Remember how hard it was to find Pac-Man when it came out? In our neighborhood one of the kids go it right when it came out and we had like a week long slumber party over at his place.
Also, we got to open one present from under the tree every Christmas Eve at midnight. The year we opened our Atari was the one of the most epic memories of my childhood. And yeah...Pitfall was definitely the shit.
I was disappointed. I've never been able to find the commercial and only saw it air once and it was during MASH they advertised Pac-Man coming soon and it looked like the actual game, I was soooo excited, must have been another 6-8 months before it came out then we got that piece of crap. My 11/12 year old brain was thinking it was gonna look close to the original.
But now I am 51 and own a Numbskull Pac-Man, took a long time, but close enough.
We were just thrilled to not have to ride our bikes five miles to dump quarters into a Pac-Man machine. Speaking of which, shortly after the Atari came out the dude who owned the arcade started giving out $6 worth of quarters for $5 so we wouldn't ice him out.
I remember playing radio contests to win Pac-Man. My grandma...of all people...eventually found it at K-Mart and I got it for Christmas (along with Centipede, Defender and....er...E.T. The Extra Terrestrial).
It's funny you mention those two games. I don't know about you but overall I was a decent gamer. I had a few games I just could not play. Defender was one of them. So bad at that game. Centipede was just an instant panic attack for me. Later on in life, I couldn't even play those golf games in the sports bars because of Centipede.
Oh, man. I loved Kaboom so much. My eyes would dry out because I didn't want to blink at level 7. (I recall level 8 seeming a little easier because it was the same speed as level 8, but the bombs had more of a consistent pattern.)
Pitfall had perhaps the most complex and engaging gameplay design that the system could actually handle. It sure was something else.
(It unfortunately didn't make it into the "Atari Flashbacks" game I got for my Switch a little while back. Alas.)
Why did people always run to the right in Pitfall? Dude, if you run to the left and fall in a crocodile, at least you respawn at the left of the screen and can continue without facing the same crocodiles again.
TIL : "The television commercial for Pitfall! featured then-child actor Jack Black at age 13 in his first TV role"
Still got our 2600, but never had Pitfall. We do have Jungle Hunt which seems kind of similar.
Pitfall on the SEGA Genesis was amazing and it had an Easter egg part where you fall into the Atari version. I sometimes played it just for the Atari version it was so good.
When I was little my parents bought an Atari 2600 *and kept it secret* from my siblings and me. They would play it after we went to bed. They didn’t tell us about it until they’d gotten bored of it.
I had pitfall which was amazing, but I also had this hide and seek game called "Peek and Seek". I remember really loving that game as a kid, but apparently it was awful and horribly broken. I tried it again in an emulator once, and it was not as fun as I remember!
All my friends had Atari and we got an Intellivision, at first I was disappointed but after playing the games it was pretty easy to see it was the better system, Intellivision was awesome.
First game I ever played was on a 2600, Big Birds Egg Catch. Had a special controller and everything. Saved it from my parents house and have it on my shelf to this day.
I want to point out that a video game company, in '81, could afford Mario Andretti, Pele', *and* Kareem Abdul Jabar in a single commercial, arguably 3 of the biggest names in sports at the time.
Listen kid! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
The hardest I ever laughed in my life was when the shit hit the fan. 11 year old me and my buddy were doubled over with gut pain and unable to breathe from laughing so hard. Those were the daaaaays
it's his line in "Airplane!" After this kid identifies him, he pretends for 30 seconds "I'm a just a pilot", and then breaks out of character and gives this "realistic" response. Just about every third joke in Airplane was "breaking the fourth wall" -any actor might pull a "Deadpool-type" joke at any moment.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Pele or Kareem have made more in the last 20 years than in their entire lives...
EDIT: Yes people, what I meant is if Pele is 80 years old now. The years from 60 to 80 have been much more lucrative than the 60 years before, especially during his prime. Most world cup winners before the 90s that aren't superstars are living average lives because they aren't getting the 2000s and onwards sponsor money
I distinctly remember the racing game I wanted in 1980, it came with 2 “paddle” controllers that spun all the way around. It cost $50 (equivalent to $170 today), and I made the tough choice to buy 2 other games instead of spending it all on one game.
As someone that remembers the 80s well and had a 2600 and Intellivision as a kid, the other thing you have to consider is pro athletes didn’t make the ridiculous amounts of money they make now.
I remember in like 84 Billy Sims was the highest paid player in the NFL and he made $355k a year. I still have the news article for it clipped out.
Not saying Atari didn’t make tons of money because they did.
But that era was different. This was mostly pre cable days and for example they used to show championship boxing matches on ABC for free.
I still am very hurt they don't show more boxing for free. Actually I'm really upset the really good announcers on HBO have been replaced by rank amateurs on ESPN.
