 This is the SF Productions podcast network Have you played Atari today from the pop culture bunker? I'm Indy and I'm Mark You can check out our audio podcast how I got my way three comics on iTunes or on our website SF podcast network comm Now we've done a few episodes about video games But we've never really covered the company that started it all which was Atari and we begin with Nolan Bushnell an Engineer an entrepreneur He spent his college years playing what was the first video game called space war on a mainframe Computer while working at an arcade when we say arcade We need a collection of pinball machines and ticket games like ski ball Bushnell first saw the addition of electronic games to that equation and spent years bringing that to fruition Bushnell met Ted Dabney when they both worked at Ampex Which was the tape and recorder company in? 1969 and together they built the first coin operated video game called computer space Essentially space war and that was released in 1971 It was never a big hit, but it made enough money for them to start on other ventures Their company was originally called Psy guy, Siji. I think Siji But after learning another company had the same name changed it to Atari So depending on how you translate it Atari is either a reference in the ancient game of go Or it means to hit a target signifying good luck Bushnell saw a demonstration of the first home video game console the Magnavox Odyssey Which could play a number of games including table tennis now the Odyssey also had Which was essentially a update of the winky-dink and you concept where you put this plastic screen Over your TV screen and and then you could play other games with it Now the simple tennis game two pucks in a ball had already been on computers as far back as 1958 Bushnell turned it into a coin-op game called Pong built by engineer Hal Alcorn The first prototype went into a local bar and it was so popular that the bar owner called to have the machine Fixed the problem being that the coin receptacle a milk jug inside was jammed with quarters by 1974 Atari built 8,000 Pong games shipping worldwide all making about $40 a day at one point Atari created a sister company called G games solely to circumvent Exclusivity rules in the arcade industry of the time the first home version of Pong appeared in 1975 and Sold its ears under the name telegames selling 200k that year and I had one Unfortunately Atari didn't have a patent for Pong but Magnavox did they ended up in a licensing agreement Magnavox's patent was very broad and Basically covered any computer-based home game Magnavox then turned around and spent decades Battling it out with dozens of unauthorized Pong clones all of which were inspired inspired by Atari not Magnavox Soon you could go to Sears and buy a range of Atari games a tank game a motorcycle game for player Pong and Ironically video pinball based on games created for the coin-op market. There was a fatal flaw in video games However, they were unit askers able to play only one game or variations of that game Once the kid got bored the game would gather dust behind the TV set newer technology Specifically affordable microprocessors made it possible for games to be programmed rather than just hardwired to do one thing Bushnell saw this huge opportunity, but couldn't bankroll it himself. He had actually bought out Dabney in 1973 So he sold Atari to Warner Communications His company had developed a video game that used cartridges hardly the first to do so Fairchild had what was called Channel F Which had the worst controllers ever But it was the first to make them practical and durable enough for kids to use them the Atari Video computer system or VCS later renamed the 2600 was a handsome Full-wood unit with six switches power reset select color black and white and difficulty for each player along with the middle slot for a cartridge It came with a joystick and tennis controllers with racing and others available separately along with a single cartridge called Combat which was a set of tank game variants It took a while for the public to understand the idea of an expandable video game, but once they got it Sales boomed. I know I understood it because I was lucky enough to get one for Christmas in 1977 I also got the Airsea battle cartridge I remember opening the box and seeing an IOU note someone at the department store had borrowed the cartridge for a demo and hadn't returned it to the box Bushnell was forced out of Atari by Warner in 1978 and he later went on to create the Chuck E cheese pizza arcade chain Ray Casar took over at that time Casar ran with another Bushnell project of the time creating an Atari computer line Originally planned as an Apple II clone both used the same microprocessor the Atari 400 and 800 shipped in 1979 The former had a membrane keyboard while the latter had a real keyboard and expandable memory all the way to 48 K K That's before Meg and And gig and Tara way down the line K They both came with a dedicated graphic chip called Antik later the name of a long-running Atari magazine Something that had to be added to an Apple computer. They could also use cartridges and existing Atari controllers for games Unfortunately companies like Radio Shack the TRS 80 aka the trash 80 and Apple had a huge lead on them by that time And Commodore came in with lower-priced units like the Vic 20 leaving very little market available Back on the gaming front Atari initially planned to sell only ten different cartridges for the 2600 But as sales swelled he realized how much further they could go According to Atari age comm there would eventually be 470 different Atari cartridges many of which came from third parties Activision was one of them started by four former Atari employees who squeezed every pixel out of the console along with a second company in Magic There was also a few adult cartridges on the markets you had to mail order for them Although you you really had to use your imagination because there's not a lot of graphics in there There were also third-party controllers and other items such as the supercharger an extra long cartridge Filled with RAM using a cassette to store the game itself I had one of these the cassette connection was very Fragile to the point you