Nine Atari Games
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Transcript
Show Notes00:00:00Jeffrey: This is They Create Worlds, episode two hundred and fifty seven.
00:00:03Jeffrey: Nine Atari games.
00:00:05Intro Music: [Intro Music - Josh Woodward - Airplane Mode] One, two three, four...
00:00:06Intro Music: If anybody wants to find me.
00:00:12Intro Music: I'll be in the last place you would look.
00:00:16Intro Music: In a place where people used to be. A land that's called reality. You'll find me there.
00:00:27Jeffrey: Welcome to They Create Worlds. I'm Jeffrey and I'm joined by my co-host Alex.
00:00:32Alex: Hello.
00:00:33Jeffrey: You would think. After so many episodes talking about Atari, we would be done with it.
00:00:39Jeffrey: We've done the history of the brand.
00:00:42Jeffrey: We've done all sorts of crazy things about Ray Kassar.
00:00:47Jeffrey: We've done stuff about the crash and how it wasn't their fault, but it was their fault, but then it is their fault, and then how we think of the crash is not their fault.
00:00:55Jeffrey: It's all crazy. Go check out those episodes.
00:00:59Jeffrey: Here we are again, Alex.
00:01:01Jeffrey: Talking about Atari because apparently there's something we missed.
00:01:06Alex: Well, you know, Jeffrey, I mean, we've talked about their general history, we've talked about their corporate shenanigans, we've talked about the crash, we've talked about their CEO.
00:01:15Alex: You know what we haven't talked about all that often if you get right down to it?
00:01:19Jeffrey: What?
00:01:20Alex: Their games.
00:01:21Jeffrey: So you're telling us we never did play our Ataris at all in the last I don't know how many episodes.
00:01:28Alex: Something like that. Obviously, in our Atari history episodes, we've talked about some specific games. I'm being a little facetious.
00:01:34Alex: We did a whole episode on Ed Logg and all of the fine coin-op and occasional console games that he did with Atari games. So I'm being slightly facetious, but no, we have not spent a great deal of time on the actual output of Atari, particularly in the old days.
00:01:50Alex: Of course, part of that is because a lot of their older output, I mean the very early output is very simple. You couldn't fill a whole episode with it.
00:01:58Alex: So you have to do something that's a little themed.
00:02:00Alex: Kind of in the same vein as our Activision Games episode, where we just did a whole episode where we went through a bunch of different Activision games.
00:02:09Alex: We're gonna do something similar with Atari here, except we're gonna limit ourselves just to the games that were available when the system launched in 1977.
00:02:20Alex: Which is a decent number, there were nine of them.
00:02:23Alex: They're simple games.
00:02:24Alex: Don't worry, this isn't gonna be a nine hour episode or a ten part episode because we're doing so many games. They're all very simple games. We can, without any irony, we can truly do that in a single episode.
00:02:36Alex: That seems to be a great way to start unlocking some of these Atari games. Just kind of go over what was there at the beginning and how it came about and how that spoke to what the console market was like in those early days.
00:02:50Jeffrey: I guess there's nothing to it but to go for the Atari equivalent of the Nintendo Black Box launch titles.
00:02:57Jeffrey: Are you gonna do this in alphabetical order or something?
00:03:00Alex: Uh well I think we'll probably do it in part number order. So the Atari VCS, it was called the VCS at launch.
00:03:06Alex: People know that later on it was called the 2600.
00:03:09Alex: That's because that was the part number.
00:03:12Alex: It was the CX-2600 was the official like catalog number within Atari.
00:03:19Alex: So all of the early games counted up from that. CX-2601, CX-2602.
00:03:26Alex: Et cetera, et cetera. So That seems like the logical way to go through them.
00:03:30Alex: One final note that I do want to call out is there is a YouTube channel slash website that goes into way more depth on the Atari library than anyone else, myself included.
00:03:43Alex: That is the Atari Archive. Atari Archive is a YouTube channel. AtariArchive.org is the website where the blog is.
00:03:50Alex: That's my good friend Kevin Bunch who does that.
00:03:54Alex: We're gonna be scratching the surface of these nine games. If you really wanna get deep on these and all the rest of the Atari 2600 catalog, he's not through the whole thing yet, but he's somewhere in 1981 now, I think, or 82, no, 82, 83.
00:04:08Alex: I do watch them. He just hasn't released one in a while. So if you're listening
00:04:11Alex: [Alex Chuckles]
00:04:11Alex: But he's going through the entire catalog and he does really deep dives on each of the games.
00:04:17Alex: I'll be cribbing from him as kind of a refresher. I'm not just parroting what he says. It's just an easy way to organize the information.
00:04:24Alex: And if you want more information, I urge you to check out his YouTube channel and his website.
00:04:29Jeffrey: At least that makes the show notes easy.
00:04:31Alex: Yes, indeed. The whole show notes should really just be a link to his website and a link to the videos for each individual game.
00:04:37Alex: And you know, whatever random tangents we go on about or any past episodes we reference. But yeah. [Chuckles]
00:04:43Jeffrey: Already done.
00:04:45Alex: Indeed.
00:04:46Jeffrey: So starting off our top nine list, we have CX-2601.
00:04:52Alex: Comebat.
00:04:53Alex: Classic.
00:04:55Alex: But before we get into combat, I do want to talk about a couple of things in general about the Atari VCS and the launch of the VCS.
00:05:03Alex: This isn't history of the system, we've talked about the system before. I don't know that we've done an episode dedicated to the system, but in all of our various history of Atari episodes, we've certainly talked about the genesis of the system.
00:05:13Alex: So we're not gonna rehash the whole development of it, but we wanna keep a couple of things in mind here.
00:05:18Alex: First of all, we have to remember that we are dealing with somewhat primitive technology here.
00:05:25Alex: For the time it was fairly Impressive for the home. It was outshining a lot of its competitors.
00:05:31Alex: But in order to do that, they had to cut corners in other areas and they really, really couldn't afford to put much memory in it. We've talked about this in earlier episodes.
00:05:42Alex: But this is a system that had a hundred and twenty eight bytes of memory. That's not a misspeak.
00:05:48Alex: A hundred and twenty eight bytes of memory.
00:05:50Jeffrey: Considering that most standard ASCII characters take up one byte.
00:05:55Jeffrey: That's one hundred and twenty eight characters.
00:05:58Alex: Indeed. Now it did have fairly sophisticated graphics for the time, the time being 1977. Obviously the Intellivision will come out in a couple of years and have even more sophisticated graphics,
00:06:07Alex: but at a cost of $250, while the VCS, will officially retail for $190 on launch and will often be seen at much lower prices out in the real world.
00:06:20Alex: As low as a hundred and seventy dollars at launch.
00:06:22Alex: But it does have pretty sophisticated graphics for the time. It has a solid graphics chip in there. And the way it's able to do that is it doesn't have a frame buffer.
00:06:30Alex: Generally speaking, at the time when you had a video display, that would be created as an entire Frame.
00:06:38Alex: So in memory you would draw a frame that makes up the entire screen.
00:06:43Alex: And the memory of that would be uh depended on the resolution, how many pixels there were.
00:06:47Alex: And then how many colors you had or whatever.
00:06:50Alex: So you would draw an entire screen in memory and then put that on the screen, and then the next screen would be drawing in the frame buffer while that screen's on there and so on and so forth, which requires a lot of video RAM.
00:07:01Alex: In the Atari VCS, they are drawing by scan line.
00:07:06Alex: They've synced the graphics to the vertical sync of the screen and they're not using a frame buffer. They're just always updating in real time.
00:07:14Alex: It makes it a very difficult system to program for, but it also means that you don't need a lot of memory to get a lot on the screen, and that's kind of a big deal.
00:07:23Alex: That'll come up a couple of times in these early games, just the way that they draw the screen like that. We're not gonna get into all of the the specifications, but Just to keep that in mind.
00:07:32Alex: The other thing is that when this was being developed In nineteen seventy five, nineteen seventy six, finally comes out in nineteen seventy seven, but they're looking at it as early as seventy five.
00:07:42Alex: This is a system that they're starting to develop while the dedicated
00:07:46Alex: console market, which we've talked about in other episodes, is still ongoing.
00:07:52Alex: At this time nobody really knows what a console cycle is.
00:07:57Alex: They don't know how long these systems are going to be viable. They don't know what the future's going to bring, what capabilities you need to plan for.
00:08:04Alex: There's no roadmap for doing this.
00:08:06Alex: So with the VCS, they actually took a fairly conservative approach, again, in part to keep costs down, which is they really only made it to be capable of playing Atari's biggest hits at the time.
00:08:19Alex: That time being nineteen seventy-five, nineteen seventy six.
00:08:23Alex: So at that time you had Pong.
00:08:26Alex: Simple enough.
00:08:27Alex: As well as their four player variant.
00:08:30Alex: Quadrupong.
00:08:31Alex: You had Gran Track, Gran Track Ten, the racing game.
00:08:35Alex: One of the earliest driving games.
00:08:37Alex: Then you had the one on one dueling style games.
00:08:42Alex: Tank, and jet fighter.
00:08:44Alex: Which are in many ways the same thing, except Tank takes place on land in a maze and Jet Fighters between planes in the sky.
00:08:52Alex: There's some other differences, but the basic conceit of each player controlling a vehicle and trying to shoot at the other player.
00:08:59Alex: Those were the big hits.
00:09:01Alex: They had some other games that had varying degrees of success, but those were the ones they wanted to make absolutely sure this system could play.
00:09:08Alex: So the entire graphical setup of this thing was really designed to be able to play those games.