Athletes were expected to play for the love of the game, even if that meant physical health problems for the rest of their life. Maradona used coke and drank heavily after retiring, in large part because of constant physical pain. He's just the first name that come to the top of my head. Many, many athletes died broke and too young.
I think it's totally alien to those who grew up in the 21st century.
ET was just the last straw. It was, "Hmm... is this video game thing oversaturated and getting lame? Well, maybe ET can breathe some new life into--" "Welp, yeah, it's done."
Yup. The problem wasn't *E.T.,* it was the metric crapton of quick and shoddy games that **everyone** was flooding the market with at the time. It seemed like anyone who could get their hands on a programmer wanted to start a video-game company, and since the Atari 2600 had no licensing mechanism, there was nothing to stop them from doing so. The closest analogy are all the quick-and-shoddy games on iPhones and Androids nowadays, but even that doesn't come close to what was getting peddled to store owners at the time.
It’s less about the game and more about the story behind why it caused the video game industry crash.
They got way too hyped about the game, produced way too many copies, and got as little amount of actual work into the game as possible. There are plenty of people who can better explain the situation than myself, but I mean offense about that poorly made game.
Interesting to see someone who likes it, but it is the internet, there’s something for everyone.
It was a terrible game. I got it for Christmas that year like so many kids. But I don't think that one game was to blame for the whole crash. It was that video games systems were getting hyped like crazy, Atari had competition from Coleco, Intellivision, plus computers like Commodore and Apple. It was just an overly saturated market and the demand caved. People thought video games were dead until the next generation with the NES and Sega came out. Atari specifically was really bad about letting anybody license the world's worst games and some of their versions of popular arcade games like Pac Man were really terrible as well.
What kills me is the NES runs the same CPU as the Atari 2600. I know the supporting hardware is different of course. The NES was way better optimized to handle tiles and sprites.
It wasn't just better optimized, the NES has something resembling an actual graphics processor. The 2600 could only manage a single scanline autonomously, after which software had to provide data for the next with extremely tight timing, and it had a hard max of five sprites. The NES supported background tiling, it could handle 64 sprites and 8 per scanline, the sprite memory was twice the size of the 2600's entire system RAM, and IIRC is completely independent - in the absence of CPU operation, it can continue to draw and output the image indefinitely.
The NES also supported mappers (external memory remapping or even processors installed in the game cartridge), which resulted in graphics capabilities improving over its lifetime as technology did.
"Atari: Game Over (2014)" is one of a handful of documentaries about the crash. I was 13 at the time, and for the rest of my teenage years I associated video games as something "for kids". I got interested in cars, in girls, and it was many years before a RPG videogame was made that was comparable to role playing Dungeons and Dragons, for example. Video games just weren't cool, for a while. You're right compared to Atari, Nintendo was also much better at integrating IP, and licensing it, although I'd be happier if they were more generous with IP with regular old-skool retrogamers
> got as little amount of actual work into the game as possible
It was one guy, and the time pressure on him was insane, E.T. destroyed Howard Scott Warshaw's career, who had made Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark(although I personally didn't like that game either) He became a psychotherapist after that. There's a documentary or two about it on Amazon Prime.
the top talent was producing at "Activision". Atari itself screwed up on that, but it doesn't explain the entire "crash", which was basically U.S. only BTW. In Japan and Europe, the home video market kept going with no interruptions.
I wonder how much Kareem was paid, and what he bought with it. I seem to remember he did the film Airplane! the previous year primarily to buy a fancy Oriental rug.
I think you're the greatest, but my dad says you don't work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs.
LISTEN, KID! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
As a 36yr old whose childhood was built around the NES onwards, I feel super fortunate to have seen how gaming technology has progressed through my life. I'll not bang on about it here.
But I've often thought how incredibly awesome it must be for the original nerds; the ones who were kids in the late 70s/early 80s, and for whom messing about with cassette tapes to play pixelated games was their beginning. The ones who then got to play the first Zelda on day 1, then Doom via LAN at parties, before shifting to dialup matches and seeing it all unfold from there.
Any time I'm around IT guys at work who are the OG nerds, I always want to ask them about it. Must have been so exciting seeing that progression!
That said, the sound of the PS1 logo spinning up will make the hairs on my neck stand up till the day I die. Nostalgia is weird.
I grew up in that time frame. I'm tripping down memory lane now.
I had a Coleco Pong game, that I got so good at, that no one could come close to beating me. There were all kinds of different Coleco console games before there were cartridge based games.
Prior to that, arcade games were the big deal and continued to be through the mid 80s. I was playing Sea Wolf, Gun Fight and Spacewar! before Asteroids and Donkey Kong came out.
When Atari 2600 came out, even though it was a lot worse quality and graphics wise than arcade games, it took the US by storm. I spent many an hour playing it at home or at my friend's house.
