Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 59: Atari's SwordQuest

Episode Date: April 21, 2017

Jeremy and Benj discuss the history of Atari's fascinating, extravagant, and incomplete SwordQuest series with (literally!) one of the authors of the game's new comeback: Comics scribe Chris Sims.

This week in Retronauts, quadrology is not a word. This episode is brought to you by Audubil. This episode is brought to you by Audible, the audio book service with more than 180,000 titles to choose from. Get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial at audibletrial.com slash game. Dell Gaming creates machines to make every experience more intense and real. From powerful Dell gaming PCs with Intel Core processors to the ultimate Alienware VR-ready experience, there's a PC designed to bring your best game at every level.

Because the best feature of a gaming machine is the power to make you forget it's there. Don't just play. Game. Visit Dell.com slash gaming to learn more. That's Dell.com slash gaming. Hi, I'm Clay Smith, host a fully booked by Kirkus Reviews, the podcast for book lovers interested in interviews with bestselling authors, insider scoop on the hottest releases, reading ideas for book clubs and bibliophiles, and even tips about which books to skip all together. So be sure to download new episodes of fully booked by Kirkus Reviews every Tuesday. You can get it on the Podcast One app or you can subscribe on iTunes and don't forget to rate, review, and share. Hi, everyone, and welcome to a Retronauts Micro special episode. This is a little different than the format I usually use for Retronauts Micro because it's not just me monologuing into a microphone. That's right.

It's an adjunct to Retronauts East. And with me here today, we have... Ben Jarwitch. Video game is tory. You already know. And also joining us is special guest. Chris Sims. And Chris Sims, why are you joining us today?

I am joining you because I am one of the co-writers of the upcoming SwordQuest comic book, the first new Atari comic in 30 years. That's right. I did post a blog about this a few weeks ago. But Chris, what's the publisher you're working with on this? Dynamite Entertainment. Okay. They're the publishers of the Art of Atari book.

in the upcoming Atari poster book. Ah, now it all becomes clear, I understand. Okay. So, yeah, when I found out that Chris, who lives here in the Raleigh area, very conveniently, is working on a comic book based on an old Atari series, it seemed like a pretty sensible and logical decision to have him come in and talk about the comics and also the games, because I've always been really fascinated by the SwordQuest series, but I don't really know that much about them.

And I tried playing them, but without the manual and the comics to sort of, the original comics to sort of make sense of everything, I have no idea what the hell is even going on. They're kind of like E.T. in that regard where like if someone explains it to you or you have manuals or a guide or something, then, oh, yes, okay, I understand these abstract things that are happening on the screen and what they represent. But maybe it's a little tough to just pick up, but definitely one of the more ambitious games series, really, on the Atari 2,600. So I know Benj knows the games pretty well in their history. And Chris, I don't know how much of that you know, but I figure we can triangulate between the three of us and come up with a pretty good discussion. Perhaps. So with that said, actually, Chris, how the heck do you get involved? in writing a comic about SwordQuest.

It's actually really, it was a really interesting process. Dynamite came to Chad and I, Chad Bauer, is my writing partner. We had been working together on X-Men 92 for Marvel in the upcoming Deadpool Bad Blood graphic novel, and they came to us because Chad was emailing with some of the editors and had been for a while, just letting them know that if they had a project that they thought we would be right for it to get in touch. And they came to us and they said, hey, we've done the art of Atari book. It was a huge success for us.

We want to revive some Atari properties as comics. And they literally sent us like a three-page list of every property that Atari owns. And they said, pick three and pitch them. So we went down the list. And honestly, as you both know, a lot of it was like super blackjack or baseball. Did they literally just give you a list of first-party Atari 2,600 games? Super Blackjack, my favorite. As far as I know, it was everything.

And we ended up pitching a couple of different ones. I actually, I think I figured out how to make Pong work. Wow. But the one that they ended up going for... Would it be like a Forrest Gump tie-on? I'll tell you off my, because I still want to do it one of these days. Because I had a revelation about doing Pong as an action story. spoil it. But going down the list, you know, we saw, I was like, oh, we always want to try and do something that's a little different than the last project we've done. And coming off of superheroes, we had been talking a lot for a long time about doing something that was more fantasy inspired, more sword and sorcery. So obviously adventure was one that I looked at. But, you know, we wrote down a couple as we were going through the list. And then I hit Sword Quest because it was an alphabetical order. And I had never heard of it, but I have

played enough Dungeons and Dragons in my life to know basically what Sword Quest means. And then I looked it up and then I read about the contest and then I read about the four different games. And then I saw that there were actually comics made for that by arguably some of the most famous comic book creators of that era. Because those comics are written by Jerry Comway and Roy Thomas. Oh, I didn't realize that. Wow. Yeah. Jerry Conway, who listeners may know was a longtime Spider-Man writer created The Punisher with Ross Andrew

co-created Firestorm with Al Milgram, who you can see on TV every week. Roy Thomas was the second editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics after Stanley. And then they were drawn by George Perez and Dick Giordano. Seriously?

