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Atari-Jess

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  1. For those of you here long enough to remember me, I was a big fan of Berzerk. Quite a long time ago now.

     

    I knew early on about the significance of that era of video game history and that many of the games and devices that I enjoyed were created by people, pioneers, who were largely still with us 20 years ago. On occasion, I could find the contact information of some of these individuals and talk about "the good old days"...

     

    I found one for Alan McNeil the programmer for Stern's Berzerk. I found the email while waxing nostalgic. I thought I would look him up again and discovered he had passed in 2017.

     

    I had a number of questions for him, but he offered me a lengthy writeup about Berzerk that he had originally written for an British video game magazine. I don't know which one it was, and none of the text is coming up with any results online. Maybe it's out there somewhere but he copied his original responses to the questions which for all I know could have been abridged, reduced, edited, modified in some way, etc.

     

    He invited me to use his writeup as I had always planned on sharing it with AtariAge. I just never got around to it.

     

    That was in 2008.  

     

    I'll just paste the good part, the actual body of text rather than the kind words I had for him and Berzerk... what I offer are the unabridged and verbatim responses for the unnamed magazine. Maybe you can help identify it?

     

    Quote

    I found the Berzerk stuff I wrote for an English retrogames magazine. 
    I'm working on a bit about Frenzy, although that time went by in a 
    blur due to all-nighters. The questions starting with a - are from the 
    gamer magazine.

    BACKGROUND
    - What's your background (education/work)? How did you get involved in 
    programming and the games industry?

    I had went to college and took 6 years to figure out what I was doing. 
    I started in Architecture, then switched to Industrial Design, then 
    switched to Film then Video & Computer Art where I met Ted Nelson who 
    showed us a lot of cutting edge graphic and music computers (like 
    Moog). Then PLATO came to campus. It was a network of amazing 
    graphical computer terminals for computer aided education. Because of 
    the size of the network (about 1000 terminals across the USA) it was 
    the perfect platform to develop the first network games. Almost 
    everything from chatrooms to forums were invented back on PLATO way 
    before the internet. The games were crude but it was fun to be 
    'zbaren' in dogfight sitting in Chicago and blast someone out of the 
    sky playing in a different state.

    - You got in on the ground floor of gaming, so to speak, so what was 
    it that excited you about the medium? Had you played any games prior 
    to creating your own?

    I always liked games. I played a lost of Mille Bournes and Stratego as 
    a kid.

    - How did you come to work at Stern? What was it like in those days, 
    being pioneers of arcade gaming, and not being restricted in terms of 
    conceptual output (unlike the way all games designers are today)?

    Lets go back a step. I started at Dave Nutting Associates, a small 
    group (under 12 people) that was owned my Bally/Midway. They had 
    already done Gunfight and Seawolf for Midway when they hired me away 
    from the first computer store in Chicago, "itty bitty computers". 
    While at DNA, I worked on GunfightII and SeawolfII then on the Bally 
    Arcade. That game console should have beaten the Atari but Midway 
    couldn't build them without zapping the main chip with static. 90% of 
    the units were dead at the end of the assembly line. Very sad. I wrote 
    the OS for the Bally Arcade also wrote the development system. When 
    the Macintosh came out, I saw a lot of similarities in OS style.

    So after it was obvious that I would be working on arcade games 
    forever, I asked Dave Nutting if I could design my own game. He said 
    "No, you need more experience." He showed me some graph paper with 
    boxes filled in (how we coded up pixels) - "There's a lot of work in 
    the design of a game. In a couple of years, you can try designing a 
    game." This annoyed me. Every McNeil I've bet is stubborn - I'm no 
    exception. I don't like being told "You're not good enough to do 
    that." So I started reading the job ads every Sunday.

    I already had a couple of primitive games by other people running on 
    my Sol20. There was sort of missile command like game and in Basic I 
    had coded up "robots" based on a magazine article in Byte magazine. It 
    was clunky - we still have it in Gnome. I thought a smooth running 
    "dodge the robots that are trying to kill you" game would be cool.

    URL (Universal Research Labs) a subsidiary of Stern Electronics ran an 
    1/8 page ad looking for a pinball programmer. I scheduled an interview 
    right away. They were in a tough spot. They had a license from Bally/
    Midway to make Bally's pinball controller board for use in their own 
    games. The problem was they didn't get source code so they couldn't 
    change the scoring or rules. They could change the playfield and art 
    but the hardware was frozen. I asked if I could do a video game after 
    I fixed the pinball problem. They said yes the wanted to get into 
    video games. So I hired on for 32K$/year.

    I took hex dumps of the ROM's and figured out the assembly language 
    and then knew how the hardware worked. Then I wrote a new OS to run 
    the pinball games. The first game out with the new OS was Meteor. Next 
    one I did was Big Game - that had a wide box and 7 digit scores. 
    Meanwhile they recruited two of the engineers that worked on the Bally 
    Arcade who started work on hardware for a black and white video game - 
    about like original SeaWolf.

    Finally I had a prototype hooked up to my development system (from 
    Tektronix - remember 8 inch floppy disks?) and started a game.
    =
    =
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    ========================================================================
    BERZERK
    Berzerk was the number one game in Chicago until PacMan came out. 
    Games were tested for popularity at a neutral arcade that all the big 
    boys used. Red Quarters! I just remembered that whenever anyone 
    connected to the game industry came in the door at that arcade the 
    owner would hand you a hand full of quarters all painted red with nail 
    polish. He could eliminate all the red quarters from his counts. It 
    was a good arcade. He had a rent-a-cop here in the evenings to keep 
    things calm. Mostly it was frequented by teenage boys.

