The Making of Imagic - great classic TV episode

[+Random Terrain]

okay, the fucking codec didnt help me, it still says i need "one or more codecs to play the fucking file" WTF do i do now.

 

btw:i willl delete all the bad words and shit once i am done being pissed off at the shitty ass pharoah's curse game.............................

 

okay, fuck vixy.net, i will use the firefox one

My old computer had trouble with some avi files no matter what I tried, so you might have to use something like Fast Video Download then convert it to MPG with something like the riva FLV Encoder. The destination file name in the box will end with .flv, so change that to .mpg and you'll get an mpg file when it is done. It can take many minutes depending on the file size, so don't freak out. If the mpg doesn't work, get a hammer and smash your computer to bits and buy a new computer that will work properly.

[Mindfield]

Now, I'd love to find one like this on Atari or Activision. That would be sweet.

Although not as good, something for Activision does exist if you haven't seen it yet:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yqVqwcICKQ

 

You get to see the programmers and their commercials.

 

And a young Phil Hartman in the Ice Hockey commercial. Great!

 

I've found a surprising number of present-day (then) and before-they-were-stars people acting in video game and computer commercials:

 

Phil Hartman: Activision's Ice Hockey

Gary Grubbs: Activision's Stampede

Alan Alda: Atari XL computer system (running series of ads)

Pete Rose and Don Knotts: Atari 2600 "Don't just watch TV tonight, play it" spot

Elizabeth Shue: Atari 2600 "Buy two, get one free" spot

Bill Smitrovich: Atari 2600 "She's Relentless" spot

Mel Allen: Atari 2600 RealSports series

Billy Martin: Atari 2600 RealSports Baseball

Henry Thomas: Intellivision and Intellivision II (running series of ads with -- who else? -- George Plimpton. Ironically, Atari never hired him to reprise his role as Elliott for the E.T. commercial)

Buzz Aldrin, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, Little Richard, Burt Bacharach, The Pointer Sisters, Tommy LaSorda, and Tip O'Neil: Commodore Amiga - "Celebrity" spot.

 

It's fun particularly seeing the before-they-were-stars stump for the classics.

Edited February 27, 2007 by Mindfield

[ewing92]

okay, the fucking codec didnt help me, it still says i need "one or more codecs to play the fucking file" WTF do i do now.

 

btw:i willl delete all the bad words and shit once i am done being pissed off at the shitty ass pharoah's curse game.............................

 

okay, fuck vixy.net, i will use the firefox one

My old computer had trouble with some avi files no matter what I tried, so you might have to use something like Fast Video Download then convert it to MPG with something like the riva FLV Encoder. The destination file name in the box will end with .flv, so change that to .mpg and you'll get an mpg file when it is done. It can take many minutes depending on the file size, so don't freak out. If the mpg doesn't work, get a hammer and smash your computer to bits and buy a new computer that will work properly.

i tried fast video download, i will try what you suggested later, thanks

 

oh believe me, i have been wanting to smash my computer into tiny pieces for a while, try running "today's" stuff with a socket a AMD Athlon XP 24oo+ processor, let's just say you won't be happy lol

[jaybird3rd]

 

OH ... MY ... GOD !!!

 

I don't know how I managed to miss it until now, but that had to be one of the most amazing pieces of classic gaming history I've ever seen. What a time capsule that was! It's a real pity that other companies didn't do similar documentaries; HSW's "Once Upon Atari" talks a lot about the inside of Atari during the same time period, but it would have been even better to show it "live" as this documentary did.

 

This must be the video that Rob Fulop talked about during the CGE2K4 Imagic roundtable: at about 46:30 into that discussion, Rob took a question about it from the audience. He said it was a very uncommon type of production that was made with the involvement of a friend of Bill Grubb's who was doing PBS documentaries, and that he still has a copy of it and watches it whenever he's in a foul mood. Brad Stewart also talked in that discussion about going up in a hot air balloon for a ride with the president when he was researching Sky Patrol; the ride shown at the end of the documentary must have been the very one he was talking about.

