Mindfield

Yeah, that's the only bittersweet bit about watching -- knowing how the rest of the story unfolded after the credits rolled. Still, it's flat-out amazing how quickly these company climbed to the top of the ladder. The repeated upward revision of sales projections from $15m, $30m, $50m -- all in less than a year, is astonishing, and a testament both to the video game business climate of the day and to Imagic's vision and quality games.

I don't think they actively assembled survey groups for various regions, possibly because the benefits may not have been considered too closely and therefore it may not have been deemed cost effective. I do remember that a lot of those types of magazines often contained survey cards you could fill out and send in. That in itself likely wasn't of much use as kids were very unlikely to fill anything out, much less mail anything, and the adult respondant rate was probably fairly low, especially in mags about home computers and video games which really were very much the domain of kids in those days.

Check out Atari's original box-art for the 2600. They thought the demographics for games would be broader than they were. The older crowd had trouble adapting to the new technology. The reason the game business has more adults today is that we have now grown up with this stuff. Not just the boxes, but their commercials, too, like where the whole family, a few neighbours, and pizza guy have at it, or this one wherein finely dressed adults apparently take time out of their party for an exciting game of Breakout. Speaking of breakout, these parents, clueless at first, seem to end up enjoy it more than their son.

Suffice it to say, that which has been protected has been cracked. Even Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have been cracked. The thing about copy protection is that no matter how clever you think your method if protection is, someone will crack it. All they need to do is run it through a disassembler, look for the bit(s) of code that perform the copy protection check(s) and bypass them. Back around '94, I released a program on the Atari ST. I wrote a method of generating a registration key that I thought was pretty clever: The key was generated in 4 separate components based on a unique serial number that was generated, encrypted, and saved into the middle of the main data file. When the user entered this registration key, the program decrypyed the serial number, then performed the check against the generated registration key in four steps: Generate one of the four components of the key against one of the four quadrants of the serial, verify, set verification flag, purge memory where that portion of the key sits, repeat. I thought at the time that this might foil memory scanners. In the end though, it was cracked. How? They disassembled the main program, went to the part of code where began the check for a valid key, skipped completely over it, and fed the part of the program that checked against a valid key a positive result, effectively telling my program the key was valid. Very simple and efficient. But I took (and still take) a very pragmatic view on piracy. The way I see it, those who were willing to download a pirated copy of my software probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place, even if it hadn't been pirated, so in the end, I really didn't lose anything to piracy. Those "lost sales" figures that the industry throws around that are supposedly due to piracy never had the potential to become sales to begin with, so the losses are pretty much nil. Oh sure, there may have been those that would have ponied up the cash if they couldn't download it for free, but those are much fewer and further between than those who wouldn't have paid no matter what. If you don't want to use a converter or install a Youtube downloader plugin (if you don't use Firefox) then just feed Vixy (link in my first post) the URL to the movies, choose a format to save to, and let it download and convert the movies for you. It's free and you don't have to install anything. That was the general opinion back then. Game systems -- and even home computers -- were considered children't toys, since adults couldn't think of much use for them, and most adults considered games of any sort to be the exclusive domain of children. Those adults who worked on computers and had to take their work home with them typically had IBM PCs in their home -- which weren't very good for gaming, so those were generally excepted. Plus, it was rare to see a home with a PC in it. (Heck, in the earlier 80s it wasn't very common to have a computer in the home at all; of all my friends of the era, I could count the number of kids who had a computer on one hand) It wasn't until computers started proving their worth through the ability to do up professional-level word processing, desktop publishing, databases, graphs and so on that adults began to buy into home computing technology, and it too the publicisation of the Internet to really start to make computers ubuquitous fixtures in the home. Nowadays the tables have turned completely, where it's rare to find a home that doesn't have a home computer.