    - What was the inspiration behind Berzerk? How did the project come to 
    be?
    There was a game in BASIC called robots that was in the first or 
    second issue of Byte Magazine. I played it a lot on my Altair. There 
    was a plus sign (you) and a bunch of O's (hunter bots). You typed in 
    your move in compass direction and then it refreshed the screen. The 
    robots moved toward you on the shortest path possible using only the 8 
    compass directions but were stupid in that they exploded when the 
    crashed into each other. I carried that concept of vicious robots that 
    were so single minded about killing you that they didn't watch out for 
    each other. I'd also read all the Fred Saberhagen Berzerker stories. 
    The title is homage to his excellent stories.

    - What was the original concept for Berzerk, and how did this change 
    as you worked on the game? Please talk a little about the process of 
    making the game.
    * How did you come up with the visual design for the enemies?
    * How did you come up with the AI/capabilities for the enemies?

    I had a dream of a Black & White video game with a stick figure man 
    and lots of robots closing in on him. Just a second's worth of action 
    but it was exactly what I made in pass one. I had the shifty eyed 
    robots inspired by the Cylons with their moving red eye in the 
    original BattleStar Galactica. I had a stick figure guy. Interface was 
    a joystick designed in house (more on that in a minute).

    When I got the pass one game up, it played like an extremely intense 
    realtime version of gnobots. It was too hard even with just 6 robots. 
    I knew the game favored the robots too much. They would run into each 
    other occasionally but the average game time (one life) was about 6 
    seconds. No good.

    I had a rule of thumb for game play that the coin operators (arcade 
    owners) hated. They were greedy guys (as so many no talent people are) 
    They always wanted options switches to set the number of lives to 1. I 
    refused to program that in/ I also believe that my rule of thumb help 
    make Berzerk a good value coin-op game. The rule was take the current 
    price of a movie theater ticket and divided it down to pennies per 
    minute then figure out the time you should get for a quarter - it was 
    between 3 and 5 minutes back then depending on where the theater was 
    located. So I made my goal a 3 minute game for a beginner.

    It was the start of pass 2. OK I need help beating these robots. I 
    need a weapon. I put in laser bolts because I could add a dot to the 
    front and remove on from the rear on each frame and they then looked 
    smooth and were large enough to see. This was better. I could kill a 
    few robots but they were changing paths fast and coming at you from 
    too many directions. Playtime for a life was up to 10 seconds and 
    sometimes you'd survive. So far there were no walls. I tried making 
    your bolt bounce on the edges but that kept it alive too long, you had 
    to dodge you own reflected bolt too. I brought that feature back in 
    Frenzy in some rooms with mirror walls.

    On to pass 3: So how could I slow down the robots? Also now that there 
    were walls they crashed too often. I tried making them move slower but 
    then they looked clunky and lame. The animated legs didn't look right 
    when slowed down. I figured I'd need barriers between the robots and 
    the human. So I started looking at maze generators. They took too much 
    time on a 4mHz Z80 (the target cpu). So I devised a super simple 
    scheme. Assume there are solid walls around the room with doors in the 
    N,E,S,W walls. Now divide the space into a 4 by 3 group of tiles. 
    Pretend there is a support column at every tile intersection that 
    isn't embeded in a wall. Now attach one wall to each column, spin it 
    in a random N,E,S,W direction while allowing overlaps. Most of the 
    time it made very nice maze like rooms. Sometimes it would create a 
    2x1 box in the middle. I'd put a robot in every tile so sometimes 
    there would be 2 robots stuck in a room in the middle.

    To make the maze non-random, I used the XY coordinate of the room as a 
    16 bit number to seed my random number generator. That way you could 
    exit the room and run back and see the same shaped room. It makes the 
    universe more real if you leave a room with a box in the middle and 
    return to a box in the middle room. Totally random rooms are not 
    immersive - your brain goes "HUH?", the robot shoots you for a place 
    it couldn't before and you get pissed at the game.

    Ideally the game should be challenging but not brutally so. You should 
    feel like you are constantly making progress at getting better. You 
    should leave it after defeat with the feeling, "Awww I just made a 
    little mistake, I could beat that next time."

    The pass 3 game had some problems. The game was feeling decent but 
    still too hard. It was smooth playing and fun but the robots were too 
    deadly accurate. Theyd all open fire at once. Also there were robots 
    stuck in center rooms that you couldn't shoot. Another problem was you 
    could stand all day in a room once the robots were eliminated so I 
    needed something to get you to "move along".

    Yes you lucked out. I'm not a bad writer myself. All writers are 
    weasel according to Dilbert/Scott Adams: "The best weasel ploy is to 
    get the interviewee to write the article for you, then sell it." yup 
    yup yup. OK with me (although I should get a copy of the magazine I'd 
    hope!). I get to rehash the process from a far perspective, my kids 
    get a bit of biography of their dad. Plus there are a ton of Berzerk/
    Frenzy fans out there and I do appreciate them all. It leads to some 
    great friendships - "You wrote Berzerk? You? Oh man! Do you know how 
    many quarters I put into that machine in college!" that kind of 
    conversation with a Internet star trumps the usual who can pee higher 
    on the tree, one-upmanship that programers often go through when they 
    meet.

