← Ridiculous History
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- [00:00]
A
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. In. That's our super producer, Mr. Max Magnavox Williams. Max.
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Atari Teenage Ryan Williams.
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A
Remember them?
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B
Oh, man, those guys are old.
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A
That's Noel Brown. I'm Ben Bullen. This is part two of the Ridiculous History of Atari. So if you haven't heard part one yet, please get the to Thy podcast platform of choice and check it out, because part two will make a lot more sense when you've heard part one.
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B
It's true, but it's a pretty good division. I mean, we definitely recommend checking out episode one. You probably already have, but we're going to start from kind of the fall from grace type period of Atari.
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Yeah, more money, more problems, as Biggie would say.
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed Human.
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This is the story of the One. As the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering, so her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. This is the story of the 1. As the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering, so her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
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A
We're here in what we call the post Pong era. Yeah, I guess we're still in the post Pong era.
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B
I think we are, man.
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E
I think we are.
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A
Like postmodernism. What a weird term. So Keza McDonald, writing for IGN, points out that Atari is growing to new, unprecedented levels. But at every step along the way, the company is facing a litany, a chorus of challenges. Their trajectory is up, up, up, up, up and away. But they make a few missteps in the 70s.
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B
That's right on the business side of things, maybe their reach exceeding their grasp a bit when it comes to EXP markets. Not to mention sinking a whole lot of capital into a particularly convoluted development Process on a game called Grand Track 10, which may not surprise you that you have not heard of.
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A
Right? Yeah. And it also, it reminds me of other missteps that have occurred in the past. We'll get to some of them with.
- [03:27]
B
Atari ET Yeah, buried in the desert.
- [03:31]
A
Right. And also games that require a specific controller can be a little bit of a hard. Like a couple of battlemech games are like that. And a couple of other in depth simulator games. Luckily though, Atari is able to save their bacon with a game that is a huge hit in arcades. It's called Tank.
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B
Tank, right?
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A
Yes.
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B
That is the game that lifts them out of this morass, these doldrums. And Atari then has a merger with one of their sister companies called Key Games. Key Games K E E. Which split off from Atari's main business in 1973 to help the company get around some tricksy legal areas surrounding exclusivity.
- [04:23]
A
Okay. Yeah, exactly. And this was the rule of the day with the arcade industry. So by spinning off Key Games, they were able to say, oh no, I mean, it's not really us anymore. This is a different guy.
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B
And now we have sort of another Sears type situation. In terms of mergers though, in case with a big boy in the communications industry, Warner Communications, who you may have heard of, They've been in the news a little bit lately. It's the same, right? Warner Communications and Warner Brothers. Wouldn't that have been like an extension or. This is very related. It has to be. And forgive me if anyone knows that not to be true, but I do believe it is the case. So they sold to Warner Communications for this number was not a secret. Unlike the settlement with Magnavox for a publicized 28% million. We got an inflation calculator. This guys.
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A
Boop boopy doop boop boop boop. Oh, we must. And thank you for the boop there, Max. Nope, it's trying to get me to inflation calculate syzygy, which we're not going to do. That was something we had pasted earlier. Okay, here we go, folks. In $1973 28 million is going to be, as of 2005, the equivalent of. Drumroll rat attack. $203,027,117.12.
- [06:02]
B
Lot of cash, but still not at the level of the types of communications and tech acquisitions we see today that are like in the billions.
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A
And of that 28 million, Bushnell himself receives the lion's share. He walks away with something like 15 million of that 28 million.
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B
Good on him. He's put in the work.
- [06:22]
A
Yeah. And he also, he bought out his co founder, Ted Dabney. Also, if we inflation calculate once again to see Bushnell's share of this sale, We will see that 15 million in 1973 is the equivalent of 108 million 700, $164,527.03 easy retirement type windfall there for Buddy Bushnell. Yeah. And weirdly enough, though, this is the beginning of Atari's death knells.
