Retro Rogue

Depends. If it's run like Kickstarter then nothing, if the goal isn't met there's no money exchanged.

We have that name copyrighted for video game use. Hence our use in it for Syzygy Company, Syzygy Press, and several different products we're working on.

The Colecovision does. You said "2600 and Coleco hardware," if you wanted to make a unit that has 2600 and Colecovision support, you'd need to deal with the bios licensing issue. Otherwise I don't get your reference to Coleco. Nothing in the 2600 hardware is covered legally any more, the patents have long since expired. If you're just making a 2600 clone you don't need to license anything from Coleco for that, and the Gemini name itself would have very little brand name recognition.

You'd also have to license the Colecovision's bios, unless Kev would come up with a reasonable alternative (that was not based in any way on inside knowledge of the CV's bios).

I agree. Most of the history on the page is wrong, and a bunch of the IP they have listed is not IP that the current Atari owns. Pitfall? Pac-Man? Seriously? Funny to see Yars' Revenge misspelled as well. As Curt also pointed out, their understanding of the bankruptcy, the IP, and what's actually going on is waaaaay off. This is coming off more like a publicity stunt for their handheld.

Someone else is trying for a publicity stunt for their handheld now: http://www.fundable.com/reset-atari $250,000 won't come anywhere near the cost of buying the brand and IP (we're talking millions), the history on the page is laughable, most of the titles listed the current Atari does not own (Pitfall? Pac-Man?), and the financial info is completely wrong. It really saddens me seeing stuff like this.

Yes, it's fake. That's a poor photoshop job done as a joke.

Al hasn't come up in a while. Consequently, I don't think he believes the show is as big as it is.

While we're certainly full of as many happy memories, and could probably be considered groupies as well, with this it was all business. Your video was a different format, more of a "let's get everyone together and tell their stories and capture it on video." An oral history. Ours is a research style effort. With so many conflicting (and in some cases self-serving) stories over the years, we set out purely to get as accurate a telling as possible and to let everyone have an equal voice this time around (which is why we don't center the story of Atari around Nolan like previous efforts have). That meant having to seriously critique and pour over material, trying to crossreference as much as possible to weed things out. i.e. if something sounded a bit different or way out there, such as Kassar's claim that he met with Steve Jobs to buy Apple, if we couldn't get anyone else to do a blind (as in not leading them) confirmation then we left it out. A lot of times that meant when we had conflicting info from two different interviews with people, we had to go back again to both of them and get them to confirm, deny, or elaborate the conflicting info until Curt and I were satisfied. Such as when Al Alcorn's recent IEEE article on PONG (specifically the portion on the home version) conflicted with what Harold Lee stated about his time at Atari and how he got involved with PONG-on-a-chip, we got them both together in email and put both versions on the table. Presented with Harold's rememberances, Al stated "I agree with what Harold said," basically invalidating his recounting in the IEEE article. This was a pretty common process throughout. In cases where we couldn't corroborate but the telling and details were way too detailed to not be believable, we retold it with an "according to..." Another example is Nolan's claim here: Where Nolan is talking about with tying up N-channel chip (NMOS) manufacturers, and mentiones a strategy of locking up the 5 manufacturers by doing deals with all of them and continually making small changes to keep them locked with Atari. Both Al Alcorn and Steve Bristow said that never happened, and that the reson for going to different manufacturers like they did was very simple ones: A) get more capacity and b) provide insurance in case any one vendor had a problem and could not deliver. Steve also said (verbatim), "Obviously Atari did not lock up the capacity to the extent that RCA, Magnavox, and Fairchild could not get parts. TI and GI were selling to all comers and had capacity. I also do not recall that any tweaks were done just to keep the design changing. I did run the IC design function as part of my job at one point and the work we were doing was more focused on delivering new product and improvements to improve yield for the existing designs. The priority was new product, not just tweaking a design to do ????" Steve and Al described it as Nolan "waxing philosophical," which is a term we ran across a lot with the people who worked directly with Nolan. It basically means that he's looking back and embellishing things to make them sound more grand (what Steve also humorously described as a "retrospective plan"). Needing to weed through Nolan's past commentary like this was pretty common, we simply couldn't take anything at face value because it more often than not turned out to be a situation like this. During the initial interviews, we may have had specific things we wanted to cover or questions answered, and for the most part would let them talk about what they wanted based on our general questions and then steer the conversations to the specifics we wanted answered. But we were always very careful never to "lead the witness" during that initial interview. It was magick when someone would mention a specific new detail and then during an interview with someone else that worked with them, they corroborated it without being directly asked about it. There's also a lot of other stuff that didn't make it into the book (overly risque stories, damaging info, etc.) That simply wasn't the goal of this book.

