[ATARI] Atari Turns 50: A Look Back on the Original Name in Video Games

[Jesus Cea]

https://hackaday.com/2022/06/27/atari-at-50-the-story-of-our-lives/

https://www.pcmag.com/news/atari-turns-50-a-look-back-on-the-original-name-in-video-games

Adjunto transcripción en beneficio de los archivos de la lista:

"""
Atari Turns 50: A Look Back on the Original Name in Video Games

Atari launched a multi-billion-dollar industry, only to lose control of 
it in a series of missteps. But the name will always resonate.
By Jamie Lendino
June 27, 2022
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Atari Turns 50: A Look Back on the Original Name in Video Games Image My 
Atari 800 computer and 2600 game console (Image: Jamie Lendino)

On June 27, 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney incorporated Atari in 
Sunnyvale, California. And it's safe to say that if this didn't happen, 
I'd be a different person.

I spent my childhood living and breathing Atari: playing 2600 games, 
crowding Atari coin-ops crammed into pizzerias and bodegas, and running 
an Atari 800 bulletin board system (BBS) in the mid-1980s. These early 
experiences inform everything I write about technology now.

As an adult, I've written Adventure(Opens in a new window), 
Breakout(Opens in a new window), and Faster Than Light(Opens in a new 
window), three books about the Atari's 2600, 800, and ST, plus Attract 
Mode(Opens in a new window), a book about arcade coin-ops that features 
Atari heavily. Many other tech enthusiasts of a certain vintage feel as 
strongly about Atari as I do. So in honor of the brand's 50th 
anniversary, it seems appropriate to celebrate and look back on the 
storied history of one of the most iconic names in technology.
Beginnings

When I grew up, two common tropes were that the first video game was 
Pong and that Nolan Bushnell invented it. Although Bushnell and Pong 
both deserve plenty of credit, the real story is more nuanced. It 
evolved over the course of the 20th century, as amusement parks led to 
penny arcades, Skee-Ball, pinball, and other electromechanical 
attractions that relied increasingly on skill as well as chance. 
Inklings of video games appeared as early as the late 1940s with the 
very first vacuum-tube-based, room-sized computers, as researchers 
experimented with chess, puzzles, and displaying moving points of light 
on screens.

One of the most important and influential early video games was 
Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT primarily by Steve Russell. 
Spacewar! was a two-player spaceship battle against the gravitational 
pull of the Sun. It was the first true title where two people could 
play, control, compete, and ultimately win a game that took place 
entirely on a screen.
Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1
Spacewar! on a DEC PDP-1 (Image: Kenneth Lu/Creative Commons)

It was this game that Nolan Bushnell, a young electronics enthusiast, 
came across. By the time he entered college at the University of Utah, 
he had already been a ham radio operator, ran his dad’s cement business, 
and managed an amusement park. Bushnell played Spacewar! and dreamed of 
building an amusement park-style video game of his own at a reasonable 
cost—certainly much less than DEC wanted for its PDP-8 minicomputer, 
which cost $120,000 in the mid-1960s.
Computer Space

After Bushnell earned his electrical engineering degree and went to work 
for videotape company Ampex, he began designing his own Spacewar!-like 
electronic coin-op game with his coworker Ted Dabney. They mocked up a 
prototype, and along with fellow Ampex employee Larry Bryan, they 
started a partnership called Syzygy Engineering. They soon joined forces 
with Dave Nutting, a local amusement park coin-op game manufacturer, and 
began to build, sell, and distribute their new creation, Computer Space.

“People would look at you like you had three heads,” Bushnell said of 
describing the game to others, in Van Burnham's excellent Supercade: A 
Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984. “You mean you’re going to 
put the TV set in a box with a coin slot and play games on it?” Two 
Stanford students also had the same idea in 1971 and developed Galaxy 
Game, another Spacewar! clone. But lacking Bushnell's business savvy, 
they couldn't figure out how to do it at scale and make money.
Computer Space
Computer Space at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, 
California (Image: Jamie Lendino)

Computer Space had a striking fiberglass cabinet design that came in a 
variety of colors. It was clearly ahead of its time, and it even showed 
up in the Charlton Heston film Soylent Green (1973). It sold a 
reasonable 1,300 units. But Computer Space proved too complex for tipsy 
patrons to get the hang of in a noisy bar. Bushnell needed a new idea, 
and fast.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score

The Magnavox Odyssey was the world’s first home video game console. The 
late Ralph Baer conceived the Odyssey way back in 1966 and built several 
prototypes of it. In 1971, Magnavox agreed to manufacture and sell 
Baer's system. Bushnell saw an early version of it at a Magnavox dealer 
demonstration later in 1971. He played the built-in table tennis game 
and decided he needed to make a coin-op version.