00:09:13Alex: Which is why it has a very limited number of what we would today call sprites and what they called back then, Player-Missile Graphics.
00:09:22Alex: You had a low resolution background, that you could kind of draw on two halves of the screen.
00:09:28Alex: So you could do some mirroring stuff for some variety there, but there was not a lot that you could do with the background. It was very low res.
00:09:34Alex: Then you had only five of these Player-Missile Graphics.
00:09:39Alex: It was basically two larger sprites. We'll use the term sprite because it's just less of a mouthful than Player-Missile Graphics.
00:09:46Alex: Even though they didn't use the term sprite back then.
00:09:48Alex: You had two sprites for player objects.
00:09:51Alex: Like tanks or race cars or whatever.
00:09:54Alex: You had two sprites for missiles.
00:09:57Alex: Things that these player objects may be shooting.
00:10:01Alex: Then you had one very tiny sprite that was meant to be a ball.
00:10:05Alex: Like in a ball and paddle game like Pong.
00:10:07Alex: That's all the sprite generation the system could do.
00:10:10Alex: Everything else had to be done through background graphics or through clever tricks.
00:10:14Alex: Some of which I believe we've talked about in the past and a little bit of which we'll talk about in this episode here.
00:10:18Alex: That's kind of the limitations of the system, and it was really just meant to be able to play this very narrow range of games because they figured they might be doing another one of these in two years.
00:10:27Alex: They didn't know.
00:10:28Alex: In fact, their original plan was to do one about two or three years after this one released and through circumstances that morphed into the Atari 8-bit computer line, the four hundred and the eight hundred.
00:10:38Alex: In some ways it wasn't a very forward-thinking system, but in other ways it ended up being incredibly versatile because to keep costs down, they didn't hard code into the hardware a lot of capability. And so you could do a lot in software if you were very good at counting your cycles.
00:10:56Alex: Final thing, we talked about the hundred and twenty-eight bytes of memory in the system.
00:11:01Alex: The cartridges, all of the original cartridges, were only two kilobytes.
00:11:07Alex: 2K cartridges.
00:11:09Alex: There's 128 bytes of RAM and there's only 2K of ROM.
00:11:13Alex: Which means that the early games had to be especially compact and primitive as well.
00:11:20Alex: They eventually move up to 4K cartridges, which is technically the maximum that the system can address, again for cost reasons.
00:11:27Alex: They do for a few games later on, they develop a bank switching technique that lets them unlock even more memory than that, and there are a small number of 8K cartridges.
00:11:36Alex: Even though 4K becomes the norm within a couple of years.
00:11:39Alex: Everything in this initial release is 2K. So very, very itty bitty tiny Jeffrey.
00:11:46Jeffrey: These days people think that two gigabytes is small.
00:11:49Alex: Indeed, what a world we live in.
00:11:53Alex: The other thing that I want to talk about before we get into the individual games is because the VCS was coming out of this dedicated console market.
00:12:03Alex: There was kind of this idea at the time that when you bought a dedicated console, which of course you couldn't expand, I mean small number of them had interchangeable cartridges,
00:12:14Alex: but even then you're not really expanding what's on the hardware. It's not ROM memory interfacing with a CPU.
00:12:20Alex: The idea is when you buy this console, that is your entire purchase.
00:12:24Alex: As a result, there was a need to put multiple games in those consoles.
00:12:29Alex: Which were usually just variations on a theme, and that theme was usually ball and paddle.
00:12:35Alex: We have ball and paddle episodes. We have a million of them. Jeffrey can find some of those to put in the show notes if he so desires. Not rehashing that.
00:12:42Alex: But I just want to mention that that idea of multiple game selectability that both the Magnavox Odyssey had with its circuit cards,
00:12:52Alex: and that the wave of dedicated consoles had in '75, '76, going into '77 was something that was reflected in the design of the VCS as well.
00:13:04Alex: Because these are simple games, as I said, 2K cartridges.
00:13:08Alex: Even though you can do interchangeability.
00:13:11Alex: Even though every time you get a new game you're not paying fifty, seventy, a hundred dollars for a whole new console.
00:13:18Alex: You are still spending twenty dollars to buy a 2K cartridge and the games of the time, pre-Space Invaders just aren't that complicated.
00:13:29Alex: Most of them are coin operated derivatives, and of course, coin operated games are meant to just be little time wasters that you play for 60 to 90 seconds on a quarter.
00:13:39Alex: Before Space Invaders, in most of them there wasn't a lot going on, even before breakout. I mean, like
00:13:44Alex: Well, Breakout's out.
00:13:46Alex: It came out in seventy-six, but very few games have anything of consequence going on, especially since the VCS is focusing on the hits of
00:13:55Alex: seventy two to seventy-five and less even on the slightly more sophisticated games coming out in seventy-six, seventy-seven, like a Breakout.
00:14:03Alex: So if you were just to put say Tank, on a cartridge.
00:14:08Alex: That would be a really, really simple, really, really gets old fast game, and people would very quickly be like, Why did I spend twenty dollars on this.
00:14:18Alex: So the answer to that was to take an approach that was very similar to what dedicated consoles did, which is to have multiple games,
00:14:25Alex: he says in air quotes,
00:14:27Alex: on a single Cartridge.
00:14:30Alex: Then there were actually a couple of toggle switches on the VCS, that directly changed the gameplay they were using. One of these was a difficulty slider, or rather, two difficulty sliders, one for each player.
00:14:43Alex: Which could toggle between an easy mode and a hard mode.
00:14:46Alex: We'll talk about that in relation to some specific games as we go along.
00:14:50Alex: The other was the game selector, which allowed you to flip through a bunch of different game modes.
00:14:57Alex: On some of these cartridges, those game modes will just be very subtle differences.
00:15:01Alex: On a couple of the cartridges, there are actually very different games on the same cartridge on these early games.
00:15:08Alex: Though obviously all based on the basic kernel that was used to create the primary game. So they can't get too wild and crazy with it.
00:15:16Alex: So you'll see on all these Atari games, especially these early ones, they'll be advertising that there are X number of video games included.
00:15:24Alex: And it'll usually be a pretty big number.
00:15:26Alex: Really what it is is there are about four or five variants,
00:15:30Alex: and then there are some ways to mix and match across those variants that give you other variants.
00:15:35Alex: So it's not really all that many separate games, but it's still more variety than just having a single basic arcade game on that VCS system.
00:15:45Alex: With all those caveats out of the way, we can finally turn our attention to that first entry, CX-2601, which is Combat.
00:15:55Alex: Combat, which is very clear from the box, even if less so from the name.
00:16:00Alex: Basically is the adaptation of Tank.
00:16:04Alex: Which was the classic nineteen seventy-four Kee Games, one on one dueling game that sold well over ten thousand units.
00:16:11Alex: Helped in distributorship exclusivity in the coin op business.
00:16:16Alex: And was at the time just about the most fun you could have in a multiplayer video game as you and a friend,
00:16:25Alex: Or a frenemy,
00:16:26Alex: were navigating a tank through a maze.
00:16:29Alex: Which could also have landmines in it as additional dangerous obstacles and trying to score hits on your opponent for points.
00:16:39Alex: Of course this was one of Atari's biggest hits, came out Kee Games, as anyone who's listened to our million Atari episodes know, that was a secret and then not so secret subsidiary, of Atari, so it's still an Atari game.
00:16:51Alex: It's one of their absolute biggest hits, so there was no doubt that it would be one of the main games that they created.
00:16:58Alex: Since it was a little more complicated than say Pong in terms of the objects on the screen at any given time.
00:17:03Alex: It was also basically their test bed as they were creating the system.
00:17:07Alex: Even when they were doing the wire wrapped prototype before they even had the chips done,
00:17:12Alex: as Steve Mayer and Ron Milner, the two gentlemen in Cyan Engineering who started the design of the VCS,
00:17:18Alex: as they were creating the system, they were Creating tank slash combat in parallel with the creation of the system because it was the best way to test out that everything's working. It was gonna make more sophisticated use of the backgrounds, cause you needed mazes.
00:17:33Alex: It was going to use four of the five Player-Missile Graphics.
00:17:38Alex: This is the earliest game that was created for the system, and it kept getting refined over time as the system kept getting defined.
00:17:48Alex: Once Joe Decuir was hired to help debug the system.
00:17:52Alex: He spent some time as well working on the Tank game a little bit, but then it ultimately,
00:17:58Alex: was handed off to the third person who was a member of the internal Atari team that worked on turning the VCS from Cyan's wire wrapped prototype into final system, which is Larry Wagner.
00:18:12Alex: A mathematician who had joined the company after he and Al Alcorn Had gotten to know each other.
00:18:19Alex: So Wagner was the first head of the programming group once there were more programmers than just him and kind of sort of Joe Decuir, uh who was focused on hardware, but also did a little programming.
00:18:29Alex: But at this point, he's kind of the first guy that's dedicated primarily to getting game stuff to work.
00:18:36Alex: Throughout nineteen seventy six, he's working on getting a few different things together in a single prototype cartridge.
00:18:45Alex: Basically, all of those hits that I talked about before that they were working towards being able to play.
00:18:54Alex: Which is as I said,
00:18:55Alex: Pong,
00:18:56Alex: Quadrupong,
00:18:58Alex: Gran Track Ten,
00:18:59Alex: Tank,
00:19:00Alex: Jet Fighter.
00:19:01Alex: His original program that he was working on, and a lot of his notes have been scanned and preserved. Kevin Bunch played a big role in that.
00:19:11Alex: So that's how we know a lot of this stuff is from Larry Wagner's own notes from the time.
