers really competed on price and accessibility, and that's not something that was as big a deal here. Like the Ti-99-4A and the Commodore 64 were kind of the leaders in that regard.

And those were, you know, kind of more expensive. Like the C-64 was a more expensive system, relatively speaking, in the UK, wasn't it? Like, compared to the Sinclair Spectrum. Yeah, I mean, it definitely started off slowly. The computer launched in 82 and sort of 83 and 84. Sales were fairly slow, but by time 85 rolled around, it was, you know, sales really picked up at that point. But it took a while. It did.

I'm sure that had to do with prices coming down. Yes, absolutely. New models and everything. Yeah. So anyway, there were quite a few original games that Activision created. They also published a lot of games by other computer companies. They published a lot of Lucasfilm games. That's correct before they were a publisher.

Right. Ballblazer. Fragalus. Rescue on Fractalus. They published some pretty well-known adventure games, like a Mind Forever Voyaging and the Idleon, Murder on the Mississippi. Like, there was some great stuff that Activision put out. There's a game called Hacker as well, which was a really innovative sort of adventure game.

Little computer people, which was the Sims, many, many years before the Sims were invented. That was another David Crane game. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And disk drive-based, you actually put your disk into the disk drive, and it would randomly generate a unique little computer person in a house, and then you could type to your little computer person and get them to do. things and he had interact with years. I thought it was

absolutely fantastic at the time of just a really innovative, you know, very unusual concept. The idea of this little dude that lives inside your computer. They made a cassette version of it, which didn't work very well, but such as its popularity

that, particularly in the UK and the demand for it, that they made this disc-only game into a cassette version. so they could sell it in Europe, and it did very well. Well, Square Inix, or I guess Squarespaceoft, ported it to Famicom Disc System in Japan under the name Appletown Motogatari.

All the little rabbits, all the rabbit characters? It's like an AppleTown, okay. I thought those were just like a bunch of, I think we had the dolls or something. I think you're thinking of Onyanko Town. O'Nanko Town? Oh, is that something different? It is.

Okay, is that a little computer people port, or... No, it's like, it's a game about cats in a town. That Appleton, I just remember my sister might have had dolls based on it, where they're just like these fuzzy bunny dolls, but... No, I don't think it's weird, okay. I don't think it ever imported back into the U.S. My memory failed me. I thought it did.

Appletown, God, okay. Are you thinking, like, Richard's scary stuff? No, I remember later finding out was Japanese. Busy town, that's it. Someone tell me what I'm thinking of. I don't know. I will give you $1 in Bobbucks. Bobbucks.

It's going to be worth a lot when the dollar crashes. Yeah, invest now. It's like Bitcoin. I shouldn't forget. God's best as well. Ghostbusters? Yeah, well, we'll get to that in a second, but I would like to say that all the games

that we've just kind of named have all been very different from anything that Activision published before. I guess Space Shuttle was an attempt to kind of move in that direction, like a simulation, more deeper adventure-type game. But, you know, as much as moving away

from the 2600 had its detriment, you know, and maybe made Activision work harder for less money, it did liberate them to come up with more ambitious or to bring in more ambitious concepts to do things that you could not have done on the 2600 like little computer people sure would not have worked on the 2600. So there was, you know,

even with some of the challenges that Activision now faced, there was this kind of creative fertility that took place. And Ghostbusters, I think, is a pretty good example of how their action games became large, and more sophisticated, even though the game does have some troubles to it, like design issues. Yeah.

Like, it does a lot of stuff. And, you know, coming based on a movie, like license games weren't supposed to be good or ambitious. What's this craziness? I do want to do a Ghostbusters episode, a remake of the one we did a long time ago. That was, like, my first one I phoned in on.

But I love this game, but essentially it is, the entire game is building up enough resources to withstand the awful gauntlet at the end. Just like the entire game is preparing for that final battle. But I was reading about the making of it. It was interesting. I feel like the world definitely moved a lot slower back then.

But the movie was summer and the game came out at Christmas and they were worried they missed the train on that movie. But I feel like later in the 90s, games would come out a year, maybe two years after the movie, like things like Golden Eyes. So it's funny they were worried about this kind of months-long gap between the movie and the game when it was really just like, man, the world was moving so slow back then. I assume the movie was still in theaters by Christmas, too. Yeah, I remember Ghostbusters being one of those movies that was held over. This was something you would see in the newspaper, right? And it's like, yeah, you can keep watching, like, held over another week and then another week because that word. There was no on demand.

