lazzeri

I´ve read an interview with Mr. Van Ryzin on Digital Press recently. He said that his first game for Activision was "Cosmic Commuter" but it wasn´t published because it didn´t was good enough (his words). Only then he made H.E.R.O. Only when the US market collapsed Activision released Cosmic Commuter to grab some quick cash. My point is: Maybe A LOT of above-average games were ditched back in the day because even been great they were not "Activision Quality". So HH might even be a very nice first attempt from someone who got axed later on. I´ve asked him for an interview two weeks ago. He never answered. Here´s the interview: http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_john_van_ryzin.html Here´s a very interesting quote from it: DP: Where there any other 2600 games that you did that were never released? There was talk about some unreleased games by Activision, and little is known about them. I’ve talked to some other Activision programmers… supposedly Zenji was going to be released. Do you know of any games that were close to completion, but where never released? John Van Ryzin: Yes, there was a lot of that. You’d be amazed by how much of that happened. In the peak of the Atari 2600 days, Activision was very concerned about their image. They would only release games that were really good. If a game didn’t live up to their reputation, Activision had no desire to release it. Cosmic Commuter is a perfect example. I finished that game in the peak of the industry, when the 2600 was really hot stuff. Activision felt that it didn’t measure up. They decided not to release it then. That was really disappointing for me – I finally got a job with this big, successful company. I write a game, work like crazy to do it, get to the end, and then they decide that they don’t want to publish it! It probably took me nine months to write that game. So then I wrote HERO. They thought HERO did measure up and they released it. Six months to a year later, they decide to release Cosmic Commuter. There were lots of games that the company was not thrilled with. Activision opened up a number of design centers where all the people who worked there wrote games. Then Activision would say that they didn’t like any of the games. Those games were not released, and then the design center would be shut down. There were some guys from the Boston design center that wrote a couple of games that were pretty good, and Activision never released them. I only wrote two for the 2600.

Thank you!

Thank you, I'll hold on that hope. I do have Pac Man, I was lucky to gather buyers enough to convince e5frog to make a 2nd run. You joined us on that, didn't you?

Standard protector worked just fine for me!

Yeah, I´m training my mind for that moment. About a month ago one showed up on eBay so now at least I have an idea of how much its worth these days. And I´ve kicked myself twice in the head for letting it go.

Looking for the following paperwork. PM if you have a spare! - MANUALS: Dragonstomper (Starpath) Ghostbusters II (Salu) King Kong (Tigervision) Spacechase (Apollo) EARLY MODEL MANUAL - CATALOGS: Data Age (both models) M Network Thank you!

BUMP! Looking for complete (box + manual) games. Anyone?

BUMP! So apparently I´m "only" missing Checkers now. Anyone with a spare ? If someone has one for sale please PM me. Serious buyer here.

That´s probably the funniest thing on growing up in a place were piracy was - basically- legal and state-sanctioned: USA rarity guides don´t mean that much for us. For example: X-man, a R9 game, was an extremely common cart down here. Probably half the kids had their pirated copy. HERO is another incredible common game. So is Condor Attack, or Halloween (most of the times sold as "Friday the 13th". Don´t ask... ). On the other hand, some early Atari games were REALLY hard to come by. I´ve never seen a Brazilian "Casino" (R1). Same goes to Blackjack (R2), and a lot of those.

I´m slowly and painfully photographing and cataloguing my collection, one system at a time. A few systems already done. I´m currently working on A2600 - still need to sort loose carts and, basically, my entire Brazilian collection. *sigh*. Quite a few systems to go. Some of them will be a pain (400+ MSX games, complete Brazilian Odyssey set, A5200, INTV). But it´s been great fun. http://www.lazzeri.online/vg/

I don´t know how helpful this is but I´ve just asked Mr. Steve Cartwright if he ever heard of "Hard Head" since he was an Activision programmer back in ´83. Here´s his answer: " Sorry... never heard of it. It might have been prototype work of one of the external design centers... perhaps New Jersey, LA, or Sacramento."

As soon as it´s ready I´ll let you know!