- [07:02]
B
Sometimes that happens right when you get a big company coming in and changing the company culture and stuff like that, which we're going to get into. However, before that death knell kind of rang out, there was another hugely development at Atari, which was the vcs, the home game console that we know as the atari. The Atari 2600.
- [07:27]
A
Yeah. That's probably what you picture in your head, folks, when you think of Atari.
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The one stick and the button.
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A
It's going to be this console. It stands for video computer system. Not the most creative name, but a very creative piece of technology. Also at this time, Bushnell is drifting further and further away from the company that he created. But if we go to James landino writing for PCMag, we'll see that the 2600 is probably the. I would say it's the second most famous thing Atari's created outside of Pong. It's September 11, 1977. This is weird because it's not the first video game console. It's not the first one to accept cartridges, but it could bring actual arcade games home to your house when you plugged it into your TV.
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B
That's right. And by the end of 1976, we started to see other competing systems jumping into the fray, including Magnavox, old favorites, and Coleco with their. Was it Colecovision?
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A
Yeah, that was one thing they did for sure. And these other. There was real proliferation of boom and.
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Bust, the earliest days of console wars, really. I mean, that's really what we're seeing here. And that did not stop.
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A
Yeah. And we see this happen in all kinds of industries, like the early days of soda pop. There were so many flash in a pan soda companies and flavors. And the history of that is amazing. But ultimately the market starts to collapse. The choices. Right. And there are just a few big. A few big video game console manufacturers left. There's something else that happens here with an outfit called Fairchild. This company gets in front of the curve and beats Atari to the punch with something called Channel F. This is a microprocessor based Game console.
- [09:33]
B
Want to say that Fairchild was also responsible for a pretty important piece of audio equipment, the Fairchild compressor, which is another classic audio device that exists in plugin form today. It's all full of vacuum tubes. And this is a kind of a sacred cow of studio tech.
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A
Oh, yeah, Love the tubes, man. Love to see it this. Okay, so Fairchild, or the Channel F, we should say, has color graphics. It can accept cartridges unlike all the other TV game systems on the market. And that's exactly what Atari was working on doing on their own end. So eventually RCA releases something called the Studio 2. The Studio 2 has built in gamepad buttons. It also takes cartridges. Magnavox, not to be outdone, comes out with the Odyssey 2. That has a built in keyboard that lets you write your own game software. That's crazy. And a couple of other companies also, again, got into the race. Places like Bally and Allied Leisure and, you know, we were talking a little off air about something that we also see in the early days of the automotive industry or appliance manufacturers. A lot of the video games are coming from companies that already had the ability to manufacture electronics. It was a natural step.
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B
Yeah, like RCA as an example. A company that was responsible for a lot of innovation involving, you know, record playback, like LPs and other pro and consumer audio products.
- [11:13]
A
And so we're back to Atari. It's 1977. You can get the 2600 with all kinds of fun stuff. Joysticks, two paddles, the cartridge Combat, which comes packaged with it. And this Combat cartridge gives you not one, but two games. Tank and Jet Fighter. However, you're gonna have to be a really good kid to get one of these for Christmas. It cost $189.95. We return to the inflation calculator.
- [11:47]
B
That'll be a boop, please. And a boop.
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A
$189.95. 1977 is $1009.13.
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B
And that is a tall order today for any home gaming system. This is like early camcorder prices, prohibitively expensive. I mean, Even like the Switch 2, which people balked at, was, you know, I think $500.
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A
Right. And how much is a PS5?
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B
Probably there's smaller versions of them now that are closer to 300 max.
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E
I think they're still in the four. They just went up in price. But, oh, because 400.
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B
Did they ever come out with a smaller form factor one or are they still big honkers?
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E
They've just come up with a bigger one, probably.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Which does what Higher res video streaming, more memory.
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It's supposed to.
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E
Okay, so according to the Google AI, you can get the Slim with not a actual disc, or you can get a standard. You can get the Digital Edition for 500. Yeah, you can get a pro, you can get a regular one, a standard disc for 500 and you get a pro for 750.
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B
Okay, yes, but even that's well below, you know, upwards of a grand.