Yeah, so it's like, well, it's still in the theater. And, I mean, Ghostbusters, I saw a ton in the theater. So it was one of my favorites. Yeah, Jazz, it seemed like you had something you wanted to say about Ghostbusters. Yeah, it was just, I think you've already said it. It was unusual for the time. I mean, you know, it wasn't a great game retrospectively, but nevertheless, it was ambitious.

It captured different scenes of the movie. On the Commodore 64, it actually had the music done very well. It's like a multi-format game. Yeah. And so it was just a really unusual, quite inspiring movie time for its time. You know, I mean, when you look back at sort of a lot of the dross that really helped crash the market in 83 out here you know this was

you could really see that they were trying to articulate sort of the movie through video games and to me it's one of the very early video games that successfully captured the essence of the movie even if the ecto one didn't have a ghost vacuum that's true yeah I mean but should have when I did that episode I watched the Ghostbusters movie

was screening somewhere near me after that and I was like wow they they chose really specific moments to make into game scenes. Like, them running up the stairs is right out of the movie. Like, it's just a joke in the movie that they turn into the final level of the game. They're out of breath because they're running up the stairs and they're a bunch of middle-aged fat guys with all these proton packs on their backs. Well, I guess maybe just Ray is the fat guy.

But still, it was just played for comedy. But it's an intense final confrontation in the game, which is a terrible level in the NES game. I assume it might be better in the Commodore original. I think that NES port is really bad from what I've heard based on the original. Yeah, you have completed a great game. game, I guess I call it, English. Congraturation? Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

Right. You go ahead. Oh, go ahead. I was just saying the Ghostbusters, to Bob's point, it was done very quickly and was basically a sort of re-skin of a game in development, right? I was like car battle or battle car or car wars. Car wars, I think. Yeah, David Crane was working on a game that was basically upgrading cars.

And then they came to the team and said, you know, we, have the opportunity for the Ghostbusters license, can we do anything with this? And so they repackaged that. And I believe this was one of the first games where they started pulling in additional team members to work on other parts of the game. Yeah, it was a six-week process, and it was kind of all hands on deck to get this game finished, even though it was based on an original game. It was a very complex undertaking to just get it out in time, you know, for Christmas. Yeah, so one other thing that's happening at this time in Activision's history is, like, you know,

83 through 86 is the original founders are leaving, along with a lot of other people to sort of brain drain, right? I think there's interviews where they say, yeah, all of a sudden, my stock was worth a tenth of what it was before. And, you know, we were working on things we didn't want to work on. And so they kind of splintered off to form other game companies that starts with A, like absolute and accolade. I feel like initially you got to Ardvark. Yeah, right. They were all trying to climb up the phone book before who they used to work for. So it was like Atari, then Activision, then Accolade, then Absolute, and then I don't know what else came after that.

Yeah, wasn't that, like, the added bonus when they formed Activision is that it was ahead of Atari and the CES guide or something. Back when that mattered, like Alphabetic Order listings. A-A-A-A games. All right. So, yeah, there were some other pretty ambitious games around this time. You started to get more exploratory games. I mean, Pitfall, we talked about how that was an adventure. But Pitfall 2 was even more so.

It was not just a linear game going straight across, but it descended in, it was the Lost Caverns, and it descended down underground and had a mapped out structure to really, you know, again, kind of get to that UK sort of screen-by-screen, flick scroll, adventure, treasure hunting type game. And that was developed by David Crane also, wasn't it? Yeah. I think so.

I think so. Yeah. And then you had a hero, which was not really exploratory, but it did, you know, kind of, you were like a guy in a jetpack and you could shoot and you were like descending down into these stages and they became gradually more complex as you went from stage to stage. But like each level was its own sort of maze that you had to fight through and you had to like place bombs. It's been a while since I've played it. Yeah, I think you rescue people as well. Yeah, you rescue people and you place bombs to get the doors. and there's things like you would come down a shaft

and you would turn off the lights, basically, so, and then you have to go back up to turn the light back on. Yeah, a lot of verticality. I loved, I played hero, I think, on probably the Apple 2, but that was probably my favorite game of this era. And finally, one of the last games I want to highlight is Shanghai, which was published by Activision

and has been cloned ruthlessly through the years, also released on tons of platforms. But it's an interesting game because it was developed by, I think his name was Doug Brody, who was a gymnast who had fallen while performing and had become a quadriplegic. And he came up with this game concept, which may or may not have been based on a more traditional Chinese game.