So it was like literally the top guys at DC Comics doing these weird Atari tie-ins. Atari must have been throwing cash at these guys like crazy. I think they were at first and then they ran out of cash. Which is part of the story here.

Because they already threw all of it. Yeah, I cannot imagine, like, you know, having read about the video game crash, like, I'm sure that, like, in 1982, they backed a truck up to, uh, to D.C. comics and just the money fell out. Well, and it makes sense that they would be a D.C. tie-in because at the time, Atari was owned by Warner Communications, who now owns D.C. I don't know. Did they own D.

D.C. back then, I assume they did. They bought D.C. in the 70s. Okay, yeah. So it was all one big, happy family. And D.C. was doing Atari Force at the time, which is, is very fondly remembered, and has some great art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. So there was already some kind of connection.

And also at the time, D.C. was doing like the mini-comics for the He-Man toys. And there was a lot of weird license stuff going on. So I went and read those comics. And, you know, I tracked them down and read through them. And they're really weird, especially if you're reading them side by side with, like, going to YouTube and typing in SwordQuest Airworld or SwordQuest Earth World.

Because they are vastly different than what you see. And it really made me think about all those times, and I'm sure you both had this experience as well, of being kids in the sort of 8-bit era, from the 2,600 up to the NES, and having to kind of complete the story in your head. And, you know, I have very fond memories of a vacation that my dad took me on to Myrtle Beach,

where I was, where I drew Street Fighter comics, but Batman was also there. I played that video game. It was called Shinobi. So we kind of got fascinated by the fact that there were existing comics and there was a deeper existing mythology than pretty much anything else on the list. And, you know, obviously there was stuff like Missile Command and Yars Revenge that we were, that was on our short list of stuff to pitch. But the more we thought about SwordQuest and the more we learned about that contest, that really informed our story. All right. So now I think it's time to actually talk about what these games are. And this is where Bench comes in. So he even brought in a copy of Atari age from what, 1982, where... It says September, October, 1982, volume one, number three.

Yeah. So this is where Sword Quest was announced. And this game was, this was, like, the pinnacle of the original video game console market before the crash, like the epitome of Atari hubris. Yeah. Like, why would they do something that's ridiculous? I don't know, but it's so cool that they did, and it's so sad that it never actually, you know, went through all the way. I have to say, they must have been feeling really lush with cash and success at this time to think that they could do this. I mean, look at how many copies of ET they sold.

They sold more copies of Pac-Man than there were actually consoles to play it on. Another concept occurs to me is they may have considered this like a lottery where they, you know, they wanted people to buy into it by buying the cartridge. And they'll convince everybody to buy it. And they make more than whatever it was, 150,000 total for the prizes. And then that's like peanuts to them. And then if they sell tons of cartridges. Why don't we talk about what the games actually were?

There were four of them. It was a tetrology, not a quadrilogy. There's no such word. And thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate that. Fox needs to get punched in the face for that. They destroyed our language. But yeah, there were four games, and each of them had an elemental theme.

It was kind of like an early rough draft for Avatar. There was Airworld, Fireworld, Earth World, and Waterworld. No relation to Waterworld, the movie. or to the amazing virtual boy game based on the movie, a totally separate water world. But, yeah, the idea was that there were these four games that were interconnected. They were part of a series. Each one had a contest attached to it, and each one shipped with not only, you know, the instructions,

but also a comic book created by amazing people that would actually explain what you were doing in these very abstract games. But I don't know what you were doing in these abstract games. So what the hell? So Earth Quest came first, and that was, no, Earth World. Earth World came first. Sorry. Earth World came first, and it looks like it was around October 82. And in that game, I remember playing that, and you're just a guy walking around a sort of maze that's featureless, and you go from room to room, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Of course, I picked up these cartridges. I have Earth World and Fireworld, and they, you know, they make zero sense without the comics set. Most of the 2,600 games I got as a kid were bought at flea markets and stuff. So I never had the comic books for them. So you never tracked down complete copies of these games? No. You're not that fanatical collector. Yeah, at the time, I don't know.