Bushnell's most important early hire was Al Alcorn, who was the brain 
behind Atari's own first coin-op. Bushnell ordered Alcorn to get to work 
developing a coin-op game with two paddles, one ball, and a way to keep 
score, which he felt was important. The result was much more 
sophisticated; Alcorn added not just scoring, but sound, a sped-up mode 
once you've been playing for a while, and more precise control that 
changed the angle of the ball depending on where it made contact with 
the paddle. They named it Pong, after the sound it made when you hit the 
ball.
Birth of Atari, and Arcades

Once the game was finished, Bushnell and Alcorn installed a 
prototype(Opens in a new window) of Pong in a local tavern to see how it 
did, only to get a call a couple of weeks later that it had broken. It 
turned out so many people played it that the coin box was already 
overflowing and had jammed. The new Atari, Inc. began manufacturing and 
distributing Pong cabinets later that year and soon hit the big time.
An Atari Pong cabinet
An Atari Pong cabinet (Image: Rob Boudon/ubcule/Creative Commons 2.0)

Pong's runaway success in bars immediately attracted dozens of 
competitors building Pong-like games of their own. So Atari iterated as 
it grew, releasing different kinds of games such as Space Race, Gran 
Trak 10, Tank, and more. It had another hit on its hands with 1976’s 
Breakout, the game Steve Jobs famously asked his friend Steve Wozniak to 
design for Atari, only to cheat him out of most of his deserved bonus 
once Wozniak finished it.

Video arcades grew in popularity throughout the 1970s, but Taito's 
wildly addictive Space Invaders opened the floodgates. It signaled the 
arrival of a golden age of arcade games, the period between 1978 and 
1983 when coin-op video games took off. No Atari coin-op was as big as 
Space Invaders, or Namco’s Pac-Man (1980), Ms. Pac-Man (1981), or 
Nintendo’s Donkey Kong (1981)—the first hit games with mascots, a 
concept Atari missed out on. But it still created some of the biggest 
hits of the era, including Asteroids, Missile Command, Centipede, and 
Tempest, a striking coin-op with color vector graphics. This culminated 
in 1983 with Atari's Star Wars arcade game, a phenomenal achievement 
that put you in the cockpit of an X-Wing fighter attacking the Death Star.
Star Wars Arcade Game
Atari's Star Wars coin-op
Have You Played Atari Today?

Atari also broke into the home console market like Magnavox, but not 
until 1975 with Home Pong, a dedicated unit that played selectable 
variations of its first hit arcade coin-op. Other copycats followed this 
effort, too, and 1976 marked a brief wave of popularity for these 
devices. Soon, the microprocessor-based Fairchild Channel F arrived, a 
cartridge-based system that meant you could keep adding new games to it. 
It became clear immediately that cartridges would be the future. 
Luckily, Atari engineers were already working on one.
Atari 2600 with Adventure cartridge
A "Heavy Sixer" Atari 2600 from 1977 with the Adventure cartridge 
(Image: Jamie Lendino)

In September 1977, Atari released the Video Computer System—known today 
as the 2600 (a name it didn’t get officially until a 1982 revamp). The 
brainchild of Alcorn, Jay Miner, Joe Decuir, and some others, the 2600 
launched the other half of the video game industry, the one in the home. 
The 2600 was a compact, attractive console that came with two joysticks, 
two paddles, and an adapter that let you commandeer channel 3 or 4 on 
your television set (whichever one had the most fuzz in your area) to 
use for displaying games.

Atari's original nine-cartridge lineup wasn’t particularly amazing. The 
pack-in Combat played variants of Atari's 1974 coin-op Tank. Video 
Olympics offered many sporting event variations that were essentially 50 
ways to play Pong. Air-Sea Battle offered target practice with airplanes 
and boats. Indy 500 let you drive crude race cars in a top-down view 
like Atari's Sprint 2 coin-op. But the difference was that you could 
play these games at home, on your living room television set while 
sitting on your fashionable shag carpeting (just watch out for static 
electricity).
Space Invaders on the 2600
Space Invaders on the 2600

The system's cartridge slot beckoned, of course, and Atari programmers 
followed up the initial launch with many new games over the next several 
years. And soon, programmers figured out how to bypass the system's 
tricky limitations and create more advanced, compelling games, such as 
the multi-screened Superman (1978) and Adventure (1979), or shoot 
'em-ups with many more on-screen sprites, such as Space Invaders (1980).

