Retro Rogue

Different Atari company (Atari Corporation). Most of Atari Corp.'s game development was by outside parties, hence the need for dev kits.

BTW, noticed the Atari Corporation on the box - you guys know it's Atari Inc. and not Atari Corporation that released PONG right? That was a misprint on the original flyer. The control panel of PONG says Atari Inc. as well. Atari Corporation was the later Jack Tramiel Atari branded company.

AtGames doesn't do xxx on a chip consoles, they use modern internals running emulators. We were the only ones doing new implementations of original old consoles on a single chip format for plug-and-plays, such as the 2600-on-a-chip we did for the Flasback 2 and 2+. They also don't make any of their products hackable (a signature of ours). We talked to Intellivision Productions about doing the same with the Intellivision and they instead went with those poorly received ported games/emulated plug-and-play. We wanted to do the same with the Colecovision as well, and had further plans for the Atari Flashback series (the series we created) before the Los Angeles licensing guys unfamiliar with the background of the series decided to license out the name to AtGames.

Yes, there was a number of third party 2600/5200 dev systems for both the 800 PCS and Apple II at the time. They were frequently advertised at the back of computer magazines.

Actually that's not quite right either. It depends on the generation and what was readily available. We talked to many 2600 programmers from the '76 to '84 period, and a lot of them talked about the exact process I just mentioned, including the frustration of needing to keep running to the burning room to wait and burn an EPROM and run back and test it. Nothing to do with demo of prototypes at that time. Later they got the RAM boards you're talking about.

They didn't. 2600 development at Atari was usually done on 6502 simulators running on mainframes and then code was burned to eproms and tested on an actual 2600. Here's a picture of Steve Woita during the development of Taz/Asterix in 1983. In relation to Andrew's comment regarding the Apple having a keyboard right on it which would make it easier for development, that's exactly one of the form factors Jay Miner and Joe Decuir wanted for their next project at Atari in '79 before they quit. Specifically they wanted to do a 68000 based console/computer that had a keyboard on it already so programmers could code games right on the console and not have to do the whole eprom burn thing to test. They carried that idea on to Amiga when their Lorraine was initially a game console with a keyboard attached (think the later Amiga 500).

Ehh, and before CreatiVision there was the APF MP1000.

Just revisiting this, as we're knee deep in interviews and resource gathering for the second book (specifically on the May through December '84 period). Specifically in relation to two previous claims in this thread. First, regarding this meeting with Nintendo that was brought up, we did manage to track down and talk to people (management) directly involved in these meetings (not just poking their head in). It was a series of meetings, not just one, and it had nothing to do with Nintendo offering the Famicom to Jack. What they had to do with was Nintendo coming after Jack for royalties they were promised based on the licensing agreement with Atari Inc. Specifically, that Jack's July '84 purchase of Atari Inc.'s Consumer Division was only an assets purchase of that division and the Atari name and logo. As such, Nintendo was counting it as a sale of game stock (one of the assets he purchased), and felt it was entitled to earned royalties. Until it was settled, Jack was not allowed to sell Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. for any platform. These meetings lasted into '85 and almost went to a full lawsuit until an agreement was finally made. Second, we have direct verification from GCC (printed documentation and interviews) that as of August '84 Jack was in talks with them about releasing the 7800 that Christmas '84 (and not only that but upping the initial order that Atari Inc. had placed). The sticking points were indeed a) GCC was in business with Warner and not Atari, and felt Warner still owed them for MARIA development and the development of the launch titles. Warner in turn felt Jack would have to pay that if he wanted it. b) Jack wanted to sell the 7800 units and carts for lower than what Warner/Atari Inc. had agreed on, which would mean lower royalties for GCC which didn't sit well with them. Both issues lead to continued negotiations into spring of '85 until an agreement was made and payment rendered. Third, we have direct verification from GCC (printed documentation and interviews) that Jack also discussed with them on his plans to release the cost reduced 2600 (the 2600 Jr.) alongside the 7800 that Christmas '84 (which matches the Atari Corp. internal documentation we had that the 2100 aka the Jr. was started up again in August), to which GCC was looking forward to because of planned royalties on the 2600 titles they programmed for Atari Inc. To that end Jack had already had planned out and enacted how to reduce the costs of manufacturing on both units and carts to make manufacturing new 2600 feasible considering the game industry at the time. Again, this documentation regarding GCC is from August '84 and the related events lasted into '85. We will have the documentation reproduced in the book as we did with other important documents in the last book.