I'd more be interested in doing it now than when I was younger. Do these games complete sell for a ton of money now? I have no idea. Honestly. I didn't even think of stuff. Thanks have changed so much. Wait till May when everyone is obsessed. I know, right?

Everyone, everyone's going to want. So let's buy in right now, guys. Look it up on eBay and let's get it before anybody hears this. I did actually look at one. I think a complete copy opened of Earthworld was like $100. That's actually not nearly as bad. There's another thing that might increase its value, a tangent, which is, I don't know if you guys have read Ready Player 1 by Ernest Klein. I think that's who it is.

And that has a giant video game contest theme to it that seems to be dramatically, inspired by this Sword Quest contest. And he even mentions it in the book. And one of that becomes a Stephen Spielberg movie, which they're filming right now, or who knows when they're done with it, that might increase the exposure of this idea.

So your comic will tie in with that very well. We hadn't, we, I had never read Ready Flair one and Chad hadn't either. And then we did a convention, we did the convention here in Raleigh a couple weeks ago, and we had two people in one day be like, oh,

it's just like Ready Player 1, right? And I was like, that depends on whether that makes you want to buy it, I guess. Of course it does. Yeah. See, everybody's trying to get me to read that for years and years since it came out, and I finally read it when I went to San Francisco sitting on plane for six hours. So I was like, I might as well read it finally. And I loved it.

I thought it was great. Well, there you go. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting about the games is that each one is meant to be themed around a sort of something mystical. Like Earth World is meant to be themed around the Zodiac. And I think, like, one is themed around the Sephirothic tree, which sounds very ambitious for a Atari 2600 game. And then I think it was Air World, the last one, that was supposed to be the E. Ching. But I don't, like, having, just from watching Let's Play's and looking at videos online, I don't think that really comes through in the games themselves. Yeah, that's more of the theme, the accessory materials, the comic books and stuff and the manual that give you that feel of the story to it.

So in addition to being like elemental theme, it's also kind of each game was sort of based in a different culture, like Chinese culture or Judaism. That's interesting. We're missing a key part, which is I don't know who actually created these things. I was briefly trying to figure that out, who programmed or who made up. up these puzzles, you know? I don't really know that. Well, if you, if you grab a copy of the Art of Atari from Dynamite Entertainment, I have one.

Yeah. It's got a nice little bit of information in there on, I think it was Thomas Frye maybe. Todd Frye. Todd Frye. And Dan Hitchens, yep. Well, let's call him right now, get him on the show. Yeah, right. Yeah, and Todd Frye, of course, was the guy who did 2,600 Pac-Man, but that's not his fault.

Yeah. He had like a short deadline in 4K or something. Yeah. So anyway, we haven't really talked about the contest element, which is really important. But each of these games, it was maybe one of, was it the first game that had sort of a real world prize element attached? I know there were games released throughout time, throughout the years that had that like treasure master for NES. The Activision patches might count for something where you could take a picture of a, Yeah, but those were, those were more like rewards than prize.

Yeah, there wasn't really a contest. Those weren't limited. It was if you got the high score, then you got the patch. Whereas these, there was like one chalice, one crown, one sword. Yeah, there's a, there's a later one called Treasure Master for the Nies or something. Yeah, I just mentioned that, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm not obviously not actually listening to this show we're doing right now.

But, yeah, I could summarize maybe some of these prizes here. They said the grand total was $150,000 worth of prizes. and one of them was a talisman which one was it for that that one for? I don't know what the specific... I believe that is the talisman of ultimate truth. Yeah. That was for Earth World. And the

Crown, I think, was Waterworld and the Chalice was Fireworld. You would think Waterworld chalice, but what do I know? No. The Philosopher Stone is the last one that was supposed to be for Airworld, which is all we see is a picture of the

box that it comes in, but it was supposed to be a piece of white jade, I think, underneath it, according to eyewitness reports. So people were denied the opportunity to live forever by the fact that the Atari crash happened. Well, the philosopher's stone is supposed to transmute metals into gold, I think. Oh, sorry, I got my true lore mixed up with Harry Potter lore, my apologies. So basically the way it would work is you would be walking through the game and you would get a set of two numbers.