It's not worth it to fix it, replacements are cheap enough: http://www.myatari.com/atarixlh.txt PRA002 KEYBOARD 400 MEMBRANE 25.00

There just wasn't enough room with all the material and stories we knew we had to make sure were in there. We're going to work that and Atarisoft into the next book - though Jack doesn't really have much to do with Swordquest, Warner had shut that down. He was human, and that's what we tried to show. The reality is he was a kid with a vision that produced a company that started growing dramatically - far beyond what he had the experience or insite to run. Maybe he'd do some things differently now, maybe he wouldn't. Too much of the covered past history regarding the company did very little coverage of that human dynamic, the relationships and interactions. They also took everything he had to say at face value as "the way it was" instead of getting the viewpoints and stories of everyone involved to crosscheck and find what he was saying was on the money, what was not, and what lay somewhere in the middle (where the truth often lies). That lead to credit not being given where credit was due for others, which is what we also hoped to rectify. Where Nolan truly shined and deserved all the credit, we heaped praise. Where he had long told something else that turned out not to be the case, or was seriously in question (where we made sure to include for instance "According to Ted"), we also clarified that. Some have taken this as being negative towards him, some have not. We're very happy with the end result in this issue though and consider it as neutral as it could possibly be given the task of needing to present as many possible sides for the first time and contrasting against what had previously been told. We asked Nolan point blank about his interaction with Ted towards the end of their partnership. He stated verbatim "It was just business, not personal." LOL, love that one too.

Just received a short but sweet five star review from noted "Ultimate History Of Video Games" author Steven L. Kent on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Mr-Curt-Vendel/product-reviews/0985597402/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_recent?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Just received a short but sweet five star review from noted "Ultimate History Of Video Games" author Steven L. Kent on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Atari-Inc-Mr-Curt-Vendel/product-reviews/0985597402/ref=cm_cr_pr_top_recent?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

I'm sorry, but I think you're confusing what you personally may have heard or not heard about the legend with what the actual legend is. That is not one in the same. In books, http://books.google....ved=0CDwQ6AEwAw http://books.google....o atari&f=false http://books.google....ved=0CF4Q6AEwCA And news, http://nl.newsbank.c...ackval=GooglePM http://news.google.c...ew mexico&hl=en http://www.nytimes.c...5hero.html?_r=0 It's always been about the Alamogordo, New Mexico dumping. We simply did not pull that out of the air, and there's an entire thread of people here on Atari Age that's been around for years discussing just thd topic of this dumping. No, it simply is not. Atari specifically burrying millions of E.T.s in Alamagordo because it was a bad game vs. Atari emptying most of it's stock across warehouses (of many games including E.T.) because they had too much stock and burrying them in Sunnyvale is hardly semantics. Not true, the fact that academia was making games on early mainframe displays (including XY displays) is more than documented. It was in no way, shape or form a progenitor to PONG. And that's exactly what I meant by it being an isolated one off. There is absolutely no direct link between Tennis for Two and the Odyssey's Tennis or Atari's PONG. Progenitor means "A person or thing from which a person, animal, or plant is descended or originates; an ancestor or parent." Neither of the two games mentioned are descendants, there is no direct connection or influence. Tennis For Two literally had zero influence on the industry or it's creation. It is precisely because of this fast and loose playing with the facts, such as with the NY Times article you cited which is just a Brookehaven PR piece, that historians such as myself remain vigilant on the issue. I repeat again, no direct link, no matter how much Brookhaven has tried to promote as such in recent years or apply the pop culture definition of "video game" in hindsite (which comes off as rather unscientific for a science lab). How is evidence settled out of court? As I stated, in every case it was brought up as prior work to try and invalidate Sanders/Magnavox's position (and there were many cases over three decades), Tennis For Two was thrown out because of what I mentioned in the previous post, it's technology had no bearing (it involved zero video technology) and even then it's lack of use of user controlled objects did not show prior work to invalidate the rest of the video game patents in question. I think you're confusing the lawsuits, (the first of which is covered in the book - Sanders/Magnavox vs. Atari/Midway/et al.) with the fact that Tennis For Two was brought in as evidence during those lawsuits as prior work. Atari/Midway/etc. were all trying to collectively invalidate Sanders' (Ralph & company's) landmark patents in order not to have to license from Magnavox. Atari wound up dropping out and settling out of court by going through with the license, the others wound up loosing the case. Likewise in every subsequent case over the next two decades (Magnavox vs. Midway again, Magnavox Vs. Nintendo, and more) each time Tennis For Two was also invalidated as prior work for the same reasons stated. Obscurity exactly means irrelevance when talking about any sort of relationship the game had to said games: PONG and/or the Odyssey's Tennis game. If we were doing a generic video game history book and said the earliest known electronic tennis game was Tennis For Two, then certainly. If you expanded that to some how imply that it then had some connection to PONG beyond both just being electronic representations of a tennis game, you would be 100% historically inaccurate. Regardless, I'm glad you enjoyed the book and feel free to help out with the community sourced book index project we're doing.