There's some debate about the inspiration and the origins of it. But it's a very slow-paced kind of game, puzzle game almost where you take mahjong tiles and you just have a stack of them and you have to match two pieces at a time you can only pick them from the edge of the stack and it's like kind of like a the pile

like gets smaller you know like fewer pieces stacked as you get higher so there's lots of exposed edges but there is a certain strategy to it because it's easy to take out pieces and then lock yourself into sort of a situation

where you get to the very end and there's like pieces trapped inside of each other like it's hard to explain but anyway it's like solitaire right yeah it's kind of like solitaire a little bit but it's it's like visual matching and it uses like I said the mahjong tiles

so you're kind of like looking to recognize Chinese characters either numbers or like the chrysanthemum art or like north-south east-west or whatever so it's just a kind of a very different game, but went on to become, I think, you know, kind of like an understated

classic. It's been everywhere and everyone has played some version of it. Anyway, we'll kind of wind this up by talking about sort of the business moves that spelled the end of Activision. You know, around the time that it moved into PCs, it started to, I think, you know, because there were more challenges in the industry and games were harder to sell on PCs, and it wasn't the salad years of the Atari 2600. they began to diversify and the guy who ran the company of the time, Bruce Davis, started to look into

other kinds of software like productivity apps. And around this time, they bought Infocom, the legendary text adventure maker who had also kind of caused trouble for themselves, one, by not being able to evolve with the times

and move satisfactorily away from texted Ventures as graphics were becoming more and more important to games, but also because Infocom, as Steve mentioned before the show, kind of moved into these sort of productivity apps that didn't necessarily match what people wanted from Infocom. Yeah, there was like a big bet, I think it was called like Counterpoint or something like that, which was sort of their big, big goal, and it failed, and right after that, that failed that, you know, they ended up selling to Activision, so.

Yeah, and so throughout the second half of the 80s, you know, you saw Activision's name on all kinds of PC games, on what few Atari games were coming out. You began to see them pick up more and more licensed games, Rampage, Kung Fu Master, Afterburner Quartet, lots of Sega. Lots of Sega in there, lots of, yeah, Wonderboy, some Data East, Carnov, Commando, that's Capcom, Kung Fu was IREM, Rampage was Midway, wasn't it? Yeah. But these, some of these picked up from the UK, because I know that they were kind of, they published Spin Disney right here, which is a fantastic kind of combination of marble madness

and a sort of an adventure game, which is a sort of a flick screen game where you controlled a little spinning top and you'd sort of make your way around these quite complex environments and an attempt to sort of reach the end of the maze. And that was a UK game published by Electric Dreams, and it was published out by Activision. Yeah, I think a lot of these, they just picked up

the software that had been developed and they just distributed it here. So they were moving into sort of, like, beyond just a third-party developer to a third-party publisher. No original titles during this. Yeah, I mean, I think they made some. I mean, you know, they were publishing for NES

in the late 80s and into the early 90s. None of those games were actually any good. No. That's true. But a lot of the, actually... It's a list of terrible games. Like Ghostbusters, they, you know, that was their game. But I think it was developed by, I don't know, probably Tose or someone.

Yeah. And also by 88, it wasn't the most with-it game, especially on the NAS. When big, cool games were coming out, Ghostbusters looked pretty primitive. Yeah, like Three Stooges. That was a cinema-ware game. Yeah, yeah. Super Pitfall was, that was also, that was Pony Canyon, I think. Just, yeah, just picking up lots of games and not making good choices.

So things were looking pretty dire, and around this time, right as they started to publish on NES, they changed their name to Mediagenic, which was meant to represent the company's expanded focus. They weren't just video games. They were all media. And this was a terrible move. This is our cliffhanger. Will Activision be okay? No, actually, they won't. The company would have gone bankrupt and out of business except a dude named Bobby Codick, who was like 25 years old at the time, swept in with some German investors, I think.

And they basically bought the company to serve as a tax write off. But Codick was like, you know, I think I can turn this around. And he did. And Activision became a giant 10 years later. It's crazy. Yeah, they went chapter 11, right? Did they go chapter 11? Yeah, in order to reorganize that.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the death now, I think for Mediagenic was actually the lawsuit, like the Magnavox Sanders Associates Patent. Yeah, do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, real quick. I mean, it was the theory that Ralph Baer, when he was working at Sanders, effectively invented video games. I think that the patent is very broad, and they were trying to apply that to everything. And almost everybody settled.

But, you know, Bruce Davis being an intellectual property lawyer, I think, thought that he could beat it. And then they had a really bad year. And then the judgment came down to where, you know, Phillips won the suit. And so it was kind of the double whammy. And at that point, I think that's when Cotic kind of jumped in and said, you know, basically take this amount of money for the settlement or you're getting nothing because we're going to die anyway. Can someone remind me what the first big Activision game was after this period? I'm just curious.

