G.Whiz

Obtuse beat me to it -- Deathrace 2000 for sure. Cannonball Run wouldn't be bad either.

Oh definitely Plimpton was right -- Intellivision did have better sports games. In fact that was kind of the feeling in my group, you go to one friend's house to play Intellivision Football, Baseball, etc. and then another friend's house for Atari everything else. Perhaps the fact that Plimpton was right made it all the more threatening... Nostalgia for the days when Atari was the only kid on the block started even back then. ~G

Wow, tough room. Except for Hookem's response (don't know what ATHF means, but I'll take it as a compliment) nobody seems to have "gotten it". Just for clarification, my post was pure fiction, written for the enjoyment of all here -- especially for those who have heard and/or discussed the myth a thousand times. The whole story came to me in a flash, and I wrote it as a one-off. (BTW, no mushrooms of any kind or colour were hurt during the writing of this post. I've tried similar "creativity enhancing" supplements before, and it makes it very difficult to type or look at bright monitors.) Does anyone remember the George Plimpton commercials for Intellivision? As a kid, I always thought that he had it in for Atari for some reason (of course now that I'm in marketing I have a better idea of how things work...) So the whole idea that George Plimpton took glee in burying Atari in his own backyard seemed funny to me. Then the word games, the secret room in the editorial offices, the "cover up" and why nobody can find the carts at Alamogordo anymore... Anyway, I had fun writing it and I'm considering turning it into a short story. I'll let you know if it's published. (Any comments, good or bad, are welcome.) ~G

The carts are not fabled, but the grounds are -- at least now... I recently dined with a junior editor from the Paris Review. We used to go to school together -- actually he used to go to school and I used to go to the pub. That's why my friend is living the high life in New York and I'm writing to AtariAge forums in the middle of the afternoon. But I digress. Anyway, as you may have known, George Plimpton (put down the torches and pitchforks, he's no threat to us now) was the co-founder and editor of the Paris Review -- the magazine that if you remember back two paragraphs my friend edits at. One day, about a month or so after Mr. Plimpton died, my friend came back early from lunch. It was raining and since he usually ate brownbag outside (okay, at least I got him there -- I can afford to go out for lunch, hee hee!) he just wolfed it down in the lobby and decided to get back to work. When he made his way floor and back into the depths of the maze of offices to his junior no-window suite, he startled two of the senior editors in the hallway who were looking into a small hole in the wall. I'm not quite sure what it was -- Mr. Junior Editor has a hard time expressing himself sometimes (which is why he edits, instead of writes HAHA) -- so I can only go by what he said. It seems to me it was not quite a door, but not really a cupboard. Maybe like what a wall safe would look like if there was no safe there. I don't know. It was an old building, and it had this small space with a door. In all fairness, he didn't get a good look inside either because they hastily shut it as soon as my friend came around the corner. Although visibly anxious, the senior editors quickly composed themselves, quite matter-of-factly locked the door, and walked away with a smile and a nod. Of course my friend was quite interested. He'd seen the door before of course since it was right by his office, but hadn't taken much notice of it. He waited for the footsteps to recede, then tested it but sure enough it was locked. There wasn't much for it, and he certainly didn't want to start breaking down doors (literally) so soon he forgot all about it. I should mention at this point that shortly after he saw an Atari cartridge in the office of one of the senior editor's bookshelves. He didn't really take much notice of it at the time, but he said it looked old and beat up -- maybe E.T. but he wasn't sure. It seemed strange -- these guys were too old even for Atari, and besides how many literary review publishers have any type of video games around? -- which is why he noticed it at all. But he certainly didn't connect it with the cupboard/door thingy. A few months later he was wandering the hallways during the staff Christmas party that year when he found the door open. It wasn't wide open, but just a crack, just enough that he realized it was no longer locked. This was a bit of a surprise, but not entirely shocking -- literary editors may not play video games but they sure put back the scotch when it's called for. He assumed that in all the levity (and inebriety) of the party, someone had forgotten to lock it after going in. Of course, he had to look. He made sure nobody was about to come upon him and sidled to the door. He slowly opened it, fearful of some give-away creak, but none came. He peered inside. It wasn't a huge space. Inside he saw a couple of more Atari cartridges and a stack of papers. Again looking over his shoulder, he took out the stack and looked through it. All of it was obviously Mr. Plimpton's stuff -- his letterhead and his name was everywhere on the letters, bills, and documents. One had official Atari letterhead, and was addressed to him. My friend sifted through and found a manilla envelope, not sealed but something told him that it contained important stuff. He put down the pile of other papers back in the hole and opened the envelope. Inside was a few papers including a contractor's bill, a bill from some shipping company he had never heard of, and a scrap of paper. The bills were addressed to Mr. Plimpton, but he couldn't make much sense of it. The contractor was apparently from New Jersey, and the shipping company had a P.O Box in Jacksonville, Florida but both mentioned Alamogordo, NM. He didn't know about the "myth" so it meant very little to him. But he did wonder what Mr. Plimpton had to do with Alamogordo, a contractor, and a shipping company. (Of course, all of us here immediately make a connection!) On the slip of paper was just one sentence: "The Answer Is: George Animadversion Much Wow Pool". It was written in handwriting, and my friend had been around the office enough times to see that it was Mr. Plimpton's penmanship. Now as weird as this may seem to us, it is actually less weird than seeing Atari carts. Literary editors don't play videogames because they are too busy playing word games and engaging in other "real" pursuits (like drinking scotch). My friend was used to seeing tidbits like this all the time. But he knew that this time there was something a bit more special about this jumble of words. He thought the answer might be in one of the other papers in the stack, but he never got a chance to look. One of the senior editors happened around the corner, and much as my friend had done to him, got startled. The editor just looked at my friend, and my friend just shrugged with a sly grin. "You probably shouldn't be in there," the editor said. "No, I probably shouldn't," my friend said. The editor took the papers still in my friend's hand, put them back in the envelope and into the cupboard, and locked the door again. Then they when to top off their scotch glasses and didn't say another word about it. I'll wrap this up quickly by saying that last summer my friend was at the Plimpton house for some affair there. There were apologies all around because the pool wasn't available -- it had cracked and needed to be replaced. The job, he was told, was made so much more difficult because of the "bits of dark plastic" the "obviously clueless contractors" had put down instead of gravel... So it's obvious. The carts are no longer at Alamogordo because George Plimpton had them shipped and buried under his pool in his backyard. But why? Remember, there was Atari letterhead in that stack of papers that my friend never had a chance to go back to. Was Mr. Plimpton working for Atari somehow? Or was this an "in your face" gesture, where he could literally bury the competition? I did find out one other little thing. The phrase "GEORGE Animadversion Much Pool Wow" is a word game, sort of. The word animaderversion, although it sounds made up, means "harsh disapproval". Makes sense so far -- I remember being scared that George Plimpton was going to come right out of the TV and throttle me, he was so incensed with my owning an Atari. But there was something else. Although it would be a fairly common word for this man of letters, I had a feeling he was going in a different direction with it. There I was, mulling over it "animaderversion, animaderversion, animaderversion" under my breath. And then I got it -- it wasn't a "word" game so much as a "sound" game. You try it: say "animaderversion" enough times and you'll hear it too. I'm a diversion. That's when I really cracked up. Of course, maybe I appreciate that type of humour more than some, but just the literary nuances with the baseness of a child's prattling... irony thy name is George. It's not hard to see that he, as a diversion, put a lot of cartridges ("much wow") under his pool, and was somehow making a game of it. I thought that's where the story ended. But my friend caught my enthusiasm when I explained the back-story about Alamogordo. He played around with the words a bit and came up with an amazing discovery. It's an anagram, a simple word game. Took him a while, he did it by hand. Just as well, it was a word game inside a word game (of course!) and he never would have found it with an anagram generator. This is what he found: Who is covering up Alamogordo New Me.? I think we can call this case closed. ~G