 

I noticed Dennis Koble's "Imagic Prima Donnas" t-shirt, too; it made me laugh out loud when I first saw it.

Edited March 3, 2007 by jaybird3rd

[Mindfield]

It is indeed a pretty amazing and detailed look into life inside one of the great video game companies of the early 80s. I like all the miscellaneous clips and retrospectives and interviews, but they all just skitter along the surface of the subject matter, and while interesting to hear anecdotes and watch how things were promoted, it's just not the same as seeing it all done as it's being done from the inside, which is the missing element this show provided -- and it did that amazingly well. This is definitely my favourite video of the collection.

 

I finally managed to stitch the three parts into one complete MPEG. Unfortunately it's about four times larger than the original rips, but it was the only way I could transcode it without further degrading quality. It's all good though -- as long as it plays.

 

I didn't know Rob discussed this previously -- but it's cool that he did. I can see how this would lift one's mood; it's a real, almost tactile reminder of the good ol' days right from the inside. I'd love to get my hands on Rob's copy and cap it at DVD quality. Think he'd lend it out?

[NE146]

okay, the codec didnt help me, it still says i need "one or more codecs to play the file", what should i do now?

 

[btw:i willl delete all the bad words and shit]{done!} once i am done being pissed off at the shitty pharoah's curse game

 

okay, fuck vixy.net, i will use the firefox one

 

{edit:yay! im done being pissed, time to erase the bad stuff, well, the false bad stuff lol, i kept everything that i thought was true.}

 

Look man. If all you want to do is watch stuff, forget all the codec crap. Download VLC Media Player. It plays everything. No codecs needed.

 

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[jaybird3rd]

I finally managed to stitch the three parts into one complete MPEG. Unfortunately it's about four times larger than the original rips, but it was the only way I could transcode it without further degrading quality. It's all good though -- as long as it plays.

Heh ... I did the same thing. In fact, I converted it to AVI using mencoder and am burning it to VideoCD even as I write this. That's a whole lot easier to deal with than the FLV format.

[ewing92]

okay, the codec didnt help me, it still says i need "one or more codecs to play the file", what should i do now?

 

[btw:i willl delete all the bad words and shit]{done!} once i am done being pissed off at the shitty pharoah's curse game

 

okay, fuck vixy.net, i will use the firefox one

 

{edit:yay! im done being pissed, time to erase the bad stuff, well, the false bad stuff lol, i kept everything that i thought was true.}

 

Look man. If all you want to do is watch stuff, forget all the codec crap. Download VLC Media Player. It plays everything. No codecs needed.

 

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

 

*gasp* thank you very much, it will get alot of use.

[Mindfield]

Hey, nice. Leave it to open source software to have the most comprehensive functionality.

 

I tried out MediaCoder. Works great, and it's fast! It even handles Quicktime, though it's not perfect; I have a bunch of Quicktime 3 vids from the old Commercial Archive that I ran through MEncoder. The video converted on some of them, but there was no sound. Others just errored out. Pity, because I'd like to finally eliminate the Quicktimes from my collection.

 

 

I can't get MPlayer to work to save my life though, and VLC has been a bit buggy for me. (I tried VLC months ago, but I just installed MPlayer and its GUI and skins). MPlayer just shows a pink screen, like it can't render video regardless of what video format I feed it.

Edited March 3, 2007 by Mindfield

[jaybird3rd]

I only wish that the filmmakers had focused more on Dennis Koble's development system. I couldn't identify the terminal he was using (with the dual 8" floppy disk drives), but I did recognize the Atari 800 that the graphic artist was using for the sprite editor and the 2600 console by the TV (for some reason the 2600 looked like it had its cover off at one point). It also looks like he had an Atari 850 interface hooked up to the 800 ... I wonder what that would have been connected to?

[Mindfield]

I only wish that the filmmakers had focused more on Dennis Koble's development system. I couldn't identify the terminal he was using (with the dual 8" floppy disk drives), but I did recognize the Atari 800 that the graphic artist was using for the sprite editor and the 2600 console by the TV (for some reason the 2600 looked like it had its cover off at one point). It also looks like he had an Atari 850 interface hooked up to the 800 ... I wonder what that would have been connected to?

