Atarians

15 Atari Facts You May Not Have Known About

June 22, 2021 By ausretrogamer

Gotta love video gaming related facts! Here at ausretrogamer HQ we absolutely love digging around and finding all kinds of video game related facts, especially the more obscure and lesser known ones. Since June is ATARI month, for this new ‘Did You Know’ series, we kick things off with 15 facts about the iconic Atari, which you may or may not have known (or perhaps forgotten about)!

Was it all fun and games at Atari? I would have given an arm and a leg to had been part of this great company that brought video games to the masses. If only I was born in a different era and resided in California back in the 1970s.

There has been much written about Atari – from well known facts to myths and even fan fiction. We set the record straight on a few unknown (and well known) historical facts at the once mighty Atari.

Fact 1. First video game to have background music
To contrary belief, it wasn’t Namco’s Rally-X that first featured background music (BGM), it was beaten to the punch by Atari’s Cannon Ball – an Owen Rubin developed game. Unfortunately, the feedback was not great from location testing. Arcade operators disliked the BGM, citing it as being annoying. Sadly, the game was never mass produced.

Fact 2. Space Duel was the first multicolour vector game
Another contradiction in video gaming folklore – Tempest was not the first multicolour vector game. That gong belongs to Space Duel – another Owen Rubin game. To rub salt into the wounds, Owen Rubin’s colour vector generator code was used by Dave Theurer in Tempest. Owen never received any credit for his effort.

Fact 3. Missile Command was going to be called Armageddon
Atari had designs and cabinet prototypes created for Armageddon, later to be renamed by Gene Lipkin as Missile Command.

Fact 4. The Last Starfighter
In 1984, when Atari was being carved up and sold, two games in development based on the film, The Last Starfighter were redone to become Star Raiders II and Solaris.

Fact 5. The naming of Yars’ Revenge
Howard Scott Warshaw (from E.T. fame) named his game Yars’ Revenge after Ray Kassar (Ray spelled backwards). The ‘Razak’ solar system was also based on Ray’s surname, with the letters ‘ss’ replaced with a ‘z’ and the surname spelled backwards. Very clever indeed!

Fact 6. Championship Soccer / Pele’s Soccer
Championship Soccer, aka: Pele’s Soccer was the first video game to license a sports personality, the lovable Brazilian soccer maestro, Pele!

Fact 7. The Atari and Nintendo deal
Atari was in talks with Nintendo in regards to their Family Computer (Famicom). The deal would be for Nintendo to design the printed circuit boards and engineer all the electronics, while Atari would design the console case and packaging. Basically, Atari would be selling Nintendo’s product for them in the USA and the rest of the world under the Atari brand. Imagine if this deal had gone through.

Fact 8. Naming the Atari 7800
After the Atari 5200 debacle, the marketing department at Atari would not dictate the functions or features of the new Atari 7800. However, they did come up with the product name by adding 2600 to 5200. Absolute genius (Ed: stop being sarcastic!).

Fact 9. Burying Atari
Atari could only wish they could bury the E.T. myths. When the decision was made to close the El Paso (Texas) plant, truckloads of unused and faulty stock was being ferried to the Alamogordo, New Mexico city dump. The deal was to dump the goods and steamroll them. As the media got wind of this, it was made out as if Atari was trying to “cover up” and they became the media whipping boy with the video gaming woes of the early 80s.

Fact 10. Cloak & Dagger
At the end of 1983, Atari was manufacturing upgrade kits to turn rival Williams’ Robotron:2084, Defender, Stargate and Joust cabinets into a new Atari game called Cloak & Dagger. Cloak & Dagger (originally titled Agent X) was designed to plug directly into the existing power supply in these games. Indeed, this was very cloak and dagger like of Atari. By the way, the movie of the same name was a gloried Atari advertisement.

Fact 11. Clandestine sale to Philips
Without the knowledge of James (Jim) Morgan at Atari, Warner Bros. management (Manny Gerard and Rob Newman) were surveying Atari at the request of Steve Ross (Warner Bros head-honcho). The staking out of Atari was to take visual inventory and current status of projects for a possible sale to the Dutch electronics giant, Philips. There were a series of talks between Steve Ross and Wisse Dekker (Philips CEO), but in the end, after being burned by the Magnavox Odyssey, Philips chose to walk away from the deal.