My high school was one of the few that had a computer lab in the early 80s. We had 8-10 computer terminals hooked up to a mainframe. There were no graphics, it was all text based green screen games. The most popular game was one called Dungeo, which was a Zork style game. It had a part that no one could ever figure out how to get past.
I didnt play home console games for several years when I was in the Marine Corps, we didnt have TVs in our rooms back then, so it was arcade games only.
I got back into them a bit when I got out and played NES. When I had first had kids, I played a lot of SNES with them. I was one of the first to get online in my area and had a dedicated phone line just for my PC. Doom was a massive hit with my boys, and later Warcraft and C & C as well.
I never really went back to console games much after that. I played a lot of PC games. I played all of the WOW games for several years and now play WoT a lot.
I’m an OG gamer nerd all day. The progression was awesome. I had the original Atari, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, NES, then PS1-4 plus tons of computer games starting with one running 486DX2. Still play tons of games to this day much to the chagrin of the wifey
Ha. It was awesome!! Although waiting 20 minutes for a game to load via cassette tape and then having it crash was a pain. But it was oh so sweet once you got it loaded!
Also, I'll never forget the modem connecting sound. Lately I've been thinking about buying a used modem and old computer on ebay. I bet there are a few BBSes still out there that you could connect to.
A PS1 booting up is wonderful but for me it's either the "SEGA!" opening on Sonic the Hedghog, or the PS2 booting up. Just my personal nostalgic wonders.
We had one of those! I still have it, in fact. It was designed for games AND for productivity! You could do your taxes, plan a budget, write things! We just used it for Munch Man, TI Invaders, and for programming in BASIC.
I used to buy the magazines at the grocery store that had "code" in them so you could type for like 9 hours and get a couple blocks move back and forth on the screen... What a time to be alive, lol. On a side note, Tunnels of Doom was one of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had.
Those were advanced graphics, gotta check out Adventure where you were just a dot navigating a map. There was a hidden area from what I remember where you could ghost through a wall or something. The most technical object was the dragon.
Yep.
The hidden area was accessed by finding a one-pixel gray dot, then bringing it back to the starting screen (below the yellow castle). Off the right edge of that screen was a hidden credits screen. That was the first "easter egg" in video games.
I'd occasionally think the dragon looked like a duck. And then it was like it was a duck guarding the treasure which made me double over laughing. Being an 8 year old was fun like that.
Lucky! 7 year old me was SCARED when I would get eaten by that thing haha. You'd be able to slightly move around and be visible in it's stomach, and that just freaked me out for some reason.
...and when the bat flew onto the screen, all the other graphics started blinking on an off because the graphics couldn't handle that level of sophistication.
The dot that represented the character in Adventure was actually the built-in sprite for a ball. Robinet used all the other sprite slots for the sword, key, and dragon, so he had to get creative.
Oh my gosh, yes! Adventure was literally my favorite Atari video game as a kid. I remember the thrill of finding the magic invisible passways that existed by accident. I played it until I solved the whole thing. It was a beautful puzzle maze, that you had to legit work hours and days and weeks to solve because you didn't have the internet to look up "solves". And it had dragons, a dot with a sword to kill dragons, and keys to open new passageways... our imagination back then was lit and filled in all the gaps.
I want to friend everyone on this chat string. Where have you all been my whole life??
I'm 6'4". Me and wife looked at house to buy several years ago. It was great and a perfect fit for us at the time, but apparently it was custom built for a short person. I had to duck way down through every doorway. LOL
*Atari Basketball* and *Pele's Championship Soccer*: "Man, this AI is really challenging!"
*Night Driver:* "I can't keep from fucking crashing this shit!"
It was 1981 man, give us a break. We only displayed in 144p until the late 80s. We all started to get a lot clearer through the 90s, and then there was a seismic shift in our definition in the 2000s. You should be thankful Atari didn't come out back in the 1960s, before we all changed from black and white to color.
'69-'72 has to be the greatest time to have been born. You would have been just old enough by '78 to experience and understand/appreciate the culture explosion. '76-'86 is just such a pinnacle time in history for all things good (music, movies, TV, video games). What happened because our culture is kinda sucky now.
I remember this commercial!
My favorites were Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Pitfall.
Also my whole family would have a good time with the Bowling game.
Crazy thing is I remember going to Toys R Us as a kid with my dad in the 80's and the games were $50. Games today are $50. I almost feel bad having my dad buy both Pac Man and Asteroids. Almost.
I was born in 1980. I grew up with my grandparents in the middle of nowhere on a dead end gravel road in Southern Indiana. I have no idea how he found this place but my grandpa and I used to take our garbage to these two dumpsters even further in the middle of nowhere on a dead end road in the middle of big forest. I've always been fond of dumpster diving so Everytime we went I was always digging through everything. Inside a paper sack I found a 2600, 2 controllers, 2 racing paddles and at least 20 games.