And then you would go in the mini-comic that accompanied it, which I didn't realize because I was looking at images of the Comic-Conline. didn't realize they were mini comics, they're packet in comics. I thought they were full-sized. So that makes this much harder. But you would go to that page and panel, and then you would hunt for a hidden word. And the words would show up in, like, cracks in a stone wall or bubbles in a fountain or, like, the filigree on a crown or something. And then there would be an additional riddle that you had to solve to make those words make sense in a sentence. Like, there's a, There's like a kind of poem, like an epigram in the first one.

And one of the words, I think the word prime, is colored slightly differently. It's a different shade of purple from the other purple that the rest of the poem is. And so you were only supposed to use the words that were on prime numbered pages. Okay. Wow. And then you would send those into Atari. And you would be, if you've got everything right, then you would have the chance to win the chalice. The Ernest Klein totally ripped us off because like the clues are like the same kind of thing. or just weird, obscure, count the numbers of this.

I mean, this is a pretty common, pretty common, like, you know, riddle mystery type thing. There was a, oh, man, I can't remember what game it was. I was recently, like, a few months ago, reading about it on the digital antiquarian about a, like, a PC game that had a very complex riddle that no one's ever solved. Like, people supposedly solved it, but when they went to the place and dug up,

the treasure wasn't there and so forth. But, yeah, like, that sort of, you know, really cryptic puzzle challenge is a very classic part of gaming. So this is an interesting, I think, exercise in Atari bringing that element into video games. Or what kind of gaming are you talking about? Like, D&D? No, like just the idea of games. Yeah, just puzzling.

Okay. Yeah. And so I think what really drew Chad and I to it was the idea that this was a video game contest where it wasn't just money, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't just something. It was meant to be the thing you were looking for in the game, which like never happens. And I know that, you know, obviously the chalice and crown and philosopher's stone that Atari were giving away, they don't have magic powers, but a sword is a sort. It is a giant piece of sharp metal.

And so the idea that you could kind of as a, as a player, go on. a quest that would have a real life reward and it would make you pay more attention both to the game and to the comic story. I think we were both really fascinated by. Like, this is a, it was an extremely fascinating thing that I had never heard of. I mean, you know, I'm a, I'm a dedicated retronauts listener, so it's not often that I run into something like that. We haven't talked about this before. Yeah. Well, we should clarify about the sword, which is that there were, so there are four contests for each game and each prize was worth $25,000 and after the four finalists won, there was supposed to be a contest where I think it was the four players would compete

for the $50,000 sword, which is silver with gold and encrusted with rubies and diamonds and things like that. Interesting. But that never took place. Yeah, I think the closest we've come to talking about something like this on Retronauts was like the four crystals that they gave away a Nintendo Power for Final Fantasy. I don't know if you remember that contest It was basically like you could win a Palantir

Yeah And I think they gave away four of those But yeah we haven't really talked too much about prizes That's almost an episode in itself Because there have been like some crazy contest through the years But this was sort of the first of them I remember in Nintendo Power The one that I really remember was you could win Robocop's car

Oh wow Check your 1992 Nintendo Power back issues for that one Wow Well I wonder if anyone's ever thought about the ethics of actually giving, like, a kid, a $25,000 gold a challenge. I know that means that one of the people who, I don't think kids won these. I think it was, you know, more adults, yeah. And I believe the person who won the first prize that they gave away melted it down.

Yeah, the talisman was melted. He saved the jewels, but he melted down the talisman. I think to pay for, like, the taxes on the prize. I heard college. I thought it was college, yeah. That's a little more noble. But also you can kind of understand wanting to pay for the taxes because you do get taxed on stuff like this. So that's that's kind of the oops surprise element to a contest like this.

Yeah, well, you've got this awesome golden-crusted talism. Are you going to walk around wearing that? Hell yeah. Take it to the mall? Hey, look out for me. I'm Destro. Who's the guy who wore the giant clocks? Flavor Fliv.

Yeah. See, he needed one of these talismans. Oh, that's true. he could be Blanked. What were they saying? I don't know. Oh, well, we've kind of danced around this, but the fact that this series never actually saw completion, it was launched in 1982 and it was supposed to run through the space of like two years, 1982 and 83.

But as we all know, the bottom fell out of the Atari market at the end of 1982. That was when Warner posted their huge public losses. It was like a $300 million loss or something, which was mostly tied to the collapse of the Atari platform. And at that point, Atari was toxic. And everyone started losing money on their Atari games and Warner sold off Atari, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, so they went from having like a dump truck full of money and, you know, jewel-encrusted golden relics to not having anything. And suddenly having to cut most of their staff. They had a dump truck full of ETs.