had to leave the room while it took 20 minutes to load a proto doom game By 1980 Bushnell's vision of electronic arcades had come to fruition and that fed into an explosion of Atari game seals By 1982 Atari made up 70% of Warner's revenues more than movies music and TV That year you could walk into almost any business department store grocery store quickie mark And you could buy Atari cartridges now many of these were from fly-by-night companies or bigger businesses trying to cash in Mostly with crappy games that barely worked one example US games a division of General Mills You know the serial company made a series of games that would crash within a few minutes of play if you were lucky This glut of games basically killed the Atari 2600 market along with newer competitors with better tech like Nintendo There was also the ET fiasco a game slept together in a matter of weeks to make a Christmas market Which was legendarily bad? Millions of ET cartridges were buried in a landfill and there's a documentary about finding their burial site There was a magazine called video gaming illustrated which mostly focused on Atari at least at first The first issue listed all the new games coming out and the final issue listed all the companies going out of business The great video game crash of 1983 resulted in five hundred million dollars in losses for Atari and saw Warner's stock go from $66 to 20 it also killed a planned merger of Atari with another company Famicom aka Nintendo Atari had been developing a successor to the 2600 for years But Warner had pushed it back as long as sales were good and they waited far too long The 5200 released in 1982 didn't match the technology of other consoles of that time But its Achilles heel was that it was not backward compatible with 2600 games The follow-up console the 7800 was too little too late by then Nintendo and Sega ruled the roost Meanwhile Atari updated their computer line to be easier to manufacture and to be more competitive against Commodore The 400 was replaced by the 600 XL and the 800 by the 800 XL and a new unit was added called the 1200 XL this was my first computer and I had it for years I went in for the floppy drive Of course, you had to use a cassette for storage otherwise along with a modem a drawing tablet I went in for the whole nine yards. In fact, my first comic book database was done on that computer Plans for a 1400 XL and 1450 XL D with a built-in floppy disk never made it to market by 1984 with Atari and Warner hemorrhaging money The Atari Consumer Division was sold to Jack Trameo who had just been ousted from Commodore despite their huge success He redesigned the XL computer series the low-cost 65 XE and the 130 XE while introducing a new 16-bit computer line the 520 ST and the 1040 ST Now the ST line was very much based on the Amiga a computer concept originally created by an ex Atari employee and the source of a ton of lawsuits Eventually Commodore would market the Amiga the Amiga slash ST series was basically their take on the Mac a Windows-based graphical operating system with a mouse and a floppy drive I had a long-term loan of a 1040 ST as part of my work on an Atari user group in Columbus in the late 80s Yes, I was in a user group Of course, I mostly played Starglider on it. The ST series actually did fairly well in Europe There was a follow-on called the mega with a hard drive and laser printer, but never caught on elsewhere There was also the STE which had better multimedia and the TT 32-bit and the falcon On-board audio processing and improved video none of which were sold in the US There was even a portable ST called the Stacey STACY Designed to run on batteries until they figured out how short the battery life would be so they glued the compartment shut There was a bar battery compartment you couldn't use because it was completely impractical The ST series like the Amiga had a long life in music and video production Now we used an Amiga back when I did a public access cable show in the 90s By the way, you can check out vast wasteland from the vault on SFPPM Atari got out of the computer market after that Jumping back to the early 80s and the game arcade, our Atari did rather well for years with games like Asteroids Tempest, Missile Command, Centipede and Milipede Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Marble Madness, Star Wars and Gauntlet After the video game crash Warner sold the division to Namco in 1985 So Atari tried yet again to regain home video game share with the Lynx 1989 a handheld game with color graphics Unfortunately, they were issues with getting enough parts allowing Nintendo's Game Boy Which at the time only had monochrome graphics to run rings around it Then there was the Jaguar in 1993 the first 64-bit game system The machine was buggy and difficult to write for Which resulted in a dearth of games by the time they got up to speed both Sony PlayStation and Microsoft with the Xbox Had moved in and taken over So by 1996 Atari had essentially become an intellectual property holding company Which then spent the next several years handed off from company to company 1996 JTS a hard drive company bought them 1998 Hasbro bought them 2001 Infogrames Grahams, which eventually renamed themselves Atari and then Atari SA The eventual company which had moved into social casino gaming Declared bankruptcy in 2013 the next year a new corporate strategy was announced focusing on new audiences Specifically lgbt social casinos real money gambling and youtube. That's a cornucopia there By 2017 a teaser went online about a new console called Atari box Which was designed to run both new and classic games a crowdfunding effort came and went and it was renamed the Atari vcs just like the original but as of this recording, there's no release date and may well be vaporware In conclusion Atari was both the victim of its own success and the poster child for a company with terrible timing But they had very good games that still live on in our hearts And when you're not playing those video games, you can check out our audio podcast How I got my wife treat comics on itunes or on our website sfpodcastnetwork.com From the pop culture bunker. I'm Mindy. I'm mark. Thanks for watching. Oh, I think the controller is broken again