00:19:16Alex: The original version that he was looking at making was actually a combination of pong, and a racing game, and tank.
00:19:26Alex: Presumably because all of those concepts had been prototyped a little bit by Mayer and Milner, and they probably just handed over all of their prototype information to Wagner.
00:19:36Alex: Like, here's what we've been working on, good luck.
00:19:38Alex: Obviously it didn't make sense long term to keep all of that stuff together.
00:19:43Alex: Very quickly that was separated out and Wagner continued with the Tank concept and the racing and ball and paddle stuff were moved on to other cartridges.
00:19:53Alex: Wagner is the one though that basically started the trend of adding all sorts of variants to games.
00:20:03Alex: This is what makes Combat one of the most interesting games on the system and a real banger to play, even in the present day, quite frankly. I mean, you know.
00:20:13Alex: It's no Golden Eye or whatever the latest Call of Duty the kids are playing is, but I know you have a VCS, Jeffrey, uh that you didn't have as a kid, but that you inherited as an adult.
00:20:24Alex: And I know that you have Combat on that VCS and uh you've had a little bit of fun with that here and there, haven't you?
00:20:30Jeffrey: I've played it, couple of times, but you kinda have to have another person to play it with.
00:20:35Jeffrey: It's kind of hard to have the left hand fight the right hand.
00:20:38Alex: [Alex Chuckles]
00:20:39Alex: Very true. But it is a fun little multiplayer game because Tank is kind of fun in and of itself.
00:20:45Alex: I mean, there's a maze, you're maneuvering your player through the maze and trying to hit the other player, but then the variants that he added to it were very fascinating.
00:20:54Alex: The box says there's 27 video games in this thing.
00:20:58Alex: Of course, there's not really that many video games, but he was very generous in the variants that he packed with it.
00:21:07Alex: First of all, one thing that's very interesting is he made good use of the difficulty switches for player one and player two for the game.
00:21:13Alex: The player difficulty switches are just on-off toggle switches, like there's an A and a B. You don't cycle through difficulties in the same way that you can cycle through game modes.
00:21:22Alex: Basically, the switches uh were used to set the range of the shots of the players' tanks or airplanes in those variants.
00:21:31Alex: So the interesting thing about that is it created a nice little handicapping system.
00:21:35Alex: Because if you had two players that were of uneven skill.
00:21:39Alex: You could force the better player to have to get closer to the other player before his shots will hit.
00:21:45Alex: So it's a nice little handicapping feature.
00:21:47Alex: Which was a kind of cool thing to do.
00:21:49Alex: Then the game toggle switch allowed you to go through a wide variety of interesting modes. All of them have one thing in common;
00:21:56Alex: which is that the game will be about two minutes and sixteen seconds in length.
00:22:01Alex: Two players required.
00:22:02Alex: And at the end of that two minutes, sixteen seconds, whoever has the most points, wins.
00:22:09Alex: But there are several variations to this.
00:22:13Alex: The tank ones are particularly interesting. He came up with the fun idea of what he basically called Tank Pong.
00:22:21Alex: Which is that instead of the traditional way where you fire a shot and if it hits a wall, it just impacts with the wall and nothing happens.
00:22:28Alex: In Tank Pong,
00:22:29Alex: Pong Tank, whatever,
00:22:31Alex: the shots bounce off the walls.
00:22:34Alex: So they will ricochet all over the place.
00:22:36Alex: So you can try to hit the other player, which adds a real interesting layer of strategy to the game that the simplicity of the game you wouldn't necessarily think would be there.
00:22:47Alex: Then he took it a step further and created a variant that was what he called kind of a Billiard style Pong.
00:22:53Alex: Which is your shots could only destroy the other player's tank if they bounced off a wall first.
00:23:01Alex: So if you just shot the tank head on, it would pass right through. You actually had to bounce your shot off the wall to hit the other player.
00:23:07Alex: That gave the game a certain freshness.
00:23:10Alex: And a certain level of interest that made it a really fun multiplayer game to play, even in the later years of the VCS, as some of the other games became more sophisticated. You know, most of the nine launch titles for this system were outclassed within a few years as people learned new tricks of how to program the system.
00:23:28Alex: As cartridge sizes got larger.
00:23:31Alex: Most of these early games were forgotten as new and improved driving games or shooting games or whatever type of games came out.
00:23:39Alex: But Combat,
00:23:40Alex: which was also the pack in game for the system for most of its history,
00:23:45Alex: and certainly at launch,
00:23:46Alex: retained a certain level of fun that the other early launch titles didn't. And a big part of that was because of those bouncing bullet variants that it had.
00:23:56Alex: And of course it also had the airplane variants.
00:23:58Alex: There were a couple of different types. There was just a simple one on one dueling style game, very reminiscent of Jet Fighter.
00:24:04Alex: There was one where it's big airplanes versus small airplanes.
00:24:07Alex: Then there was also the option to have clouds on the screen.
00:24:11Alex: Which would provide a little more tactical interest because you could fly into a cloud and then you were invisible.
00:24:18Alex: These were pretty large clouds because the background is very low resolution.
00:24:23Alex: These two clouds took up a decent amount of the center of the screen and you could try to use those to surprise the other player, because he won't know where you're coming back out on the other side.
00:24:33Alex: So again, trying to add a little more strategy to the straightforward one-on-one dueling than was necessarily available in the original version.
00:24:41Alex: Yeah, overall a pretty darn solid game when you consider the limitations of the VCS generally.
00:24:48Jeffrey: Yeah, I would have to agree with you.
00:24:50Jeffrey: It's something that you did not see with a lot of VCS games. Usually it was just,
00:24:55Jeffrey: the game and then a little bit of harder difficulty where it was faster, more something on the screen.
00:25:02Jeffrey: Some sort of handicap for yourself to make it harder.
00:25:05Jeffrey: But it didn't have this degree of variety or engagement.
00:25:09Alex: Absolutely.
00:25:10Alex: So that's our first title, and the pack in game, at least when you bought it almost everywhere.
00:25:17Alex: Because there were also Sears exclusive versions of the Atari VCS and the early Atari VCS games.
00:25:26Alex: The only thing that's different about them is that they have different specific Sears branded names.
00:25:31Alex: The Sears Telegames system for the base console. And then the early games, they changed this later, but the early games had different names. And at some point there were a couple of games that were Sears exclusives, but none of the launch titles were Sears exclusives.
00:25:46Alex: Combat, which in Sears was known as Tank Plus,
00:25:50Alex: was Was the pack in everywhere except Sears.
00:25:53Alex: Sears decided to pack in another game with their Sears Telegames system, presumably in order to entice people to want to buy from them instead of buying from someplace else,
00:26:02Alex: though really they got the raw end of the deal because it's not quite as good a game.
00:26:05Alex: That game is CX-2602 Air-Sea Battle.
00:26:11Alex: Or as Sears called it,
00:26:13Alex: in its bundled form,
00:26:15Alex: Target Fun.
00:26:17Alex: A note here on release dates before we go into the other games.
00:26:21Alex: The Atari VCS seems to have made its way into a nationwide release in the United States in September 1977.
00:26:28Alex: There's plenty of evidence that at least in California it was available in the month of August 1977 because back in those days, street dates weren't a thing.
00:26:38Alex: Retailers, when they got product, they just went ahead and put it out. And the idea of getting all of your inventory shipped in advance of your launch date was also not a thing.
00:26:49Alex: They were basically making them and shipping them and getting them out as fast as they could.
00:26:54Alex: California got theirs first because Atari's in California and the factory's in California and so that's not a long ways to go.
00:27:01Alex: Then in other parts of the country it didn't trickle out until September because that's when they finally started getting them.
00:27:07Alex: And I think September was as close to an official launch date as you can get or launch month you can get for the system.
00:27:13Alex: But the system was originally available in August.
00:27:16Alex: In advance of the system coming out when early advertisements started appearing.
00:27:21Alex: Only the first five games were advertised in the early newspaper articles.
00:27:26Alex: We do know from uh Weekly Television Digest and some of the reporting around Atari launching the system,
00:27:33Alex: that all nine games were available at launch, despite the fact that the early newspapers only advertise a handful of them.
00:27:40Alex: But we also know from reports in that magazine that it took a little longer for all of the other cartridges to show up.
00:27:47Alex: The system showed up in August and early September.
00:27:50Alex: The other cartridges didn't start showing up until about late September at the earliest.
00:27:56Alex: And because of the way shipping works, some places might not have gotten them even until a little later after that.
00:28:01Alex: So back in that day, what would happen in those cases is there may have been some mail order business and there were probably some stores that like took your name down and essentially a kind of unofficial pre-order.
00:28:12Alex: But it did take a little bit of time for the games to roll out, but by the end of September they were shipping all nine games, the pack end game plus the eight sold separately.
00:28:22Alex: Though I wouldn't be surprised if some places didn't get them until October.
00:28:26Alex: So with that out of the way, we turn our attention back to Air-Sea Battle.
00:28:31Alex: Or Target Fun.
00:28:33Alex: This game was programmed by the first person hired into the programming group,
00:28:39Alex: Larry Kaplan,
00:28:40Alex: who was also one of the almost co founders of Activision.
00:28:45Alex: He was gonna found Activision with three other programmers.
00:28:48Alex: Ended up chickening out and then changing his mind and coming back two months later.
00:28:52Alex: He's often called a co-founder. He's not technically a co-founder, but
00:28:55Alex: uh we talk about him in our Activision episodes, so we don't have to really go into his background other than to note that he was
00:29:01Alex: the first programmer hired. Wagner was running the programming group and he programmed the combat game, but like
00:29:08Alex: doing the in the trenches programming wasn't really his day to day. He was just doing that as part of the initial VCS development.