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A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also, by the way, not to sound like a curmudgeon shouting at this guy, but do get the one that can do physical media. If you have the ability, always go for physical media.
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B
Yep. What is that big campaign. Stop killing games or something like that. People are really. We're speaking of right to repair and right to own the things that you purchase. I say speaking of because we just talked about that on our sister show, Stuff they don't want you to know is most recent episode of Strange News. Um, it's really becoming a problem where when these gaming companies no longer want to do online support for games, that it's almost as though like they're. They're taking it away from you.
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A
Absolutely ephemeral.
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Ephemeral in video games is really bad. It's really bad preservation. I want to give a shout out to my friend Meredith, who bought a PS5 last year and refused to accept any offer that was given to her that did not come with a disc. And I was like, ah, good fight there, 100%.
- [14:02]
A
Because you don't really own something unless you physically own it. I'm just going to be honest there now. One thing that the Atari 2600 did that was brilliant is they included a switch box so that you could play a game on your TV screen. And then if you wanted to watch television, you just hit the switch and now you're back to your regularly scheduled program.
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B
They didn't have multiple inputs on TVs in those days. You would have had to. It would probably have been some sort of coax connection, I imagine. And this was literally just a little junction box that probably maybe would have been sold separately, but probably was more relegated to the areas of pro AV type worlds. So this would have been a big deal for them to include this.
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A
And for a lot of people this would have been new technology. They wouldn't have been aware of it. So another brilliant thing they did, which they weren't unique in this, but it was brilliant move. They said, well, what if these folks get bored of the games that come with the device? Well, we've got the Cartridge slot. So all you have to do is convince your household to let you buy another game.
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B
And that would have been incredibly innovative as well. And we're not talking about yet a world where there's just like all the focus is being put into game design. Like, it was so novel at this point that, like, maybe just a handful of games that were out there would have been enough to keep people's attention for long enough to, you know, make them bundles of money. But then to your point, Ben, when you run out or get tired of those games, now we've got a whole new industry that's opening up in order to fill that void.
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A
And with economy of scale, the only thing that's really changing about the cartridges is the information on them. So they become naturally cheaper to create over time and as volume increases. So not every early Atari game was an absolute banger. They had some hits, they had some misses. They had ones that were simple, fun kind of novelties, but then they had really cool conversions of things like breakout in 1978, which you can tell my cat loves, folks.
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B
Yeah, big fan of the Breakout. Big fan of classic gaming, that cat. This was actually. I didn't know this. It was a coin op arcade cabinet that was popular, was designed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
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A
And of course, if you want to learn more, you can go to some of the sources we've mentioned to get under the hood into the nuts and bolts of specs here. It's interesting reading, but we have to move on to the next beat about the story.
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Breaking news, everybody. Not everything is terrible. I repeat, not everything is terrible. The ripple effect with Jenna Kim Jones is proof that the Internet, it hasn't ruined humanity entirely.
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Let me start by saying it's a.
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Great day to be a gray shirt team Rubicon.
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You know, it truly is a team.
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Those folks, myself included, all had one.
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Desire, which is helping folks in disasters. Trying to be a little bit of hope in a really, really bad situation.
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It's like magic, you guys. So put down your doom scroller and pick up your faith in humanity and join me, Jenna, for the ripple effect. It's a reminder that you can start a ripple that changes everything. You really can.
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B
We give just that nugget of hope helping other people.
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For some of our gray shirts, it's during a time when they need help.
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Help. And by helping others, it helps them.
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Listen to the ripple effect with Jenna Kim Jones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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D
This is the story of the one as the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering, so her team members can customize. Count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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C
What if mind control is real?
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B
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
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C
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
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When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such a such good feelings.
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C
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
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D
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
- [18:33]
C
Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Nlp, AKA Neuro linguistic programming is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
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B
It's about engineering consciousness.
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C
Mind games is the story of nlp, its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, nlp, might actually work. This is wild. Listen to mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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A
Here's the thing, we sound like we might be glazing the Atari 2600 a little bit, as the younger folks in the crowd would say. But get this, it was not an instant hit.