Much of it is nostalgia, but ultimately it is one of the best "quest" games of all time. First, as someone mentioned before, it is unscripted. Except for the random placement of items, anything could happen. Dragons travel their own paths and the bat mixes things up. There is no one pathway to follow to finish the game, as in almost all other adventure-type games today. Second, the quest. Not only do you have to find the chalice, but you have to find the keys to open the castles, the magnet to get stuff stuck in a wall, and the sword for protection. Add to this the fact that you can only carry one at a time, and you really have to make decisions about which object to take where, and what your risk is of finding a dragon while unarmed... Third are the "games within games". As mentioned above, the Easter Egg and exploring across screens really was an adventure because you could explore areas in ways that were only possible because the programming was so compact. Today, you could fix it so you couldn't use the bridge to cross over the edge of a screen -- it just wouldn't happen unless the programmer wanted you to or there was a major bug. But back then, the only way to "stop" people was to warn them in the instruction manual not to do it. But the most important thing about the game that nobody above has mentioned is the suspense factor. You are literally on the edge of your seat for the whole game. Is a dragon around the corner? Where are they hiding? Great, I finally found the key -- let's hope the bat doesn't come around! Etc. Etc. Even with the dragons dead, the bat always kept things interesting. I get that adrenaline rush of "fear" more than any action game I ever played. Space invaders marching across the screen -- whatever. Missles coming down on cities, so what? Dragons coming to eat you at any moment... now that's something to worry about. Today, it is easy to see why people are not so taken with the game. The graphics and sound effects of course are no where near today's standards. And relatively speaking, it is a very small "world". Although I love the game, I find myself getting bored with it very quickly (only to come back later...) But for pure game play, it has certainly stood the test of time. Maybe WR should update it with today's techonology... ~G

The first cartridge with volleyball would be VideoOlympics -- I think that was the third cartridge we ever got. ~G