    Evil Otto and adjusting the robots viciousness.
    ----------------------------------------------------------
       **see previous** The robots have AI uncommon for the time, in that 
    they too make errors - why did you include this, and how much of a 
    difference do you think this makes to the game? I guess strong players 
    can take advantage of the robot's nature, getting them to shoot each 
    other.
       -see below- Evil Otto (what's with the name?) was also unusual for 
    the time, what with him being indestructible. What was the thinking 
    behind that character? (Subsequent games used the 'hurry up' device 
    quite a lot - Otto somewhat reminds me of Baron Von Blubba from Bubble 
    Bobble these days, although Otto's smiling face is somehow more 
    ominous.)
    ** see previous ** How are the mazes generated? Are they relatively 
    random, or is there a 'set' of mazes, with one chosen for the player 
    once they enter a room?
    ----------------------------------------------------------
    Remember the 2 robots stuck in a room in the middle. No problem when 
    the robots bump each other and blow up. One scenario was a problem 
    still: if you got a 1x1 room with a single robot in it, there was no 
    way to get rid of it. Enter Evil Otto.

    It was the era of the smiley face, that obnoxious yellow circle with 
    the two black dots for eyes and the arc for a smile and the words 
    below "Have a Nice Day!". I really despised it! I associated it with 
    salesman and corporations, neither of which really wanted you to have 
    a nice day but both want to cover themselves in fake righteousness. So 
    I decided to show it like it was: "Have a Nice Day while I beat you to 
    death." I made the smiley come straight for you while bouncing like a 
    yellow ball. It added a dash of bitter sarcasm to the game. (I was 
    known as Mr Sarcasm long before Berzerk.)

    The name, Evil Otto, was both a pun, Evil Auto (-matic push-you-on 
    device), and a reference to the security manager Mr Otto at DNA. Mr 
    Otto once decided that all engineers and programmers should take lunch 
    from exactly noon until exactly 1pm atomic time. He instituted this 
    with the announcement we all had to drop everything and head out the 
    doors for lunch exactly on time. He then locked the doors until 1pm. 
    Naturally this torqued us off. When we arrived back at 12:50 on a cold 
    day to find we couldn't get back in. The very next day we all started 
    having 2 hours lunches. Within a week, the main boss made Otto give up 
    his plan. This was but one of many "guilty until proven innocent" type 
    moves that Otto tried. So the ball got named Evil Otto. The two 
    engineers from DNA liked the name a lot.

    Evil Otto took care of the single robot in a box problem. You could 
    move so the path from Evil Otto to you passed through the 1x1 box. 
    Then Evil Otto would stomp the robot for you in his quest to smash you.

    So that was Pass 4. There were 2 robot bullets shared by all the 
    robots. The game was good but static in terms of progression - a term 
    the game industry used to mean the longer you played the harder it 
    should get. So the game was a bit too hard for the secretaries to play 
    and too easy for the programmers. Time for Pass 5.

    This was a tweaking pass. I added bullet progression starting with 
    zero robot bullets and getting up to a maximum dictated by memory 
    constraints. The whole game had to fit in 8 Kilobytes of ROM (read 
    only memory). The only ram was the screen - there was a tiny bit of 
    screen memory that wasn't displayed because those locations would be 
    in the vertical retrace time. So that tiny bit of RAM had to store all 
    X,Ys of objects, the XY of the room, the number of players, their 
    scores, the array of high scores, etc. I kept track of the rooms you 
    left after killing robots and used that count to drive decide on the 
    number of robot bullets. It made it seem like the robots were going 
    from peeved to angry to berserk with rage. I spend several days trying 
    different combos on the secretaries and other new players to get that 
    initial play time of 3 minutes. That also meant adjusting Evil Otto's 
    timer so he didn't come out too soon. I adding a hold off based on you 
    killing robots in that room. Even that got tweaked.

    Another tweak was the robot movement. The robots start slower and get 
    faster as levels progress. I revised the movement speed to match 
    animation speed of the robots. I didn't want to see any feet sliding 
    along the ground after all I got my degree in Design partially by 
    doing 7 minutes of animation. To get people immersed in the game there 
    should be no cognitive dissonance - no "that doesn't seem right" 
    moments. So glide walking stopped plus early level robots spin their 
    eye slowly but later level ones spin like the enraged enemies they are.

    Another tweak that took some time was adjusting the registration 
    points of the art. All game is track by XY points. The registration 
    point is where the (0,0) point of each object is. I tweaked the robots 
    so their shooting was just barely good enough to hit you. This allowed 
    you to dodge bolts iif you were careful. The one exception was when 
    the robot come straight at you from in front, the bolt will pass 
    through the one pixel high blank line at your neck. Most people panic, 
    move and die. When you move the player, the body bounces up and down 
    and the bullet hits you. We had one amazing player that could stop for 
    just long enough to let the bolt pass through his neck then move on 
    while fighting at the highest level. He practiced Kung-Fu and 
    consistently got high scores.

    Another game industry term is "Attract Mode" - what the game does when 
    no one is playing it to attract the customer to the game. I added the 
    high scores and attract mode somewhere along the way. The game was 
    still black and white but we were ready to go to production.

    A game came out in that month that used colored transparent ink 
    printed on a black and white tube to make their game look like it was 
    in color. I don't remember what game but the bosses were freaking out 
    that we couldn't compete without color. We need color but we can't 
    afford a new set of hardware. The engineers got busy while I lived in 
    dread the changes.

