Fujiology Archive/fujiology_archive_v1_0.iso/!MAGS/INSIDENF/IINFO57.ZIP/IINFO57.MSA/TEXT_SECRETS.TXT

Text File | 1992-02-09 | 11KB | 217 lines

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 * 30 SECRETS OF ATARI                                    by Steve Bloom
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 (c)1983 Carnegie Publications Corp.
 (c)1987, 1989 Public Domain media

 [Author's note:  Here presents information I had compiled through
 research and interviews with people from Atari, Inc. (a.k.a. the "old"
 Atari)]

 While I wrote this article back in 1983, I felt that much of the
 information would be still interesting today.  What is presented here is
 not an exhaustive list.  I used only the information I felt was not
 common knowledge and some insight on others.  Because the magazine that
 originally published this, Computer Games, (February 1984) is no longer
 in circulation, I felt that in the best interest of all that I re-
 acquire publication rights.  This is why I have placed this in the
 public domain for everyone to enjoy.  The entire article is unabridged
 and unchanged from the original published format.

 Steve Bloom,
 May 29, 1989.


 30 SECRETS OF ATARI:
 The real story of Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Pong, and Pole
 Position.

 FORWARD

 In its 11-year history, Atari has become one of the biggest, flashy,
 most influential companies in history.  They have had their share of
 incredible successes and embarrassing failures.  Perhaps more than
 anything else, they have had their secrets.

 Atari is very tight-lipped.  At one point employees were asked to sign
 confidentiality agreements and use magnetic ID cards to walk through the
 company's corridors.  Aside from the actual cartridges, the public
 learns little about Atari's games and the people who created them.

 Until now.  We have interviewed dozens of employees of the company, past
 and present.  We have guaranteed them complete anonymity in exchange
 for a tip, an insight, a never-before-heard anecdote.  From these
 interviews, we have compiled the following secrets of Atari, which are
 published here for the first time.

 1.  Nolan Bushnell, Atari's founding father, originally named the
     company Syzygy (the sun, moon, and earth in total eclipse).  He
     renamed it to Atari because another company already owned the name
     Syzygy.

 2.  Bushnell is generally believed to be the author of Pong, Atari's
     first game.  Actually, Magnavox released the Odyssey 100, the first
     home video game system, which included a game remarkably similar to
     Pong, several months before Pong's debut in the arcades in 1972.
     Years later, Bushnell admitted in court that he had seen an Odyssey
     prototype on display earlier in 1972.  The Odyssey 100 was designed
     by Ralph Baer.

 3.  Bally/Midway rejected Bushnell's Pong when he demonstrated the game
     in its Chicago offices in 1972.  Bushnell went back to California
     and started Atari.

 4.  Given a choice between Mappy and Pole Position, two arcade creations
     by the Japanese firm Namco, Bally/Midway amazingly opted for Mappy.
     Atari had to settle for Pole Position, which went on to become the
     biggest game of 1983.

 5.  Gravitar was one of Atari's worst-selling arcade games.  So they
     took the game out of the cabinets and converted them all to Black
     Widow.

 6.  Mike Hally designed Gravitar.  He recently redeemed himself as the
     project leader for Atari's spectacular Star Wars game.

 7.  Rick Mauer never programmed another game for Atari after he did
     Space Invaders for the VCS.  He is said to have earned only $11,000
     for a game that grossed more than $100 million.

 8.  Todd Fry, on the other hand, has collected close to $1 million in
     royalties for his widely criticized VCS Pac-Man.

 9.  The man for bringing Pac-Man home to Atari- Joe Robbins, former
     president of coin-op- was severely reprimanded by the chairman of
     the board Ray Kassar for making the deal with Namco without
     consulting him.  It seems Robbins was in Japan negotiating a legal
     matter with Namco at the time, and Namco demanded that Atari buy the
     home rights to Pac-Man as part of the settlement.  Pac-Man had yet
     to take off, but when it did, Robbin's gutsy decision paid off as
     Pac-Man went on to become the company's best-selling cartridge ever.

 10. The man for bringing E.T. to Atari?  None other than Warner
     Communications chairman, Steve Ross.  So convinced was he that E.T.
     possessed video game star quality, Ross paid Steven Spielberg an
     enormous sum (did I hear $21 million?) for the rights to the little
     extraterrestrial bugger.  Designer Howie Warshaw spun the game out
     in four months, only three million cartridges were sold and Atari
     began to announce million dollar losses.  E.T. is now selling for as
     little as $5 in some stores.

 11. Warshaw also designed Raiders of the Lost Ark cartridge, and Yar's
     Revenge, which started out as a licensed version of the arcade game,
     Star Castle.  "Yar" is "Ray" Kassar backwards.