Yes, between the x and y direction only x has speed increases. However, the x shouldn't be increasing either though until a certain number of hits are met. There's only three x speed rates in the arcade PONG: less than five volleys, between 5 and 12 volleys, and over 12 volleys..

It's got nothing to do with not having a microprocessor. Specifically, when I was working with Al Alcorn to do a logic level recreation of the game in Flash for the current Atari, he stated the angles weren't done via fixed degrees. Rather it's done via the timing. The ball has a flip-flop for the x direction and the y direction rate was done via the timing circuitry related to the spot positioning of the ball. Likewise, the paddles shouldn't be giving an increase in x rate until after a certain amount of hits. Just include the paddle holes that are in the coin-op version and it shouldn't be a boredom issue.

I'm assuming you assigned specific angles. What did you use to decide the angles? The original doesn't produce the angles by degrees, rather circuit timing, so there's no comparable setting.

I second the vote for a C compiler. It'd have to be very optimized of course, but as a coder I think C would be the next best thing to assembly.

Is the normal speeding up routine in there? The spin was in the original Odyssey Tennis game it was taken from (called "English"). PONG has 8 segments, not 7.

I like the differences in font colors on the 16k boards.

Computer Space is not Spacewar. It was not a copy of the game. As Ted stated, they were inspired by the game and did not try to clone it.

Tim Trezpacz brought up a rumor that Tod had done something to cause the "first ever royalties" at Atari. I responded with: "There was originally a bonus program in place in the late 70s as well in Consumer (across the board for management, engineers, and programmers) but Warner's people did some Hollywood accounting to cause it not to happen and that resulted in the exodus of people from Consumer. Ray started a regular royalty bonus program in Consumer ('81/'82 on-wards) after more (Howard Scott Warshaw, Tod, and a few others) threatened to leave. We covered the program in the book and Howard covers it in Once Upon Atari. Likewise, according to Owen, Coin had a complex royalty system for it's games plus they started receiving royalties from Consumer as well in the early 80's for games being ported over to the 2600/5200." Tim elaborated on the full rumor: " The story of Tod Frye's royalty, as it was told to me was that Tod waited until he was 2/3rds of the way done with the Pacman coding and then marched into Ray Kassar's office and demanded a 10 cent per cartridge royalty. Knowing that nobody else would be able to pick up the code and finish it in time, or rewrite from scratch and still make Christmas, he capitulated and Tod got Atari's first ever royalty." I responded with: "Tim: Told by who? That's one of several myths (including the one about there being several versions of Pac-Man). First off, the game wasn't released for Christmas, it was released in March '82 (with the official "Pac-Man Day" release in April). We interviewed Tod and Howard direct for the book, and what you're claiming was not done. It was Tod's first game after joining Atari, he wasn't in any sort of position to have clout like that. There was no crunch time frame, the game was simply put into the list of games "the Zoo" had available to them for projects. Bob Polaro had already passed on it because of the 4k limit to do Defender, which Tod wanted, so Tod instead took Pac-Man. Tod was already on probation per his annual review by Dennis Knoble, so he made sure to put in a lot of extra hours and effort on Pac-Man. He started in May '81 and finally finished the second week of September. It was after Pac-Man was done that they planned to go as a group to let Atari know they were planning on leaving (20th Century Fox had approached them about doing games), Tod spilled it to George Kiss who in turn let Ray know. Two days later there was a general meeting called with everyone and people were handed bonus checks, and the royalty program started right after that. In fact, Howard brought up about this event again during the first day of group meetings we had with a lot of the ex-Consumer programmers in front of their old Gibraltar Drive location. Steve Woita was gracious enough to organize the two days of meetings for us, and they were simply indispensable as a resource - allowing everyone to feed off each other in an informal setting so there was a lot more ground and stories covered than normal (and details remembered). Likewise, our entire chapter section on Tod, Pac-Man, etc. was reviewed directly by Tod before publication. Most of the material in the book that dealt with specific people and instances was in fact sent to those people for review/corrections before publication." Tim responded with: "The story was related to me when I was working at 3DO, not by Tod, but by others who worked with him at the time. When I first mentioned Tod, I was hoping he would relate it so that I would not have the chance to be wrong. Marty's version of the story may be the correct one, I was just relating what I had been told." Then Tod showed up and stated (across three different posts that I've gathered as one): "Marty's version is for the most part correct. PacMan was done, wrapped, sent off for ROM mask long before the compensation was adjusted at Atari. The story that i extorted Ray has a certain cachet, but is completely bogus. One develops a certain skepticism of all history once one's history has been written by those who were not there. Some stories are more fun than the reality of the time. i mean look, if i had the business chops to extort management for a percentage, i would have gone a lot higher that $0.10 per cart. the margin was like $25, so i would have gone for at least $1.00... more likely $2.50. then i would have bought MS, and really rocked for 25 yrs..." For the record, I personal messaged Tod and asked him what minor elements were wrong with the version I recounted from the book that caused him to say "for the most part" (considering he proofed the material before it was released, and it's a combination of what he and Howard stated), as we'd like to correct anything we missed for the second edition. He has yet to write back.