00:29:14Alex: Kaplan was the first person hired to specifically be like, and now you're making games.
00:29:19Alex: In these early days, for the most part, games were not assigned by management.
00:29:25Alex: They were given-- the early programmers were given some freedom in what they chose to do for their launch titles.
00:29:32Alex: However, they were strongly, strongly encouraged to look at
00:29:37Alex: Atari's current catalog of arcade games,
00:29:40Alex: coin op games,
00:29:42Alex: and focus on porting some of those games over.
00:29:46Alex: The same strategy that we see for decades after have a hit in the arcade,
00:29:51Alex: and then bring it home where people already know about it and you have some built in marketing around it.
00:29:56Alex: So for his first game, Kaplan chose the 1975 Atari coin-op game Anti-Aircraft.
00:30:04Alex: Anti-Aircraft was just a very, very simple target shooting game.
00:30:09Alex: One or two players.
00:30:11Alex: Control a gun battery at the bottom of the screen.
00:30:13Alex: In a fixed location. You can change the elevation of the gun, but you can't move the gun around.
00:30:18Alex: Targets, aeroplanes and whatnot start appearing across the top of the screen.
00:30:23Alex: And it is your job to shoot them down for the points.
00:30:28Alex: Very simple, very straightforward game.
00:30:30Alex: And one that mostly works well for the Atari VCS.
00:30:35Alex: Two players.
00:30:36Alex: Each shooting two bullets.
00:30:38Alex: The problem is the targets.
00:30:40Alex: Because you have to have a target rich environment for a game like this to be in any way interesting.
00:30:45Alex: And we have a system that can only generate five Sprites.
00:30:51Alex: Four of which belong to the players and their projectiles.
00:30:55Alex: However, as Larry Kaplan approached this problem, and I think we've probably talked about this in other episodes,
00:31:01Alex: he was saved on creating a more interesting game by the way the system draws the graphics.
00:31:08Alex: Because as we may recall, the graphics are drawn a scanline at a time.
00:31:13Alex: Which means that the system is not housing in memory what the screen looks like.
00:31:19Alex: It is literally just taking that CRT, that beam of electrons coming out of the CRT, and pointing it a line of the screen.
00:31:27Alex: And then pointing it at the next line of the screen.
00:31:30Alex: And what's in the previous lines or what's in the coming lines, the system doesn't even know because it's just being given its instructions, line by line, it's not a frame buffer.
00:31:39Alex: So that means what he discovered is well, you can actually reuse sprites on different lines.
00:31:45Alex: As long as you're not using the same sprite on the same line twice, the system doesn't realize you're doing things you're not supposed to.
00:31:52Alex: Because it's not in memory. It's just like Okay, I've drawn a sprite on this line.
00:31:57Alex: Then by the time it gets to the l next line it has no idea what it did in the previous line.
00:32:01Alex: So then it's like Okay, now I'm drawing a sprite on this line.
00:32:04Alex: And before you know it, you can have a bunch of different objects on the screen. So you'll notice when you look at anti-aircraft in Kevin's videos that we'll put in the show notes or wherever else you want to look at it.
00:32:16Alex: You'll notice there are a lot of targets, but they're all coming out at different altitudes. None of them are on the same horizontal band.
00:32:24Alex: That's because he is using this very clever trick, which he named H move, horizontal move,
00:32:30Alex: In order to get sprites on multiple lines.
00:32:34Alex: Just have to be very careful on the timing and when things update, and that all works out.
00:32:39Alex: Already, even with the very first set of games, we're seeing the VCS extended beyond the capabilities that the hardware engineers necessarily expected it to have.
00:32:49Alex: And we're already seeing some of that unique programming talent that meant that a few years later, when people were getting disgruntled and upset about lack of royalties and recognition that there really were special skills involved,
00:33:02Alex: and that if you really knew what you were doing, you could go off, and found your own. Atari VCS software creation company.
00:33:09Alex: With blackjack and hookers, and make games that truly stood out in the marketplace.
00:33:14Alex: Air-Sea Battle, based on Anti-Aircraft,
00:33:17Alex: it's a fairly basic game.
00:33:19Alex: The objects don't shoot back at you.
00:33:22Alex: Before space invaders, it was very rare, very, very rare to have computer controlled objects or hardware controlled objects shoot back at you.
00:33:29Alex: It's target shooting game.
00:33:31Alex: It's just like the coin op game. There's gun batteries on either side of the screen.
00:33:35Alex: They can't move around the screen, but you can change their elevation and then there are a bunch of targets coming at different altitudes.
00:33:41Alex: You're competing to shoot down the most targets for points.
00:33:44Alex: There is technically a one player mode of this as well.
00:33:50Alex: He really did want to try to get some kind of primitive AI for lack of a better term in there.
00:33:58Alex: But he was so memory limited that basically when you play the one player mode, it's just the other gun is just shooting off randomly at intervals.
00:34:07Alex: It doesn't really have any capability to track targets or shoot at targets, so it's probably one of the worst one player modes ever invented for a video game, and Larry Kaplan would be the first to tell you that.
00:34:19Alex: Uh you know, such was the state of 2K cartridges and a hundred and twenty eight bytes of memory in nineteen seventy seven.
00:34:27Alex: Just as with Combat and just as with all of the other games we're going to see,
00:34:31Alex: Kaplan did program variations. He saw what Wagner was doing with combat, having multiple variations, and he was like, that makes a lot of sense. I'll do that too.
00:34:40Alex: So there are a few variants to keep it a little fresh.
00:34:44Alex: There's three different modes. There's the classic anti aircraft mode where you can only change the elevation.
00:34:49Alex: Then there's a mode that is closest to the classic Midway video game Seawolf that we talk about in our Dave Nutting Associates episode submarine target shooting game.
00:35:03Alex: Where the elevation of the gun is fixed.
00:35:07Alex: But you can actually move the gun all around the screen and you're taking shots at ships and mines that are at various depths on the ocean.
00:35:17Alex: And that is very, very similar to the Seawolf game.
00:35:20Alex: Then there's just a kind of free range target shooting game.
00:35:24Alex: It's kind of a carnival style shooting game, like a carnival shooting gallery type game where you're just shooting things of all sorts of different shapes.
00:35:32Alex: In that game you can change both the elevation and move the gun around.
00:35:36Alex: So there's three basic variations there.
00:35:40Alex: There's also a couple of variations where instead of you being at the bottom of the screen, you are actually controlling one of the planes flying along the top of the screen and dropping bombs on targets that are beneath you as well.
00:35:55Alex: It's basically all of the types of target shooting games that what people had come up with by this point.
00:36:03Alex: Not just Anti-Aircraft but also Seawolf.
00:36:05Alex: There's a little bit of Depth Charge in there, though not quite as complicated, because in Depth Charge you actually have to time when the explosions are going to be and the bombing run modes of this game. You're just not having to time when things are going to explode.
00:36:18Alex: But you know, they've come up with these basic types of shooting games. You can be at the bottom of the screen elevating your gun up and down.
00:36:25Alex: You can be at the bottom of the screen moving your gun left and right.
00:36:28Alex: You can be at the bottom of the screen being able to both elevate your gun up and down and move your gun left and right.
00:36:33Alex: Or you can be at the top of the screen dropping bombs on things at the bottom of the screen.
00:36:37Alex: That was the state of target shooting in 1977. That was the state of target shooting for the most part, with a couple of exceptions, pre-Space Invaders.
00:36:46Alex: That's what you get in Air-Sea Battle/Target Fun.
00:36:51Alex: That one that you've played or that you had? I don't remember all the games that you have. I know you don't have all the launch titles.
00:36:56Jeffrey: No, I never played that one.
00:36:58Alex: You know, I mean it's Combat's a better time.
00:37:01But it's not the worst game in the world.
00:37:04Jeffrey: Think Combat's the only launch title I have.
00:37:06Alex: Yeah, and of course that was the pack-in, so people were still buying that one in 1982. Finally, later in 1982, Pac-Man replaced it as the pack-in.
00:37:14Alex: You know, for the first several years of life, Combat was the game that everybody got.
00:37:18Alex: Yes, Target Fun was the bundled game with Sears, but not nearly as many people bought VCS at Sears compared to people that bought VCS everywhere else.
00:37:27Alex: Little less common in that sense.
00:37:29Alex: Now at this point the numbers remain somewhat sequential, but they don't go up In the same way.
00:37:37Alex: So next we're going to jump up to CX-2621.
00:37:42Alex: Which is Video Olympics.
00:37:45Alex: Which sounds like a very, very fancy kind of thing, but is actually just let's put all of the ball and paddle games on a single cartridge.
00:37:56Alex: So it's Pong and the many variants of Pong.
00:38:00Alex: This was the one game that was largely completed by Joe Decuir. Again, Joe Decuir, like Larry Wagner, was a member of the hardware team that helped develop the final version of the VCS.
00:38:12Alex: Unlike Wagner, who then went on to be the head of the programming group, Decuir continued to be a chip designer on later versions of Atari hardware,
00:38:21Alex: but since he was the one that was brought on to debug the original prototype and then help chipwiz Jay Miner develop the final chips for the final version of the VCS.
00:38:31Alex: As Wagner was tinkering with stuff, so was Decuir tinkering with stuff as they were just getting this system all together.
00:38:39Alex: As we said, Wagner had kind of started having everything on one cartridge, but at some point there the whole Pong thing was put under the auspices of Mr. Joe Decuir.