Fact 12. First Nintendo, then the Amiga Hi-Toro
It seems that Atari had a knack of getting itself into some wheeling and dealing, but ultimately, choosing to opt out of certain deals. After the Nintendo deal fell through, Atari struck a gentleman’s agreement with the Amiga Corporation in early 1984. The ‘Letter Of Intent’ between Atari and Amiga had Atari advancing $500,000 to the cash strapped Amiga Corporation so that they could continue developing the ‘Lorraine’ chipset. Atari was never interested in acquiring Amiga, they just wanted to get their hands on the chipset that Jay Miner and Joe Decuir had created. The chipset was going to be used in Atari’s arcade machines, consoles and home computers. Dave Morse’s intention was always to find a buyer for his fledgling and struggling Amiga Corporation. This is where Commodore stepped in and the rest, as they say, is history. Hindsight is always 20/20!

Fact 13. Shedding Atarians
The gravy train at Atari was coming to a screeching halt. Under James Morgan’s NATCO (New Atari Company) cost saving plan, Atari’s ranks shrivelled from 7,800 employees in January 1983, to an astounding 1,500 by the end of May 1984.

Fact 14. Atari MindLink – Bionic Breakout
Atari was always at the forefront of product development. Atari’s MindLink product was a headband controller that controlled game play by the player just looking at the TV screen and ‘thinking’ about moving an object. There was no extra sensory perception going on here, the MindLink controller would read the resistance of the muscles in the player’s forehead and interpret them into the appropriate joystick or fire button signals. Was it ahead of its time, it sure was. The market did not take the product seriously so Atari chose not to pursue production of the MindLink.

Fact 15. I, Robot – The last Atari, Inc. Coin-op
The final coin-operated game under the Atari, Inc. banner was I, Robot (1984). Created by Dave Theurer and Rusty Dawe, I, Robot was the first commercial arcade game to feature filled 3D polygonal graphics. Sadly, only 750 machines were produced, with even less being sold. If you have one in your possession, hold onto it, it is worth a small fortune!

With a vast amount of information out there on Atari, we cross referenced facts, myths and misinformation with the definitive book, Atari Inc. – Business Is Fun by Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg. If you weren’t aware, Curt Vendel is an Atari historian (since the mid 1980s) and has the largest Atari collection in the world. Curt has collected vast amounts of Atari paperwork and other memorabilia over the last few decades. His intimate knowledge of Atari is second to none.

image sources: various

My Atari Story: Matt Lacey

June 25, 2014 By ausretrogamer

Why I Still Love Atari Computers

These days the Atari name is almost nowhere to be seen: the company is not the company it was when it was great. It’s not much more than simply the owner of some IP that enjoyed a golden age thirty years ago. But what a golden age it was.

Where It Started For Me

I was lucky as a kid because my dad was a computer guy. He was a programmer in the punch card era, and quickly became an Atari fan with the launch of their formidable 8-bit machines at the end of the seventies. I had an 800 in my bedroom when I was young, after my dad upgraded to an ST. That same machine is still alive and kicking to this day. Aside from a few LOGO procedures, I didn’t do anything with that computer except play games. One of those games was Star Raiders which I consider to be an incredible technical achievement for the time, and is still tremendously enjoyable 35 years after its release. It’s also still brutally difficult, and if you’ve never played it, I implore you to do so. If you ever liked Wing Commander, TIE Fighter or games of their ilk, then you’ll be right at home with Star Raiders.

The motherboard from an Atari 800XL that I'm attempting to restore — The motherboard from an Atari 800XL that I’m attempting to restore

During the 16-bit Atari vs. Amiga wars of the 80s, circumstances dictated that I was firmly in the Atari camp. Although technically the ST could never really match the A500 for power, it does get credit for being available considerably earlier, and the MIDI ports were great for musicians. I’ll never forget jumping out of my chair when I fired up a game called Chopper-X and my still-connected keyboard suddenly started blasting the music at full volume right behind me.

It was on the ST that I first played Monkey Island and Loom (games that I still play regularly) which kicked off a lifelong love affair with LucasArts’ graphic adventures. It was also the first machine I ever wrote code on, some primitive BASIC it may have been, but that pretty much set the direction for my life.

Today

Perhaps it’s nostalgia talking, but computers today simply have no charm. There’s little fun to be found using them, they’re merely tools for a job, and tools that annoy more often than they delight. Macs and a few high-end PC laptops aside, they’re generally made of nasty, cheap plastic, and none of them seem like they’re built to last. As computers have become commodity items they have also fallen prey to the talons of planned obsolescence in a big way.

For me, all old computers are a joy to use (yes I’d even like to own a few Amigas these days); they have their own quirks and oddities, but they don’t feel sterile and they’ll certainly never chastise you for disconnecting a device unsafely. Granted, disconnecting a device in use is likely to trash your data, but I’d rather learn once and be treated as an intelligent being than deal with dialog boxes displaying mundane lines such as ‘You shut down your computer because of a problem’. No, you think? (for the record, this was my Mac, last week, after I had to forcefully shut it down because it wouldn’t wake up from sleep mode).