The competing Mattel Intellivision, released in late 1979, eventually 
sold three million consoles but never quite challenged the 2600 
sufficiently, despite its superior sports and strategy titles. Other 
systems such as the RCA Studio II, the Bally Astrocade, and the 
follow-up Magnavox Odyssey2 barely made a dent in the market.
Atari 400 computer
The Atari 400 computer, released in 1979 (Image: Evan Amos/Creative Commons)
Computers for People

In 1976, Warner Communications had purchased Atari for $28 million, 
giving it the cash infusion necessary to properly launch the VCS. This 
move also proved problematic; in 1978, Warner installed Ray Kassar, a 
textile executive, as CEO of Atari. The ground immediately shifted, as 
Kassar and Bushnell battled over the company’s direction, most notably 
in whether it should release a follow-up game console to the VCS or a 
home computer to battle the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and Tandy's 
Radio Shack TRS-80.

The computer won out, Bushnell left, and in late 1979, the company 
released its first home computers, the 400 and 800. These were 
revolutionary designs, with dedicated chips for graphics and sound 
processing. In this sense, they were the two first real gaming PCs, in 
that they had separate coprocessors that were designed specifically for 
this purpose. Doug Neubauer's Star Raiders became the killer app for 
these early computers, a sophisticated and epic space battle game with 
incredible animation that was crammed into just 8K of memory.
Star Raiders
Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800

Atari then squandered its early mover advantage in computers by not 
releasing the secrets of how its systems worked to third-party 
programmers, preferring to keep all the software profits to itself. As a 
result, those programmers all flocked to developing software for the 
Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore VIC-20. Atari lost a crucial two years 
as the market for those systems skyrocketed.

Eventually, Atari management relented. Soon, plenty of storied 
developers and publishers got their start or became famous on Atari 
8-bit systems, including Electronic Arts (Archon, M.U.L.E.), Sid Meier 
and MicroProse (Solo Flight, Silent Service, F-15 Strike Eagle), and 
Lucasfilm Games (Rescue on Fractalus!, Ballblazer).
Atari Becomes a Household Name

If you were a kid in the early 1980s, you had to have an Atari console, 
or at least know a close friend with one—particularly after Atari's 
conversion of Space Invaders arrived. Excellent conversions of Atari's 
own Asteroids and Missile Command arrived the year after, plus new hits 
such as Yars' Revenge. After a highly publicized break with management, 
third-party studios such as Activision, Imagic, and board game giant 
Parker Brothers released excellent 2600 games of their own, including 
Pitfall!, Demon Attack, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
Star Wars on the 2600
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back on the Atari 2600

Things especially heated up later in 1982, as more and more games 
arrived and the appetite for them only expanded. It was also time for 
new hardware. Coleco unveiled the ColecoVision console, with its 
arcade-like visuals and powerhouse licensed pack-in cartridge Donkey 
Kong. GCE launched the Vectrex, a nifty, self-contained game system with 
a built-in 9-inch monochrome monitor and tack-sharp vector graphics.

Atari battled these stalwart contenders with the 5200 SuperSystem, a 
repackaging of the 1979 Atari 400 in an oversized console. It was 
overmatched. The 5200 came with Super Breakout, a four-year-old 
variation of a six-year-old coin-op, and it had non-centering joysticks 
that confounded players looking to duplicate the arcade experience at 
home. I had one anyway, along with an Atari 2600 and Atari 800 computer. 
The 5200 let you play Robotron: 2084 with two joysticks, and Centipede 
or Missile Command with a trackball, just like the respective coin-ops.
Atari 5200
An Atari 5200 console (Image: Evan Amos/Creative Commons)
The (Video Game) Music Stops

All three new consoles launched in 1982, but fizzled out within a year. 
So did everything else related to video games. An oversaturation of 
arcades, consoles, cartridges, and increasingly poor quality cartridges 
led to a massive video game crash in 1983. Atari was hit particularly 
hard, thanks in part to the colossal bungling of its home Pac-Man 
release for the 2600 console in early 1982, and perhaps to a lesser 
extent, its E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridge, which cost $20 
million to license from Steven Spielberg. Copies of E.T. famously ended 
up buried in the desert with thousands of other unsold Atari cartridges. 
Atari racked up $538 million in losses in 1983 and laid off nearly all 
of its 10,000 employees by mid-1984.