Thanks for the review and your thoughts, just a few comments on a couple of your points - The myth that has been presented for years was that they were all gathered up and buried in the desert in Alamagordo. How is clearing up that they weren't buried in the desert in Alamagordo and what was actually buried there and why not debunking that myth? The book treats what Dabney and Bushnell were doing for VIDEO control in 1969 as revolutionary. CRT != Video. People were using XY monitors and oscilliscopes for direct displays long before Higginbotham as well. The "video" in video games comes from the use of a standard raster TV set and it's video input, something not present in XY monitors and oscilliscopes. Video is defined as "relating to the transmission or reception of a televised image" or "the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion." Or as Webster's defines it - "video (adjective): being, relating to, or used in the transmission or reception of the television image" and "being, relating to, or involving images on a television screen or computer display" (raster computer displays using the same raster or pixel process). A video signal represents an encoding and transmission process of pixels to reproduce, i.e. rasters. The confusion in this case arises that both raster and vector use a CRT, however a CRT does not imply display method or a transmission signal. A vector driven CRT or oscilliscope is not a video display - there is no video signal present, nor signal decoding to generate an image. Rather instead it uses a direct control of the CRT's beam by the computer or electronic device (in the case of an oscilliscope) to generate images like an etch-a-sketch, or what is traditionally called an XY Monitor or "Random Scan" display. Ralph Baer was the pioneer of video technology for gaming purposes, and of course for home gaming purposes. Ted and Nolan independently developed their same technology at a later date, and were the pioneers of it's use in coin-ops. William Higginbotham had zero influence on the people involved, and thruthfully almost no influence in video game history. He did an isolated one off display that nobody would have heard of had it not been later drawn into court as prior work (and summarily dismissed as such because it did not represent prior use of that technology). As such it would have served no purpose to mention him in the book, and would have been unrelated trivia at best. We interviewed both sides extensively about the meeting (Kassar and all the 2600 programmers - who all left at different times and did not summarily leave to form Activision), and it went down as we said. Their reasons for the meeting and then later leaving were a mixture of what they felt was unfair payment and credit. What you've most likely heard or are confusing is the repeated overgeneralization by books and media over the years, because the credit part is simply a better story. The promised royalties were a common theme for everyone we talked to, not just the Activision guys, and if you were less familiar with that aspect of the story then we did our job exposing you to it. Our goals with stories such as these were to "even them out" and portray them in a more realistic and factual light with all the details present vs. just glossing over in a one sided manner like has been routinely done with much of Atari's history in the past. Thanks! We've started on book 2. You and everyone will be able to regular blog updates at our newly relaunched website (http://ataribook.com). Likewise, many of the typos and other mistakes from book 1 have already been fixed for a future revision.

2-XL came out the year after the 2600. As far as tapes vs. cartridges, they were routinely advertised and referred to as tapes at the time as well: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/200550-cloak-dagger/page__st__25#entry2605022

Since that time it's become more apparent it's just a temporary bandaid to keep things functioning during bankruptcy. It looks like everything is still going to go up for sale, and the major pieces (now including Chesnais) are just positioning themselves to make money on the exit.