According to Tod he used up too much memory being 2-player (where he'd have to keep track of the two mazes) which, combined with using ghost patterns, severely limited the resources he was given. His stated goal was to implement what he considered the important features of the game to accurately reproduce the game play vs. the look. The problem, as the many programmers stated it to us, was it was a learning curve at the time because they were being asked to port more advanced bit-mapped games to a non bit-mapped architecture. In answer to the rest of the questions, per directly quoting Tod's interview with us: "We were still new at doing advanced arcade ports to the VCS - there was Space Invaders and Asteroids - both of those used their own color schemes, and Asteroids looked and played different from the arcade. I wanted to add more color to the maze instead of black and blue, so I chose the colors. The maze was also very difficult to implement, so the exits were placed on the tops and bottoms instead of the sides. My primary focus was on the game play and making sure the game mechanics of the arcade were in the VCS title as close as could be done." Tod also developed a flicker reduction kernel for Pac-Man and it wound up being taken and used in Asteroids before Pac-Man was released. As for why he had the ghosts flicker, he felt it was more ghost like. As far as "unfamiliarity," I'm not sure where you got that idea. The consumer programmers at Gibraltar had their own arcade - literally a room full of coin-ops that were all the latest games that they were considering porting or in the process of. That's how a lot of the ports were done at the time, they had a chance to play the actual arcade games and refer to them repeatedly during coding. Sure, it's on page 582. "For Tod’s effort in coding his first game, when he received his first bonus check for $320,000 for Pac-Man, the result was a screaming, yelling, and cheering Tod - all while walking the walls. Tod even makes a photocopy of his first check and tapes it to the door of his office." It wasn't a million and it wasn't hubris, other people were getting bonus checks at that time as well. This was Tod's first game and he was very excited about getting a bonus.

That's a testament to Tod really, and how his motivation with the limited resources was to get the game play itself down rather than the look. I'll tell you, when we were interviewing a lot of the other Consumer Division programmers in the group interviews, they all stated they had a lot of respect for Tod with what he was able to accomplish and called it amazing. Keep in mind, this was also Tod's very first game after starting at Atari (and all they got as an intro was a manual to the VCS hardware and were told to read it and get to it). How long did it take all the 2600 homebrew programmers here before they learned all the ins and outs and tricks to optimize and squeeze more out of things? And without the pressure of a needing to produce an actual commercial product for their employer? Interestingly, some other myths surrounding this game recently popped up in the Atari Museum Facebook group and Tod himself appeared to dispel them. Myths like him supposedly holding out during development for more money, or the time frame of development.