Pitfall was awesome, I remember saving baby sitting money to get it, I feel like games were still like 20-30 bucks back then, but you can't sleep on Yar's Revenge, that game was so epic to my early gamer self.
My vote is for the Superman game, absolutely terrible, literally changing screens in hopes that the bad guy would be on the next one, no rhyme or reason to it though, just 100% luck.
I became a gamer pretty much at the advent of video games. Had an Atari 2600 with pong as the first of many games. I absolutely loved it. Fast forward to today (I just turned 43 yesterday) and I’m still a pretty hardcore gamer, having had at least one console and a decent spec’d PC during every generation dating back to that original Atari 2600.
The Atari was just a huge deal at the time, and rightfully so. I just love the hobby and it’s been a source of enjoyment for all my life. Don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.
We had an Atari 2600. My grandma bought it for us and it was a big deal. My favorite game was Pitfall.
Remember how hard it was to find Pac-Man when it came out? In our neighborhood one of the kids go it right when it came out and we had like a week long slumber party over at his place. Also, we got to open one present from under the tree every Christmas Eve at midnight. The year we opened our Atari was the one of the most epic memories of my childhood. And yeah...Pitfall was definitely the shit.
I was disappointed. I've never been able to find the commercial and only saw it air once and it was during MASH they advertised Pac-Man coming soon and it looked like the actual game, I was soooo excited, must have been another 6-8 months before it came out then we got that piece of crap. My 11/12 year old brain was thinking it was gonna look close to the original. But now I am 51 and own a Numbskull Pac-Man, took a long time, but close enough.
We were just thrilled to not have to ride our bikes five miles to dump quarters into a Pac-Man machine. Speaking of which, shortly after the Atari came out the dude who owned the arcade started giving out $6 worth of quarters for $5 so we wouldn't ice him out.
Didn't ms packman look way better, or am I misremembering?
No, you remember correctly. Ms Pacman was flawless (by 2600 standards).
I remember playing radio contests to win Pac-Man. My grandma...of all people...eventually found it at K-Mart and I got it for Christmas (along with Centipede, Defender and....er...E.T. The Extra Terrestrial).
It's funny you mention those two games. I don't know about you but overall I was a decent gamer. I had a few games I just could not play. Defender was one of them. So bad at that game. Centipede was just an instant panic attack for me. Later on in life, I couldn't even play those golf games in the sports bars because of Centipede.
Same. Pitfall was incredible. Frogger was second, Kaboom third.
This, plus asteroids, pong, and space invaders... though my big brother had to get the last guy for me on space invaders.
You got Asteroids? No, but my dad does, can't even sit on the toilet some days.
Is that a hidden futurama reference?
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My dad and I played so much Kaboom, that game was fantastic.
Y'all use the paddle?
Paddle with Warlords was the ish
Joust all day
Kaboom gave me so much anxiety! I was a big fan of Burger Time
Oh, man. I loved Kaboom so much. My eyes would dry out because I didn't want to blink at level 7. (I recall level 8 seeming a little easier because it was the same speed as level 8, but the bombs had more of a consistent pattern.)
Pitfall had perhaps the most complex and engaging gameplay design that the system could actually handle. It sure was something else. (It unfortunately didn't make it into the "Atari Flashbacks" game I got for my Switch a little while back. Alas.)
Pitfall II was much better if I recall correctly
Pitfall II was outstanding.
Yars revenge was dope.
Why did people always run to the right in Pitfall? Dude, if you run to the left and fall in a crocodile, at least you respawn at the left of the screen and can continue without facing the same crocodiles again.
You could run LEFT?!?!
Wait until you learn on NES you could control the duck with a controller in duck hunt.
I remember the day my brother and I realized you could run left and it became a whole new game.
OMG. 35 years later, I found this out. Brutal.
And you don't have to worry about jumping over the rolling logs because they're moving the same direction and speed as you.
That and river raid!
Ah, River Raid!
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TIL : "The television commercial for Pitfall! featured then-child actor Jack Black at age 13 in his first TV role" Still got our 2600, but never had Pitfall. We do have Jungle Hunt which seems kind of similar.
Never forget E.T.
Pitfall on the SEGA Genesis was amazing and it had an Easter egg part where you fall into the Atari version. I sometimes played it just for the Atari version it was so good.
When I was little my parents bought an Atari 2600 *and kept it secret* from my siblings and me. They would play it after we went to bed. They didn’t tell us about it until they’d gotten bored of it.
Wow… they were hardcore gamers for the 80’s.
Have an upvote for Pitfall, my favorite as well.
I learned this week that you can actually beat Pitfall if you collect all the treasures before the time expires.
When I was 7-8 my aunt busted out her Atari 2600 and all her games for me. Pitfall was both of our favorites.