I'm sure it's obvious, but I can't think of it. Like, what was the first game that, oh, Activision's back, here's their next big game? I mean, I realize what they make now, but I'm just trying to figure out. I was the S&S, the PS1 era? Like, what was Activision's, like, return to form? Super pitfall? I actually have no idea. Tony Hawk?

Were they? That's a hell of a question. Yeah. I'm sorry. I thought it was a stupid question, but I guess not. No. No, I actually. I wasn't looking beyond, beyond the media.

genetic years, because that's kind of like the company fizzled out and died, and then it became a different company, basically. I realized in the PS1 era, they had all of those Atari 2,600 remakes, which were huge, like the Frogger remake, like Pong remake, those are Activision, I believe. I remember seeing their logo on the boxes.

Right. And the Frogger especially was just this mega hit, and I kept seeing sequels to their Frogger remake. Pong was Atari. That was Atari? Yeah. For some reason, I thought, okay, yeah, maybe I'm thinking of Atari then. So the anthology stuff started coming out

around that. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, like, you know what, Frogger might have been a target too, I apologize.

Rebo. Yeah, there was Activision of Anthology. Yeah. So when did Mediogenic become mediogenic

and then they turned back into Activision? They were mediogenic and 88. Yeah, and then Codick changed it back

is almost immediately after that transaction. So that's what 80, almost like maybe a year or two later, like not very

long. I mean, the Activision label never completely went away. they were still publishing games under that name like as a label, but that was the game's label of Mediogenic.

So I can't actually find a hard demarcation. I don't know if at any point there was, you know, like a, hey, we're back. Remember Activision, that company you loved? Well, they're cool again. Because I'm looking at the early 90s stuff that they published and not seeing a lot to love here. I remember

with sort of weird games like Dynamite Ducks which is a really obscure conversion of a Sega arcade game and I remember Ghostbusters 2 um yeah

they did an adventure based on Shogun James Clevel Shogun it was an old it was an old company it felt like a company that would sort of basically release

virtually anything to keep itself alive yeah So it was, you know, it published anything that it seemed halfway decent. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really know at what point Activision went from being, like, this company that barely held on to, whoa, they're huge. I don't know. I'm sure our listeners are pulling their hair out because we're missing something obvious, but maybe it was Call of Duty One.

I don't know. Well, I mean, the Adventures of Rad Gravity was. That really turned things around. Yeah, well, like in the 90s, what, you have stuff like Tony Hawk, as you mentioned. Yeah, Tony Hawk, definitely. Publishing of things like Quake 2 or like Mech Warrior or something like that, I seem to remember the Activision logo popping up at those points. So, you know, I remember there's a million versions of Mech Warrior 2

for all the different 3D cards that were coming out. Yeah, I mean, they kept making like Infocom sequels and collections and things like Return to Zork into the 90s. So they were definitely kind of keeping that line alive. They had Pitfall the Mayan Adventure. Interstate 76, I just remembered. Yep. Oh, yeah.

excellent game. I don't know. Like, it's kind of a weird company. You can't point to any one point past the mediogenic years and say, like, this is it. This is when they became huge. It was more like they just kind of gradually, you know, diversified and built up. And they published on a lot of platforms. And they were there kind of like day one for just about every new system, Game Boy, Super NES, PC, Jaguar.

Maybe not Jaguar, but let's pretend Jaguar. I'm willing to say Tony Hawks, I feel like that's the first. time, maybe for them in a long time, they had the super popular, super ubiquitous game that everyone played it, sold millions, yeah, and it's weird to think that was like there's like a 10-year downtime or 10 years of just like finding their way, publishing

anything before they had a game you associated with their brand like Tony Hawk, Call of Duty, now Destiny, that's Activision, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I was saying, I think they were saying after Chapter 11 or after Coddick came in, the company was down to just sort of a couple dozen

people, right, from peaks of I really think they were just like a publishing enterprise at that point for a while. I saw a Lundra 2 on there as an Activition game published. That's weird. Yeah. Quake 2 was one of theirs that they published, which was surprised me. Yeah. Yeah.

I think so. So, any final thoughts on Activision, the Golden Years, looking back into the hazy past of the Atari 2600 and C-64? It's interesting to see these companies start as artists wanting to be recognized and then just becoming ruthless capitalists that have seemingly no regard for the art of making games, but I guess that's just the natural progression of any business. It's really interesting to see them recognizing their talents, recognizing their skill at making games and realizing it's not just like building a machine.