Hello, I did a (really) short e-mail interview with Mr. Cartwright for a little article I´m writing about "Megamania" for a local magazine. Nothing fancy, six short questions, but you guys might like it. 1- You were the first designer to join the original Activision founders. How did that happened? Did you have previous programming or game development experience? (The end of this answer is going to surprise you.. ) I had gone to college with Dave Crane. He was a semester or 2 ahead of me. After college, Dave got a job at National Semiconductor. When I graduated, he arranged for a job interview in his group at National - so ended up following him to the Bay Area. Now Dave was a big tennis payer - and his doubles partner was a guy named Al Miller. Al worked at a little startup called Atari. Al was a program manager in the arcade game division. Al had one particularly creative designer - but he was also a very difficult employee — impossible to work with — didn't get along with anyone. Not only that, Al discovered this difficult employee was actually paying his friend under the table to do his work for him. So Al fired this employee - and hired his friend Dave to join Atari. Shortly after, the Atari 2600 hit the stores and was a huge success. But Atari was already working on the next generation of products - the Atari 400/800 home computer. But Al was having more problems with employees. A contractor they had hired to do the operating system never delivered (turns out he was working for IBM on the side on the operating system for the first IBM PC) Al & Dave worked 24/7 for a month to write the entire operating system from scratch. After that, they had had enough of Atari and quit to start their own company. They didn’t really know what they wanted to do — but they decided to make some video games in the meantime. That company was - of course Activision. Six months later, Activision was booming - and they needed to expand their design efforts. Of course there really was no such thing as an experienced game designer back then - so Dave suggested to Al that they hire me. If they couldn’t teach me to program - they figured I could do the soldering on the development systems.. Oh by the way… that difficult employee All fired to make room for his friend Dave? None other than Steve Jobs. And the guy Steve Jobs was paying under the table to do his work for him? You guessed it — The Woz. And finally — the contractor that had been hired to do the Atari 400/800 operating system - but never delivered? The one who was working on the operating system for the first IBM PC? Bill Gates, of course… 2- Activision had creative liberty and developer´s recognition as cornerstones. How was the work environment on those first years? Was there a free flow of information and ideas? Did new game ideas get discussed in groups or formal meetings, or did every programmer had full liberty to work in whatever he/she wished, from start to end? Back then, we pretty much made things up as we went along. We took a lot of inspiration from the arcades (I think we went to Chuck E. Cheese 3 times a week) We all sat in a room on stools at work benches. Everyone could see everyone else’s screen. We discussed ideas freely — and everyone had input into everyone else’s game. Nothing was formalized. The business was so new there was really no roadmap to follow. 3- Activision´s "developer´s recognition" policy made the "golden age" game developers public figures. How was that back in the day? Did people recognized you in public places and asked for autographs? And how do you feel today being known all around the world as one of the best game developers of your time and the responsible for games that gave so much players so many great moment? The recognition of the designer was the idea of Jim Levy - Activision’s president. Jim had come from the record business - and thought the designer’s work should be recognized just like a recording artist. As for being recognized in public? Not really. I think the waiter at Chuck E. Cheese recognized us once — but probably only because we were all wearing Activision t-shirts.. We did sign autographs at trade shows — but mostly for sales reps who wanted it for their kids. 4- You developed five of the most influent and praised games of the Atari 2600 Age, three of them (Megamania, Frostbite and Seaquest) frequently listed among the "top ten A2600 games'". Did that crossed your mind back in the day? Have you imagined such a legacy, with your games being played (and re-released) some 35 years after launch? Considering the amount of time and effort what went in to “tuning” the playability of those games - it’s extremely gratifying to hear people say they still hold those 3 particular games in such high regard. Many times I’ve run into people who say something like — “Oh… you worked at the original Activision? Do you remember a game called “Megamania”? (Or Seaquest.. or Frostbite) That’s still my favorite game of all-time!” Of course they’re completely blown away when I tell them it was, in fact, my game.. 5- Megamania took an innovative approach by being a "humorous" shooter with cartoonish enemies instead of the classic "alien invaders". Where did that idea came from? What were your influences? How did the game creation evolved? At the time, the games market was flooded with “space” games. But the company thought we were sitting on something that was a generation ahead of the competition in terms of playability - and we needed some way to make the game stand out. So they decided to try marketing it completely different than other space games. The first title marketing suggested was “Gadzooks!”. We (the designers) loved the idea in general — but felt “Gadzooks” wasn’t quite it. The next idea was “Megamania - A Space Nightmare.” Marketing thought all the enemy ships actually looked like hamburgers, bow ties, tumbling dice, etc. Of course they were originally designed to look like enemy ships — but with 8-but graphics there was only so much I could do.. 6- The VCS extremely limited resources forced game developers to perform "magic tricks" on their code in every game. For instance, the questions i´m sending you use more memory than the games you made. How was it like creating games in such arid conditions? Did you have to gave up a lot of ideas? How was it like to make a game from scratch, developing the idea, graphics, audio and game kernel? It’s true — a screen that takes a few hours today to mock up using Photoshop and Unity used to take month to build pixel-by-pixel… line-by-line. I remember one day in particular - I had been up all night trying to squeeze about 30 bytes out of the Seaquest code to make room for some sound effects. It was a process by which you starred at a computer printout of assembly language and hex codes looking for duplicate bytes… rewriting code segments to save a byte here… another byte there…etc. When I came into work the next day, I said to Dave “there’s only a handful of people in the world who know how hard this”. We both laughed — and still remember that comment to this day because it was so true.

... ouch. http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/302414839354?_mwBanner=1

Thank you guys. :-)

Hi, Since I'm in mid-life crisis and looking for a "me" time without wife or kid; and since that's a little insane but way cheaper than a Porsche... Let's say that I'm willing to book a flight from Brazil to anywere in USA to spend a few days in a classic gaming expo. The best of them all, with lots of things to do and see, people to meet and some vendors to grab interesting stuff from... In that case... Where should I go? Thanks!

Is this real? From BITD? LOL

That's as much history as commented code from BITD. Please share!

Hello, I´ve got a few boxed Atari games who have multilingual text in the back (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese (?) and Spanish). One of them (Vanguard) has an english-only manual and a "standard" cart. I guess it´s NTSC. Another one (Phoenix) has a multilingual manual and a small "P" sticker in the back of the cart, so I guess it´s a PAL release. Is this usual? Also... I´ve got a few shrinkwrapped games with the same multilingual box. Is it possible to know wich ones are NTSC and wich ones are PAL without opening them? Thank you!

Knowing Atari is the Go equivalent to "Checkmate", and that Google has created an AI that beats everyone in that game, I bet it's a Go-playing box that you plug in your TV. Hope it's 4K and HDR!

PM sent, thanks!

That would be amazing. Please let me know if you have it, I'm interested. Thanks!

NECROBUMP Still got those?

BUMP! Anyone?

Amazing!