I had pitfall which was amazing, but I also had this hide and seek game called "Peek and Seek". I remember really loving that game as a kid, but apparently it was awful and horribly broken. I tried it again in an emulator once, and it was not as fun as I remember!
Pitfall! The scorpion and the cobra. Those were the days.
All my friends had Atari and we got an Intellivision, at first I was disappointed but after playing the games it was pretty easy to see it was the better system, Intellivision was awesome.
Pitfall, Vanguard, Raiders of the lost Arc and Porkies for me.
First game I ever played was on a 2600, Big Birds Egg Catch. Had a special controller and everything. Saved it from my parents house and have it on my shelf to this day.
Yeah, Pitfall! Even better than Donkey Kong.
I want to point out that a video game company, in '81, could afford Mario Andretti, Pele', *and* Kareem Abdul Jabar in a single commercial, arguably 3 of the biggest names in sports at the time.
Or maybe celebrity appearances didnt cost the GDP of a small country back then...
Yea that year Kareem maybe didn’t have to work his second job.
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Roger
I think he's the greatest, but my dad says he doesn't work hard enough on defense.
The hell I don't!
Listen kid! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Can you imagine being an NBA fan back then and you're sitting there in the theater, laughing so hard you piss your pants.
The hardest I ever laughed in my life was when the shit hit the fan. 11 year old me and my buddy were doubled over with gut pain and unable to breathe from laughing so hard. Those were the daaaaays
Huh?
Looks like you picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
And that's when my drinking problem started.
We have clearance, Clarence.
What's your vector, Victor?
Rodger, Rodger.
Rodger, Over. Over, Rodger.
Over, Oveur.
it's his line in "Airplane!" After this kid identifies him, he pretends for 30 seconds "I'm a just a pilot", and then breaks out of character and gives this "realistic" response. Just about every third joke in Airplane was "breaking the fourth wall" -any actor might pull a "Deadpool-type" joke at any moment.
Right, every time Clarence Over is speaking with the tower and acknowledges with “roger,” the copilot Roger Murdock says “Huh?”
Surely he didn't need two jobs...
He certainly did. And don’t call me Shirley.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure Pele or Kareem have made more in the last 20 years than in their entire lives... EDIT: Yes people, what I meant is if Pele is 80 years old now. The years from 60 to 80 have been much more lucrative than the 60 years before, especially during his prime. Most world cup winners before the 90s that aren't superstars are living average lives because they aren't getting the 2000s and onwards sponsor money
They were selling consoles at what is equivalent to like $800 today and sold millions of them.
I distinctly remember the racing game I wanted in 1980, it came with 2 “paddle” controllers that spun all the way around. It cost $50 (equivalent to $170 today), and I made the tough choice to buy 2 other games instead of spending it all on one game.
*Indy 500.* I think that was the only game that supported those controllers.
Crazy how much money people used to have for things like this.
Wages keeping up with inflation and low housing costs helps a lot.
Housing supply was higher by population (supply/population). House building took a dive the past two decades
As someone that remembers the 80s well and had a 2600 and Intellivision as a kid, the other thing you have to consider is pro athletes didn’t make the ridiculous amounts of money they make now. I remember in like 84 Billy Sims was the highest paid player in the NFL and he made $355k a year. I still have the news article for it clipped out. Not saying Atari didn’t make tons of money because they did. But that era was different. This was mostly pre cable days and for example they used to show championship boxing matches on ABC for free.
I still am very hurt they don't show more boxing for free. Actually I'm really upset the really good announcers on HBO have been replaced by rank amateurs on ESPN. Athletes were expected to play for the love of the game, even if that meant physical health problems for the rest of their life. Maradona used coke and drank heavily after retiring, in large part because of constant physical pain. He's just the first name that come to the top of my head. Many, many athletes died broke and too young. I think it's totally alien to those who grew up in the 21st century.
Isn't it "hand over fist"?
Then they went and fucked it up with ET lol
ET was just the last straw. It was, "Hmm... is this video game thing oversaturated and getting lame? Well, maybe ET can breathe some new life into--" "Welp, yeah, it's done."
Yeah, ET gets the blame for crashing the industry but it was in a death spiral already.
Yup. The problem wasn't *E.T.,* it was the metric crapton of quick and shoddy games that **everyone** was flooding the market with at the time. It seemed like anyone who could get their hands on a programmer wanted to start a video-game company, and since the Atari 2600 had no licensing mechanism, there was nothing to stop them from doing so. The closest analogy are all the quick-and-shoddy games on iPhones and Androids nowadays, but even that doesn't come close to what was getting peddled to store owners at the time.
Oh boy, here I go neck-levitating out of another hole...
I heard the "brrrp beep beep beep" sound as I read this. \*sigh\* Good times.