    Meanwhile the cabinets were starting to be built for us. We had an 
    optical joystick that we designed. Simple idea - take a threaded rod 
    and run it through a hole in a thick rubber sheet. Put a big washer on 
    both sides of sheet, lock it with nuts, thread a handle the size of a 
    male appendage on the top, add a big mirror finish washer on the 
    bottom. Final bit was 4 infrared led and 4 sensors below the N,E,S,W 
    sides of the washer. As soon as you learned the handle the mirror 
    would reflect infrared to the sensors. Elegant design except for a 
    couple problems that showed up later.

    We put the black and white game out for test at an upscale singles 
    bar. It did fantastically well. It was getting a ton of play by the 
    women there. The boss attributed that to, "They love to yank a manly 
    joysick." Who knows he may have been right! When we changed the joy 
    stick to a standard Wico model about 1 inch high, female play dropped. 
    We had to change the joystick during production because some player 
    would pull so hard in the down direction that they would tip the 
    cabinet onto themselves! Banging around the cabinet is a big no-no. 
    That's why there is always a little weight on a spring behind the coin 
    door. If you hit the coin door, the weight swings and closes a switch 
    connected to reset on the computer. I missed the bigger stick though. 
    Your grip was more solid on a stick you can get you fist around. The 
    little joystick needed a finger tip hold - pretty namby-pamby for 
    someone escaping from millions of enraged robots. Oh well, we couldn't 
    have any players dying as pancakes either.

    One player did die - not two as sometimes reported. The unfortunate 
    fellow was obese and had run upstairs to play the game. The legend is 
    he set a high score and died, but the owner of the arcade said he 
    didn't finish the game, he was out of breath from the moment he 
    arrived until he dropped. The legend is way better than reality - The 
    excitement of playing a game killed the player after he set the high 
    score. The desire to play games has led many a player to do stupid 
    things like stay up until 5am on a final exam day. (Who me?)
    It is appropriate that Berzerk and PacMan should share an issue since 
    PacMan knocked Berzerk off the #1 money earner spot after its fairly 
    long reign.

    ********************************
    How did we know to say "Coin detected in pocket"?
    - The game makes good use of sound for 1980, and is one of the 
    earliest games with speech. How did the use of speech and samples come 
    to be in the game, and what do you think this added to the overall 
    effect? How difficult was it to create the speech in those days? How 
    did you choose the words and phrases, and what process was used? I 
    always loved the 'robotic' speech in games such as Berzerk and Wizard 
    of Wor - very creepy, but was this intentional (in terms of how it 
    sounded), or a restriction imposed by the technology of the time?
    ---------------------------

    Originally Berzerk just had pinball type sounds. It was one or two 
    counters connected to an amplifier. If you put in a small number, it 
    would make a hing pitch square wave. A big number would take longer to 
    count down to zer, so it would be lower in tone. It was just about 
    impossible to make music with it. But we had used that scheme in 
    pinball for a year and I had quite a few zappy and tweepy sounds 
    already in my program library.

    A salesman visited us during the Development of Berzerk with a "speech 
    chip" for intended for helping blind people. They were hoping to get 
    it into toys or games. It sounded very robotic and was limited to 24 
    (or less?) fixed words of vocabulary. It was using custom hardware to 
    make hisses and tones that assembled into words. All the computer 
    could control was the word and the pitch of the word. You could order 
    these chips with any set of words limited to the tiny chip size. The 
    price was great in large quantities. The boss said, "could you use 
    it?" I was on it right away. The interface was simple - feed it a 
    number that indexed the word and a pitch number then wait until the 
    busy_talking bit cleared. The trick was getting more sentences out of 
    it. I wanted the robots to sound like they were hunting you. I wrote 
    up a bunch of sentences but then decided the best result for the small 
    number of words would be to use the construction: <killing-verb> the 
    <player-noun>. I used a big thesaurus to find synonyms of "destroy". 
    The player noun wasn't quite as simple. I thought of ways the robots 
    might describe the player: intruder, and human came to mind right away.

    One of the engineers would run thru the maze rooms with out shooting 
    any robots. I decided to add in an extra player-noun just for him: 
    Chicken! Anytime you left live robots in the previous room, the next 
    rooms robots would taunt you with "Kill the chicken", "Destroy the 
    chicken" etc. It was quite enjoyable to see the chicken taunt annoying 
    him and other players.

    When I assembled the list of nouns and verbs, I had 3 words left and I 
    had one sentence I really wanted on the chip so I drop one verb and 
    added "Coin detected in pocket". It was inteneded to encourage replay. 
    One bar patron actually said, "How did it know I still have some 
    quarters?" and he played until he didn't have quarters to find out! I 
    was surprised how many people thought there was a special coin 
    detector in the cabinet.

    The engineers finished their "color" upgrade. It was odd. They made a 
    "color overlay" video layer at much cruder resolution than the screen. 
    Each color chip cover 4x4 area of the black and white pixels. Each 
    color pixel/tile had 4 bits for color - R G B and dim. I don't 
    remember if they implemented the "dim" colors. It was in an completely 
    different place in memory. I wasn't happy that I had to deal with 
    "Kludge Kolor" as I named it. The engineers argued about how many 
    cents they were saving per game and that it would cheaper to let me 
    work a year on the code than to add a dollar of cost.

    At least the tiles were the same size as the walls thickness. I had to 
    change the object drawing routines to take a color. It painted the 
    color chips over the walls, robots and player. One problem with Kludge 
    Kolor was if the player and robot got within 4 pixels of each other, 
    some bit of the robot would change to player color. You usually were 
    dead before you could notice.