Yep. The Xerox PARC Alto Workstation introduced the concepts of Ethernet and Smalltalk, the mouse, the laser printer, InterPress (the precursor to Postscript) and the WIMP GUI architecture a good decade before it arrived in the home in the earlier 80s. The only reason it took so long to trickle down to the consumer was because the Xerox Star -- their attempt at commercializing these concepts -- didn't sell very well and Xerox considered the whole idea a bit of a failure. It took the Alto-inspired Mac to score a home run with it. I don't know of any freeware ones that will convert the videos to a full DVD structure, but there were some good suggestions earlier in the thread for some free, open-source video converters that will convert to VOB and/or MPEG-2.

Yep. There's a certain kind of irony there about using an amazingly powerful computer for the day to program games for a system that was orders of magnitude its inferior. Still, it allowed them to churn out some great games, and I suppose let them do it at a good clip given the top notch debugging and analysis tools they had at their disposal. It actually kind of surprises me that they had such sophisticated hardware as a startup -- those things couldn't have been anywhere near cheap.

Fast Video Download is a Firefox extension. You need to be using Firefox to use it. You can get the extension from the Firefox homepage's "Extensions" section. There are other similar extensions designed to rip videos off YouTube and other video sites -- "UnPlug" and "Ook? Video Ook!" (don't ask, I didn't name it) are two others. Alternatively, the link to Vixy in my first post will download and convert the videos for you online (your choice of formats), then send them to you as a regular file download. Then you can play them as normal without needing a special Flash Video player. Cool! I hope you can pull it off; I'd like to get my hands on a copy.

Sweet! So what's gonna be on this thing? (I never saw Stella at 20, much to my shame)

I don't think he's correct (I checked out all the desktop computers and terminals from HP of that era and none match), but he might have been close. My guess is that it is a close relative to the HP-64000 series microprocessor development system (PDF warning). The unit pictured in the journal is not an exact match to Koble's, but it's close enough in design that it's probably a member of the same series.

Assuming it hasn't succumbed to bit-rot, which is pretty likely. I can't tell -- it's a a bit blurry, but I don't recognize it. Looks like Microsurgeon on the Inty. I remember them pretty well. I even bought a few games there around 1985 when they had some cheapo titles in the clearance bins. (The only one I actually remember buying from there though was Journey Escape) I'd exhausted all of the affordable titles I'd bought from Toys "Я" Us so I was casting further afield for new fodder for my 2600. That was my line of thinking when I watched. "Man, talking about how the aborted IPO was just a temporary setback and they'll try again in a few months. They just had no idea what was just around the corner." Atari and Mattel both. It wasn't exactly Atari's fault, nor Mattel's, and it wasn't because games weren't selling. They were selling briskly -- the problem was that with increased competition on the software front meant the pie was being sliced into that many more pieces, and everyone got a smaller share, Atari most of all, since they'd gone from being the sole provider of games to being one of a dozen within a span of just two years -- less, if you consider that, other than Activision, the competition didn't really have any great load of product to offer until 1982, which meant that the Christmas '82 season was especially competitive. Has to be. I'm not aware of any other project Imagic had going at the time, and it's the only (known) title to have gone unreleased.

Hey, cool. I made the front page. I'm not so sure about this. The technology behind the Supercharger in and of itself wouldn't have been able to be used for copying cartridges even if modified. It may have been possible to design a cart dumper that could dump to cassette and then use the Supercharger to load the games into its memory via a standard tape player, but since the Supercharger is only half the equation (and the lesser half at that) I can't see them getting too worked up about it unless they'd heard something about cart-to-cassette dumping hardware. The Google, it does nothing, but a search of the forums here suggests that user cx2k would know, based on this old post wherein he's had contact with him Bill Grubb. As for Jim Levy, again, very little recent information comes to light, but according to this press release about the 2006 Sonoma Valley Film Festival, he's one of its board members. Probably not too surprising given his background in the entertainment industry. I suspect that they probably weren't terribly worried. Imagic weren't into the whole movie license thing, and while the game was hyped to ridiculous proportions and had some pretty good advertising going into the 1982 holiday season, Imagic were standing quite firmly on their own two feet and I'm certain they were confident of good sales. As the documentary details, they kept blowing their forecasts wide open so there was no reason to think E.T. posed a singnificant competitive threat.

