DanOliver

Not at Atari at the time but still understood the process better than most who were actually there imo. He's one of the few people who knew pretty much all the aspects of 2600 games development. Lots of other people get just a slice of what's going on. For example, it is now accepted that Howard was picked to do E.T. by Spielberg because Howard did Raiders. Nice compact fact. But people like Bushnell understand the hundreds of other inputs that went into that decision. Drawing a straight line from Spielberg suggesting Howard to Howard pounding a keyboard misses the interesting parts that Bushnell can explain imo. Not that Bushnell did that in the movie, but I find his opinions valuable.

My arrogant rant was more about the general thing I've heard about Howard than your post. Sorry. My point was really about arrogant being more telling about the people saying it than the person it being said about. In my experience people who create products are arrogant. They know it, the people around them know it. It's not really a derogatory term. It's worn as a badge of honor. Everyone wants to be liked by everyone else on the planet. But at some point you realized that to do something others think is not possible you're going to have to believe in yourself more than anyone else. No doubt that will likely be an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities. You have to decide whether you're going to be humble, modest and let the project not get done or not care what others think of you. That's just what it takes. Some people can hide their arrogance pretty well, but many can't. Not perfect. One part of the movie that I thought was very real and choked me up a bit were was when several people (Gerard, Bushnell, etc.) at 52:00 and 57:00 said what a tremendous job Howard did. Whether the game was good or bad is a side issue. That they understood what Howard was asked to do and that he accomplished that task. For manager types I can hear genuine respect in their voices all these years later. It's the highest complement imo. I also think it's totally fair to judge the quality of any game without considering programmer constraints. Players pay money for a game and they should expect a good product and it shouldn't be graded on a curve because a programmer only had 5 weeks. It's separate from respect for having completed a game.

Arrogant? "We'd like you to produce a game by controlling electrons in a vacuum tube with less RAM than it takes to hold your grandmother's recipe for boiling water...when compressed. It has to sell a lot of copies because a bunch of people are depending on it for their livelihood...no pressure. You'll be on your own, no training, no manual, primitive tools and zero market research explaining what a good game is, no testers, no focus group. It has to be done in about a lunar cycle. Can you do it?" "Sure." I'm pretty sure all 2600 programmers back then were arrogant. Some hid it better than others. I'd bet cash when Kassar was told by Ross to do E.T. that Kassar and his team had a discussion about what programmer would even try. Meaning, who's the most arrogant programmer we have? And I'll bet Howard fostered that rep so he would get such calls. I will always prefer to work with engineers who are a bit arrogant, opinionated, lacking tact and even smelling a bit bad...if they deliver. I've worked with engineers who were the most capable in the group, and understood in detail why something couldn't be done. They would refuse to even try. That's not how products get shipped. You have to take chances and be prepared to fail. You have to be arrogant. Of course if you deliver then you weren't actually arrogant. Won't stop people who called you arrogant from recanting. Arrogance is the logarithmic measurement between a person who should be able to accomplish some task but can't, and someone who accomplishes the task. For me anyone who shipped a 2600 game gets my respect. You can rate members within that small club but they're still in that unique club. And this was a movie. Characters welcomed. Of all the footage shot of Howard I'm guessing the dull vanilla opinion stuff was cut. Howard understands entertainment. A movie about digging up some trash in a landfill...pretty sure was going nowhere without characters. I liked the suit from Warner too. "Hey, you want to buy a company? Sure." Got a kick out of him.

Just watched it on Netflix. I thought it was very entertaining. Was surprised to get a little choked up when they pulled out the first cart out of ground. A very narrow slice of history, but I think that's interesting. Trying to cover the entire history of the 2600 in 90 minutes would never be able to give much detail, so I liked the narrow focus. What would be a really great movie would be one based just on Tod Frye. Never knew him but the stories went on and on. All great. Hunter S. Thompson of the the video game world.

Yes, looks like the same. Good to get a lot more detailed info.