    - How did you playtest the game? It's pretty tough! (But then, it is 
    an arcade game, designed to relieve people of their cash!) Still, to 
    counter that, there's at least the 'invincible bow-tie' effect, if 
    you're shot through the neck by a robot!
    * see previous chunks about the testing arcade *

    - What hardware did you use to create the game? Did the kit you had 
    limit your ideas in any way?

    The development system was made by Tektronix. It has a "pod" with a 
    cable that plugged into the Z80 socket. It had two 8" floppy drives. 
    It had one editor "ed" - yup the same awful ed you can play with in 
    Linux! It was easy to delete the wrong line in that editor. The only 
    other tools were: an assembler, a linker, a loader and a crude 
    debugger. The disk utilities were like CP/M (or DOS).

    The game hardware was a simple black & white frame buffer - set a bit 
    in memory and the pixel turns on. It had a "bit shifter" to help shift 
    the graphic data as it was being written into memory. Otherwise the 
    Z80 would have to do the bit shifting - one instruction cycle per bit 
    shifted. Having the Z80 do the work would have made byte aligned 
    patterns move faster than ones shifted 7 bits over.

    The CPU was a Z80, with 512 bytes of battery backed up RAM, the screen 
    ram, the color overlay ram, and 8K of ROM.

    There were 16 bits that could be connected to switches. The joystick 
    took 4 bits, plus there were all the buttons and the coin switches. 
    Coin switches were a pain in the rear. Sometime they would "bounce", 
    giving 2 on/off for one coin. There was extra code in every coin op 
    game to make sure that coins got counted correctly. There was an 
    electro-mechanical counter inside the door that counted the coins 
    dropped in. That was a precaution against "skimming the coin box" 
    where some bar owners would take some quarters out (skim) before the 
    game operator showed up to collect, count and split the take with the 
    bar owner. Outputs on Berzerk were the luminescence video (black and 
    white) and the chroma video (color info), the sound counters, and the 
    voice chip's word and pitch.

    The price of color monitors was much higher that B&W. The engineers 
    ruled out many things based on cost. I would have liked to design from 
    the start in color instead of having it put in during the last month. 
    It would have been nice if the sounds added together like real sounds 
    but that would have taken more hardware or hardware multiplication.

    The kit definitely constrained the design but all kits do even a PC 
    with DX10. You could claim that your flying game really need a wrap-
    around screen system and a motion platform. If you work in the US 
    defense industry you might get that kit but even then you might 
    complain that you need 6 gravity continuous lateral forces. 
    Constraints actually are good for design. Every game doesn't needs 
    super realistic 3D rendering to be fun. I'd argue the 3D constrains 
    you too. Often you start out all happy with the 3D world but end up 
    playing the game in 2D map mode because the 3D world gets boring and 
    isn't vitally important. I had that problem with MacroMedia MazeWars - 
    when playing the radar was most important and the 3d view ignored.

    SIDELINE - probably should be elsewhere: I was the first person to 
    sign a game. It said in the bottom right corner "Designed and 
    Programmer by Alan McNeil (using my signature)" I came from an Art/
    Design background and thought a work of art should be signed by the 
    artist. Getting royalties might be a better idea.

    - Presumably, there's no 'ending' to the game?
    It's open ended. There are 65767 rooms to visit. The edges wrap around 
    after 256 rooms in X or Y.

    - What was the response to the game when it was released?
    The game did extremely well. URL/Stern started with one shift a day 
    making game. Soon they were running 3 shifts a day. A vaguely remember 
    someone telling me that we were making a game every 5 minutes. They 
    sold for $600 wholesale to the distributors that marked it up at least 
    30%. I don't know how many Berzerks were made total but it was 
    thousands. It did so well because the operators loved it for its 
    repeat play draw and lasting power. Some games would be played out in 
    a month when kids would get easily bored with them but they always 
    came back to Berzerk. PacMan spelled the end of Berzerk's dominance 
    but even then it was earning well for operators.

    - Did you have anything to do with the home conversions? How did you 
    think they fared (if you saw any of them)?

    I had nothing to do with the home version - Atari didn't even ask for 
    the code. The first I heard of the deal was through a boss who said 
    Stern sold the right to make the home game to Atari for 4 million 
    dollars. Intellectual Property Capitalism at its finest! My salary at 
    the time 30K$. That planted the idea that I shouldn't work for any 
    company because no matter how friendly the boss, they aren't your 
    friend, they are your slave master. Don't get me started on my rant 
    about how corporations are immortal emergent life-forms that are 
    inimical to life on this planet.

    I didn't like the home version, the play was off because they didn't 
    have the right values for all those tweaks and it looked cruder.

    - Is there anything you left out of the game that you wish you could 
    have included?
    [Note this part builds into the how and why of FRENZY happening]

    I had a couple vague desires but was pretty tired after the hardware 
    guys next request: Cocktail table Berzerk. They said we need a table 
    version that you can set drinks on and sit around. It should be a two 
    player version and allow the players to sit opposite each other. Of 
    course that will require flipping the screen for the second player. 
    "Fine, put in a relay to flip the screen." Within an hour the 
    engineers were back with "Too expensive, We could let you work on it 
    for a year or two for the cost to do it in hardware." Yeah maybe at 
    $30,000. So back to the code to try to figure out flipping the screen. 
    I added a flag for "flipped" and checked it all over the code to 
    change things. The code then went over 8K maximum for the ROM's by 
    just a few bytes. I remember changing the copyright notice in the ROM 
    to be shorter. There were German and French translation in the ROM of 
    a few important phrases like "Insert Coin".