True -- I thought it was rather interesting that the two were neighbours. Of all places to rent it had to be right next door to some major competition. DataAge weren't that bad -- they had a few unique titles, but they definitely didn't have the flair for design that many of their contemporaries had. The whole thing is great, beginning to end. It's a real pity this show wasn't an hour long affair, though. There was definitely enough interesting material there to stretch it out.

The 2600 with the cover off I'd wager is part of the dev system. If I had to guess I'd say that the dev system was wired directly up to the 2600 console via the cart port or something, which would allow compiles to be immediately tested without having to burn to an EEPROM first. The 850 was probably used to transfer sprite data files via serial or parallel to an external 8" floppy disk so Kobel could bring it to his dev system and incorporate the data into his game. Those are just guesses but it would make sense.

Hey, nice. Leave it to open source software to have the most comprehensive functionality. I tried out MediaCoder. Works great, and it's fast! It even handles Quicktime, though it's not perfect; I have a bunch of Quicktime 3 vids from the old Commercial Archive that I ran through MEncoder. The video converted on some of them, but there was no sound. Others just errored out. Pity, because I'd like to finally eliminate the Quicktimes from my collection. I can't get MPlayer to work to save my life though, and VLC has been a bit buggy for me. (I tried VLC months ago, but I just installed MPlayer and its GUI and skins). MPlayer just shows a pink screen, like it can't render video regardless of what video format I feed it.

It is indeed a pretty amazing and detailed look into life inside one of the great video game companies of the early 80s. I like all the miscellaneous clips and retrospectives and interviews, but they all just skitter along the surface of the subject matter, and while interesting to hear anecdotes and watch how things were promoted, it's just not the same as seeing it all done as it's being done from the inside, which is the missing element this show provided -- and it did that amazingly well. This is definitely my favourite video of the collection. I finally managed to stitch the three parts into one complete MPEG. Unfortunately it's about four times larger than the original rips, but it was the only way I could transcode it without further degrading quality. It's all good though -- as long as it plays. I didn't know Rob discussed this previously -- but it's cool that he did. I can see how this would lift one's mood; it's a real, almost tactile reminder of the good ol' days right from the inside. I'd love to get my hands on Rob's copy and cap it at DVD quality. Think he'd lend it out?

Although not as good, something for Activision does exist if you haven't seen it yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yqVqwcICKQ You get to see the programmers and their commercials. And a young Phil Hartman in the Ice Hockey commercial. Great! I've found a surprising number of present-day (then) and before-they-were-stars people acting in video game and computer commercials: Phil Hartman: Activision's Ice Hockey Gary Grubbs: Activision's Stampede Alan Alda: Atari XL computer system (running series of ads) Pete Rose and Don Knotts: Atari 2600 "Don't just watch TV tonight, play it" spot Elizabeth Shue: Atari 2600 "Buy two, get one free" spot Bill Smitrovich: Atari 2600 "She's Relentless" spot Mel Allen: Atari 2600 RealSports series Billy Martin: Atari 2600 RealSports Baseball Henry Thomas: Intellivision and Intellivision II (running series of ads with -- who else? -- George Plimpton. Ironically, Atari never hired him to reprise his role as Elliott for the E.T. commercial) Buzz Aldrin, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Little Richard, Burt Bacharach, The Pointer Sisters, Tommy LaSorda, and Tip O'Neil: Commodore Amiga - "Celebrity" spot. It's fun particularly seeing the before-they-were-stars stump for the classics.

Although not as good, something for Activision does exist if you haven't seen it yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yqVqwcICKQ You get to see the programmers and their commercials. Yeah, I've got that one (captured from a difference source apparently but about as good quality). It's cool, but being that it's produced by Activision themselves it's just about their current and future releases and some brief bios on the programmers. It'd be cool to see a profile such as that Imagic's from an outsider's perspective.