One of my biggest let-downs was Barnstorming. The box clearly showed a swoosh of the plane doing a loop...!?! I have never really liked the game, mostly because I have never really recovered from the vision of what I thought Barnstorming could have been (or should have been!) As for advertising in general, you have to admit that many of the games left much to your own imagination. Sure, those are tanks in Combat, and these are biplanes, and the other are jets. But the artwork really helps get your imagination going. You can't tell me that you actually like the text label of Adventure over the graphic version. And although some were really, really bad artwork renderings (Imagic comes to mind), some were good enough to at least help you fill in the blanks that the woefully-inadequate 2600 graphics couldn't. Actually, the Barnstorming incident aside, I've always like Activision's presentation and those colourful graphics and even the slick in-game "Activision" logo made me believe that they were a little more polished and professional than the rest -- including Atari. ~G

If it was programmed by David Crane while at Atari, that would have been years before the keypad was invented. ~G

Yes, as someone pointed out above, it is in the Wishbook, and I've already asked my son for it for Christmas. There's memories. Used to deliver the Wishbook every year, and of course pour over it circling all the cartridges I was going to get. In fact, back in the day Sears was the only place to get it here, and usually you had to order it through the catalogue. It would take something like four weeks to ship. Somehow it's fitting that the Wishbook has it again, even if it is buried in with the kids' mock-video games and not plastering the inside and outside of the back cover... ~G

Yes, like many people here, had the first Odyssey and then got the Atari for Christmas when it came out in '77. I was lucky -- my Dad was right into that stuff, so he was happy to buy it "for me". Great times, playing Combat for hours on end, and then Air/Sea Battle. My Dad still curses to this day because he says the only reason he spent extra for Indy 500 was because Atari promised they'd come out with more games for those paddles. Ah well, maybe someday...! ~G

That is so cool! Never seen a mod before like that -- though I never looked. Great idea for sprucing up the ol' computer...! ~G

I still associate these albums with Atari when I hear them: REO Speedwagon - Hi In Fidelity Cheap Trick - Live at the Budokan Queen - The Game Queen - News of the World Billy Joel - Glass Houses (First Side) Billy Joel - Nylon Curtain ABBA - Voulez Vous I'm sure there were others, but these ones bring back the memories...

Today, creating games and merchandising to go along with movies like Star Wars is a no-brainer, but in 1977 it wasn't the same way. In fact, in a lot of ways Star Wars started the whole idea of merchandising -- and not very smoothly. The big "thing to get" for Christmas '77 was a gift certificate saying that Kenner owed you a Star Wars figure that hadn't been produced yet. I think by the time they got the toys manufactured, the movie had already been out a year. Atari was very new too -- in fact the whole gaming industry was. It probably wouldn't occur to them to make a game based on a movie. I think the first one to ever do so (and correct me if I'm wrong) was The Empire Strikes Back by Parker Brothers, but that was three years down the road. For arguement's sake, if Star Wars was willing to sell the "game rights" to Atari, and Atari was willing to buy them, then yes, I think that Atari would have gotten more popular faster -- especially given that Star Wars toys were not available until Spring 1978. As for quality, that would have mattered little because at that point the games were not advanced even by Atari standards. They could have turned Outlaw into a laser shoot'em, changed the graphics, put "Star Wars" on the front, and have the world's first million-selling game. But this is all hind-sight. I have read several threads on this forum questioning why this happened and why that didn't happen, but I think that we all fail to take into account the time period. Yes, there were video games before the VCS, but I would argue that they were mostly electronic toys that used the TV as part of its game play. And the simple fact is that Atari was the first video game company to become popular. They were the pathfinders, essentially creating the video game industry. Things that would seem like "common sense" to us now were difficult questions back then because there were no precedents to base their decisions -- both in terms of creativity and business/marketing. Today co-branding and merchandising are run by formulas, but before Star Wars it didn't really exist on any great level. And that same year with the introduction of the VCS comes the first real steps into the video gaming industry. I would be more surprised today if there had been a Star Wars video game... Great artwork! Blends the Star Wars and Atari styles beautifully.

The ad that made me drool the most was the one in the order forms that said "Adventure II - Call for Pricing". Of course that went down the tubes when EarthQuest came out... (The first cover for Electronic Gaming was quite drool-worthy as well...) ~G

I think everyone is right: the burial happened and there was an urban myth developed about it. I remember when the whole thing went down -- it was big news for a day or two. If I remember correctly, Atari claimed that it was disposing of a huge cache of "defective" cartridges. They didn't work, so they just got rid of them. Of course the big question was why they dumped the whole cartridge, and not just the chips. After all, the actual cartridge casing could be reused. But Atari said that the effort it would take to remove the chips, strip off the labels, and put them back into production would be monumental compared to just making a new one. And this makes sense from a business perspective, when you think about it. In mass production, those carts would cost pennies to produce -- even back then. However, the media started to speculate that there may be more to it. Overstocking of many titles, not just E.T., prompted Atari to dump the carts in an effort to keep the price up. At that point, Atari was reaching its peak, and sales of new units (and correspondingly, new carts) were about to slow. In the straightforward supply and demand market, there was too much supply which threatened to undermine the pricing. Personally, I believe that these were just defective carts. Back then, Atari was like a rock star and any move they made was scrutinized. Chucking carts, for any reason, would have been newsworthy given the popularity of them. An 800-pound gorilla can put its garbage anywhere it wants, but it can't do it quietly... ~G