A dump truck full of employees that they had to take out and bury in the desert. Oh, God. Not literally. It's horrible. It is horrible. Yeah, so in 1982, they released Earth World and then Fireworld. And then the market collapsed, and Waterworld came out in 1983, but it only came out as a limited mail order game that you could purchase direct from Atari. It never saw a retail release.

And then the final volume, Airwold. World never happened? I think have they found like a like a prototype for it? I think not. People said that it was faked or something. So it's terrible. Disputed accuracy. Let's let's see what Wikipedia says because that's our favorite source. Yeah. Air World was the one based on the I Ching. Supposedly two prototypes are widely rumored to exist, which yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. You know, if someone's sitting on it, probably Franksafaldi. No, if Frank had it, he would, if Frank had it, he wouldn't. he wouldn't be sitting on it. Frank is a good guy. He doesn't, he doesn't believe in, in, he's sort of the anti-collector. He wants to spoil their fun and give it to everybody. There's something wrong with collectors, but, you know, people who get rare, one-of-a-kind prototypes and then hoard it and say, no one will ever play this except me. Like, what benefit does that have to humanity? Bioforce ape wants to be free. I believe BioForce ape has been set free. Yes, it has. That was Frank.

Yeah. So, yeah, Frank is one of the good ones. He believes in liberating, uh, he believes in liberating, uh, forgotten code, lost data, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the early days Rom Hoarders has gotten a hold of a prototype of this. I think Kurt Van Dell has it then. I don't actually know who rom hoarders are and I don't want to know because I would be

angry at them. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult to I fully buy that there would be a prototype out because there's not a lot of variation in what I've seen of the games. Like there's just essentially like you said, you're walking around a dungeon kind of exploring and then you run

into mini-games. So, like in Waterworld, for instance, you basically, when you're going from room to room, you either play Frogger or... You jump over icebergs or something, right? And then there's... And there's a thing with octopus that comes after you. A voyter, swim around sharks or something. I don't remember that. The Fireworld is actually kind of cool. That might be why I have three copies of it. So people may have bought it for fun because there are some sort of space invaders like shooter elements to it. And one where you seem to be catching a bunch of daggers flying down from the sky. It's just fucked up. Like a kaboom?

Yeah, I don't know. No? It's like, it's just psychedelic. Yeah, maybe it is like Kaboom a little bit, but it's just like, why are you catching daggers with this platform? You should look it up. No, I mean, I believe you on this. And you're right about the psychedelic element.

I, you know, from what I've seen of footage and tried playing of these games, they do have really impressive graphics for the 2600. They use a lot of the sort of color cycling and, uh, other techniques you saw later in the system's life. Right now at Jack in the Box, try my $4 fish sandwich combo with 100% wild-called Alaska Pollock. That'll make anyone a fish lover. Even Tom here.

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probably um didn't he get a load of cash from pacman probably my or maybe maybe i'm thinking of et i hope so um but i know someone made like a huge stack of money off of uh yeah like their their royalty bonus off one of those infamously disastrous Atari games but that might have been et but in any case um i i feel like he i'd have to look at the actual rom sizes but i think think he had a bigger cartridge to work with than with Pac-Man. Like, they really scrimped on the production costs of Pac-Man. It went with the smallest possible ROM size, like 4K, as opposed to 8. So that's one of the reasons it was terrible because there just wasn't room for information

or, you know, good sound quality or anything like that. Whereas these, like, there's a lot going on, a lot of variety in the games. So I feel like it had to be a bigger ROM. I think you're right. If you think about Fire World, so it was called, yeah, I keep wanting to call it, FireQuest. The Fireworld has, I think, three or four mini games in it with different screens, and it's just, you've got to be right about the variety of it.

Yeah, the structure of it kind of reminds me of the Tron arcade game, where you kind of have like a hub, and you go in a different direction, and it launches sort of a different event or mini game. So I wonder if that was an inspiration. Maybe so. I only play that once. Tron game, yeah. What?

Gatlinburg. How could you only play that once? 89. If nothing else, you had to play it just because the joystick was so cool. Yeah, you know what? I have a Tron joystick. I just got it. I don't know.

I bought this huge lot of joysticks. You have the joystick, but you don't play the game? Yeah, but it's a Tron, you know, Tron joystick for Atari or something. You can roll it up the cord into the base. It's really neat. Wait, but it's not the arcade stick, right? It looks like the arcade stick. It does.