In the end though, piracy is usually responsible for raising the prices so that the company effected can try and recoup its losses. Prices usually only come down either when the software goes on clearance or when the company's product isn't selling and they want to entice new buyers with lower prices. None of this seems to concern Imagic. As was posted, you need the proper CODEC to view. Download and install DiVX and you should be good to go. (Don't bother making the DiVX player your default movie player, it's not particularly good) My pleasure. Me, too. I came across this only only because it was releated to my generic "atari" search on YouTube, and it was buried pretty deep in the results. I haven't finished my search (left off at page 23 with lots more to go) so who knows what's left to discover. This is the first business show profile of a game company I've come across from back in the day, though. The only other things I have of that nature are some arcade snippets from the UK version of "I Love the 80s," the Jaguar infomercial, and a few dealer promo vids and internal corporate vids which aren't nearly as interesting. Oh, and the "Once Upon Atari" DVD, which is cool but not quite the same thing -- that's all anecdotal recollections. Now, I'd love to find one like this on Atari or Activision. That would be sweet.

Heh, I was just watching it again. Anyone notice one of Kobel's shirts? "I'm an Imagic prima donna game designer!" I also found it kind of odd that Bill was so concerned about Arcadia and the potential for piracy of their tapes. He called the concept "frightening." What effect would that have on Imagic, or anyone else for that matter? Seems to me from a competitive standpoint Arcadia should have been the least of their concerns unless they had somehow considered writing games for that medium.

'Welcome. Although there's always the possibility of it being yanked, it's been up for over 4 months already so at least for now it's probably okay. I have a few Flash video ripper extensions for Firefox, but they still need to be converted to a more common format if they're to be played in more conventional media players, so once I found Vixy I decided to use that instead. It's a hell of a lot more convenient. It's a shame they never got to release Sky Patrol. The market crashed pretty hard and fast not long after this episode was aired. That said though it's sort of amazing that this was the only Imagic game that never made it out the door. I'd have thought they'd have had any number of projects on the go in various stages when the crash hit.

Glad to share cool stuff like this. I was quite surprised and pleased at the quality, too. It lost surprisingly little quality after conversion to DivX as well -- bonus! I love collecting commercials, but finding stuff like this, produced and aired while it was still topical and relevant, is a treasure trove. They followed Imagic staff around periodically for pretty much the entirety of 1982 to film this episode, so the material they managed to get is fantastic and deliciously detailed. The assembly line also amused me -- the days before automated lines. Man, that job (like all assembly line jobs) must have sucked. Especially the guy whose job it was to test every cart on the line by jamming it into a 2600 and flicking the power on and off. Just, wow. The aborted IPO was interesting. Mattel and Atari reporting stagnant sales (Mattel even posting a loss) causing brokers to panic and dump stocks -- the first signs of where the market was headed as they moved into 1983. The CES show was cool. That alien costume was pretty elaborate -- I wonder what company he was stumping for, or if he was just a CES ornament? I liked the 8-bit dev bits, but it seems like Activision and Atari, all code was done on a pretty early text-only computer. (Get a load of those 8" floppies!) I've always been curious as to why that was. Lack of a cross-assembler? Dev system connectivity issues? Networking requirement?

I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner, but I decided to cruise YouTube tonight in search of all things Atari to see what I could come up with. Turns out there's quite a few ads and promo vids I didn't have in my collection, so naturally I nabbed them. In the process of searching however I came across a pretty awesome series of clips. It's an episode of Enterprise (the 80s PBS business show, not the Star Trek spin-off) hosted by veteran CBS correspondant Eric Sevareid. This particular episode (looks like it was aired in 1983 by my estimate) was all about Imagic. It featured the four founding members talking about the business, current and future projects, and in part follows the development and release cycle of Atlantis throughought 1982 -- from design, prototyping, playtesting, finishing, the CES '82 debut and the following months. Some great inside shots of Imagic are shown, along with some great early and mid-stage Atlantis pre-prototype shots, scenes from the CES show, production line shots, financial stats on the company including the press conference announcing their plans to be the first video game company to issue an IPO, and so on. Really fascinating stuff and some rare glimpses into the inner world of a game company of the 80s. EDIT: Since YouTube has deleted the videos, here are alternatives from LiveVideo (thanks Random Terrain!) Video here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Anyone wanting to rip these off YouTube can use Vixy to automatically grab, convert (AVI, MP4, MOV, 3GP or MP3-audio-only) and download the videos all online. Damn cool service for anyone who doesn't have an FLV-to-Whatever converter. It's a bit slow but it works very well.