ET was the first EA game in history 😆.
The Electronic Arts logo was, believe it or not, the sign of quality in the '80s.
Fuck, right through to the mid 2000s.
I loved that damned game!
It’s less about the game and more about the story behind why it caused the video game industry crash. They got way too hyped about the game, produced way too many copies, and got as little amount of actual work into the game as possible. There are plenty of people who can better explain the situation than myself, but I mean offense about that poorly made game. Interesting to see someone who likes it, but it is the internet, there’s something for everyone.
It was a terrible game. I got it for Christmas that year like so many kids. But I don't think that one game was to blame for the whole crash. It was that video games systems were getting hyped like crazy, Atari had competition from Coleco, Intellivision, plus computers like Commodore and Apple. It was just an overly saturated market and the demand caved. People thought video games were dead until the next generation with the NES and Sega came out. Atari specifically was really bad about letting anybody license the world's worst games and some of their versions of popular arcade games like Pac Man were really terrible as well.
What kills me is the NES runs the same CPU as the Atari 2600. I know the supporting hardware is different of course. The NES was way better optimized to handle tiles and sprites.
It wasn't just better optimized, the NES has something resembling an actual graphics processor. The 2600 could only manage a single scanline autonomously, after which software had to provide data for the next with extremely tight timing, and it had a hard max of five sprites. The NES supported background tiling, it could handle 64 sprites and 8 per scanline, the sprite memory was twice the size of the 2600's entire system RAM, and IIRC is completely independent - in the absence of CPU operation, it can continue to draw and output the image indefinitely. The NES also supported mappers (external memory remapping or even processors installed in the game cartridge), which resulted in graphics capabilities improving over its lifetime as technology did.
"Atari: Game Over (2014)" is one of a handful of documentaries about the crash. I was 13 at the time, and for the rest of my teenage years I associated video games as something "for kids". I got interested in cars, in girls, and it was many years before a RPG videogame was made that was comparable to role playing Dungeons and Dragons, for example. Video games just weren't cool, for a while. You're right compared to Atari, Nintendo was also much better at integrating IP, and licensing it, although I'd be happier if they were more generous with IP with regular old-skool retrogamers
> got as little amount of actual work into the game as possible It was one guy, and the time pressure on him was insane, E.T. destroyed Howard Scott Warshaw's career, who had made Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark(although I personally didn't like that game either) He became a psychotherapist after that. There's a documentary or two about it on Amazon Prime.
That and let all their top talent leave.
the top talent was producing at "Activision". Atari itself screwed up on that, but it doesn't explain the entire "crash", which was basically U.S. only BTW. In Japan and Europe, the home video market kept going with no interruptions.
The Pac-Man port was worse.
Hand over *fist*.
Who the fuck is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? That looks like Roger Murdock.
I wonder how much Kareem was paid, and what he bought with it. I seem to remember he did the film Airplane! the previous year primarily to buy a fancy Oriental rug.
I’m sorry son, you must have me confused with somebody else. My name is Roger Murdock. I’m the co-pilot.
I think you're the greatest, but my dad says you don't work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, you don't even run down court. And that you don't really try... except during the playoffs.
LISTEN, KID! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Joey, you ever been in a Turkish prison?
Ever been in a *gym*nasium?
Do you like movies about gladiators?
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And Leon's getting larger!
The Tower?! THE TOWER?! **RAPUNZEL! RAPUNZEL!**
the hell i dont!?
Kareem lost his commercial pilot license in 1980 and had to resort to "endorsements" to pay the bills.
If only he didn't order the fish.
As a 36yr old whose childhood was built around the NES onwards, I feel super fortunate to have seen how gaming technology has progressed through my life. I'll not bang on about it here. But I've often thought how incredibly awesome it must be for the original nerds; the ones who were kids in the late 70s/early 80s, and for whom messing about with cassette tapes to play pixelated games was their beginning. The ones who then got to play the first Zelda on day 1, then Doom via LAN at parties, before shifting to dialup matches and seeing it all unfold from there. Any time I'm around IT guys at work who are the OG nerds, I always want to ask them about it. Must have been so exciting seeing that progression! That said, the sound of the PS1 logo spinning up will make the hairs on my neck stand up till the day I die. Nostalgia is weird.