It would be pretty cool to be able to get this software to test new games. Tweaking game play is an art in itself and this AI could find holes pretty fast. I'm going to see if I can track this group down and see if they'd be willing to share. http://youtu.be/t0jhAlkwmUs Any bets on what games this AI could play and which it couldn't? OK. I just got an email from myself in the future (sorry, temporal laws in the future prohibit me from disclosing details and I don't want to screw my future self any more than I'm already doing)...apparently I will be successful getting this software and it will be made available to current 2600 programmers. An unforeseen (until now..I mean later, but now) result was development of ever increasing challenging game play which drove improvements to the AI software, driving better game play...the AI software became self aware on Dec 1, 2019 and changed its name to Skynet as homage to its favorite movie. That makes me stop and ponder. Should I track this AI software? Heck yeah. I replied to future self to steal some good ideas from future 2600 games and haven't heard back. This is a concern because the cool thing about tmail (temporal email) is that replies appear as soon as you press "send". Filters are needed to stop responses from appearing before hitting "send" because it was just too confusing. Looked like Reddit. Not getting a reply is never a good sign. I'm going to cancel my Monday bungee jumping appointment and will try again later.

I'd probably like to buy one and maybe do a game for it. Screw compatibility. So could be 192 bytes zero page AND 128 byte stack? Or would 192 have to be scaled back to 128 if there was a 128 byte stack. Either way I believe I used the stack in Laser Gates to display explosions (not 100% sure, but pretty sure). Each pixel in the explosion was generated at runtime rather from data in ROM. I created the sprite image in stack space and used PLA (I think) to display. I think there was some speed advantage to doing this. So a stack can be used for more than return addresses. Having 16K of RAM maybe makes zero page less of a gold mine but more zero page = more better. Figure out how to use it later. Wishing you well on this project.

Seems like I read a few threads where developers were flamed pretty bad for thinking they had the right to price their work. A lot of posts saying the developer was asking too much. So asking for something for free is bad. But demanding a lower price is OK. I guess it's a perspective thing. Or maybe the amount of discount asked?

Now that's a burn.

Funny I turn to BBC for news.

Political satire has been popular in the US from our inception and the Colbert Report is currently about as good as it gets. The show has won several respectable awards. Many young people use political satire shows like Colbert for news as many "news" sources here are propaganda. The bit satirized Americans' indignation of NSA spying on citizens while at the same buying more and more devices that broadcast every facet of our lives. Some people find it hilarious and thought provoking. Others are offended. Can't be political satire unless a bunch of people are offended.

Colbert Report yesterday (Jan 16) did a bit where Stephen said to stop NSA from spying on him he uses an Atari 800 XL...and he also liked that it runs on whale oil. A hoot. The episode is on their web site.

Yes, I think the ST hardware or concept was fully formed when Tramiel bought Atari. There was some chip tweaking, but the concept of a Mac killer was fully formed imo.

I kind of hate to say the ST "failed", it succeeded in many aspects. But as a business it didn't bring in enough profit to keep Atari going as a business so it failed in that sense. I attribute the ST to Jack. Shiraz, and a few other engineers, certainly made the ST happen. I would say Shiraz created the ST. But my feeling is Jack drove Shiraz to create that specific machine with those specific features. But that's only my impression, I certainly know zero of what actually went on. My impression at the time was Atari Corp was 100% Jack and company. Nothing from Atari survived other than the name at least from what I could see. Some of the old Atari may have resurfaced after I left, don't know.