00:38:52Alex: Who obviously in the same vein as everyone else is doing is trying to get as many variants as possible. This one advertises a whopping fifty video games on the cartridge.
00:39:04Alex: Which sounds like a lot, but of course most of that is just-
00:39:08Jeffrey: I'm not even sure how you can get the switches into fifty combinations.
00:39:12Alex: Well, you know.
00:39:13Alex: When you count the different difficulty adjustments and then all of the different types of games, you know, that's how it happens basically.
00:39:21Alex: For instance, this one has another handicap style difficulty slider.
00:39:26Alex: Which is that the difficulty switch can change the size of the paddles on the game.
00:39:31Alex: Which again, you can- a less adept player can have a bigger paddle to create a little bit of a handicap situation.
00:39:38Alex: So I'm sure when they're counting variants, they're also counting, you know, and this person's paddle is big and this person paddle is small.
00:39:45Alex: There are also variants that allow you to use the button on the controller. I should say that this game uses the system's paddle controller.
00:39:55Alex: Atari s uh VCS chipped with both joysticks and paddles.
00:39:58Alex: Paddles at the time being incredibly necessary for playing ball and paddle games.
00:40:04Alex: Which we're not all the rage anymore, but we're still out there and we're relatively easy to develop.
00:40:10Alex: So that has a button as well. So there were also variants that allowed you to use the button to hit the ball harder.
00:40:17Alex: There were also speed up variants that causes the ball to speed up quite a bit. So there's different ways that the physics work.
00:40:24Alex: Different paddle sizes and those kind of variations.
00:40:27Alex: And then you can apply those variations across all the game types, so,
00:40:30Alex: you know, you have Pong with speed up. You have Pong with the whammy option hitting the ball harder.
00:40:36Alex: You have Pong with both the speed up and the whammy option. See, I've just given you three games right there.
00:40:40Alex: Three games right there.
00:40:42Alex: You know, when they're advertising fifty games, they don't mean it in the sense that we would think of it today.
00:40:48Alex: They're talking about the way you can mix and match all of these different variations together.
00:40:55Alex: Of course, the nice thing about Video Olympics as well is the way Atari did the paddle controllers, is each paddle controller Is actually two paddle controllers.
00:41:04Alex: Like it has one plug into the system, and that one plug is linked to two paddle controllers.
00:41:10Alex: Which is what allowed them to do four player games when you use the paddle controller. So unlike most of the other games using the joystick, which are one to two players, this has variants that can also be played by four players.
00:41:24Alex: They basically put in all the things they could think to do.
00:41:29Alex: It has Pong.
00:41:30Alex: Classic Pong.
00:41:31Alex: Super Pong.
00:41:33Alex: Which is still two players. It's just they're controlling multiple paddles all in a straight line just because I guess more paddles is more exciting.
00:41:44Alex: The coin op version, you had three paddles because this is the Atari VCS and there are only a limited number of sprites.
00:41:50Alex: In the VCS version you control two paddles, but
00:41:53Alex: it's basically Pong, except there's another paddle behind the first one, so you have another chance to hit the ball if your first paddle doesn't get there.
00:42:01Alex: Not the most exciting variant in the entire world.
00:42:05Alex: Then there is Pong Doubles.
00:42:07Alex: Which is just four player Pong.
00:42:10Alex: There's the classic Quadrupong.
00:42:12Alex: Also known as elimination by Kee Games, where you have four players each guarding a wall and trying to stop the ball from getting past them, and if the ball gets past them too often they're eliminated from the game.
00:42:23Alex: Again with those paddle controllers you can do that.
00:42:26Alex: Foospong, I think, can have three paddles because they're stacked on top of each other vertically, which means they're each on a different horizontal line, which means you can use the H move trick.
00:42:35Alex: Whereas the Super Pong variant, they had to take it down from three paddles to two paddles, because those are horizontally stacked, which means they're moving vertically up and down the screen, and H move will not save you.
00:42:47Alex: Then they had soccer defending goals.
00:42:49Alex: Handball, which is each player bouncing the ball off a wall and it returning to them.
00:42:54Alex: An ice hockey variant.
00:42:56Alex: Basketball, which is where you're using parabolic arcs to try to get it into a hoop.
00:43:01Alex: Volleyball, we're using parabolic arcs to try to get it over the net.
00:43:05Alex: You can also do spikes in that one.
00:43:08Alex: So these are all variations, except for maybe the Foospong one. These are all variations that have either appeared in the arcade in the past, or have appeared on past home pong systems.
00:43:19Alex: So there's nothing particularly new, nothing particularly exciting about this one. It's just they're all thrown together onto a single cartridge. You're getting all of your ball and paddle fun out of the way on a single cartridge.
00:43:30Alex: Obviously by 1977,
00:43:33Alex: not quite as exciting as it was in 1975, let alone 1972, so not a particularly noteworthy release, but you had to do it.
00:43:41Alex: You have to have Pong. It's the game that started it all for Atari.
00:43:44Alex: The Sears version of that one has the slightly more appropriate title of Pong Sports.
00:43:52Alex: All right. So those were the three kind of first things that came together. You know, Wagner and Decuir on the hardware team created two of them.
00:43:59Alex: Kaplan, the first programmer, created the third one, Air-Sea Battle.
00:44:03Alex: Now we start to get into some of the games that were developed a little later in the process of developing the system, though of course they all came out at the same time time.
00:44:14Alex: Our next game Is CX-2611-
00:44:19Alex: Forget all of that stuff about going in order.
00:44:22Alex: We're completely out of order now. It doesn't matter.
00:44:25Alex: CX-2611, Indy 500.
00:44:30Alex: Indy 500 is interesting for a couple of reasons.
00:44:34Alex: First of all, it is the only game that cost more than the rest of the launch titles. It cost about double. More like forty dollars instead of twenty dollars. Because it's the only game that came with its own pack-in controller.
00:44:48Alex: A specially modified driving controller that looks like it's a paddle.
00:44:54Alex: It looks like it's just a slightly taller version of the paddle controller that comes with the VCS.
00:45:00Alex: But in fact, the difference is that a typical panel controller, you can move it left a certain amount, and then it stops.
00:45:08Alex: You can move it right a certain amount, and then it stops.
00:45:12Alex: It has a range of motion that is not a complete circle.
00:45:15Alex: The driving controller had a range of motion that was a complete circle.
00:45:20Alex: So you could just constantly spin this thing around to have your cars drive around a track.
00:45:26Alex: Obviously, having a real steering wheel controller would have been way too expensive and way too crazy for a video game system coming out in 1977.
00:45:35Alex: So they did the next best thing, which is had this round controller that you could just rotate endlessly as if you were turning a steering wheel in one direction, except you never have to reset it back to a neutral position. You can just keep turning it and every time you twist it it will be turning your car around.
00:45:51Alex: The other thing that's interesting about it is it was programmed by a guy who really had no business programming games, which is not an insult, but it was programmed by a guy named Ed Riddle.
00:46:00Alex: Who was actually a hardware engineer at the company.
00:46:04Alex: He was interviewed a few years back by the uh Atari Compendium. So uh we have his story now. He was interviewed in 2017. Before that we knew nothing about him.
00:46:15Alex: He was brought in to be a hardware guy.
00:46:17Alex: Then when he got there, they were like, "Well, we don't really have any specific projects for you right now.
00:46:23Alex: Why don't you just play around with stuff, and see if you come up with something fun and interesting?"
00:46:28Alex: He was like, "Oh-kay..."
00:46:32Alex: So he was just kind of fooling around with some things and then one of the other hardware guys was like,
00:46:38Alex: "Would you like to just try programming a game?"
00:46:40Alex: This was a guy named Wade Tuma.
00:46:42Alex: Wade was just kinda like, "You wanna try programming a game?"
00:46:45Alex: Ed Riddle was like, "Um... Sure. Why not?"
00:46:50Alex: He'd never programmed before. He had no idea what he was doing. But we may recall that Larry Wagner had been working on a combination cartridge at the beginning that was Combat and Pong, and a racing game, essentially Gran Track Ten.
00:47:05Alex: Atari's big hit racing game from 1974.
00:47:09Alex: So Larry Wagner was like, "Well, here, I've started work on this driving game. I'll give you this code and uh you can start from there and then maybe you can figure it out."
00:47:18Alex: So it had some table structure in place already for the graphics. It had some move routines already in place.
00:47:24Alex: There was a kernel, essentially.
00:47:26Alex: So I don't know that it was called a kernel back then.
00:47:28Alex: Which gave him a starting point and then he kind of worked from there to figure out what he was doing.
00:47:33Alex: So this was at its core a take on Gran Track Ten.
00:47:39Alex: That first Atari driving game, which we've talked about before, it's a single screen overhead game. It's a game of maneuver because it's a very twisty racetrack.
00:47:48Alex: Has to be twisty so you're making maximum use of that single screen and you're trying to navigate all of those corners and get your car around uh the screen within the time limit kind of deal.
00:48:01Alex: Or in the case of Indy 500 racing another player as well.
00:48:06Alex: So that special driving controller worked kinda well for it.
00:48:09Alex: Because you could spin that thing around and you could take those tight turns. Obviously there's no acceleration that you have to worry about as you did in the actual arcade game and on later driving games because everything was too primitive for that. But it was mostly based on navigating turns, getting your car turned around, that kind of thing.
00:48:27Alex: Then of course he did offer some additional variations, to go along with it, as they did with everything else.
00:48:35Alex: The standard game is a race against the clock, which is what the original Gran Track was, because it was a single player game.