 

The 2600 with the cover off I'd wager is part of the dev system. If I had to guess I'd say that the dev system was wired directly up to the 2600 console via the cart port or something, which would allow compiles to be immediately tested without having to burn to an EEPROM first.

 

The 850 was probably used to transfer sprite data files via serial or parallel to an external 8" floppy disk so Kobel could bring it to his dev system and incorporate the data into his game.

 

Those are just guesses but it would make sense.

[+Random Terrain]

Look man. If all you want to do is watch stuff, forget all the codec crap. Download VLC Media Player. It plays everything. No codecs needed.

 

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I just tried it and it works great on my computer. I can finally watch flv files full screen. I compared the flv version of the video I grabbed with Fast Video Download to the same video converted with vixy.net and this time the flv version looks better as you might expect.

 

Quickly grabbing the video with something like the Firefox add-on Fast Video Download and watching it with VLC Media Player is going to save me a lot of time.

 

Thanks.

[supercat]

The 2600 with the cover off I'd wager is part of the dev system. If I had to guess I'd say that the dev system was wired directly up to the 2600 console via the cart port or something, which would allow compiles to be immediately tested without having to burn to an EEPROM first.

 

One could construct a board pretty easily to upload games to the 2600 if one didn't mind tapping into the machine. All one would need would be two 2Kx8 SRAMs, a 2Kx8 EPROM, a 74138 (1 of 8 decoder), and a computer with a TTL-level output. Wire the board so that when the computer's output is low RAM is selected and when it's high the EPROM is selected. The computer should start with its output low when the VCS is powered up, and the VCS should start by copying a bootloader into RIOT ram. The computer should then raise its output, and then send 4K of data at whatever baud rate is convenient, leaving its output high when it's done.

 

Many variations on that design are possible, but any simple design will require access to the phi2 and R/W signals that are not available on the 2600 cartridge port. Thus, I would expect anyone seeking to build a cheap development system to tap into the machine to get them.

[+Random Terrain]

One could construct a board pretty easily . . .

Could two or three or four construct a board pretty easily?

[jaybird3rd]

Could two or three or four construct a board pretty easily?

Probably ... but Imagic's game programmers were non-union labor, so they only needed one person. Edited March 5, 2007 by jaybird3rd

[Fellow Atari Man]

I also found it kind of odd that Bill was so concerned about Arcadia and the potential for piracy of their tapes.

 

I thought it was GREAT that they were mentioned though. And ironically funny as hell that Data Age was right next door. I must say, Imagic really blew the pants off of them!

 

Thanks for posting these, I've only just seen the first one

[Mindfield]

I thought it was GREAT that they were mentioned though. And ironically funny as hell that Data Age was right next door. I must say, Imagic really blew the pants off of them!

 

True -- I thought it was rather interesting that the two were neighbours. Of all places to rent it had to be right next door to some major competition. DataAge weren't that bad -- they had a few unique titles, but they definitely didn't have the flair for design that many of their contemporaries had.

 

Thanks for posting these, I've only just seen the first one

 

The whole thing is great, beginning to end. It's a real pity this show wasn't an hour long affair, though. There was definitely enough interesting material there to stretch it out.

[jaybird3rd]

I also found it kind of odd that Bill was so concerned about Arcadia and the potential for piracy of their tapes. He called the concept "frightening." What effect would that have on Imagic, or anyone else for that matter? Seems to me from a competitive standpoint Arcadia should have been the least of their concerns unless they had somehow considered writing games for that medium.

I may be wrong about this, but based on what he said about the Arcadia allowing piracy to take place, and based on the remarks that Brian Dougherty made about the ease of copying cassette tapes, I got the impression that they were concerned that the Arcadia would become a vehicle for piracy, making it possible to transfer and copy cartridge games (including Imagic's) on tape. It has been done, so I suppose that concern was valid, but the Arcadia would have had to sell a fairly large number of units before any such piracy could have become widespread enough to hurt Imagic's margins. I think that might have been another one of Dougherty's points: because cassettes are so easy to pirate, Arcadia wouldn't make much money off of a cassette-based system because the few games they sold would be so quickly copied, and so they weren't a competitor worth worrying about. Speaking of competitors, I didn't realize that Data Age and Imagic were neighbors, either, before I saw them singled out in that list of companies during the board meeting at the end of Part 1.