    By that time, I was also in charge of eight programmers. They were 
    driving me pretty hard. I was a bit resentful. The boss noticed and 
    raised my salary to $36K. He gave out a bonus that year too. That 
    caused all my programmers to want raises and bonuses. I worked on all 
    kinds of pinball games for a year while Berzerks were being cranked 
    out in the plant. Also on a game for the "Super Cobra" hardware called 
    "MoonWars". It was only tested for 5 days. It didn't do well. I was 
    pissed that the wrong control had been put on the game.

    I was getting more and more stressed and angry with the bosses. They 
    had a theft problem about then - tubes of programmable ROM's were 
    disappearing from the plant. Then a VCR disappeared from the coffee 
    room. The boss was pissed and hired a goon with a lie detector. I got 
    a call from the boss' secretary, "Please go to the coffee room and 
    tell the detective what you remember about last Friday." Oh alright, I 
    can help them out for ten minutes. When I got there, the guy asked if 
    I wanted to hook me up to a lie detector. "No. There's no point." Then 
    he proceeded to ask questions while hiding behind a large black box 
    and constantly looking at some display, probably a voice-stress 
    analyzer. When he asked me "Did you steal the VCR?" I blew my stack. 
    "What?! Are you out of your mind? This ******* interview is over." I 
    stormed out of there and straight downstairs into the CEO's office and 
    asked him if he was out of his mind. He tried to mollify me but I 
    remained steamed far into that night.

    A month later they fired the VP of manufacturing and two associates. 
    They had been smuggling chips out and reselling them to us! What a 
    scam and all from his right hand man. Do you wonder why I have a low 
    opinion of CEO's?

    Sometime in spring the CEO went on a trip to Japan to see Konami. 
    Before he left, he called a meeting of the heads of a few departments 
    tell us to work on evaluations of our "peons". When he came back he 
    called my to confer about the salaries on my guys. It was weird. I was 
    trying to help my guys. I told him what I thought he should give as 
    raises for each guy and said it would depend on bonuses too. He 
    behaved like there wasn't a penny to give and said, "You know that guy 
    that did Space Invaders? They didn't pay him any bonuses, they just 
    gave him a watch and he liked it! I should do that." I said, "You 
    actually think the guys will go for that?" It was too much. He was 
    going to screw my team. I slammed by attache case shut and said, 
    "That's it. I quit." I went straight to my desk, packed quickly and 
    headed home. That night the CEO called and said, "Are you done with 
    your tif?" "No it's a permanent tif." I was done with the idiots or so 
    I thought until the call that started Frenzy.

    - What do think Berzerk's legacy is to videogaming? To me, it almost 
    appears to be a proto-Robotron these days.

    The authors of Robotron would probably agree now but when I asked them 
    back then they said they just wanted to make a better robot game than 
    mine. They said they were frustrated with Berzerk. They did Defender 
    first (check that ut I think it was first).

     

     

     

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  2. Jan, thank you for making this game. It's nice to see the ol' VCS still can get an enjoyable game out of it.

    I think the sequel, especially if some random-ness could be managed (with some help from our friends here) then that game would be quite incredible.

     

    Congratulations on your release, I look forward to more!

  3. Ive bought my copperclad and some ferric today along with some parts for a test unit. The plan is to make several PCBs, manufacture one - test it to ensure it functions... then take orders for the rest of the PCBs from the etching. I plan on etching as many as possible and going from there.

     

    I want to thank everyone who has shown interest thus far, and I look forward to providing you all with the demonstrative unit via video in the near future.

     

    Anyone still looking to nab one, there is still plenty of time before I go out to buy the parts in bulk! I'll also give the final price, I hope to be as close to possible as my estimate :)

    • Like 1
  4. Shipping International with tracking costs more (actually a lot more) than that. I usually ship without tracking but with insurance (and I just found out that I will be filing an insurance claim soon for one of my shipments ;-) ). Small Packets International Air which includes insurance up to $100 is about $10 to Europe and slightly more expensive to South America and other far away places.

     

    I used the shipping calculator from Canada Post as an international shipment to the netherlands. I was admittedly suspicious of the price I received as well (the next price up jumps to about 40 euro) but the quote I got was the quote I got and I've yet to be surprised once I reach the counter... I'd be happy to see it be accurate (naturally) and I appreciate your experience in the matter :)

  5. I'm interested, but I don't know a lot about them. Will yours come with the SIO cable? Is there anything I would need other than an SD card, the SDDRIVE.ATR file, and my own ATR files? Sorry for the basic questions.

     

    You'll need to provide your own SIO cable, however if someone wanted to ship one to me, I could slice in the sio cable directly. What the sdrive pcb is designed for is a DB15 connector...

     

    What I usually do is shove wires in between the port there, and the sio cable and tape it together. I've done that with my old SIO2PC cable for years with no problems. You could even hot glue it together without worrying about permenant damage to the sio cable. I find this works just fine.

     

    And yes, you'd only need to provide your SD card, sdrive .atr file and your user .atr files just as it is intended.