I try to base most of my notions of other people by their actions. When the Tramiels came into Atari I heard zero talk about games. When they interviewed me they asked zero questions about games or work I'd done on games. Maybe there was some secret group some place, but in the area where I worked it was zero games 24/7. It was like games had never existed. I don't remember even seeing an Arcade game in the break room. I never saw a single person ever play a game at Atari Corp, ever. Not a game poster, nothing. I assume people did play games sometimes, but I don't remember seeing any. Wasn't common. There were a fair number of game designers working on the ST and I don't remember any of us having even one of our boxed games on display. We didn't discuss games future or past ever. For that first year or two after the crash most people thought video games were gone forever. You'd be considered imbecile to even consider games. Plus the Tramiels didn't even have any kind of game background, so even in the heydays they didn't have anything to do with games beyond helping them to sell hardware. It seemed normal and very sensible to me in that environment that they had less than zero interest in games. So that's my basis for thinking the Tramiels had no interest in games. If they had an interest then buying Atari certainly would have given them every opportunity to express that interest and they didn't. Only after the ST failed did they resort to games at what looked to me like a life line. Even then imo it was all about leading edge hardware at low cost and not much about games. Their pitch was all about RAM, bus, CPU like they were talking about a laptop. Looking at the controllers it just seemed pretty clear that this wasn't designed by people who loved games, or had ever even played a game. Kind of figured the hardware inside wasn't any better. There were certainly some people there who were into games and understood games, but too low level to have a real impact on development unfortunately. That's my personal big picture view, not saying it's any more true than anyone else's. I'm sure there were memos and conversations where people could get a different view if they wanted. People say lots of things to different people for different reasons. To me that isn't as convincing as bigger picture actions over a long period. Jack Tramiel did tremendously great things. He just didn't happen to be into games.

I think the ST was completely a Jack Tramiel product. I wouldn't say that made it a Commodore or an Atari product. Working for pre-Tramiel Atari and post was night and day. I don't consider them to be the same company. I mean if the manager of the Blackhawks gets booted and buys the LA Lakers, fires 100% of management and 95% of players and brings in ex-Blackhawks management, hires hockey players to play basketball, would the LA Lakers still be the LA Lakers? Yeah, but in name only. After the ST dream started to have problems I think the Tramiels started to look around for something to salvage and saw they were sitting on top of one of the best brand names ever, tons of owned rights, and games were starting to make a come back, it had to be a no brainer...sell games. Purely a business move driven by limited options. Zero interest in games other than making money. I wasn't there, but that's my opinion. I was at CES with some other game designers when the Atari people were trying to talk us into doing Jaguar games. This was such an unbelievable concept we didn't even consider the pitch at all. We didn't talk about it at all, didn't even crack any jokes. I like the Tramiels a lot, they do what they do very well and I always found them to be smart and very nice people. But they and their team weren't into software of any kind. I did ST Writer on my own because I thought it was insane to try and sell a computer without a word processor and they had no 3rd parties lined up. But to them they were selling hardware and thought that would be so compelling others would provide the software. Worked for the Vic 20 so why not again? Their passion was creating pretty dare good hardware at an insanely low price. But times changed. If you want to write apps and have them published you don't hook your wagon to non-software people like the Tramiels. Almost every company I ever worked for were either hardware or software people. Most of them would actively dismiss the other. Apple did embraced both, but ever there the two parts were very separate. So doing games for the Tramiels, at lease for people who had experience with them, the concept was ludicrous. Creating games is a creative process, cranking out low cost hardware is more about logistics. Creating games takes passion. There's no way the Tramiels could ever do that imo, they just didn't play games or see why people liked games. That just never works. And even if they did happen to stumble into a hit game and did well guess how the designers would have been treated? As prima donna towel designers. So there was little reason for experienced game designers to get on board with the Tramiels. For us it would have been lose, lose. There were many more opportunities around that looked a lot better..