Updated pending items. Added Sony earbuds.

PM sent.

Got a bunch of iPod (and generic music player-related) stuff in a bundle recently. I've kept what I wanted to keep, so the rest is up for grabs. Everything's new or like-new in open box, and some of the stuff that I've been able to test has been tested as working. All prices are in Canadian funds. Headphones Panasonic RP-HNJ50 in-ear monitors (canalphones) (white) - Great set of in-ear monitors, provide deeper bass, better volume and outside noise isolation - 3 sizes (S, M, L) of silicone tips to provide the best fit for your ears - I'm also including an extra set of small and large black tips from another set that didn't work. (The medium set was missing a tip) - Neckstrap included - Reduced plug hood diameter - perfect for iPod - Sensitivity: 104dB/mW - Frequency Response: 6Hz - 25KHz - Impedence: 16ohms - Cord length: 2ft - Tested working (no, I didn't put them in my ears, they're still perfectly clean) - $15.00 Panasonic RP-HS52 Clip-on headphones - Over-ear, clip-on style headphones -- no headband required - Drivers: 30mm neodymium - Sensitivity: 102dB/mW - Frequency Response: 14Hz - 24KHz - Impedence: 24ohms - Cord length: 3.6ft - Untested (re-shrinkwrapped) - $5.00 Sony Fontopia MDR-E10LP (Black) - Open-air earbuds - Drivers: 13.5mm neodymium - Frequency Response: 18Hz - 22KHz - Tested working - $5.00 [ SOLD! ] Griffin Ear Jams - Clip over your existing iPod headphones to conver them to in-ear monitors - 3 sizes (S, M, L) of silicone-tipped clips to provide the best fit for your ears - $5.00 [ SOLD! ] Cables Dynex Dual Sync/Charger Cable - Connect your iPod via either USB or FireWire with one cable - Works with all iPod models with dock connector - Tested working (via USB) - $5.00 [ SOLD! ] Dynex Retractable FireWire Cable - Both ends retract for compact self-storage - Compatible with all iPods with dock connector up to 4G models (does NOT work with 5G iPod models, which do not support FireWire) - $5.00 Accessories & Cases Dynex Universal Digital FM Transmitter DX-MP3FM - Connects via headphone jack to transmit any audio source to FM radio - Selectable full-spectrum FM channel frequency with LCD display - 10 channel preset memory - Previously selected channel remembered for future use - Noise filter for clean sound transmission - $15.00 [ SOLD! ] Dynex Universal FM Transmitter DX-AC101 - Connectws via headphone jack to transmit any audio source to FM radio - 4 selectable FM channels - Designed for car stereo use - $5.00 [ SOLD! ] 3-Pack iPod Shuffle (1G) Cases - 3 faux-leather cases in white, red and black - Fits 1G iPod Shuffles - $5.00 Griffin Trio Leather Case for iPod Nano - Designed for 1G iPod Nano, but will fit 2G - Slim, genuine leather case - Snap-on, removable protective cover with latchless enclosure - Secure integrated belt clip - $10.00 Misc. Universal cassette adapters A bunch of these came in the bundle. I think I've got 4 or 5 left; all but one are Dynex brand, the other is Belkin. Plug one end into the car cassette player and the other into the headphone jack of any music source. Free with purchase or for the cost of shipping. [ ALL TAKEN! ] Whatever doesn't sell here I'll toss up on eBay. Buyer pays actual shipping on all items. Local pickup in Brampton is also available. Payment by PayPal, E-Mail Money Transfer, or cash on pickup is accepted. Void where prohibited. Contents may have settled during transit. Please tip your waiter.