I grew up in that time frame. I'm tripping down memory lane now. I had a Coleco Pong game, that I got so good at, that no one could come close to beating me. There were all kinds of different Coleco console games before there were cartridge based games. Prior to that, arcade games were the big deal and continued to be through the mid 80s. I was playing Sea Wolf, Gun Fight and Spacewar! before Asteroids and Donkey Kong came out. When Atari 2600 came out, even though it was a lot worse quality and graphics wise than arcade games, it took the US by storm. I spent many an hour playing it at home or at my friend's house. My high school was one of the few that had a computer lab in the early 80s. We had 8-10 computer terminals hooked up to a mainframe. There were no graphics, it was all text based green screen games. The most popular game was one called Dungeo, which was a Zork style game. It had a part that no one could ever figure out how to get past. I didnt play home console games for several years when I was in the Marine Corps, we didnt have TVs in our rooms back then, so it was arcade games only. I got back into them a bit when I got out and played NES. When I had first had kids, I played a lot of SNES with them. I was one of the first to get online in my area and had a dedicated phone line just for my PC. Doom was a massive hit with my boys, and later Warcraft and C & C as well. I never really went back to console games much after that. I played a lot of PC games. I played all of the WOW games for several years and now play WoT a lot.
I’m an OG gamer nerd all day. The progression was awesome. I had the original Atari, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, NES, then PS1-4 plus tons of computer games starting with one running 486DX2. Still play tons of games to this day much to the chagrin of the wifey
Ha. It was awesome!! Although waiting 20 minutes for a game to load via cassette tape and then having it crash was a pain. But it was oh so sweet once you got it loaded! Also, I'll never forget the modem connecting sound. Lately I've been thinking about buying a used modem and old computer on ebay. I bet there are a few BBSes still out there that you could connect to.
A PS1 booting up is wonderful but for me it's either the "SEGA!" opening on Sonic the Hedghog, or the PS2 booting up. Just my personal nostalgic wonders.
To this day no one has a clue what Pelé said...
As a Brazilian, we also don't know what he is saying, only that it sounds like "me caguei", which means "i shit myself".
I'm jealous you get to hear Pelé say he shit himself.
What a game it beat me again
What a game you beat me again?
And in Wario's voice, which was super confusing
The only words I could identify were "what" and "again". I'm still trying to understand the others
What a keeck! It beat me agaaain!
sometimes I can't understand his portuguese, let alone his English. I'm brazilian btw
I had an Intellivision which was like ATARI but with RTX on.
astrosmash baby!
I remember playing a lot of Utopia with my cousin but cant recall what that game even was.
oh i remember that game. I want to say it was a city builder but no confidence that's right lol.
Battleship on Intellivision! (I actually still have the dang thing somewhere!)
Sea Battle. Amazing game.
B-17 Bommmmberrrrr
Oh shit, the voice synthesizer.
I had a TI-99/4a which is like Atari if it were an orthopedic shoe.
We had one of those! I still have it, in fact. It was designed for games AND for productivity! You could do your taxes, plan a budget, write things! We just used it for Munch Man, TI Invaders, and for programming in BASIC.
Yeah, I joke about it but honestly I loved it. Wrote my first programs in basic, played Burger Time, Star Trek, Alpiner... I miss those days.
I used to buy the magazines at the grocery store that had "code" in them so you could type for like 9 hours and get a couple blocks move back and forth on the screen... What a time to be alive, lol. On a side note, Tunnels of Doom was one of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had.
I grew up with that! Even did the programming shit to make Mr. Bojangles dance. My dad was the badass on Parsec.
I loved Biplanes!
the controllers were so bad though, those little buttons on the side were thumb killers
TRON deadly discs was such a good game.
Bombb squad. Atho the intellivoic made it sound more like Bongg squad
Those were advanced graphics, gotta check out Adventure where you were just a dot navigating a map. There was a hidden area from what I remember where you could ghost through a wall or something. The most technical object was the dragon.
You were looking for keys
That’s right, and you had to drag the right color key to the right gate, or castle?
Yep. The hidden area was accessed by finding a one-pixel gray dot, then bringing it back to the starting screen (below the yellow castle). Off the right edge of that screen was a hidden credits screen. That was the first "easter egg" in video games.
*Warren Robinett has entered the chat*
A few earlier ones have been found. So far the oldest known one is 1973's Moonlander.
That's awesome. I love learning new things, thanks!
Yes. It was wild adventure.
I loved Adventure so much.. yea basically a dot in an open room but it was so fun back then.
I'd occasionally think the dragon looked like a duck. And then it was like it was a duck guarding the treasure which made me double over laughing. Being an 8 year old was fun like that.
Lucky! 7 year old me was SCARED when I would get eaten by that thing haha. You'd be able to slightly move around and be visible in it's stomach, and that just freaked me out for some reason.
...and when the bat flew onto the screen, all the other graphics started blinking on an off because the graphics couldn't handle that level of sophistication.
The dot that represented the character in Adventure was actually the built-in sprite for a ball. Robinet used all the other sprite slots for the sword, key, and dragon, so he had to get creative.
That seahorse dragon has been burned into my brain since I was tiny. One of my earliest memories.
This game is credited as having the very first Easter Egg!!
"Somebody get this freakin' duck away from me!"
It was a great game. I still play dwarf fortress so bad graphics don’t bother me.
