Search the Community

Hello! Strap in, because this isn't the kind of thing you'd usually see here. I'm Jake Riley. I'm making a game based on the video game crash of 1983. The idea for this project has been in my head for quite a while now. It's been in inactive development during that time. It is a story-driven 2D platformer that’s a homage to the Atari 2600. I thought this forum would be a good place to talk about it, considering the Atari theme. Anyway, my game will have a unique spin on the Wreck-It-Ralph-style formula, where video game characters are sentient. It takes place in the world of a poorly-made Atari 2600 game during the 1983 video game crash. The project is called “Randy’s Crazy Mission!”, which is also the title of the Atari game it's set in. The game was made by a fictional sucker company (The Buscal Candy Company) to tie-in with their brand’s cartoon commercials. Think something like that old Tootsie Pop ad. It’s like how Coke and other brands made tie-in games for the Atari. Aesthetic As you're about to see (or have seen if you've already scrolled down), even though this project's about a 2600 game, it won’t look like one. Considering this game has dialogue and humor, and considering my background in hand-drawing, I didn't want it to have the 2600's very basic visual style. I decided to give it a 70s animation art style instead, since the game within this game is based on 70s cartoon commercials. That’s how the characters perceive their world. Sources of influence include the classic cartoon Tootsie Pop commercial, Schoolhouse Rock!, and The Point! (not sure how many of you’d know about that last one). There'll even be a period-appropriate, old-school film filter to make the 70s-style animation more authentic. The 70s cartoon style fits the time period of the Atari 2600 well. The presentation will still have elements of the signature pixelated 2600 look however. The HUD and text will look like they came straight from an old Atari game, some sound effects will use the 2600 sound, and the characters' Atari sprites (what they actually look like on TV screens) will come up in certain places. Dialogue prompts will use NPCs' Atari sprites. Randy's 2600 sprite will appear on the grey HUD bar on the top of the screen when players can interact with something. And, the very beginning of the game will look like an actual Atari 2600 title, before flashing to the 70s cartoon style seconds later to highlight the contrast. The 70s cartoon style and retro Atari look come together to create an interesting blend of aesthetics. In-game, the pixel graphics will have a filter to make them look like they're on CRTs, similar to what I'm doing with the hand-drawn stuff. Here's a picture of some of the characters' sprites: Story You'll play as Randy, the mascot of the sucker brand that created him and the player character of their advergame. He's a living mushroom. There's a conflict that's happening while his game is on the shelf in yet another disappointed buyer's home. Yeah, the game was returned to the store repeatedly. Randy wants to solve the conflict to gain appreciation from his family. The times he's been controlled by someone in the real world accomplishing a fake, programmed plot don't count as something Randy meaningfully did. Also, bringing the video game crash of 1983 into this, the characters who live in the game within this game are aware of the video game industry and the then-current 1983 crash, and that factors into the story. I'm not (outright) fully revealing how just yet though, at the time of posting this. WE ARE ALL JUNK The fact that the characters live in a poorly-made game had caused some of them, including Randy's family members, to develop a poor outlook on their game world’s denizens as a whole and generally gain dumb and bad views. Views that most people in the game rightfully and unanimously look-down-upon. Randy's upbringing (if you can call it that, considering the timeframe) has consisted of him being surrounded by backwards folk who, among other awful things, say that all the sentient characters who live in their game world are "junk" simply for living in a bad game, relishing in this "fact" on top of that, and Randy has to just suck it up. This particularly radicalized a certain someone who Randy is very, very close to. And these peoples' reactions to the video game crash of 1983, oooh man, how dreadful! A big focus of the story is how certain CREEPS who live in the game react to the then-current 1983 crash, and the trauma that the crash gave Randy due to his upbringing. Yeah, if it wasn't clear already, this is not your average Atari-related project. Oh, one more thing though! After the start of 1983, the characters, through a few different things, discovered even more of how broken their game is. This is relevant as well. Gameplay Moving on to the gameplay, the game within this game is poorly made, as I said earlier. When players boot this game up for the first time, they get exactly what the game is in-universe. Though, it's using the 70s cartoon art style, just as the story is. It starts out purposefully frustrating and shoddy, what lots of people associate with games around the time of the crash. If you can tolerate beating the six levels, the real game will begin. It's actual story will start after the game's put on the shelf by disappointed customer number whatever. The interesting thing is that, during the story, you replay all six levels (with a few more courses thrown in), but they'll be better. Stuff will be added to the levels to improve them, and alleviations to the previously frustrating gameplay will take some edge off. On top of that, story cutscenes will take place in them, you can talk to NPCs (who just stand there in the in-universe game), there'll be new NPCs, and there'll actually be music playing in each stage (which, by the way, I'm also composing the soundtrack). There'll even be moments to take advantage of the game's shoddiness, and there'll also be gameplay nods both big and small to classic games of its time period, complete with new spins on them and perhaps even more challenge. There will be a couple of creative liberties when it comes to it actually being on the 2600, but not too much. Art Here's the game's logo: Now here's art of Randy himself: Here are some mockups I made of what this game will look like in action: As a side note, I'm planning for the game's cutscenes to be quite dynamic. There'll be zoom-ins, close-up shots, cutaways, and all that fancy stuff. It'll almost be like you're watching an actual cartoon. Fitting, considering that the game within this game is based on cartoons. Summary So, to summarize, Randy's Crazy Mission! will feature: A surprisingly rich story based on the world of an Atari game during the video game crash of 1983, with wacky characters to talk to. Unique visuals that blend the looks of Atari 2600 games and 70s cartoons, complete with an old-school filter to give some authenticity to the graphics. An interesting gameplay shift where you go from a frustrating experience to something more interesting once the game's actual story begins. Gameplay nods to classic Atari-era video games with unique twists and maybe even more challenge. A diverse soundtrack, also made by me. The OST will use the Atari 2600 sound here and there, but it will mostly just sound like "real" music to go with the hand-drawn look, and it will use a lot of different styles. Closing Words I will admit, this is a pretty strange concept for a game. That's why I'm planning to make a demo as a sorta proof of concept. I also created a website focused on discussing Randy's Crazy Mission! in detail. I get more into where the game's currently at in development and why it hasn't been in active development yet in the first blog post of my site. For some more info about the game, check out the blog. There is one new thing to say about the development as of late. I'm considering switching the engine for this project, for, well, reasons. I didn't know if AtariAge would particularly like for me to show off this game, since it's not Atari homebrew as usual, so I actually emailed them a while back, asking if it was alright for me to promote here. They never seemed to respond, so I took it as a yes. Hopefully this is okay for me to do here, moderator.... I also made a couple of devlogs for Randy on itch.io, and the indie game development site TIGSource. And I'm about to published a page for the game on GameJolt later. I'll provide a link when I release it. There will be devlogs over there too. Hopefully, you'll follow along as I talk more about this game. Here's the link to my blog: https://jakerileygamedevblog.com/ Feel free to ask questions if you're at all interested! Some of them might not get answers though.