It's kind of like big translucent blue plastic. It's crazy. Huh. All right. I played the light cycles game. Is that part of the arcade game? Yes, it is part of the arcade game. arcade game.

So maybe I played it more. It was like events. You had the grid bugs. Yeah. Okay. I remember now. You walk around. Don't you move a little guy around?

Yeah. And then you have to go fight the M-P-C-P-M-C-P master control program. Yes. And that part was always impossible and I died. The end. Yeah. And then Jeff Bridges shows up. If only, it's the fake Jeff Bridges from the sequel.

Oh, man. Digital Jeff Bridges. It's synthespian. I have nothing to add up with the problem. What? Man, you guys. What kind of? Kind of Gen Xers are you.

What's the deal of the deadly disks of Tron? I never played that one. Yeah. I only played the arcade game. Okay, we're going off on a tangent now. That's fine. It wouldn't surprise me if they did, like, put a lot... I mean, obviously, they're putting a lot of money behind the Swart Quest.

It's really fascinating to me that, that again, this is something that seems so obscure. Like, it's not something that I think is very well remembered. And, you know, now that I'm going to convention and talking to people, about it and that it's been announced. It comes up as, you know, people say, like, oh, yeah, I think if I read about that and read your player one. But it doesn't seem to be anything

that people talked about. But clearly, Atari wanted this to be huge. I mean, it's four separate games, like four commercially released games that plan to be anyway, that each have, you know, it's a multimedia blitz. They've got the game,

they've got the comic, they've got a real-life contest that they're sinking $200,000 into just in terms of how much the prizes cost, let alone flying people out to compete for them. So this brings up a good point. Do you think it was a cultural failure

this contest, since it didn't, like, get absorbed into the greater consciousness or popular culture or something? Yeah, I think it might have arrived a little too late to really catch on in the way it could have a couple of years sooner. Like, you know, the Atari lifespan was coming to its end,

the 2,600's lifespan. And this was after the launch of the 5200, and, you know, they had the 7,800 waiting in the wings. So it was kind of, it would be a little bit like Nintendo releasing some kind of crazy huge game for the Wii U right now. Yeah. Like they could do that, but why? I'd say in 82, 83, you know, I was really little, but my brother is, is your age. And he, Jeremy.

And his name is Jeremy too. Oh, yeah, that's probably confusing. Yeah, that's cool. So the thing is, he was into the Atari 800 at that time. and his friends had the Commodore 64, so that was like the big thing. They weren't, you know, he had a friend with Atari 2,600,

but the coolest new games were coming out on those home PCs that were like semi-game systems at the time. Right. Yeah, I mean, I really feel like the console market was, I mean, it was on the way, which is why Atari lost so much money, and there were a lot of different reasons for that,

but I do think it had less of a cultural footprint at that point. People knew Pac-Man and they knew Donkey Kong, but Atari was not, necessarily where the mine share was. I think that was kind of like the big toy for the 1779, 1980. Didn't the Kalikovision come out in 82? Yeah, the Kalikovision

had come out. The Commodore 64 had come out and was like inexpensive and a huge step forward technologically. Yeah, television had been kind of nipping at Atari's heels for a while. So I think it just sort of showed up

a little too late to really have the cachet that they wanted it to. I wouldn't say that it's a cultural failure. I don't know. Like, if they had actually followed through and released all four games and had that final contest, I'm sure that would have made headlines and really, you know, like, that would have been much more visible.

The generic fantasy theme, is there anything standout, Chris, in the theme that you see as distinctive features of the storyline that are... It's all pretty standard. One of the things that's really interesting is that if you go back and, If you play the games, you obviously just have like the one little pixel dude on the screen. But if you read the comics, it's about a pair of twins, a boy and a girl, who are thieves who are trying to get these mystical artifacts to defeat the kind of evil warlord who killed their family because they were prophesized to destroy them. So it's all very kind of standard issue fantasy stuff to the point of, you know, the tyrant's name is literally Tyrannus, and his wizard friend is Conjuro. Like Darth Ternus?

That's him. My goodness, Star Wars tie in. But, like, I feel like as much as they have, like, top tier, like, comics talent of the time on those comics, they're not trying to, like, create a bold new mythology as much as something that will just, like, get this information out and make it interesting for themselves. Wouldn't it be funny to talk to those writers and say, what were you going for with this? And they're probably, like, we just want to do the easiest thing possible.