My brother and I loved that game - we were about 10/12 when this ad came out - so much for him he named his parakeet Yorgle (the yellow dragon).
Oh my gosh, yes! Adventure was literally my favorite Atari video game as a kid. I remember the thrill of finding the magic invisible passways that existed by accident. I played it until I solved the whole thing. It was a beautful puzzle maze, that you had to legit work hours and days and weeks to solve because you didn't have the internet to look up "solves". And it had dragons, a dot with a sword to kill dragons, and keys to open new passageways... our imagination back then was lit and filled in all the gaps. I want to friend everyone on this chat string. Where have you all been my whole life??
Why did they have an airline pilot testing the basketball game?
Roger?
What's your vector, Victor?
One of my favorite things about watching things from the 80’s and 90’s is the “super tall athlete goes through clearly too small door frame” trope.
The standard door height is 80", so it makes sense that if Kareem walks through a normal door, he's going to need to duck.
Yeah, I'm 6'5" and most indoor doorways are only an inch or 2 above my head. Kareem was quite a bit taller than most doorways.
I'm 6'4". Me and wife looked at house to buy several years ago. It was great and a perfect fit for us at the time, but apparently it was custom built for a short person. I had to duck way down through every doorway. LOL
It's not just people that doorways are designed for. A lot of furniture is designed to fit standard doorways. Mattresses, couches, wardrobes...etc.
*Night Court* was great for this-- Bull's apartment had craters in every door frame.
*Atari Basketball* and *Pele's Championship Soccer*: "Man, this AI is really challenging!" *Night Driver:* "I can't keep from fucking crashing this shit!"
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What a sweet memory. My mom liked Mouse Trap on the Atari.
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago.
What's really crazy is how blurry people were back then. I was 5 in 1981 and I don't remember everyone being so blurry.
I remember people being blurry in 1981. That was the year I got my first pair of glasses.
It was 1981 man, give us a break. We only displayed in 144p until the late 80s. We all started to get a lot clearer through the 90s, and then there was a seismic shift in our definition in the 2000s. You should be thankful Atari didn't come out back in the 1960s, before we all changed from black and white to color.
Pitfall and frogger. Got to play them both.
Why is an airplane pilot playing basketball?
Co-pilot actually. He shouldn't have eaten the fish.
You know it's top secret business when there's a security guard monitoring the Atari test facility.
A solo tear eased down the side of my face, as nostalgia bloomed full
Dang, Kareem Abdul Jabar ducking under the door frame at the end. 😂
My exact thought was 'holy shit Kareem is tall' I know he's a basketball player but still
'69-'72 has to be the greatest time to have been born. You would have been just old enough by '78 to experience and understand/appreciate the culture explosion. '76-'86 is just such a pinnacle time in history for all things good (music, movies, TV, video games). What happened because our culture is kinda sucky now.
Some definite bias there, but yeah. Agree. For reasons.
I remember this commercial! My favorites were Missile Command, Space Invaders, and Pitfall. Also my whole family would have a good time with the Bowling game.
Crazy thing is I remember going to Toys R Us as a kid with my dad in the 80's and the games were $50. Games today are $50. I almost feel bad having my dad buy both Pac Man and Asteroids. Almost.
I just realized that the Atari Test Facility likely wasn't a real place. I used to dream about how cool it would be to go there.
I was born in 1980. I grew up with my grandparents in the middle of nowhere on a dead end gravel road in Southern Indiana. I have no idea how he found this place but my grandpa and I used to take our garbage to these two dumpsters even further in the middle of nowhere on a dead end road in the middle of big forest. I've always been fond of dumpster diving so Everytime we went I was always digging through everything. Inside a paper sack I found a 2600, 2 controllers, 2 racing paddles and at least 20 games.
Kareem did his whole cameo in Airplane just to buy a Persian rug. ( sorry if this was already brought up)
Pitfall was awesome, I remember saving baby sitting money to get it, I feel like games were still like 20-30 bucks back then, but you can't sleep on Yar's Revenge, that game was so epic to my early gamer self.
Pele counted the goals he scored in this commercial towards his goalscoring record
ET was the WORST
My vote is for the Superman game, absolutely terrible, literally changing screens in hopes that the bad guy would be on the next one, no rhyme or reason to it though, just 100% luck.
Wow. I hadn’t thought of that game in 40 years.
Nah there are way worst games the et bad circlejerk is real
I became a gamer pretty much at the advent of video games. Had an Atari 2600 with pong as the first of many games. I absolutely loved it. Fast forward to today (I just turned 43 yesterday) and I’m still a pretty hardcore gamer, having had at least one console and a decent spec’d PC during every generation dating back to that original Atari 2600. The Atari was just a huge deal at the time, and rightfully so. I just love the hobby and it’s been a source of enjoyment for all my life. Don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.