 

I'm struck again at how strange it is to watch the events of 1982 unfold as they happened. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see all of the factors that lead to the video game crash beginning to materialize in this documentary: all kinds of companies jumping onto the video game bandwagon looking for a quick buck, and major players like Imagic being focused entirely on securing big purchase orders from retailers and stuffing the sales channels with product. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that there was much more product being generated (by them and everyone else) than the fledgling market could absorb, and not nearly enough of it sold through to the customers. So when that excess product started coming back, and when they started building up more and more product in their warehouses in anticipation of future 1983 sales that never materialized, they found themselves with a multi-million-dollar inventory problem, and that's ultimately what did them in. And that's probably why it still isn't too hard to find sealed Imagic games some twenty-five years later: hidden stashes in forgotten corners keep cropping up even today, and I think there are still more out there waiting to be rediscovered.

 

Just out of curiosity, I wonder if anyone knows what became of Bill Grubb after his time at Imagic? Or, for that matter, Jim Levy after Activision? I know that Bruce Davis (who, oddly enough, succeeded both of them as president of Imagic and then as CEO of Activision) heads up Digimarc these days, and I know what most of the programmers have done, but I don't think I've seen any post-crash information on Grubb or Levy. I think a new interview with either one of them would be fascinating: we've all heard a lot about the pioneering work that the great programmers at Activision and Imagic did, but the business side of these early software companies (including their successes and failures) deserves discussion too, and who would be better qualified to talk about it than the people who were at the very top?

Edited March 6, 2007 by jaybird3rd

[supercat]

I may be wrong about this, but based on what he said about the Arcadia allowing piracy to take place, and based on the remarks that Brian Dougherty made about the ease of copying cassette tapes, I got the impression that they were concerned that the Arcadia would become a vehicle for piracy, making it possible to transfer and copy cartridge games (including Imagic's) on tape. It has been done, so I suppose that concern was valid, but the Arcadia would have had to sell a fairly large number of units before any such piracy could have become widespread enough to hurt Imagic's margins.

 

I don't think the concern was that people would pirate other companies' games (few of the people with the means to copy a 4K 2600 game to a SuperCharger-compatible tape would be interested in doing so) but rather that Starpath/Arcadia, for as long as they remained in business, would effectively be selling games for $1/$5 each. The low net price of their product would put them out of business, but it might also hurt their competitors as well.

 

Is there any evidence whatsoever of anyone "back in the day" having copied even a single 4K cart to tape?

[jaybird3rd]

I don't think the concern was that people would pirate other companies' games (few of the people with the means to copy a 4K 2600 game to a SuperCharger-compatible tape would be interested in doing so) but rather that Starpath/Arcadia, for as long as they remained in business, would effectively be selling games for $1/$5 each. The low net price of their product would put them out of business, but it might also hurt their competitors as well.

 

Is there any evidence whatsoever of anyone "back in the day" having copied even a single 4K cart to tape?

I'm not aware of anyone successfully copying cartridges to tape back then, but since the site I linked to includes a "ROM playback" utility for the C64, I imagine it would have been possible to do it with the computer technology that existed at the time--if, as you say, anyone with the knowhow to do it would have been interested.

 

Your interpretation (the price issues) hadn't occured to me, but it does make sense.

[MaDDuck]

Guys-

What about the terror they must of felt upon seeing the Atari E.T. commercial?

 

If only they knew the game was the Yoko Ono of the video game industry.

 

That was an amazing piece of video, I cap'ed it using tubesocks and it looks and runs great.

 

Fantastic!

[Jetboot Jack]

Awesome videos - great to see some old faces when they were young

 

And great to see my good friend Michael Becker (beard and glasses) sat there drawing ships for Atlantis at around 7 minutes into the first video!!!!!

 

sTeVE

[Mindfield]

Hey, cool. I made the front page.