Well, I can't say much about it, but we may be involved with a certain Atari alumni's book on the designing and creation of the 400/800 PCS.

Keep in mind, the 3-4 months is also because this is all a part time venture for us. I have a regular day job The whole thing was a learning process really, because of the accelerated time frame the layout and editing stages significantly overlapped. So a lot of times I was applying significant edits to already laid out pages. And then there was the mad dash at the last minute to cut/merge a 100 pages (we were at 900) because we discovered CreateSpace's page limit is 820 pages. Just insane around the clock work for me (luckily I was unemployed at the time and could work on it full time).

A) This is laid out in inDesign, anything indexed in the original Word chapter files would be irrelevant to that. B) Index programs (such as a decent one we also purchased) work off of keywords (which is how we generated the work in progress index at the link above). They can't intelligently group subject matter like a normal index. That's usually done by hand, and with an 800 page book, as stated it would have taken too long. Not to mention the complication of edits and revisions going on continually up until the very last minute.

I think you're confused, I said we're creating it that way - i.e. working on it that way. It's not going to stay "wikipedia" style in it's final version, it'll be located on our website and available as supplemental material as a lot of books do. I'm not sure how they're irrelevant, those are all people talked about in the book. But you're entitled to your opinion, others haven't agreed and actually were very happy to see the material. We certainly appreciate that. Thanks, but I have no idea who you are and this book is a partnership (50/50). As such I was simply addressing some of the points you mentioned and provided explanations - which as partner in the book I'm allowed to do as well. I don't believe anyone was saying you don't have the right to criticize. Yes, we both worked very hard in resources and interviews. Very happy on how it all turned out, and we're working on book 2 right now.

Just a correction to my earlier post - Curt and I were looking into things all day and discussing it further and Fred buying out Blue Bay's shares doesn't actually get Atari out of bankruptcy or stop the auction. It's just changing the players at the table.

Well, the worst possible thing that could have happened to the brand has happened: http://www.4-traders.com/ATARI-2168735/news/ATARI-SA-announces-new-shareholders-to-replace-BlueBay-Funds-16009769/ Curt summed it up nicely on Facebook - So Atari SA has been taken over by the lowest piece of garbage in the industry - Frederic Chesnais... this is the same two-bit cheapskate swindler who reneg'd on paying the engineering and design costs for the Gene Simmons Axe guitar controller several years back. So now the slime ball has pulled some dirty insider moves with his old pals in France and now Atari stays with the incompetent and arrogant people that dragged it into the gutter in the first place. Atari is dead beyond dead!!!

The myth of Activision was organized around that, however the reality of what happened has blow way out of proportion. Ray did not consider these guys disposable. The issue was one of greater credit and money than they were then currently getting. Ray's position was that while he valued what they did, there were a lot of people who were also very involved in getting the final product out - including artists, all the people involved in manufacturing, the marketers, etc, which is why he couldn't see giving in to their demands. There was no towel designer comment during the meeting. We interviewed both sides (both Ray and the Activision guys) for the book and have the full story in there. Now where they had a legitimate gripe was in Warner playing Hollywood accounting games with earned royalties, factoring in the cost of development to significantly cut down claimed earnings. But then there also was the huge drop in earnings on the 2600 that '78 as well. So again, it goes back and forth.

The lack of index was not just a page count issue, it was also a time issue. As this is self-published, it would have taken us another 3-4 months to sit and go through everything to put one together. Too many people were complaining about how long it was taking as it was. Likewise, many first editions of these types of books have not had indexes either, they're often added in a later revision. We are in the process of putting together an index to be available via our website (ataribook.com). We are also trying to take a unique approach with it by crowdsourcing it, so everyone is invited to participate: https://revisionator...dC9WX47cU7/view ?? All sub-chapters are summarized in the table of contents at the beginning of the book. In the case of your example above, it is listed under Chapter 7, which is summarized as "Chess, Coin expansion and a mass exit to the beach." Those directly correlate to the titles of said sub-chapters, "How About A Nice Game Of Chess?", "Flip Side Of the Coin" and "The Beach Clause." Simply listing the chapter titles would have had people complaining about there not being a summary, and there simply was not room for both. Regardless, thanks for the review and we hope you enjoyed the book.