Last year I purchased my dream computer: An Atari Falcon 030. This ill-fated and little-known machine was the successor to the ST, released in 1992. Unfortunately the plug was pulled in 1993 so that the company could focus on the Jaguar. On the outside it looks pretty much the same as an ST but with a different logo and darker keycaps, but on the inside it’s a solid performer, supporting a true colour display and capable of recording audio direct to hard disk thanks to a Digital Signal Processor running alongside the CPU. Today people still covet these machines and you can even get new hardware for them. Lotharek produces a few items including the NetUSBee which makes transferring files on and off of the machine far easier than in the past, and there’s some cheap IDE DOMs available which make for easy, silent replacements for aging IDE hard drives.

Yes – it feels a little clunky and awkward compared to modern machines, but it’s fun to use and explore. There’s a few people developing games specifically for the Falcon still, and I’m looking to join their ranks; I have some sprites and things moving around but free time is hard to come by. Either way, I’ll keep at it when I can because it’s enjoyable and a good way to sharpen the programming skills.

Debugging sprite routines. Note the NetUSBee sticking out of the cartridge port

Go Buy One!

There’s still a strong and very active community surrounding Atari computers and consoles with several great forums and #atariscne on IRCNET is a great way to get help with code, so there’s never been a better time to get involved. The machines are relatively cheap (Falcons and TTs aside), though slightly tricky to get hold of in Australia compared to Europe and the US. There seems to be more and more hardware extensions appearing all the time which makes using them better than it’s ever been. And don’t forget to buy that Star Raiders cart while you’re at it if you spring for an 8-bit.

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Matt Lacey
Co-Founder of SPKeasey and ProxInsight. Salesforce & ForceDotCom MVP. Code addict. Fan of science, snowboarding & beer. Learning M68k ASM for kicks. A proud Atarian.

Follow Matt on Twitter

My Atari Story: Sue Lamport

June 24, 2014 By ausretrogamer

The Atari 2600 is where gaming truly began for me.

The year was 1979, I was five years old. My mum bought the Atari 2600 from Boans in Perth (which is now Myer department store) as an anniversary present for my dad. I’m not sure how much it cost back then but mum reassures me it was ‘a bloody fortune’. I can remember sitting next to this huge box in a nearby cafe just staring at all the little screens pictured on this wonderful box while my mum and grandmother chatted. How I wished it was for me! I just wanted to go home and see it, what was it? Prior to this, all I knew was Pong. My grandmother had Pong on an old black and white TV. It had two paddles that slid up and down, that was it! Don’t laugh, that was fun back then. I can remember we all had a go. But the Atari, just sitting in the box as it was, fascinated me. It was colourful and all the screens on the box had something different going on, not just two white lines and bouncy square.

From here on I pretty much grew up with the Atari. At first, my time using it was heavily restricted but as time went by I got to use it more often. My parents soon realised they could use it as a potential for punishment, ‘Look, if you don’t behave no Atari!’. I shocked my dad one day who came home from work and saw how well I was doing on Frogger. After I had gone to bed he tried his best to match me, but he couldn’t. I also surprised my uncle when it came to games like Warlords, in how well I could hold my own against the other adults. It became a regular thing on a Saturday for mum and dad to have friends and family over to play. Everyone had to have a go at Combat, my aunty loved Asteroids, my mum’s favourites (even to this very day) are Space Invaders – especially invisible Space Invaders – and Kaboom!; but I loved them all. The first game I ever finished was Defender. I was very sick in bed at the time and mum put the Atari in my room. I guess there is no harm in admitting now that I was in no hurry to get better.

I am very pleased to say that the same machine, with all those wonderful memories attached to it, still works and is still in the family today. Mum still has it in its own custom built box. The original box died years ago, so at the time my Dad (a wood machinist by trade) built his own with special compartments for the console, controllers and games. The Atari, for me, isn’t just a console, it’s a family heirloom. I have my own hand-me-down console from my aunty, and although mine is not the ‘woody’ like our original family console, it does the job just fine.

I’ve played some of the old games on today’s modern systems, such as the PSP and Xbox 360, but trust me on this; you cannot beat the Atari console itself. Games like Kaboom! and Night Driver are both fine examples of when you must use the paddles! But it’s good to see these games getting the exposure they deserve. And it is certainly something to see my kids play games on my old Atari, and enjoy them just as much as I did.

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Sue Lamport
Educator, art lover, gamer. A proud Atarian.

Follow Sue on Twitter

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