00:48:41Alex: Or a race against another player who is also playing with a driving controller.
00:48:45Alex: First to finish twenty five laps wins.
00:48:48Alex: There are two different tracks.
00:48:49Alex: So there's a little bit of variation there as well, which is why they can get the-
00:48:54Alex: Even though he really came up with only four variants, they could claim that there were fourteen games on this cartridge.
00:49:00Alex: Next, there was a version called Crash and Score, which was another Atari coin-op game, not one of their more well-known ones, but Crash and Score exactly as it sounds.
00:49:11Alex: You're driving a car around the screen, there are various objects on the screen that are worth varying numbers of points.
00:49:16Alex: Your job is to crash into those and score points.
00:49:21Alex: I don't know that in the VCS game they have different point values. I think they did in the coin op game though.
00:49:26Alex: This can be either done in a timed mode where whoever has the most points after the time limit wins, or you can do it in a first person to 50 points wins.
00:49:34Alex: Next there was a tag version.
00:49:37Alex: Which was just a chase game. You're trying to catch the other car and run into it.
00:49:41Alex: With the goal being the first to reach 99 points. Again, you can play this on a couple of different play fields. So there are some obstacles in there as well.
00:49:51Alex: Kinda like a Mario Kart battle mode, I suppose, if the only way you could pop the other players' balloons in Mario Kart was by ramming into them.
00:50:00Alex: And they had ninety nine balloons.
00:50:02Alex: Ninety nine Luftballoons.
00:50:03Alex: [Alex chuckles]
00:50:04Alex: Anyway.
00:50:05Alex: The other version, the final version is a very interesting one, was racing but with ice physics.
00:50:13Alex: So the road basically has no traction and you're skidding around.
00:50:17Alex: Kind of like playing Vanilla Lake in Mario Kart. We all remember playing Vanilla Lake in Mario Kart, don't we?
00:50:24Jeffrey: My therapist tells me not to bring that up.
00:50:26Alex: [Alex laughs]
00:50:28Alex: But a very early period to have something as sophisticated as ice physics and,
00:50:31Alex: I mean, in terms of how much memory that takes up, it's not so much because you're just you know, changing a couple of variables,
00:50:37Alex: but not something common at the time. And of course, just about every driving game anymore has ice physics somewhere in it.
00:50:43Alex: They're not influenced by Indy 500.
00:50:45Alex: It's just ice is a logical, challenging terrain type to drive on, but nonetheless, a very early implementation of that.
00:50:53Alex: That was Indy 500, not a very well selling game compared to some of the others, as near as we can tell, because it was twice as expensive because of that controller.
00:51:03Alex: And then they never made another game that used that driving controller, which means they never released it in any other capacity.
00:51:10Alex: That controller just kind of faded completely into obscurity. Ed Riddle actually started on a second game that would have used the driving controller, one that would- involved smashing bugs.
00:51:20Alex: But he ended up moving on before he finished that. That would have been called Roach Wars. That was the working title at least.
00:51:26Alex: But, gaming wasn't actually his thing, so he never actually finished that and ended up moving on someplace else, and the driving controller was forgotten for all the rest of time.
00:51:38Alex: So that's Indy 500.
00:51:39Alex: Moving on.
00:51:40Alex: Gets us to the other driving game that was released on the system.
00:51:46Jeffrey: Street Racer It's like Ridge Racer.
00:51:50Jeffrey: But worse.
00:51:51Alex: That's right. Remember that one?
00:51:54Alex: CX-2612 is the number. The game, as you said, is Street Racer.
00:52:00Alex: This was the second game created by the first programmer that was hired in,
00:52:05Alex: Larry Kaplan. Since Larry Kaplan was the first programmer hired in, he had a little more time than everybody else, so he actually is the only person that completed two games for the launch.
00:52:15Alex: As opposed to just one.
00:52:17Alex: The reason this game exists, it's superficially similar to the other big racing hit of the time,
00:52:24Alex: which was Tito slash midways speed race slash wheels.
00:52:28Alex: We've talked about that game in other episodes, but according to Kaplan, he wasn't influenced by that game, and uh that's believable because it doesn't really play all that similarly to Speed Race, even though
00:52:40Alex: It shares the basic ideas of overhead vertically scrolling in some modes having to dodge other cars. But really the reason he did it is they were looking to try to find other games that could use the paddle controllers, because the unlike the special driving controller, the paddle controllers actually shipped with the console. So you want people to get their money's worth out of it.
00:52:59Alex: So he was thinking to himself, what can I do with the paddle controllers other than ball and paddle games?
00:53:03Alex: And he came up with the idea that he could do an overhead driving game because if you're just moving the car left and right,
00:53:10Alex: then you can turn the paddle left and right to do that. You don't need the full range of motion that a Gran Track style racing game needs.
00:53:18Alex: So that's why he did Street Racer. Originally he was actually going to do Night Driver.
00:53:22Alex: Which was Atari's 3D first person racing game that had come out in 1976.
00:53:30Alex: According to Kaplan, he claimed someone else had dibs on it, and so he didn't get to do it.
00:53:34Alex: That seems kind of weird because Night Driver didn't actually come out on the Atari VCS until 1980.
00:53:39Alex: I don't think anyone probably had dibs on it at the time.
00:53:42Alex: Maybe he's misremembering, maybe it's more complicated. Maybe somebody did try to start Night Driver and it didn't work out, so they just abandoned it. Who knows?
00:53:50Alex: But the point is he was going to base it on the Atari Arcade game, Night Driver. That didn't work out, so he did this overhead racing game instead.
00:53:59Alex: So very much like speed race, you're driving down this straight road and there are other vehicles and obstacles that you have to avoid.
00:54:07Alex: Several gameplay modes as well in this one.
00:54:11Alex: Once again, probably because of the way the Atari VCS timing works or whatever, most of these are timed competitions.
00:54:19Alex: Where they end after two minutes and sixteen seconds.
00:54:23Alex: The game also ends if one of the two players gets ninety-nine points, presumably because he doesn't want the score to roll over.
00:54:30Alex: So those are the two ways the games can end.
00:54:33Alex: The difficulty switches here, which again can serve as a handicap for less experienced player as well, control whether you lose points or not when you collide.
00:54:42Alex: So on the harder difficulty mode, if you collide with something, you actually lose a point.
00:54:47Alex: A few different variants here.
00:54:50Alex: There is a computer opponent in this one.
00:54:52Alex: We may recall Kaplan tried to implement a computer opponent Air-Sea Battle as well. That didn't work so well.
00:54:57Alex: In this one, there is a computer opponent as well that you can race against.
00:55:02Alex: The scoring is based on passing cars. So as you drive up the screen, there are cars coming down the screen.
00:55:08Alex: Each car you pass is worth a point. If you have the hard difficulty on hitting a car loses you a point, and then it's whoever has the most points after two minutes, sixteen seconds, or whoever gets to ninety-nine points first.
00:55:21Alex: There's also team mode.
00:55:23Alex: Because we may recall that the paddle controllers allow for up to four players.
00:55:27Alex: So you can actually have two players and multiple cars.
00:55:32Alex: Then there are a couple of other interesting variants.
00:55:34Alex: He did a skiing variant on this one, where instead of a car you have a little skier.
00:55:39Alex: This variant's called Slalom, and there are gates representing the gates created by Slalom flags on the slalom ski course, though obviously it's way too graphically primitive to accurately show something like that, like Activision Skiing Game would several years later.
00:55:54Alex: But there are these basically giant background blocks that come across the screen and then there's just a little gap in the block uh that you have to navigate your player through.
00:56:04Alex: So you get points by flying through the gates.
00:56:08Alex: The difficulty switch on this one not only causes you to lose points when you collide with the walls, but it also makes the gates narrower on the higher difficulty as well.
00:56:18Alex: This one can be played in team modes because four players with paddles.
00:56:24Alex: Then the next one is called Dodge'em.
00:56:26Alex: Later on there would be an actual Atari VCS game called Dodge'em.
00:56:30Alex: This is not that.
00:56:31Alex: This is actually basically Atari's second coin-operated video game, Space Race.
00:56:37Alex: Except it's cars instead of spaceships because you don't want to introduce yet another graphic when you have so little memory.
00:56:44Alex: But in Space Race, uh Atari's 1973 game, each player controls a rocket ship at the bottom of the screen.
00:56:50Alex: They're trying to get to the top of the screen, they score a point each time they get to the top of the screen.
00:56:55Alex: There are asteroids coming at them from the side of the screen, and if they hit an asteroid, they're put back to the start of the screen without scoring a point.
00:57:02Alex: So you're trying to get to the top of the screen without hitting an asteroid.
00:57:06Alex: In this case it's other obstacles.
00:57:09Alex: It's rocks, oil slicks, potholes rather than asteroids flying at you from the side.
00:57:15Alex: But it's the same idea. You're driving up the screen, trying to get to the top of the screen, score a point every time you make it.
00:57:20Alex: If you hit an obstacle, you're placed back at the bottom of the screen, and most points wins.
00:57:26Alex: Then there's a few really wild variations. Kaplan got very creative on this one.
00:57:31Alex: There's a variant called Jet Fighter, not to be confused with the Atari coin-op Jet Fighter or with the one-on-one dueling variants in the Combat game.
00:57:41Alex: This one is a vertically scrolling shooter.
00:57:46Alex: Where you're controlling a fighter at the bottom of the screen, planes are coming and you have to try to shoot them down. They're not shooting back at you. Again, this is pre-Space Invaders.