I wouldn't be surprised, like, a lot of times you get, you know, like those, we knew we were getting a lot of money for this, so let's just do whatever, you know, like, it was a sealed deal or something. Yeah, I mean, like, I'm sure, I'm sure Roy Thomas and Jerry Conway had, like, a real easy time and poor George Perez has to draw, like, every monster in the, you know, the zodiac, like, all 12 zodiac signs as monsters in this dungeon. And he has to base it on, like, the little square block interpretations on the 2600, I'm sure. But I do think even if the contest itself was a failure, which I mean, clearly it was, the fourth one never happened, you know, and it's kind of a weird forgotten piece of video game lore. I think it's a much more interesting story that it failed because, you know, it's, you look at the first three prizes and it's like, it's like, oh, who won the chalice? And it's literally some dude in Aiken, South Carolina, you know, who got it. And it's like, oh, well, I guess that's why happened with chalice. up, the talisman got melted down.

But the sword is one of the, it's essentially like a lost treasure. And there are rumors about it. You know, the rumors that it hung in the Atari offices behind the CEO's desk for 20 years. And there's a rumor that it was stolen. I could see like Jack Tremil, like executing bad employees. Somebody said online that Jack Tremil had it or something, but I wouldn't be surprised. There's like a ton, there's actually a ton of conflicting reports on what happened to it. They should have asked him, but he's still alive.

If somebody had told me about this, I would have asked him, Jack. Way to go, Ben. You and Jack, we're first name basis. Yeah, I know. I actually never interviewed him, but I had plenty of chances. I should have done that. So it's that. that idea of like

of having what is essentially like a real life lost treasure tied into video games from 30, 35 years ago that is... Does your story play on this? Yeah, that's what really informed our story. Yeah, we can kind of book in this by sort of coming back to the

comic, it's okay, make it a sales, but why not? We honestly thought about doing just like a modern take on Torantara, are the names of the characters and kind of doing like a modern fantasy take and maybe doing some, like some puzzle stuff in the comic, which is something I've always been fascinated by since I was a kid, you know, hunting

for hidden clues. But the more we got into it, the more that we realized that what's really interesting about it and what's really unique about it is that real life story. So our story is called Sword Quest Real World, playing on the titles of the video games, and it essentially picks up with a guy who was a kid who was a huge fan of the games

who mailed away for Waterworld. And now he's 45, and some bad stuff happens. to him and his life kind of falls apart and what he decides to do is he's going to finish what he wanted to do 30 years ago and he's going to get that sword so it's him and his his his childhood friends that he would play this video game with like if in the zero issue you see them kind of it you know doing that thing that we talked about like completing the story of

the game uh like imagining themselves traveling through this dungeon that's only represented in vague squares on the screen but it's it's kind of a a weird take on a heist story because they find out where the sword is now as a piece of video game history in a world where like the video game crash happened and that Atari exists as a company and he's going to go steal it. So he's going to go on a real life quest for the sword. You should have Frank Sevaldi show up with an Air World copy. Say, I found it guys. Here you go. Play it. Win the contest. The contents of AirWorld are actually going to, we're probably going to talk more about the contents of the airworld comic. But we have, like, there are

plot points coming up where we talk about sort of what happens in the lost video game and the lost comic. It's awesome. And, yeah, this actually sounds really interesting. Like, I, I wasn't sure what you could do with a Sword Quest comic, but it sounds like you've really put some thought into the concept and have tied it to some actual video game history and some research, as opposed to just being like, hey, here's a thing. Yeah, we, uh, we've been calling it, uh, we've been calling it, um, Oceans 11 meets the King of Kong. And one of the really cool things, it's me and Chad writing it, Ghost Rider X, is the name of our artist. And Josh Kroc is our letter.

And it's the team behind what was our first creator-owned graphic novel, Downset Fight. So we're kind of approaching this as though, I mean, we've got that real-life story behind it, but we're approaching it as though it's just entirely ours, like a creator-owned book would be. And Dynamite's been really supportive of that. Atari has been really supportive of that. They've been like a really easy licenser to work with. And everything we've kind of pitched that we want to do has been met with people being pretty excited about it.

Can you get a cut of the movie rights? No. What? Let me see your contract. Let me renegotiate that for you. But yeah, like getting the team back together and, and sort of this being our return to doing something unusual on offbeat after a couple of years of doing superhero stories, it's really exciting. And I think even though we, I think we had some pretty good ideas for baseball and night driver, the game about driving at night.