Was it 1983/1984 severe or was it just a burnout?

Hi Everyone! This is my first post to this site, even though I've visited in the past. Thanks for all you do for the gaming community and the valuable information you all provide! I'm here because I recently found an interesting trio of items, and I'm hoping to learn more if anyone knows more. These are Atari employee pay stubs from '82-'83, which include a regular pay stub, severance package stub and a "sick bonus" stub which I'm assuming was a PTO payout of some kind. These are interesting enough on their own, but what makes them even more unusual is the fact that they came from right around the time of the crash. Even more unusual is that the "severance" stub was from '82 and the others from '83, possibly meaning that this employee was terminated in '82 and brought back to work in '83 only to be met again with termination most likely due to the crash. That's about as much as I know about these, hence my reason for starting this post. I can't find any information on the employee (name is in the photo). I don't know anything on the timeline of this person's employment besides the tale the stubs tell. Did/Do any of you possibly know her, or recognize these? Any information you all may know would be appreciated. I'd love to know more about this person's story if it's out there. Thanks in advance! OldStuffJunkie

Being too young to know what happened, what was it like? Were Intellivision or ColecoVision owners affected at all? I always had the cliched viewpoint of "New from All American Video Astrogames, a division of Joe's Plumbing Co, comes Space Revenge! The Blorgzom Blasters from Planet 24 are firing at earth! Help stop them! Available at MTF, your liquidation superstore." But is that true?