00:57:54Alex: Your goal is to shoot down all the planes. If you miss a plane you will either lose time or lose points depending on your difficulty selection.
00:58:06Alex: Apparently though, with the paddle controller and the limited screen real estate, this one's not a really hard game, so it's really not that interesting.
00:58:14Alex: Then there's one called number cruncher.
00:58:16Alex: Where you're controlling motorcyclists.
00:58:18Alex: And there are random numbers bouncing down the track.
00:58:21Alex: You have to try to pick up the numbers and they're worth the number of points that they are on the screen.
00:58:28Alex: If a two is hurtling down the screen towards you, it's worth two points. That kind of thing.
00:58:33Alex: Then there's one called Scoop Ball.
00:58:35Alex: One to four players.
00:58:36Alex: Where you have a scoop on the front of your car and there are balls and you are trying to pick up the ball, which gets you one point.
00:58:45Alex: And then there were goals that appear, and if you get the ball in the goal, you score three points.
00:58:51Alex: Kinda like Rocket League, if Rocket League were you just driving forever in one direction gathering balls and shooting balls.
00:58:59Alex: So not like Rocket League at all.
00:59:01Alex: But it could be.
00:59:02Alex: It could be.
00:59:04Alex: So yeah, just everything he could think of in obstacle avoidance while using a paddle controller and driving a car, maneuvering a skier vertically up the screen.
00:59:14Alex: That's our second driving game Street. Racer.
00:59:18Alex: And I should say that that game was called Speedway 2 in Sears. And I forgot to mention that Indy 500 was Race in Sears.
00:59:27Alex: So now we'll move on to our next game, which was definitely in some ways the most ambitious game of this initial set.
00:59:34Alex: Though it doesn't necessarily completely hold together as a result.
00:59:40Alex: Which is CX-2603 Starship.
00:59:45Alex: Which at some point in development must have been called Space Mission because very early ads for the VCS don't call it Starship, they call it Space Mission.
00:59:55Alex: They're not calling it that because it's the Sears name. The Seer's name is Outer Space.
01:00:00Alex: Starship was the first game created by Bob Whitehead.
01:00:03Alex: Who was the second programmer brought in at the very beginning of 1977, also one of the co founders of Activision, who we have talked about before.
01:00:11Alex: It is in its basic form, because of course there are variants, a port of Atari's arcade game Starship One.
01:00:20Alex: Which had come out in 1977 and was a first person perspective game.
01:00:26Alex: Whitehead thought that would be fun to try to figure out how to do on the VCS.
01:00:32Alex: Not exactly a system optimized per se for a 3D perspective.
01:00:38Alex: But our man did his best here at porting Starship one over to the VCS.
01:00:46Alex: Uh the primary mode of the game is called Space Wars, which has nothing to do with Space War, but everything to do with Starship One.
01:00:54Alex: Again, the time limit is two minutes sixteen seconds. I'm sure if you do the math on that.
01:00:58Alex: That time limit makes sense based on clock cycles and memory and all sorts of stuff.
01:01:03Alex: To destroy UFOs that come at you on the screen. They have different point values.
01:01:09Alex: You also have to avoid colliding with ships or asteroids, the asteroids being indestructible.
01:01:15Alex: There are some variations here that adjust how fast the objects move and whether they come at you in groups of one, or groups of two.
01:01:23Alex: Not that one is a group, but you know what I mean.
01:01:26Alex: The difficulty toggle is used on this one as well.
01:01:29Alex: It weakens the power of your missiles and makes the enemy ships more difficult to hit.
01:01:35Alex: This is a one player game, so this is just to increase the difficulty for your own edification.
01:01:40Alex: It is not a handicap because it was hard enough trying to vaguely do a 3D setup for a single player. They were certainly not going to do it for two players.
01:01:49Alex: The second main version on here is a game called Space Race.
01:01:53Alex: Which confusingly is not at all like Atari's arcade game Space Race.
01:01:58Alex: Larry Kaplan, on his Street Race cartridge, did a game that was essentially Space Race.
01:02:03Alex: Whitehead called a game Space Race, but it's not the same at all.
01:02:07Alex: This is basically the exact same as the main version of the game. It's just that you can't shoot at the ships.
01:02:14Alex: You are just dodging them.
01:02:16Alex: You are traveling as far as you can within the time limit.
01:02:21Alex: Distance is measured in parsecs.
01:02:23Alex: So it's a number that increments slowly like a score and collisions will cause you to lose these points.
01:02:31Alex: Finally, there is a game called Lunar Lander.
01:02:36Alex: Which was probably loosely inspired by the classic Lunar Lander mainframe game.
01:02:43Alex: But doesn't play anything like it because there's no way you're doing all of those sophisticated physics on an Atari 2600 in 1977.
01:02:52Alex: Instead, you are controlling a little blob that represents a lander.
01:02:57Alex: There's a moon floating around the screen because yeah, that's what moons do.
01:03:02Alex: They just kinda float around on their own.
01:03:05Alex: You have to try to land up your little ship with the moon. It's not a game of physics and burning fuel like the computer games are, but It's probably inspired by the same concept.
01:03:17Alex: This actually has a two player mode.
01:03:18Alex: Because the second player can actually take control of the moon and try to keep it away from you.
01:03:26Alex: Space Wars actually has a similar two player mode. When I said it didn't have a two-player mode, I meant that two players aren't competing to shoot things down.
01:03:33Alex: But the second player in Space Wars can control some of the enemy ships and make them harder to hit.
01:03:40Alex: Uh, not exactly the strongest game. There would be a far stronger version of Starship One created by Activision many years later called Starmaster, which we talked about in our Activision episode.
01:03:54Alex: By then, with more memory and better programming tricks, it was more possible to do something like this halfway decently.
01:04:02Alex: Mr Whitehead is a talented programmer, it's just the system and the techniques were not really up to it in 1977.
01:04:10Alex: The next two games, not much to really say about them.
01:04:13Alex: At this time, we've talked about this in some of our other early console episodes, there was this idea that you had to make a console appeal to the entire family. It's a major purchase. It's very expensive.
01:04:25Alex: So you have to justify that purchase with Mom and Dad; with it not necessarily just being frivolous games for the kids.
01:04:32Alex: The main way that was done back on all of the early systems, the Atara VCS was not the only one to do this, was to include some games that were considered more adult games that could be fun for the whole family.
01:04:44Alex: And to include some stuff that had educational value, because then you could argue that little Johnny is getting something out of it other than just bouncing a ball around all day.
01:04:57Alex: Our next game that we're looking at very briefly-
01:05:00Jeffrey: It's one of Bender's favorite games.
01:05:02Alex: Which of course means it is Blackjack.
01:05:06Alex: CX-2651.
01:05:10Alex: Not really gonna go into detail on this one. I mean, you know, there are some variations on it and all of that, but it's a blackjack game.
01:05:18Alex: Bob Whitehead did it.
01:05:20Alex: I lied when I said Larry Kaplan was the only one who managed to do two games. Bob Whitehead was also hired fairly early on, so he was also able to do two games at launch.
01:05:29Alex: This one he picked just because he thought a gambling game would be widely appealing, and you're always trying to have some games that'll appeal to more than just the kids to justify the cost, as I said.
01:05:40Alex: It used the paddle controllers just because it could.
01:05:42Alex: There's really no advantage to using the joystick versus paddle on a blackjack game like this. It's just they want to justify including those paddle controllers in the box.
01:05:51Alex: So if a game can use the paddle controllers, it might as well use them.
01:05:55Alex: This of course does mean that you can have more than two players playing, which is nice. So blackjack can actually support up to three players.
01:06:02Alex: There are a few different variants that are based on different types of rules using Vegas rules versus just regular blackjack rules.
01:06:11Alex: It does have an end state. It's not just a game where you play blackjack forever.
01:06:16Alex: The player wins the game if they end up taking in a thousand chips.
01:06:19Alex: They lose the game if they go completely broke.
01:06:21Alex: There is a way to quote unquote beat the game, though obviously it it's just playing blackjack.
01:06:27Alex: There wasn't a lot of time for Whitehead to do variants on this one. I think he ran out of time. After all, he was doing Starship, which was a little difficult, and he was hired a little later than Kaplan was.
01:06:35Alex: He had originally hoped to include other casino games on this as well as additional variants. He quite simply just ran out of time to do that.
01:06:43Alex: Which is why he did create a game called Casino for the system a little later that added a few other games on it.
01:06:50Alex: That's Blackjack.
01:06:51Alex: It exists.
01:06:53Alex: Our next one is that token educational game that you always had to have on those early systems.
01:07:00Alex: CX-2661, who knows what the numbers even mean anymore, Basic Math.
01:07:06Alex: It's addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.
01:07:10Alex: It was written by a guy named Gary Palmer who didn't stay around. Like all of the other dedicated programmers that were hired in the beginning went on to long illustrious careers.
01:07:19Alex: Ed Riddle didn't, but he was never a programmer to begin with and wasn't really interested in video games.
01:07:24Alex: Gary Palmer we don't really know much about.
01:07:27Alex: He joined after Kaplan and Whitehead.
01:07:30Alex: Our understanding is that he spent some of his time developing real development systems for the VCS to make the programming task easier for his fellow programmers. So that's a good thing.
01:07:40Alex: Then he just created this very basic math game.
01:07:44Alex: There are two game modes.
01:07:45Alex: It's addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.
01:07:48Alex: One set of game modes is timed, with the difficulty switch changing the amount of time.
01:07:53Alex: The other just throws random problems at you.
01:07:58Alex: You can either have it do two digit numbers or one digit numbers, depending on the difficulty.