  6. I calculated shipping to oregon, but I assume prices will be similar across the continental US

    ~$8 for small packet surface

    ~$10 for small packet air,

    ~$20 for expedited parcel

     

    All these prices may vary, could be much cheaper for NY, MI, NJ, or much more for NV, TX, FL etc... You can calculate it yourself with any generic toronto postal code

     

    Estimated service times here:

    http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/personal/productsservices/send/parcels.jsf

     

    Assuming an 8"x8"x3" at about 1lb.

     

    Please use this as a general guide, I might add a buck or two for the actual packaging material, but I'm not charging for my time to ship it.

  7. Selling my K-TEL Vulture Attack 2600 Cartridge. (R9 @AA)

     

    See pictures.

     

    If anyone here can *strongly* beat my current 'offer' of $115 -- this is your chance to own one of the rarest Atari 2600 cartridges.

    Buyer pays actual shipping (no BS handling charge)

     

    There are rarer, and yes, some may critique the "rarity" of this cartridge, but "it is what it is".

     

    Would make an excellent x-mas gift for yourself ;)

     

    As you can see cart works, features the funky black handle and has typical K-TEL label mottling (just like your standard Activision cartridge)

    I'm not getting out of collecting, just getting out of this "burden" ;) I know it would make someone else happier (and I could use the cash!)

     

    I will accept Paypal or Interac Etransfer if you're a Canuck.

    post-575-0-92960900-1355958940_thumb.jpg

    post-575-0-33058400-1355959045_thumb.jpg

    post-575-0-88234400-1355959155_thumb.jpg

  8. loose carts wanted, things to trade?

    looking for: Mario Bros, Dark Chanbers, Star Trek, Star Wars: Death Star Battle and Jedi Arena, Montezuma's Revenge, Video Olympics

     

    TRADE FODDER:

    All of these I'd need most/multiple/several+cash to part with trade wise...

    Ipac 4 (4 player arcade to usb/ps2 thing)

    Final Fantasy 3 (6j) for SNES

    Atari 130XE (with box but missing screws and psu)

    boxed c64

    (Obviously the shipping on these items would be significant...)

     

    OR:

    Or offer me a reasonable price!

     

    located in Toronto Canada, and as you can see I'm something of a veteran of this site ;)

  9. I saw a slot car game of this concept. Wait too expensive. 400 for ipad then 200 each per itouch? Or worse per iPhone? I love the concept but anytime it's been used it always didn't come to fruition or flopped. Lynx and jaguar, gba and gcn gbplayer, ds and wii, this will likely fall into those footsteps. It's a good idea but economically unrealistic as a even a side thing.

     

     

     

    Cant talk about things in too much detail but think about board games and then put an I pad in the middle of the table and everyone around the table has an Iphone that is connected to the iPad through bluetooth or Wifi. It becomes the universal board game videogame delivery platform.

    That's a very interesting idea (assuming I'm envisioning it correctly), and I applaud anything that helps board games survive in the digital age. There would be the obvious benefits of only you being able to see your cards, moves, possibly dice rolls, etc. as opposed to playing on a console. I do wonder though, most people play the PC/Console version of a board game mainly when they don't have a opponent in the same room (either against the AI or somebody in another part of the world via the internet). AI & internet opponents would be welcome additions if they are not already in the specs. I don't see this replacing board gaming as we know it though, especially as "house rules" often come into play, but if it came with a large number of licensed games (or the ability to install said games as inexpensive add-on modules) I could see it doing well. Being iPad based will hurt it IMO, but this could be the killer app the iPad needs. I wish you luck with it.

  10. I'm here to ask some hard questions, not about your recent history so you can relax!

     

    Atari had a real chance to become a technological superpower rivaling IBM, rivaling Apple, rivaling Google.

     

    Many of the technologies that came out of atari were at least thought up, drafted, or spawned during your tenure. The end result of course is that you now get to return to what some may call a "disgraced" brand (of which I blame Warner and then much later the Tramiels) that is now legitimising itself in the new eyes of new generations through it's publishing efforts and paying homage to old fans with products from legacy engineering (hint: help these guys)

     

    You're now in a better position than everto help guide Atari SA into something you might again be very happy with. Of course in a much different direction...

     

    The questions are of course:

     

    What would you have done differently to have prevented your ousting in the late 70s (perhaps something years earlier)?

     

    What do you feel was your greatest failure at Atari (a regret).

     

    If you could have had one final project (a product release) that was either shelved or drastically changed post departure, what would it have been?

     

    As Atari corporate culture changed more and more, when did you find yourself no longer the leading figure of influence?

     

    And finally, what kind of personal sacrifices did you make during the early days and then later during the latter part of your tenure?

     

    Much obliged!

  11. Wow.

     

    This has been a pretty intense thread from about every possible angle.

     

    Who could have guessed that we would end up seeing both the best and the worst this forum could offer?

     

    We've got some of the old-standbys who have changed little in the almost 10 years (edit: i'll be fair and say 8.5 years) that I've been here (you probably don't know who you are unless you want to be smart and finger point yourselves)

     

    But at the same time we've managed to bring some of the most uniquely fortunate individuals from the literal birth of an industry (using electronics for 'consumer' purposes!) pioneers in many respects. The people who are directly responsible (directly in any sense you wish) for the playthings, and the obsessions therein, of millions of childhoods.

     

    My point is, I'm glad that we've managed to take another huge step thanks to the internet. I'm glad I always seem to arrive just in time for things like this, and am fortunate to have been a part of this forum as long as I have.

     

    Some of you fellows got way too emotional these past days. And others though both right and wrong in many respects are in the end concerning yourselves with the warm hospitality that AtariAge is known for (though in this case a little late and after a lot of mud slinging...) and more importantly the facts.