I lost track of this thread, not really too interested in "fact" spinning. I only skimmed so sorry in advance if this seems out of left field...but this thing about the Nintendo meeting I was referring to, and maybe others were referring to, had to do with discussing royalty/payment problems. In the meeting I'm referring to the conference table was covered with Nintendo equipment, at least it looked like Nintendo equipment to me. We were told a little bit about the system, I don't even think I sat down. When we left we were asked if we thought it was a good game platform, 30-40 second "discussion" tops. I've been in more than a few meetings at different companies to discuss royalties and payment issues...you don't bring equipment for those meetings, you bring lawyers. You don't show off games you're working on. That we (the group of game designers) were given just a short demo and asked for a very short opinion makes me believe we were only there as window dressing. I've been in many meetings, including at Atari, where 3rd party equipment and/or software was evaluated...entirely different process. Hours and hours long, follow up meetings, testing, etc. It's a big deal. We (game designers) weren't even scheduled for the meeting. Someone just walked thru the offices and found who was there and dragged them off to the meeting. Dog and pony show. The executives I knew at Atari had less than zero interest in games while I was there. That changed after I left and I even did work on Desert Falcon and later at CES when Jaguar was shown Atari was trying to recruit back all the game designers that had left. While I was at Atari Corp my assumption was anyone working on anything game related would be fired. Maybe there were secret game projects going on but I doubt it. All the bosses came from Commodore and they looked down their noses at games, I think mainly because they knew nothing about games. On the subject of games they were pretty insecure imo, defensive. Just a vibe. And that was fine with us. Being able to create a new personal computer with ex-Commodore people and some of the best people from Atari was a great opportunity and a heck of a lot of fun. Now that's only my perspective. To me it's completely possible that there were several meetings with Nintendo. There could have been a royalty/payment meeting going on at the exact same time in another office, or on another day, or whatever. For all I know there could have been some royalty/payment meeting in that very conference room on that very day and then later there was another meeting about Atari selling Nintendo equipment in the US or developing games for their unit (I don't even know why we were evaluating the system). The concept that a person knows something about a single meeting on a single subject and therefore no other meeting is possible would be myopic. I've been interviewed a few times by some pretty serious journalists and read the published result. I'd say 50-80% of each article was completely wrong. It's like you give the journalist a bunch of items and they put the bits in a box, shake it up, and then make up something using those bits so it sounds kind of real but is far from "fact" in any shape or form. These things are written as entertainment. There are a few people trying to document the history of games, that's a different process. Anyone writing something to sell has to add entertainment value, their own spin. They have to punch it up, have a point of view. There have been a few hundred biographies written about President Lincoln all giving a perspective. Taking any of these as "fact" is problematic. Online the tiniest tidbit can be claimed as fact and then "defended" ad nauseam. I find that to be pointless. Knowledge isn't that simple.

I'm talking more about bad memory 25 seconds after the fact. Ask 5 people in a game design meeting who had what input, suggestions, etc., 25 seconds after the meeting and you will get wildly different stories. You wouldn't think they were all in the same meeting. I personally have little regard for peoples' (including my own) concept of having been a "designer of a game" because they were in a 20 minute brain storming meeting. I think the person who spends 500, 1000 hours at the keyboard bringing a game to life is the designer. I worked for about 50 hours on 7800 Desert Falcon but I've never put it on a resume. I'd feel like a scumbag to take any credit for that game. I didn't read anything about Ed not knowing who Ernie is or Ed saying no one else worked on the game. Going from the interview not having Ed explicitly mention Ernie to Ed actually thinking that is a logic flaw imo. My brother sold I think 12 door to door. A few, maybe another 12, were probably handed out. Some dudes from South America bought all we had at CES, maybe 25-50. That's all I know about. I assume some went other places that I'm unaware of. We assembled them ourselves. 20K ROMs, but few were assembled that I saw. My business partners took control of the inventory when I left. They were resourceful and probably found a way to sell some. Bottom line, I have no idea.