Like, I think SwordQuest ended up being by far our most compelling pitch because it has, because you can tell somebody, go look it up, this is real. This is the thing that happens And then the idea of playing with that Is just like fascinating to us And the zero issue is going to be out on May 3rd Which is right before Free Comic Book Day So if you're going into the store on Free Comic Book Day Make sure to pick up a copy of that too

And we did a 16 page full-color Zero issue that's kind of the first chapter of the story That's going to be 25 cents Two bits for the 8 bits is what Dynamite's calling it But it wasn't an arcade game That doesn't make any sense It was not an arcade game but it is cheap and it's cheap comics so yeah it's it's been really fun to go back and and look at all

the stuff like in in the art of Atari book and in the the old press releases about it and see how big this thing was supposed to be because that makes it like I feel like if I had been you know alive and playing video games at the time you know I was born in 1982 so I was a little too young for this one but I would have been obsessed with this and I know that not being able to do that last game would have bugged me. And I feel like the idea of that idea sitting at the back of your head for 30 years and then coming out in a weird way

when everything else falls apart is a really interesting take on this kind of story. So you've come off a comic book series about superheroes from 1992 to do a story about a man in 2017 who's obsessed with a video game from

1982 steeped in the fantasy elements of the 1970s. So you're really spanishe spanning half a century there. It appeals to all eras. I'd like to point out one other thing about sword quests that we haven't mentioned, which is it's literally a quest for a sword. That was the main price.

And I never... That is true. I just never put that connection together. It's such a prosaic name that you don't realize. Oh, right. It's literal, too. There's an actual sword, and you actually have to solve puzzles and travel somewhere to go get it. All right, well, unless there's anything more you want to add,

This has been a great conversation, but I feel like I've tapped out my knowledge of SwordQuest, so I don't have anything more to say. I would point listeners to an interview done by, it may have been Digital Press, long time ago, with one of the winners of the Sword Quest competition. Maybe the Chalice guy. I forgot what his name is. I apologize. But he talks about Atari offered a payoff $15,000 to not compete in the last competition or something like that. But you can read that online. Interesting. Yeah. There's a lot of really interesting stuff.

And if you want to get the full story and see what we're working from, there's so much, like, really cool, really interesting stuff that's, like, floating around the interviews. And because as obscure as this thing is, it's such a fascinating subject that I think once you hear about it, you want to find out more. And so you get people doing interviews and people, like, theorizing where these the sword and the chalice are today. So definitely go out.

Question I have is, would it ruin it if I found the sword? Like, should I try to look for it? Not if you gave it to me. Okay. You got to give it to me, though. Like, if we find where it is, it's just sitting in somebody's basement this whole time. Well, time's ticking. There's only a few weeks before the comic starts running.

Okay. I'll get working on. You got to get cracking on that. All right, thanks, guys. This has been a good conversation, and I hope everyone listening has enjoyed it. I've enjoyed it. I feel like I learned a lot, which usually happens before I come into record a Retronauts, as opposed to during.

So for those of us here, Retronauts, I am Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on the internet at GameSpite on Twitter and, of course, at Retronauts.com. There are shows on iTunes at the Podcast One network and so on and so forth. Please support us because we need to eat. Yes, that's important. Benjj, of course. Benjeds where you're from. Benjedwards.com, Vintagecomputing.com.

Benjed Edwards on Twitter. And Chris. You can find links to everything that I do at the. isb.com and I'm at the ISB on Twitter. And yeah, you have your own podcast. You can pitch that. Yeah, you've been on it Jeremy. It's War Rocket

Ajax. Which you can find at War Rocket Ajax.com. That's with Matt Wilson. Matt and I also do a podcast called Movie Fighters. It's a very original concept. We watch a bad movie and talk about it. No one else is doing that. Do you have robots on that thing? Not yet. Okay. But we're

looking at options. And then I also do an episode-by-episode podcast, one for Sailor Moon called Sailor Business, and then a spino-warier princess called Zena Warrior Business. Nice. So check those out as well, please. That sounds cool. All right, and we'll be back in a few days with a full episode of Retronauts and also in two weeks with another Retronauts Micro.

Thanks again for listening. We'll be back. My time's rough to have made I've locked in in places of cold This last a thousand years A more than you waking a line of gold Where the key of the world was a creature Oh man a woman a least

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I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it.

In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout,

have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.