01:08:05Alex: Single digit, you have the twelve second timer, two digit number, you have the twenty four second timer.
01:08:10Alex: Yeah.
01:08:10Alex: There are game modes where you choose the top number and it gives you a random bottom number, or it chooses both numbers.
01:08:16Alex: It's just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
01:08:19Alex: Moving on...
01:08:21Jeffrey: But I wanted to do long form square roots.
01:08:24Alex: Well, aren't you just a precocious little Jeffrey then?
01:08:28[Alex and Jeffrey laugh]
01:08:30Jeffrey: Yes, kids, you can do long form square roots, they just don't teach it in school anymore.
01:08:35Alex: You just get addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and you'll like it. [Chuckles]
01:08:39Alex: So yeah, not much to say, and then our final, final game.
01:08:44Alex: Last and, almost certainly least, because it was offered with five dollar rebates very quickly after it came out, which means it probably didn't sell well.
01:08:53Alex: The game Surround. CX-2641.
01:08:59Alex: Surround was the first game created by Alan Miller.
01:09:02Alex: He and Gary Palmer joined at the same time as the third and fourth programmers.
01:09:06Alex: Alan Miller, of course, ended up not just being one of the co-founders of Activision, but was one of the driving forces behind Activision. And he and Bob Whitehead, of course, after that founded Accolade.
01:09:16Alex: So a lot of distinguished people in the this first group here.
01:09:19Alex: Surround is basically just Blockade.
01:09:23Alex: Blockade was a game that was released by Gremlin Industries in 1976, created by Lane Hauk.
01:09:31Alex: One of the very early microprocessor games, not the first one, just one of the very early ones, and a predecessor of the modern snake game.
01:09:39Alex: Where basically each player has a cursor, it draws lines on the screen, and if you hit one of the lines on the screen, whether it's the other players or your own, you crash, and the other player scores a point. So the idea is to draw lines in such a way that your opponent crashes and you don't.
01:09:54Alex: We haven't talked about Blockade much yet because I'm waiting to talk about Gremlin Industries until Ethan Johnson, friend of the show, finally gets his book on Gremlin released through limited run press.
01:10:07Alex: Hopefully later this year, early next year, I don't know.
01:10:10Alex: He's done writing it.
01:10:11Alex: He's just waiting for them to have time to publish it.
01:10:13Alex: So we haven't done a Gremlin Industries episode yet, and we're gonna stay away from them here as well, but basically Blockade caused a brief sensation at the 1976 MOA show.
01:10:23Alex: Then it was heavily copied by all of the bigger companies in the business that were more established in Gremlin, including Atari, who released a version called Domino's.
01:10:32Alex: Then it turned out that the public didn't find it very interesting.
01:10:35Alex: After all of that hullabaloo at the MOA show, it ended up just not being all that successful, and everyone forgot about it.
01:10:42Alex: It was an arcade game.
01:10:44Alex: There was an Atari version of it, Domino, so it was an Atari arcade game that nobody else had done yet.
01:10:49Alex: So Alan Miller was given surround to do.
01:10:53Alex: It plays pretty much like Blockade does in its basic form. Drawing lines on the screen. Trying not to crash.
01:11:00Alex: There's some interesting game variations on that basic theme, like forcing the players to speed up every few seconds, which means that the game gets more dangerous and more high stakes the longer it goes on.
01:11:11Alex: There's a race version.
01:11:13Alex: Where if you hold down the button on the joystick, you can actually stop your trail from forming for a while, which allows you to backtrack in a way that you normally can't in the game.
01:11:23Alex: There's a wraparound option that allows you to go from one end of the screen and wraparound to the other side of the screen. And of course you can mix all of these things up in various ways.
01:11:34Alex: The difficulty switches in this case determine whether you can do a 180, just reverse and go back in the exact same direction that you started from.
01:11:42Alex: Obviously in the modes where you crash; you wouldn't want to do that, but in the erase gameplay mode you could theoretically backtrack in that way, and difficulty switch Indicates whether you can do that or not.
01:11:55Alex: Then there is also a drawing version, just a free form drawing version, because hey, you can draw lines on the screen. It's kind of like an etch a sketch. So there's a video graffiti mode that allows you to just draw lines on the screen.
01:12:07Alex: As I said, by 1978 they were already offering it at a rebate to customers to purchase the system, which implies that it didn't sell all of that well, though it was decently reviewed in some of the magazines at the time.
01:12:22Alex: And I've been very bad. Blackjack only has one name, the one game that Sears didn't give a separate name to.
01:12:28Alex: Basic Math is just Math at Sears, and Surround is known as Chase.
01:12:35Alex: So that's it, Jeffrey. Those are the launch titles for the Atari VCS, all of them simple.
01:12:40Alex: Some of them funner than others, some of them just filler to make the parents feel better about purchasing the system.
01:12:45Alex: But a nice variety and still generally better than what the competition had on the market at the time, particularly with the ability to do all of these variants.
01:12:55Alex: The competition was often doing games that were of similar complexity to the VCS, but they didn't have all of these game modes. And in a few years that didn't matter so much when recreating Space Invaders or recreating Pac-Man or Defender or whatever became the most important thing on home systems.
01:13:12Alex: Having game variants didn't matter very much, but in this early stage it really did set them apart because it allowed you to have some interesting twists, whether it be Billiards Tank, where you have to bank shot your opponent or Surround where you can do the erase mode to backtrack.
01:13:28Alex: It provided some ways to get a little more fun out of some of these games that were otherwise very simple. And uh-
01:13:34Alex: Mostly got the Atari VCS. off on the right foot, though obviously with the exception of Combat, most of these games were quickly forgotten and replaced in people's hearts by the much better games that came out later.
01:13:47Alex: Some of those we've talked about in our Activision episode.
01:13:49Alex: As for the rest, those will have to wait for a different episode.
01:13:54Jeffrey: So you're telling me we're gonna have to cover more Atari games?
01:13:56Alex: Yeah, we probably will at some point. We'll probably do some other batches at some point, but not right now. We're not doing this as a two or a three parter.
01:14:03Alex: Launch titles are perfectly sufficient.
01:14:05Alex: As these are simple games that get old if you play them too long, so too would it get very old to just do five episodes on them in a row.
01:14:14Alex: Though if you like that kind of thing.
01:14:15Alex: Kevin Bunch does a great job of it.
01:14:17Alex: I'm not being facetious there. His episodes are all very interesting.
01:14:20Alex: He doesn't just go into the games and the gameplay themselves, but he goes into a lot of the history surrounding the creation of the games and the influences of the games as well.
01:14:27[Outro Music - Bacterial Love Starts] All very good stuff.
01:14:28Jeffrey: They come with pretty pictures too.
01:14:30Alex: Indeed.
01:14:31Jeffrey: Well then, since we are done mining Atari yet again.
01:14:35Jeffrey: What shall we go into in our next episode?
01:14:38Alex: Well, Jeffrey, you know me.
01:14:39Alex: I like myself good corporate shenanigans.
01:14:41Jeffrey: Oh dear god!
01:14:42Alex: It hasn't been that long since our last corporate shenanigan episode on Virgin Games.
01:14:46Alex: But it's been long enough. We've done a few things in between that are not corporate shenanigans.
01:14:50Alex: So I want to look at another one of these French companies that got involved in the kind of gold rush in the telecommunications deregulation dot com boom of the late 1990's, which is Vivendi.
01:15:03Alex: Not really going into super history on the actual games Vivendi did, but kind of looking at how Vivendi games came together and then how it was broken up because it involves some wildness around Sierra and Davidson and Associates and Blizzard and all of these companies that is just delightful to tell.
01:15:25Alex: So it's gonna be a high level view. It's not gonna be the same kind of inside look we did on Virgin Games where we're talking about a lot of games and stuff as well.
01:15:33Alex: This is just gonna be a corporate shenanigans episode because sometimes, Jeffrey, I need to do an episode for me.
01:15:39Alex: Most of these are for the fans.
01:15:41Alex: This one's for me.
01:15:42Jeffrey: But Alex, we actually finally get to touch on that Vivendi company that we've talked about so many times in so many other contexts, and we actually get to understand where they came from instead of these little asides about and that Vivendi person came in and bought them and then shenanigans happened, and then moving on.
01:16:00Alex: That's right. This will be all shenanigans all of the time.
01:16:05Alex: Probably our most shenaniganiest episode ever.
01:16:08Alex: I'm so sorry, slash, your welcome.
01:16:11Alex: Depending on where you stand.
01:16:13Jeffrey: So get your alcohol out or get your uh bets in for how shenanigan-y this gets in our next episode on They Create Worlds.
01:16:23Jeffrey: Check out our show notes at Podcast.TheyCreateWorlds.com where we have linked to some of the things that we discuss in this and other episodes.
01:16:31Jeffrey: You can check out Alex's video game history blog at VideoGameHistorian.wordpress.com.
01:16:36Jeffrey: Alex's book, They Create Worlds, The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. 1, can now be ordered through CRC Press and at major online retailers.
01:16:45Jeffrey: Feel free to email us at feedback@TheyCreateWorlds.com.
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01:17:13Jeffrey: Intro music is Airplane Mode by Josh Woodward. Found at joshwoodward.com/song/AirplaneMode used under a Creative Commons attribution license.
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01:17:31Jeffrey: This episode is brought to you by live streaming the editing process for over four or five hours. I've lost track at this point.
01:17:37Jeffrey: Thank you all who decided to hang out with me for a bit and learn how the sausage is made.
01:17:42[Outro Music - Bacterial Love - Fades out]
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