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B
No, no. I mean, surely the pricing had something to do with that.
- [19:38]
A
Yeah, I bet. Man, this would be one of the most successful game consoles ever. But because to your point, Noel, it was so expensive it didn't take off immediately.
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B
And you also had to educate the public as to what was possible with these things. Because I think that folks were mainly still pong brained.
- [19:58]
A
Yeah, they were thinking, why would I pay the equivalent of more than $1,000 to play one game? So you had to educate the public. You had to market and promote to them. As a result, the 2600 didn't really hit the sales numbers they wanted in 1977 and 1978. By the end of 1978, they had only sold 750,000 machines. And this was despite a $5 million marketing investment by their parent company, Warner.
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B
That's a lot.
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A
The board was not Happy, I bet.
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B
No, no, no, no. For sure. This was a problem. So now it's 1978. No, Bushnell has left the company entirely. His version, as we maybe mentioned in the previous episode, that kind of early spirit of laissez faire, punk rock kind of Silicon Valley startup mentality, this laid back atmosphere, super creative exchange of ideas, this was not something that the brass wanted to continue.
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A
Yeah, it was a culture clash which happens when different companies acquire each other. Right. No more hot tub parties, no more drink.
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B
He's not joking, folks. This is a known thing. Yeah.
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A
No more drinking, drug riddled company retreats. The corporation border says, look, we hate you guys. Weird Friday parties. We think there should be a more professional dress code. And Bushnell says, you guys stink. And he fights with the owners and the managers all the time. Including a standup shouting match with a Warner executive in front of the shareholder board.
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B
Yikes. Yeah, not a good look, this dude. It was time for him to go, at least as far as the execs were concerned.
- [21:56]
A
Yeah, he got his walking papers and then he goes on. His story doesn't end there. He goes on to participate with a ton of other companies in related adjacent fields. But looking back in interviews, we always get the sense that he would have loved to stay on with Atari, which. It's his baby and let's call it his boy. It's his baby. You know what I mean? It's his baby boy. Yeah, it's his baby boy in a box. And so now it's 1979. We've got a new CEO, Ray Kazar.
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B
That Max refers to lovingly as the video game Palpatine. Though I don't know if Max coined that. And maybe it's something that gets thrown around in gamer circle.
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E
He was not well liked, let's just say that, right?
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B
So Shakedown, 1979, we've got space Invaders hitting the scene. I think that's one that you'll still see around in bars.
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A
Or on your phone.
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B
Or on your phone. And by the way, shout out to button mash in Los Angeles, in the Highland park area. It is an incredible vintage arcade wonderland barcade situation. And they have a lot of these really cool. It's almost like a combination of an arcade in a museum, but it's a museum where you can actually play the things really, really cool spot if you're ever around that part of the country.
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A
Yeah, I love an arcade bar. I haven't been in years, but there's a spot here in our fair metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia called Joystick, which I used to have a lot of fun there.
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B
Still pop. And they do some good burger pop ups there too. It's a cool spot.
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A
Yeah, they had these great fries. Anyway, we're getting close to lunchtime, folks. So this. That dreamy voice. Oh, great fries. So. So this is a huge hit. Space Invaders becomes just a massive success for Warner because they're still pumping marketing money into this product. The home conversion of space invaders sells 2 million units for the Atari 2600 in 1980. And now the sales numbers are starting to double year over year. It hits 10 million in annual sales in 1982 too.
- [24:09]
B
That's right. Yeah. Just exponential growth. No question about it. And considering that it was not a huge success out of the gate, this is a big deal. And Warner really thinking they've kind of found the secret sauce.
- [24:24]
A
Oh, yeah, for sure. By 1982. Right. Some of those numbers we just kicked there. Atari's revenue just from atari makes up 70% of Warner's total income. It's bigger than Warner's music. It's bigger than Warner's film. Uh, It's. The Atari 2600 is becoming a worldwide hit. Oh, yeah.
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B
It's the age of Atari. I mean, this is like what you think of when you think of like the early 80s and gaming culture right before Nintendo hits the scene, of course. Yeah.