 

I may be wrong about this, but based on what he said about the Arcadia allowing piracy to take place, and based on the remarks that Brian Dougherty made about the ease of copying cassette tapes, I got the impression that they were concerned that the Arcadia would become a vehicle for piracy, making it possible to transfer and copy cartridge games (including Imagic's) on tape. It has been done, so I suppose that concern was valid, but the Arcadia would have had to sell a fairly large number of units before any such piracy could have become widespread enough to hurt Imagic's margins.

 

I'm not so sure about this. The technology behind the Supercharger in and of itself wouldn't have been able to be used for copying cartridges even if modified. It may have been possible to design a cart dumper that could dump to cassette and then use the Supercharger to load the games into its memory via a standard tape player, but since the Supercharger is only half the equation (and the lesser half at that) I can't see them getting too worked up about it unless they'd heard something about cart-to-cassette dumping hardware.

 

Just out of curiosity, I wonder if anyone knows what became of Bill Grubb after his time at Imagic? Or, for that matter, Jim Levy after Activision?

 

The Google, it does nothing, but a search of the forums here suggests that user cx2k would know, based on this old post wherein he's had contact with him Bill Grubb. As for Jim Levy, again, very little recent information comes to light, but according to this press release about the 2006 Sonoma Valley Film Festival, he's one of its board members. Probably not too surprising given his background in the entertainment industry.

 

Guys-

What about the terror they must of felt upon seeing the Atari E.T. commercial?

 

If only they knew the game was the Yoko Ono of the video game industry.

 

I suspect that they probably weren't terribly worried. Imagic weren't into the whole movie license thing, and while the game was hyped to ridiculous proportions and had some pretty good advertising going into the 1982 holiday season, Imagic were standing quite firmly on their own two feet and I'm certain they were confident of good sales. As the documentary details, they kept blowing their forecasts wide open so there was no reason to think E.T. posed a singnificant competitive threat.

Edited March 11, 2007 by Mindfield

[MayDay]

What I found most interesting was when they showed several pages of the hand-written coding before he typed it all in... it's impossible to tell, given the compression of the video, but did they show most/all of the code, and if so, could it be recreated at least in part if an original copy of this video were found?

 

Thanks for the links, had not seen this.

[Tempest]

I just watched this and had a couple of thoughts:

 

Part I

-------

1. That WIP version of Atlantis was neat. I wonder what happened to it, maybe it's still on some 8 inch disk somewhere?

2. Speaking of which, what kind of systems was Imagic using to program the games? Those 8 inch disk drives are killer!

3. The sprite editor was interesting, I didn't realize they had something that advanced for doing graphics (I always assumed they did them on graph paper). Looks like it was running on an Atari 800 or something.

4. Data Age was next door to Imagic? Never knew that before.

 

 

Part II

--------

5. Look at that development rig. Looks like a modded 2600 hooked up to an Atari 8-bit via an 850 interface!

6. About 2 min into the video where Dennis is showing off a prototype of Atlantis, whats playing on the monitor next to him?

7. The look at the kids doing the playtesting was interesting. I wonder how many original games never made it out the door because some punk ass little kid didn't think it looked enough like Asteroids, Pac-Man, or whatever arcade game was popular at the time?

8. I never knew the games were assembled like that. Somehow I pictured a more efficient operation.

9. At 5:55 in the video, what game is playing on the monitor?

10. When they showed a shot of the trailers in the parking lot and said "That's not the only place business is booming" did anyone else think that they were going to show a makeshift brothel? I swear that was my first thought...

 

 

Part III

---------

11. It's hard to remember when K-Mart was a serious retail chain...

12. Atari 2600 E.T.! That poor kid doesn't know what he's getting into...

13. The Atlantis commercial was cute.

14. Billboard had a video game chart?!

15. It's so sad to hear them talk about an IPO and a bright future ahead. It's like watching one of those VH1 Behind the Music things when you know something bad is going to happen after the next commercial.

16. Atari caused a massive stock market drop?!

17. Hot air balloon racing? Could they be talking about Sky Patrol?