 12. One of Atari's most popular early arcade game was Tank, only it
     didn't say Atari anywhere on the cabinet or screen.  Instead, it
     said "Kee Games," which was another name for Atari from 1973-78.
     Atari and Kee (named after Joe Keenan, Bushnell's longtime partner)
     put out identical games in order to create more business for Atari.
     For instance, Spike (Kee) and Rebound (Atari) were volleyball games
     that came out a month apart in 1974.

 13. Tank was designed by Steve Bristow, who is still with the company
     after all these years.  Most recently, he has been in charge of
     Ataritel, Atari's telecommunications project which had been
     code named, "Falcon."

 14. Code-names have always been popular at Atari.  The VCS was "Stella,"
     the 400 computer was "Candy," the 800 was "Colleen," the 5200 was
     "Pam."  All were named after well-endowed female employees working
     at Atari (except for Stella, which was a bicycle trade name).

 15. And there was "Sylvia," the 5200 that never was.  Pam, as everyone
     by now knows, was a stripped down 400 computer for the sole purpose
     of game playing.  Sylvia was intended to be Atari's answer to
     Intellivision and was in the works long before Pam was born.  But
     problems developed largely because the 5200 was projected to be
     compatible with VCS software, which limited the design of the
     hardware.  When push finally came to shove, Sylvia went out the
     window, and Pam walked in the door.

 16. Cosmos, Atari's experiment with holography, was a battery-operated
     game system that was introduced at a New York press conference in
     the spring of 1980.  Created by Al Alcorn, Cosmos was never to be
     seen again.

 17. Alcorn was the first engineer hired by Nolan Bushnell.  His first
     project was Pong.  His second project was Space Race, the forerunner
     to Frogger.

 18. Another project announced was a remote-control VCS.  Since it was
     wireless, you could play games at 30 feet without having to hassle
     with the console.  It too mysteriously disappeared from Atari's
     catalogue.  (Note: it looked almost exactly like the 5200).

 19. Nobody in Atari coin-op liked Dig-Dug, the company's first Japanese
     import, except for Brian McGhie, now with Starpath.  It was McGhie
     who added the finishing touches to Dig Dug.  His latest game is
     Rabbit Transit.

 20. Quantum and Food Fight were not designed by Atari.  They were the
     work of General Computer Corp. of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  GCC
     broke into the business selling kits that would speed-up Missile
     Command.  Atari sued and settled with GCC for the above mentioned
     games.

 21. Tempest was originally intended to be a first-person Space Invaders
     -type game.  Then Dave Theurer came up with idea for tubes on the
     screen.  Theurer also designed Missile Command.

 22. The first 200 Asteroid machines were actually Lunar Landers.  Atari
     was so hot on Asteroids, that it cut short the production run on
     Lunar Lander- Atari's first vector game- and released the 200
     complete with Lunar Lander art.

 23. Asteroids had two incarnations before it achieved its spectacular
     success.  The first, Planet Grab, simply required you to claim
     planets by touching them with your spaceship.  The second version,
     allowed you to blow up the planets and duel with another ship,
     Space-Wars style.  Only in Asteroids, which came along two years
     later, did Atari engineer Lyle Rains introduce the concept of
     floating rocks.

 24. Many at Atari, past and present, dispute Rains' claim that he was
     solely responsible for Asteroids.  Ed Logg, who programmed it, and
     who also had his hand at the design of Centipede and Millipede, is
     said to be the true mastermind behind Asteroids.

 25. One of Ed Logg's game that has never been released in the arcades is
     called Maze Invaders.

 26. Battlezone Ed Rotberg left Atari after he was forced to convert his
     favorite game to Army specifications.  Dubbed the MK-60 by the Army,
     it included 30 game variations, improved steering and magnification,
     and simulations of Russian and American tanks.  It sold for $30,000.

 27. Rotberg joined two other Atari engineers, Howard Delman and Roger
     Hector, and formed Videa, which not too long ago was bought by Nolan
     Bushnell for more than $1 million amd renamed Sente Technologies.

 28. President of Apple Computers Steve Jobs began his high-tech career
     at Atari.  He was known to walk around barefoot, kick up his dirty
     feet on executives' desks, and talked continuously of going to India
     to meet a guru.  Not only did he do the latter, he designed Breakout
     before leaving Atari for good.

 29. Before they left Atari, designers Al Miller, David Crane, Larry
     Kaplan, and Bob Whitehead were working on games that would later
     become Activision cartridges.  Crane's Dragster was a spin-off of
     the Atari coin-up Drag Race and Kaplan's Kaboom was based on the
     Atari coin-op Avalanche.

 30. Warren Robinett, tired of Atari's policy of no author credit for
     game designers, decided to sign his game, Adventure, in an obscure
     secret room in the program.  He never told his fellow designers
     about this for fear of word getting out and he being reprimanded.
     Ultimately, a 12 year-old in Salt Lake City discovered the room
     where it was written:  "Created by Warren Robinett."  To his
     surprise, Robinett was never punished.  He too left Atari shortly
     thereafter.