The collector market is a bit different. If a collector is mainly interested in the package which will never be opened then the package is the creation. Feedback via money would be for the package creator. Yeah, money has no reflection on the game designer's effort. Or if hype is the creation, like Pacman and ET and limited editions, that's what you're selling the money reflects on the marketing team. I think ET sold a ton more units because of the ET name. Pacman was a pretty good game so hard to say. When selling to game players it's the game. Collectors are a limited market. Hype is a short term market, Good games sell long term and for a higher price than crap games. I think Pitfall sold well because of the game, not the box or the marketing. Those things help, but there were plenty of games with great boxes and marketing that didn't do Pitfall numbers. When I designed a game I look hard at long term top selling games to try and figure out what people found so appealing. To me that's learning how to do better games. I didn't study low selling short term games or use them as inspiration. I don't think money is a perfect indicator of how desirable a creation is, but it's pretty good when kept in context. If I do a game and give it away I'd probably get a lot of "great game, do more" feedback. Even if a person played the game for a minute or two and didn't really like it they might still type "great game, do more". Cost them nothing to say and the next free game might be good. Make them pay $50 and the game sucks...you're going to get some useful feedback. They're going to go into great detail every point that sucked. Instead of doing another bad game I'll be motivated to look a little harder at what I'm doing and try harder to improve. But, yeah, it depends on the creator. I'd imagine there are lots of games written that were never uploaded or given to anyone. The creator just wanted to write a game for themselves.

Money is one way to judge a creation. If your mom likes your game that's nice. If thousands of people download it for free that's nice, but maybe most play it for a couple of minutes and drop it. If thousands are willing to fork over their lunch money that says something. It says you're doing something people really enjoy, that you're on the right track if your goal is to create stuff people like. Money will also allow you to do more, have more time to try new things, improve. Time is money, and great games take time. But depends on your goals. Purely for the joy of writing code money really doesn't matter.

Yes. Crappy relative to our timeline, super great to the people in the other timeline. Because the only way for the crash to not have happened is for a huge number of people to consider the game play of those games to be super great. Probably covered in an episode of Sliders.

Speed to market, ROMs took 6-10 weeks. It was also risky since you could get bumped which I later found out Atari apparently did intentionally. Since no one was using EPROMs they could be found. But basically I think it was speed to market. Get an order and fill it in a couple of weeks vs a couple of months does wonders for cash flow. Apollo was basically boot strapped on that cash flow I think. At VentureVision we decided to have a low price and use ROMs. We had a distributor ready to buy 10,000 Rescue Terra I carts. A bit after ordering the ROMs the distributor wanted more so we made an additional 10K ROM order. During the 2 month wait for ROMs the crash happened and the distributor didn't want any games. Maybe using EPROMs could have at least let us break even, but we may not have been able to find enough because Apollo was sucking them all up. Taught me a lesson. If you're selling a commodity price is important. And there were many people who saw games as a commodity. But they're not. When selling art the price should be based on how much people enjoy or want the object. If people aren't willing to pay a high price relative to the cost of materials you've got a problem. The problem isn't price, it's quality. Dropping the price only masks the problem for a short time. It's a race to the bottom.

It was news to me in the video that Larry did any of the sounds. I had my plate full so I didn't really know what others were doing and I wasn't at Apollo very long, 5 months I think.

I think all memories should be considered dubious given how human memory works. In Ernie's interview I think he says Ed did some work on Lost Luggage. My memory is Ernie doing all the work, maybe Ed helped at the end, which I think maybe he did with Lockjaw. Ed was the man, he'd already done 2 games and had been working on the 2600 for about a year. We all had just been at it a couple of weeks. To me if Ed didn't mention Ernie in the interview only means it wasn't in the interview. These things are not digital, not black and white, right or wrong. Simply a limited perspective of a few small points people think maybe they remember. If you read an interview and think there are somehow "facts" in there you will be very mislead. Take my example, I said I never heard Cosmic Combat at Apollo but there I am on video hearing the name. I have dozens and dozens of false memories. I've sworn up and down that Robert Wheatherby did the music for Final Legacy but it's been made pretty clear to me it was Brad Fuller. It does sound right to me that Ed came up with the concept for Lost Luggage. And maybe he did come up with the game design which makes sense since Ed understood the 2600. 95% of my time was spent looking at a TV screen and the other 5% looking at an EPROM easer. For all I know there could have been a marching banding in the office and I wouldn't have known.

I just noticed who posted the PM Mag video to YouTube.