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A
Right. Nintendo looming in the shadows. So this CEO that Max also calls Sauron at times in our research.
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B
Sauron and Palpatine. Yeah. That secret sauce we were talking about. He thinks he's got it so good that he can kind of, you know, slacking up on some other things a bit. Not the best move though, right?
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A
Yeah. He cuts the R&D department in 79. It makes no sense. Right. It's like, wow, this car is doing great on this road trip. I think we should stop paying for gas.
- [25:29]
B
Yeah. Or just stop making cars. Like, we've already got it. This is the only car we'll ever need. That is not a very forward thinking CEO there.
- [25:38]
A
No, he's chasing the bottom line in a very strange way that a lot of people disagree with. He's adding market staff to sell the thing they're already making. And he might not say it explicitly, but he has an internal political motive here. He wants to hamstring the influence that Atari's creative team had under Bushnell.
- [25:59]
B
Okay. So he's being a little bit petty, if we're being honest here. And certainly, it would seem, is not nearly aware enough of all of the looming competition thinking that he's got it. This is all that it's ever gonna be gaming. He's not looking at it big picture.
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E
And to jump in here real quick to kind of point out how Warner Brothers really didn't think this out. They had posted Ray Kazar from Burlington Coat Factory.
- [26:27]
B
Definitely a top gaming mind. Yes.
- [26:30]
A
And that, you know, that kind of hopping around from leadership role to leadership role happens pretty often in corporate America. It can't be surprised when you hear a fact like that and you're thinking, what, the guy was C suite at a coat company and now he's C suite at a video game company. It's just always been weird to me how they define expertise or experience at that level of corporate America anyway.
- [26:58]
B
Well, I mean the argument might be that a leader at that level should be more focused on the numbers of it all and doesn't necessarily have to have a head for the products. But I don't know, I think we've seen time and time again that if there's no passion there and there's no real vision in a leader like that, that things aren't, gonna. They're not gonna continue to grow. And you can't just look at the numbers and the things that are happening right now. You need someone that can recognize innovation and look at the overall landscape and make smart plays considering those factors.
- [27:31]
A
And that guy was not Ray. Not a good fit for Atari. Atari has been rioting off this massive wave of success. But arguably. Well, I'm being diplomatic. Historians will tell us that Ray Kassar's actions set the company up for failure. There was a bunch of what Cory Doctoro would later call insification of Atari.
- [27:56]
B
Isn't it funny, Ben, that like the first big video game company is an American company with a fake Japanese name?
- [28:02]
A
Very Haagen Dazs.
- [28:03]
B
Not a fake Japanese name. I mean it's a real Japanese word. But it's just considering that we had not yet seen the ultimate takeover of gaming, you know, by.
- [28:13]
E
I never thought of that. That is absolutely hilarious.
- [28:16]
A
Yeah, it's true. And look, there's some of this in poopification occurs. There's a lot of low quality software running through wild through the marketplace. And a lot of it is coming from Atari itself. Because since the creative team hates Kasar so much, Atari has experienced serious brain drain. People are leaving the company in droves.
- [28:40]
B
Not to mention that whole resting on the laurels mentality surely trickled down in terms of the amount of time and resources that would be devoted to developing. So a perfect example would Be the ET video game. It's a great example of an era where if you had cool art and it was tied in with some kind of intellectual property that people understood, then it didn't have to, to have any relation to it. In the game itself, like the Superman game, absolute garbage, you know, just looks like trash. But the art on the cartridge, super, super vivid. You know, we even see that, you know, into Nintendo early days.
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A
Sure, yeah. We, we also still see that with money grab branding efforts. You know, there's a famously not great Mad Max Fury road game.
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B
I never even crossed my, my radar.
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A
I've just saved you so much time. So this leads us to some strong headwinds. The so called video game crash of 1983, it hits everybody in the business pretty hard. It hits Atari especially hard. This is the legend that we always love to talk about. And Jonathan Strickland, AKA the Quizter, loves this story too.
- [29:55]
B
There's an old episode of tech stuff about it for sure.