     

    It was important for Curt to be 100% certain on the identity of NolanB. He did him a service by ensuring he was speaking for himself (despite the perhaps high probability that it took a while for that to actually be true)

     

    As far as the other people lurking like Dabney and co., that's pretty cool too.

     

    While I don't really expect much of a reply, I think we are going well in the bridge making process and the healing efforts.

     

    Good job folks.

     

    That said, I'm still quite excited to see what will happen as a result of Bushnell's appointment to the BoD at the new Atari, if we end up with something good, all is well. (Though obviously I'm coming to understand just how limited the clout level will be)

     

    Really cool thread, the kind of thread I've been waiting for in many respects. Just a bit of a shame that we didn't do it in the best way. Definitely could have used less emotional/private "BS" but looks like we're mostly clear.

     

    I realise I'm rambling.

     

    I'll keep my eye open on the new threads that will popup from these interesting new accounts.

    • Like 2
  12. I haven't read many of the posts in this thread, I'm just putting in my input.

     

    Nolan Bushnell is important just like The Queen of England, the Emperor of Japan and any other "head of state". Many of these people throughout history have been fortunate merely in circumstance. By this I mean he is a figure head.

     

    He is the kind of person who has lucked out by being at the right place at the right time, and putting ideas together. He is a Steve Jobs type character in some respects. Not with incredible business sense or technological sense, but a person with a vision (though I use that word very lightly) By this I mean he is an ideas man.

     

    As someone trained in PR, this obviously reeks of it and is clearly just a way to try to gain some legitimacy. In many people's eyes there is pretty much nothing that is going to satisfy them.

     

    I often wonder why people are even riled up about this when its clear the only thing they really care about are the games.

     

    Certainly I can understand why someone like Curt would be "butt-hurt" over Bushnell, being screwed over is a pretty serious thing though I'm now warning Curt that he ought to be careful with his tongue if Bushnell ends up with any clout given his current dealings with "Atari" and the enjoyable flashback efforts.

     

    All I can say is that I personally see this as a positive move. Atari now has the name, the licenses, and "the man" and is inching its way to being a remade Atari. As much as I can already sense you armchair experts in the various disciplines hammering away at keyboards to rage at me and I don't mean that to be insulting (as I myself am an armchair expert in various things I claim to know) but in the end it doesn't matter what a group of enthusiasts like us care. Atari doesn't cater to us and won't ever.

     

    Atari delivers products to a young generation of hardcore gamers with the occasional serving of retro love to interested audiences. Despite this, it's still about as mainstream as they can be given their circumstances. They aren't here to remake your favourite arcades, they aren't here to be the all-american hardware company (Microsoft is your next best bet there) and they are here for one reason. To make money.

     

    And that is all Nolan ever wanted to do, despite his successes and failures his name alone lends to the uninformed and perhaps even the carefree an extra iota of legitimacy to an otherwise hollow institution.

     

    If they make money, then thats good for them. If they end up enabling people like Curt to make things like the Flashback portable, or Flashback 3 then even better, thats about the most we can hope for from the new Atari, and maybe just maybe Bushnell might even like this idea more than those already on the board of Atari. This might be a blessing in disguise.

     

    But I don't know, none of us know (with obvious possible exceptions) and it will be interesting to see where it develops from here.

    • Like 3
  13. mmmmh ... wednesday and on the weekend is easy ... the others days are rather packed and we're leaving the house real early because of our daughter ... i can keep my eyes open for something else if u want ...

     

    If everything goes to plan, it doesn't look like I'll be able to get there on Wednesday or the weekend (though its still possible if i find different trains)

    If you know of anyone willing to take in a lost little tourist/traveller, let me know as soon as you can.

     

    I appreciate your efforts to the highest degree.

  14. If you change Oslo for some place near me in Sweden you're more than welcome to stay a night, and breakfast will be included in the super expensive price of absolutely free :)

     

    Where in Sweden are you? I'd probably be there on like, the 17th, 18th, or 19th.

     

    Is there anything open on Sundays?

  15. I realise this is off-topic but:

     

    I'm going to be taking a budget trip to Europe on April 6th to April 20th-21st.

     

    If you live in:

    Paris France (metro area)

    Lisbon Portugal (metro area)

    Rome Italy (metro area)

    Berlin Germany (metro area)

    Oslo Norway (metro area)

     

    I need a place to sleep and a shower for one night.

    I do not need meals, money, or a ride.

     

    I am 24 years old. I don't have any criminal record, I don't smoke or drink. I am quiet, clean, and very friendly.

     

    I can offer you 5-10 euro if necessary.

     

    I can give you more exact dates ASAP but dont yet have them, please send me a PM or REPLY if you can help make my europe trip great! If you have any questions, ask me!

     

    thank you!

     

    And yes, I've already taken into account hostels and I will be sleeping in a lot of trains already. I'm looking to save even more money.

  16. I've amassed the vast majority of my collection thanks to the thrifts.

     

    I still find carts now and again (I'm in Toronto for the record) but I haven't seen big finds in quite some time.

     

    I started collecting about 10 years ago (late comparatively!) and I'd just about say finds are dead. I used to be able to pick up entire systems with 20+ games for 20 bucks? 10 bucks? Now I see the occasional common for $3, and that about scores it.

     

    I'm happy I have my collection and that I managed most of it on my own, I hope in good time It will have proven itself a wise investment, sure has been fun to play with!

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