It's not just, you know, physical labor. There's an art to it. There's design to it. And them moving on their own really made it viable for other people too. So I feel it's very important. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's basically two different companies. They might as well be, right?

Yeah, for sure. I remember as a kid is these games are awesome. You know, they're recognizing the creators. Like, it's the golden age. And I think one of the impressive things about Activision now is, you know, since Kodak took over, they've expanded, right? They've survived a lot of really bad times in the games industry and succeeded, right? You know, and then up to, you know, Activision Blizzard now. So it's incredibly impressive.

And I think that there's a story to be told about, you know, we're sitting here thinking, what brought Activision back, you know, back in the 90s? There is the story there about how they went from, you know, going back down to a handful of people recovering from bankruptcy to sort of the, you know, juggernaut that they are now in the industry. Yeah, it was for me, I mean, the early days of Activision, they just made exceedingly good games. And, you know, a lot of, some of them were kind of copies and clones of concepts, but there was some really innovative ideas that were being kicked around at the time by a small group of people. think, you know, they would become very influential throughout the games industry. You know, to me, Activision was a company that bought me the Lucas Film Games. And those were just amazing. And I'm really glad that they published those and bought those.

And they were just, there's another podcast all about Lucas Arts Games and Lucas Film Games. but they were particularly brilliant. But I associate those with Activision, funnily enough, rather than Lucasfilm. Interesting. So I really want to recommend everyone check out a site called the Digital Antiquarian. Antiquarian, which is written by a guy named Jimmy Mayer. It's at Philphra, F-I-L-F-R-E dot net. And he's written about a lot of basically PC history in the early 80s.

and into the late 80s covering a lot of really broad topics, but he has a couple of really great articles on infocom, on early Activision, and on Mediagenic, and they were invaluable resources for this episode. Some of the best games history

writing I've seen. So everyone definitely checked them out, check him out, I guess. And he's got a Patreon, so maybe throw a few bucks's way to continue doing this great work. So anyway, I think that wraps it up for this. episode. Steve, Jazz, Bob, thank you for shoring up my weaknesses about the history of

Activision. I think together we were comprehensive, like a knowledge Voltron. I was here for the spider-based game. That was excellent. Just for that. I can feel them crawling all over me right now. So yeah, guys, why don't you tell us where we can find you on the internet? I'm at Stephen P.Loon on Twitter and stevelyne.com. I'm at Jazz Rignor at Twitter, and you can read me on us gamer.net every day. Wow. I have a lot of plugs. You guys kept it economical. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I do too much stuff.

So one of those things is Talking Simpsons. It's a weekly chronological exploration of the Simpsons every Wednesday at Lasertime Podcast.com or TalkingSimpsons.com or look for Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine. Every episode is a new episode of The Simpsons in chronological order. And at this point in time, I think we'll be in

season five. And Steve told me he endorses it. He enjoys it. Yes. He enjoys it. Walking through Japan And for six weeks, I listened to everything that I could. That's amazing. I always like to hear people like, put the show. So thanks so much, Steve. And, yes, I also write every day on fandom.com about video games

and every other Thursday something awful.com. I have a new comedy article there. And that's all I do. That's it. As for me, you can find me here at the Retronauts podcast and at Retronauts.com, which is updated daily with cool things about old things. And, of course, we are supported through the generosity of you, the listener, through Patreon.com,

Patreon.com slash Retronauts, and Patreon.com slash GameSpite. The first is for the podcast. The second is for video endeavors, such as Game Boy World and Good Intentions, and so on. Oh, Gintendo. Yes, that's great.

Just, you know, talking about the history of video games and showing it off sometimes. It's what I do and do with the help of these cool people and you. Also, you can read my design-in-action column at US Gamer, every Wednesday, which is awesome

and you should definitely read because why wouldn't you? So that about wraps it up for this episode. Besides the Patreon thing, you can download us at iTunes. We're Retronauts.

Follow us on Twitter. Pretty much, that's about the shape of it, yeah. You should follow Facebook, though. Oh, yes, Facebook is good too. We will talk to you. You can like us. Yeah.

And we will respond. We also respond on the blog and on Twitter, but, you know, we're easy to reach. We're accessible human beings because we love talking about video game history and we love talking to you about video games. Just don't be mean to me. I don't like it. Yeah, we're all a little fragile. It's video games. What can I say?

So anyway, for everyone here at Retronauts, this is Jeremy Parrish saying thanks again. And we'll be back next week with another episode of the show because we're weekly now. Thank you.