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A
Yeah, it's a cautionary tale. It's a parable for our times. They couldn't sell stuff and things went so disastrously wrong that they ended up dumping unsold merchandise in the desert and covering it with concrete as though it were nuclear waste.
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B
Yeah, Yucca Mountain of video games. And that of course includes famously and probably most referenced in this story, the, the absolutely abysmal ET the video game which apparently Max owns a copy of.
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A
Yeah. How do you find it, Max?
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E
I do. Alex got it for Christmas for me. And I have been looking all around my room trying to get back to me. It's somewhere in a drawer of this desk. It's just a big desk.
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B
I believe you.
- [30:41]
A
We believe you, man. So look, Atari was not just set up to come out with a next gen console, a Successor to the 2600. They were definitely going to do it had the execs not interfered. But Warner was just fixated on selling the existing hardware, not innovating like we were saying earlier.
- [31:04]
B
Correct. And there, you know, there was the aforementioned brain drain and the Atari division just kind of having been segmented up in an odd way with different divisions almost operating at like cross purposes. You know, we've got home computer Arcade and game console div divisions working independently, but without talking to one another. So they're almost like. Yeah, again, competing with themselves in a.
- [31:31]
A
Very counterproductive way and doing redundant projects. Right. They're doing double work. So there were different versions of the 2600, including things like the 5200, but they were small improvements they weren't anything significantly new. This is one of the criticisms you sometimes see with Apple post Steve Jobs. Right, right. Where they say hey, we've got a new thing, don't worry, we've made the ports even more inconvenient.
- [32:02]
B
Correct. Yeah. Or you know, largely things that could be accomplished with the software update.
- [32:08]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. Because Atari's competitors in home computing are coming out with more and more fascinating, increasingly sophisticated machines like the old Commodore 64. That's a cool name.
- [32:21]
B
Which are still really popular today. The early chiptune kind of creation like of audio production could be accomplished on Commodore 64, which is that classic early video game kind of arpeggiated beep boop kind of sound. People still enjoy Commodore 64 for making kind of vintage sounding music.
- [32:40]
A
And here we see the so called PC master race of gamers begin to emerge. Because now people are going away from cartridge based dedicated gaming machines to home computers which can do a bunch of stuff and also play games with you.
- [32:59]
B
We're talking the early days of like real time video and things like that. And just like, you know, they just had a much more expandable set of, you know, hardware in these computers so you could upgrade them, update them, et cetera. Whereas the consoles were just sort of stacked.
- [33:18]
A
Yeah. And so the 2600 is starting to fall from grace. It's looking increasingly obsolete.
- [33:25]
B
Along in the tooth. Yeah.
- [33:34]
A
The sad part is here, the bittersweet part is that Atari is still cranking out pretty awesome games even as the home console begins to lag in popularity. They have games from the 70s to 80s that are classics. Asteroids, Lunar Lander. Oh gosh, there are a ton. Centipede. We could just keep naming them, honestly.
- [33:57]
B
Yeah, Centipede is still cool. I love those flat screen on top consoles that you'll see or cabinets that you'll see sometimes in bars like Gattaca or Galaga.
- [34:07]
A
Galaga. Gattaga is the film that's the movie about the.
- [34:12]
B
On like what? Bespoke gene splicing or gene editing?
- [34:17]
A
Yeah, yeah. Eugenics got incorporate. So now as we've teased a little bit, Atari is at this point competing with other titans in the arcade game of games. Nintendo, Sega, Konami. But Atari's games are still holding their own. People like them. And so home consoles may not be as popular from Atari as they once were for a few years, but if you go to an arcade, some of your favorite games are going to be.
- [34:46]
B
Atari creations, which is interesting considering the cut in rd. So I'm A little, yeah. Obviously there was still some good stuff coming out of Atari. And to your point, Ben, earlier, those segmented divisions, it would maybe seem that some of the best innovations were still happening in the arcade division.