The gameplay looks a little off on PONG. The speedups don't look right and it doesn't look like the paddles have all the segments.

Didn't someone here already do this?

The Breakout game gives you an opportunity to earn a new life, and you can enter secret codes during it to skip levels. According to what Owen told us, Breakout was simply added via a bet that he couldn't code a game of Breakout in the 89 bytes that were left in the game ROM.

Stock market crash, beginning of major downturn (industry crash). That's what's concretely stated in just those few examples. Unless you were under the illusion that the industry crash was just this sudden thing? Or that it would be trumpeted "This is the crash, it's just started" when such statements are usually retrospective once it's already underway? It started in December '82 as shown and built up momentum in '83 and completed by summer '84. Looking at all the "big picture" and full spectrum of documentation and interviews, the industry crash started with this stock crash in '82. It's only speculative if it's not true, and in this case the claimed speculation was followed by the actual downturn of the industry. No different than the .com bubble, where people were speculating events that were happening would lead to a crash, then the event the speculation was surrounding actually leads to the crash, crash is occurring and it's stated the bubble has burst, and then we can look back and say "Hey, that event they were saying was going to lead to the crash - it did."

Nope, we were lower middle class, both my parents worked full time and struggled. Again, you're making continued assumptions. And re: me putting forth my experience as the norm or coloring things, absolutely not, what are you smoking? It's like you didn't read my previous post where the whole reason for me even stating my experience was that your experience doesn't mean everyone had the same experience or were rich socialites. I.E. that you're the one coloring things. And your whole premise is a bit offensive, stating that " I implied that rich people and the upper middle class were more likely to watch the news, read the daily newspaper, read the latest magazines" comes off as stating poorer people were more likely to be dumb and less informed. I've known some very well informed and smart lower income people in my time. Is that really what you're saying? Where's your data for tv watching, newspaper reading, and vcr watching for lower income and lower middle class in 1983? And how did VCR even get into this? Because you made the assumption the majority of "average joes" couldn't find time to watch the news at any one of a plethora of time slots, read a newspaper, or read a magazine or were less likely to because of your personal experience. Regardless, this whole class argument is silly and I'll state again "That doesn't make either viewpoint on what one personally experienced any less valid," nobody speaks for everyone else's experience or what was most likely. Again, this is getting way off topic and I'm done.

You're making a lot of generalizations there, seemingly based on your personal experience. For example, most people I knew had VCR's since the late 70s, and were well home to watch the 10 o'clock news. They read the newspapers in the AM or during lunch or relaxing at home after, and same with magazines. Your claims do not match my experience of the people in the average suburban neighborhood I grew up in. That doesn't make either viewpoint on what one personally experienced any less valid, just that making claims that infer only rich stock market analysts watched the news, read the newspapers, read Time and other magazines, seems a bit odd. Regardless, getting back to the original topic: While the initial sales of 2600 Pac-Man were strong, by the summer of '82 they had petered out. Pac-Man had been manufactured at all three of Atari's US plants plus the Taiwan plant, and was being put in as the pack-in for the 2600s being manufactured that year. So when it started stalling that summer, it only added to the overall inventory problems. When they decided (i.e. were forced) to finally get inventory under control after the bomb of an earnings report on December 7, two days later the order went out to stop manufacturing Pac-Man for the 2600.

People who read newspapers, read magazines, watched TV news, etc. It was very well covered from '82 through '83 in all those media channels, and in fact in regular news - it has nothing to do with "rich people" watching the stock market. A few more online examples: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/24/business/more-layoffs-at-atari-inc.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952015,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952210-2,00.html http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=S9cxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=muMFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4366,4457478 http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/12/business/activision-sets-layoffs-for-90.html