Writing this because: - People on YouTube seem to be missing some history - I'd like my kids to maybe read it (someday) - Some of these things I can't find on the internet Please add your own stuff and corrections. What would you highlight (add asterisks to) as being significant? ------------------------------- Early 70's I remember being in Disneyland with family waiting for "American the Beautiful" Circle-Vision 360 and they had a play tic-tac-toe agents a computer or electronic something. I just remember it winning every time. Watching rockets blast off going to the moon. Mid-70's Balsa wood airplanes w/rubber ban windup propeller. Tandy Leather co (get tools and kits to make designs in leather mostly for wallets. My dad had a lot of tools)(Tandy co owned Radio Shack) Burning wood kits (no lawsuits back then) No 8-track tapes but still had cassette adaptor for the car 8 track player. ONLY 3 TV channels! (Maybe a UHF fuzzy channel)(something called VHF and UHF (one dial U-2-3-4..12-13 and the other channels 15-20-25-...–80 that didn't click) Saturday morning cartoons (Hanna-Barbera: Speed Buggy, Scooby-Doo) CB radios (new language "breaker one-nine"), 8 mm home movies (no sound), board games (master mind, monopoly, battle ship), bikes (kid would do wheelies, and jumps ala Evel Knievel) First calculators (I remember a magnifier on each digit) Library no computer! card catalogs, microfilm, microfiche 1972 Magnavox Odyssey home ~pong system with gun (Magnavox latter sued Atari and others for Pong) 1975 Oct Saturday Night Live 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975 Atari/Sears pong 1976 Bicentennial (USA 200 years old, Red, White, and Blue everywhere, posters with 1776-1976 on them, special quarters) 1977 May Star Wars IV (was such a hit that having a Star Wars T-shirt made other boys envious)(Kenner Star Wars Early Bird Kit) 1977 Space Wars arcade (my big brother and I played this in Disneyland after riding Space Mountain in the Starcade (currently they have Fixit Felix with Wreck-It Ralph they look like Donkey Kong machines)) 1977 June ****Apple ][ **** $1,300 (Atari employee #40: ) 1977 June TRS-80 computer $600 (Radio Shack) 1977 handheld electronic mastermind 1977 Sep **Atari 2600** heavy 6er $200 with Combat, fun but you need another person. 4k rom addressing 9 games (all early games are 2k, it is more expensive to make 4k) 3 different controllers: joystick, paddles, driving (Indy 500 only(game was to bring home a fun arcade game that had big steering wheels for multiple players) 1978 Merlin game, Handheld LED Football, Simon 1978 ****2600 Space Invaders ****(Atari 2600 killer app) (pretty much first game you can play by-u-self for hours. (Well maybe Surround or Code Breaker) Otherwise you had to get a friend over or convince a sibling or parent to play with you) 1978 Dr. Demento (radio show of funny songs, this show will start "Weird Al" Yankovic, Space invaders by Uncle Vic, ((Locked In The Closet With You by SuLu))) 1978 Adventureland text RPG on the TRS-80 1978 Basic Computer Games book (a book with basic programs to type into your computer to play games) (We also would have magazines with type in games and latter some would be rows of data statements : "100 DATA 4E 00 48 63" and the basic program would write the data to a cassette tape and then you could load the games and play Late 70's - Early 1980's Shacky's Pizza all you can eat with the whole family with video games silent moves would play on a big screen and a player piano would play music. 1979 Galaxian arcade game (Shacky's had one we would flick pennies up the return slot to add a credit until the owner bent the metal on the return slot) 1979 Steve Jobs goes to PARC and see a GUI! 1979 Nov 2600 Asteroids (first bank switching game:8k) 1979 Nov Atari 8-bit computer With Star Raiders killer app Arcade: Pac-man, Missile Command (first trackball), Battle Zone 1980 Commodore VIC 20 1980 Intellivision $300 1980 ***Adventure*** (OMG saw this at a friend’s house and got this game within a couple days) 1980 first Activision games 1980 July Airplane! Movie (A friend was playing Adventure at my house. He saw the maze blinking with only one object. He said there must be something in here. I'm all naw. We said there is a little square right here and he got the ladder and got in there and hit something in the corner. It was a dot but it was late and he left to go home. I was so excited. While carrying the dot I went to the main hall way and the line on the left disappeared! But it didn't let me through ahhhh! Well eventually I got through the other line but didn't know what it said.) 1981 we started seeing arcades in strip malls with tokens! (I use to go after school and play Gorf and centipede and they expanded the arcade and Robotron: 2084 and Donkey Kong came.) And Golf and things had a ton of arcade games. 1981 Arcade: Gorf, Donkey Kong 1981 Dec Pac-Man Fever song 1981 Aug IBM PC (thus starts the monopoly switch from IBM to Microsoft (also hardware to software). 1982 July Tron movie 1982 Aug Commodore 64 1982 Aug ColecoVision with ****killer app: Donkey Kong****** 1982 Sep Star Raiders 2600 with touch pad 1982 Tron arcade game 1983 Kid controller 1983 Dragon's Lair (first laserdisc video game) 1983 Oct Coleco Adam home computer attachment to ColecoVision video game (a quick story: Adam was sold in JC Penny's (Tucson El Con downstairs) in Video games in the toy department and they had a computer department. Someone walks up to the guy behind the counter at the computer department and asks “where is the Adam computer?” Reply: that would be in the toy department. The person leaves and we both crack up laughing.) 1983 video game crash(or home video game console crash) I remember outside the KayBee toy store ("where you guna find a KayBee toy store?" (Tucson mall bottom floor) loads of 2600 games in a bin, one box I remember had a big tank on it with the title: "Tanks but no Tanks" and no one wanting to buy them because they mostly sucked and we wanted computer games. (watch David Crane video on Pitfall (54 min in): no quality control/lockout chip and 3rd party crap games) A stupid home computer commercial with a kid going off to collage on a train and coming back because of "lack of computer skills". Part of the Video Game crash for me was that parents said if we are going to spend money about $200 on a video game thing why not buy a computer that plays video games and my kid will learn some programming and not just waist time. 1984 Firefox video game with laserdisc background (based on Warner Bros (parent company to Atari) Firefox movie. (First 7800's had a laserdisc port) Arcade: Paperboy, Marble Madness 1984 March IBM PC Jr (home/cheep computer w/ inferred keyboard) 1985 Oct *****NES *****(rebirth of console gaming) ... Bulletin board systems distributing pirated software