- [35:04]
A
Oh yeah, I agree with you there. It's strange too, because to your point about the segmentation, having having one division of Atari that just does home video game stuff, having one that just does computers, having one that just does arcades, they end up being poisonous to each other because Atari makes the arcade less popular.
- [35:29]
B
Well, that's funny too, Ben. Cause I think we are all old enough to remember when the quality of games you would see in arcades was higher than what could be achieved on home consoles. And it wasn't until a few generations later on consoles that you started to see ports of those arcade games that were, wow, it's almost as good as the arcade version. So obviously there was innovation going on in game design, but they were pushing all of that into the arcade because they could have bespoke, you know, proprietary hardware in those that wouldn't fit in the home console version.
- [36:01]
A
Yeah, well put. And I think a lot of us, and not to date myself too hard, but I think a lot of us in the audience probably still remember that astonishing moment where you get Mortal Kombat.
- [36:15]
B
Or Street Fighter 2 on the Sega Genesis.
- [36:17]
A
Yeah. And you say, wait, you mean I don't have to have a bunch of quarters to play this? I can play it all the time.
- [36:25]
B
And they still didn't look identical. They were a little shaggier, let's just say.
- [36:30]
A
Right, yeah, absolutely. And so people started discovering their games at home on their television sets. And this drew a lot of criticism from Nolan Bushnell. He had some very strong words to say about this.
- [36:47]
B
Yes. Specifically about Warner, who he had clearly had some public beef with. Under Warner it committed suicide. Yeah. Intense. It wasn't homicide, it was self inflicted stupidity. What you had was a bunch of record guys thinking they knew what the game business was about. Warner, obviously, big music conglomerate as well. I could catalog the screw ups they made. I would have liked to have taken Atari to another level. If I could go back in time, I would not sell to Warner. Yeah, he's got that kind of fu. Money. He can say this kind of stuff.
- [37:24]
A
Totally can.
- [37:24]
B
Without fear of, you know, retribution.
- [37:26]
A
He's probably literally in the interview, he's probably counting money.
- [37:30]
B
Yes.
- [37:31]
E
Don't forget all that Chuck E. Cheese money he had.
- [37:34]
A
Oh yes, yes, Charles E. Cheese. Cheese, Charles Entertainment. Cheese. And so Warder is having a tight spot they're going through a tough time. Atari's dying and they run away. They sell the home computing bit of the atari business in 1984 to the founder of Commodore. He renames it Atari Corporation. That could be confusing. They held onto the arcade development now called Atari Games for a little bit longer, but ultimately they sell that as well to Namco.
- [38:08]
B
In 1985, Namco's still a huge concern in games. Didn't they do. Wait, Bandai.
- [38:16]
A
Aren't they Bandai. Namco.
- [38:17]
B
Bandai. Namco is Elden Ring. Right.
- [38:20]
A
Namco is huge.
- [38:22]
B
And there's tons of titles that they make that you will see in some of those Japanese arcades that you're talking about, Ben. Or places here in Atlanta, like round one, which I think is in other cities as well, in other parts of the country.
- [38:33]
A
I think you're right. And we are going to have so much fun when we finally convince accounting to pay for us to go to Japan.
- [38:40]
B
Hey, man, I'll go on my own steam with you anytime, dude. I'm really excited. We've got a trip planned with the kid for their 18th birthday.
- [38:46]
A
Yeah, that's right. That's cool. Maybe we can meet up there.
- [38:49]
B
Sure.
- [38:49]
A
And so now we see a bunch of horse trading on these names. In this ip. A group of employees buy Zatari Games from Namco. They go on. They make stuff like Paperboy, San Francisco Rush. It's kind. Paperboy's cool. Paperboy's cool. It's kind of like what happened to us with how stuff works back in the day where a bunch of different parent companies were acquiring different pieces.
- [39:14]
B
They only wanted this bit or that bit. Honestly too. It's sort of about. It's not that far off from what's going on with a huge bid for Warner right now from Netflix and Paramount. Like, I think part of the deal is like Netflix or. Versus Paramount only wanted, like, certain parts of it and that they did not necessarily want, like the television division or like some of the cable, you know, properties or whatever. I forget exactly the way it parses out. But when you got these kind of acquisitions, there are going to be sort of piecemeal kind of breakups of the. Of the overall corporation.
