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Stingray

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Posts posted by Stingray

  1. Posted

    Moycon, you continue to crack me up. I love your super close zoom in shot. I may use that on the landfill page. :)

     

    I finally heard back from the guy I emailed yesterday and he has given me permission to quote him. The entire email is here.

     

    He is John-Michael Battaglia and was the Senior Copy Writer at Atari in 1982 & 1983. The manuals that he did include Football, Space Dungeon, Phoenix, WaterWorld, and Adventure.

     

    Here are a few quotes from the email:

     

    Regarding the dumping of game cartridges, I have no physical evidence about the event myself, but I do recall the essence of the story, or rumor, you guys appear to be discussing. It was a long time ago, but I believe the story to be true.

     

    Actually, I sort of mocked the whole issue of excess inventory in my next job. A week after being laid off by Atari, I went to work for Atari founder Nolan Bushnell as his publicist at Catalyst Technologies, an incubator of prototypes for new high-tech companies. One of the new companies Nolan and his investors were developing was Cumma Technology, which was designed to directly deal with the problem of excess inventories in the game cartridge department by inventing re-writable EPROM cartridges that could be programmed by jukebox devices I dubbed the "MetaWriter."

     

    A Cuttle Cart/ Croco Cart years ahead of it's time! :)

     

    Cumma was one of several other companies who appeared at the Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas the following year to try and come up with a new form of Electronic Distribution of Software. I know, because I co-ordinated the Public Relations for Cumma's presence there. In the process, I developed a brochure to illustrate the concept of the company. You can see the entire brochure on my portfolio web site, where you initially discovered me. The cover of the brochure shows a stressed-out man (modeled by me, representing a retailer of video games) buried almost up to his neck in Atari game cartridge boxes. The headline reads: "No More Inventory Risks, Please."

     

    cumma_brochure_p1_1.jpg

     

    cumma_brochure_p4_1.jpg

     

    I had to use boxes from the game, "Outlaw," at the time, because all the E.T. boxes were vacated, missing, destroyed, and the Outlaws were the only ones I had access to then to make my point. I do know that the game cartridge debacle was on my mind then, however, because I also designed a version of the cover with the illumininated finger of E.T. sticking in one corner of the photograph, but I later opted for the version without that finger protruding in the shot. It was meant to be a direct reference to the problem created by the over-production of game cartridges for the E.T. game, and others, a direct consequence of which, along the new game machines, led to the precipitous fall of Atari.

     

    He also said that he might have the unused E.T. brochure cover in the attic, and will scan it for us if he comes across it.

     

    -S

  3. Posted

    Was just fooling around with google maps. Using the info that I got from that last video that Spud posted, I was able to locate the landfill area very easily. Here's a picture of the landfill pretty well centered. For reference, the grey circular shape toward the top right is the natural gas storage facility that was pointed out on the video. Near the bottom left you can see what surely must be trails made by the ATV & dirt bike riders that the gentlaman in the video referred to.

     

    googlemap.jpg

     

    -S

  4. Posted

    A listing was found for them two hours east of Alamogordo somewhere in Texas. If e-mail fails, that same dude was going to snail mail them to see if it was the same person.

     

    Sorry for the delay, my laptop's hard drive melted down a couple days ago and I just set up an alternate machine this morning. The promised email will be sent when I get home tonight. If I hear back, I'll post to this thread straight away. If I don't, I'll unleash a snail mail volley in the general direction of Texas.

     

    Have you heard anything yet? I started to send a snail mail letter to this person, but I thought I'd check with you first to see if you already did that.

     

    -S

  8. Posted

    It's not that no one understands what you're talking about, just that no one really cares.

     

    People keep arguing with me don't they.

     

    That's because you're deliberatly trying to be offensive. I don't know, nor do I care which handheld outsells the other. I further don't care if the DS is discontinued after xmas. I plan to own both, I plan to own the next Gameboy. I don't care which company does better than the other financially. All I care about is the fact that they both make great handheld video game systems, and games that I want to play.

     

    -S

  11. Posted

    Generally speaking, he seems to have at least some concern about the quality of the projects he's involved in.

     

    And I don't want to hear anything about ...  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. :)

     

    I actually liked that movie. I think I'll wait and hear what Maibock thinks of this game before I buy it though. I've long ago lost all of my faith in EA.

     

    -S

  14. Posted

    Also chanced across a resume for a man who worked at Atari in 1982-1983. Sent him an email asking if he can confirm or deny the landfill story, we'll see if he responds.

     

    I heard back from this guy. I replied asking permission to quote his response, so I don't want to do that until he does get back to me. The essence of it was that he was not there (he was involved in producing manuals so there's no reason why he would have been), but that he did hear the story and believed it to be true.

     

    There's also a fairly amusing twist involved here so I do hope that he gives me permission to quote him.

     

    -S

  15. Posted

    A few hours of near aimless wandering around the wacky wide web (what do you mean I should be working at work?) has produced these tidbits:

     

    Found a 1984 interview with James Morgan. He says in the interview "The excesses of the past are getting purged out of the organization.", but you'd really have to be reading between the lines to see that as a reference to the Alamogordo landfill. It's still an interesting read, particularly given the benefit of hindsight.

     

    Also chanced across a resume for a man who worked at Atari in 1982-1983. Sent him an email asking if he can confirm or deny the landfill story, we'll see if he responds.

     

    I've stumbled across a few vague references to this not being the first time Atari destroyed carts to reduce inventory, but nobody sites sources. Anyone know anything about Atari destroying carts previous to the 1983 entombment? Found this article regarding some of Atari's wasteful behavior.

     

    I'm amazed at how widely the number of carts that were supposed to have been buried fluctuates. I've seen the number sited to be as small as 5000, and as high as 7 million. Nowhere have I seen the number of trucks reported to be higher than 14. I suppose that my calculation of the number of carts being 350,000 might be off by quite a bit, but I just can't see them being able to cram even as many as one million into fourteen truckloads.

     

    I'm ready to drive to New Mexico with a shovel just to put this thing to rest. ;)

     

    -S

  16. Posted

    Not an actual Atari financial report, but I did find this info:

     

    http://www.icwhen.com/book/the_1980s/1983.shtml

     

    FISCAL FINANCIALS  (1983)

     

    Atari, Inc. loses $536 million this year (over $2.06 million every business day) on sales of $1.1 billion. Several thousand employees are laid off. Most of the manufacturing is relocated to Mexico.

     

    SEPTEMBER  (1983)

    On Tuesday, September 6, Mr. James J. Morgan assumes roll as Chairman and CEO of Atari, Inc.. Mr. Morgan was formerly an Executive Vice President of Marketing with Philip Morris USA. One of his immediate decisions is to halt product development completely which kept any new line of products making any Christmas retail deadlines.

     

    The decision to halt product development in September lines up pretty nicely with the date of the alleged Alamogordo dumping incident. 8)

     

    -S

  20. Posted

    My wife has little to no interest in video games (she'll play the occasional classic on my MAME cab, but that's about it). However she has no problem with any of my strange hobbies. Video games, little British cars, scale modeling, I've even been known to build a siege weapon. She thinks the fact that I'm into kind of off the wall hobbies is neat.

     

    As to when I play games, well she has hobbies of her own. She's a musician so I'll usually play games while she's playing her guitar, piano, violin or mandolin.

     

    -S

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