- [39:47]
A
Yeah. It's a common practice. Right. And Atari goes through a lot of this. Their golden age is officially over. But the nostalgia and the fascination remain. So we don't have to get too into the weeds other than to summarize it by saying a lot of stuff got sold and parceled out. And then a lot of Things that those Atari descendants, we could call them, a lot of stuff they made gets passed by by other companies. They have some failures with some of their other systems that they try to roll out, like the Lynx that was here and gone.
- [40:25]
B
Well, I think a lot of that was in response to a new boom in home consoles once you started inching towards the bits systems of the early 90s. So after being dormant for a while, Atari was trying to get back in the game that they essentially started. But they'd been mega, no pun intended, passed over by the competition, including the Sega Master System, soon to be the Mega Drive.
- [40:54]
A
Yeah. And the real last nail in the coffin for Atari is the Atari Jaguar. It's. It was pretty impressive for 1993. I remember 64 bits, first of its kind. It looked really weird. It was very powerful, technically speaking. But it had a janky controller. There wasn't a lot of software support. And the Super Nintendo. The Super Nintendo was the Coca Cola. Sega Genesis was the Pepsi.
- [41:28]
B
Yeah, for sure. And after this massive failure, sort of the death knell of Atari as we know it, and it kind of descended into, as described in the IGN piece. We referenced corporate purgatory. You surely will still see, like, Atari branded stuff, like T shirts and sort of nostalgia bait products. So whoever owns the IP of that stuff is still making a few bucks at, like, GameStops and, you know, Five Below. Right. But I believe at this point, the remaining. The name, the branding, and the remaining assets were sold to a electronics company primarily known for making hard drives called jts.
- [42:08]
A
Yeah. And then JTS gets bought. Other companies from around the world get into buying up, as you said, kind of the IP of Atari, the idea of Atari. And then we get to January 2013. Atari filed for bankruptcy yet again. As of the day, we're recording on January 15, 2020, 26. Nobody has stepped up to buy the name yet.
- [42:35]
B
Got it. Okay.
- [42:37]
A
Yeah. And so passes a legend. Hats off. Thank you for all the beautiful memories, Atari, everybody who worked there, and thank you for launching 1,000 ships for entertainment.
- [42:50]
B
Well, Bushnell still has more to say about it concerning Atari's place in the modern gaming landscape. He said, absolutely. Atari could be competing with Xbox and PlayStation today. I would have liked to have taken Atari to another level if I could go back in time again. Wouldn't have sold to Warner, take the company public, raise money that way. I think I should have just taken a vacation instead of. Yeah, okay. Well, hindsight, my guy.
- [43:15]
A
Yeah, we've all been there on a much smaller level, Nolan. And look, this did shape the business of video games. The idea of video games. And even if Atari is not what its creator originally envisioned, it has an inarguably important place in history. And we can't thank our super producer and research associate, Mr. Max Williams. Max Magnavox Williams, enough for getting in the trenches of the research here.
- [43:47]
B
Man, oh, man. Thanks, Magnavox Max.
- [43:49]
A
And big, big thanks to our composer, Alex Williams, who I was supposed to hang out with him a little bit earlier, but I think we had, we had some different projects to work on. So, Alex, we might have to hunt you down in Mexico.
- [44:01]
B
I think he's around for a little bit longer. But yeah, I did get to catch him once. We did a yoga together and it was delightful. Huge thanks to Christopher Osiotes and Eve Jeffcoats, both here in spirit. Jonathan Strickland, the Quiz. Are you little so and so? AJ Bahamas Jacobs, the Puzzler.
- [44:16]
A
Dr. Rachel Big Spinach Lance. Big thanks to the rude dudes of ridiculous crime. If you did Big Us, you'll love them. Beep bop, boop, beep, boop. That's the show.
- [44:26]
B
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [44:41]
C
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [44:43]
A
Guaranteed Human.