The biggest reason for the crash, though, was the rise in inexpensive 
home computers. Why pay several hundred dollars for a game console when 
you can buy a computer that does so much more? Commodore’s Jack Tramiel 
launched a price war with its VIC-20 and especially its excellent 
Commodore 64 computer, slashing prices in half soon after launch and 
then lower still. The rivalry between fans of these different computers 
was palpable: If you weren't there, think of Commodore versus Atari as 
the Mac versus PC of the day. Guess which team I was on?
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Ultimately, Tramiel wanted to not just win, but destroy his competitors 
at Atari, Apple, Radio Shack, and Texas Instruments. He wanted to ensure 
Commodore wouldn’t lose the way it lost the calculator market in the 
1970s. Then, for rabid Atari fans, the unthinkable happened.
Atari 1040ST
The 16-bit Atari 1040ST with an SC1224 color monitor and mouse (Image: 
Bill Bertram/CC BY-SA 2.5)
Atari Corporation: Power Without the Price

In January 1984, Tramiel and his sons had a falling out with other 
Commodore management. They left the company, entered negotiations with 
Warner, and then struck a deal to split off and buy Atari Computer from 
Atari Coin. The coin-op division became Atari Games. Tramiel bought 
everything else and named the new company Atari Corporation.

Tramiel immediately got to work building a new team—largely with 
ex-Commodore employees—and launching a new computer system. The 16-bit 
Atari 520ST, designed by Shiraz Shivji and unveiled at CES 1985, 
represented a new era for Atari computers. The 520ST was the first 
desktop system to deliver a color GUI with mouse control for under 
$1,000. Jack Tramiel took the battle not just to his former 
company-turned-competitor Commodore, but also to IBM and especially 
Apple with its new Macintosh. Early looks at the ST led some pundits to 
label the machine the "Jackintosh." The following year, the 1040ST with 
its integrated floppy drive became the first machine under $1,000 with 
1MB of memory.
Dungeon Master
FTL's Dungeon Master

The ST lineup developed a cult following in America and had more 
mainstream appeal in Europe, thanks to several well-advertised “Packs” 
that included plenty of quality software and games with every new 
machine. The ST also found footing in recording studios the world over, 
thanks to its built-in MIDI ports and locked-in sense of timing that 
attracted many musicians and composers of the day. Although the ST 
lacked dedicated gaming coprocessors, like the ones Jay Miner designed 
for the Atari 2600, 400, and the competing 16-bit Commodore Amiga, it 
was still a solid gaming machine, as evidenced by innovative 
genre-splitting games from Psygnosis and Michtron, hit graphic 
adventures from Lucasfilm Games and Sierra On-Line, and especially FTL's 
Dungeon Master (pictured above).
Sputtering and Last Gasps

By 1990, it was clear Atari wasn’t doing well—especially in the US, 
where sales had reached a near standstill. Atari's upgraded 1040STE 
model launched in late 1989 with support for 4,096 colors, digital 
sound, and hardware scrolling, which better positioned it against the 
Commodore Amiga 500, but it was two years late.
Atari Lynx
An Atari Lynx handheld console (Image: Evan Amos/Creative Commons)

Otherwise, the operative word for Atari Corporation was "flailing." The 
7800 game console—which Tramiel canned after purchasing Atari, only to 
resurrect it in 1986 after Nintendo reinvigorated the video game 
industry with the stellar Nintendo Entertainment System—failed to find 
purchase. So did Atari’s XE Game System, another repackaging of the now 
eight-year-old 400 computer, and its Lynx handheld, which was in color 
and more powerful than Nintendo’s Game Boy, but had poor battery life 
and a meager cartridge lineup.

An ill-fated merger with retail store chain Federated Group in the late 
1980s hobbled Atari and sapped it of crucial resources. And a series of 
more advanced Atari computers also bombed, including the 32-bit TT, the 
STacy and ST Book portables, a run of MS-DOS-compatible PCs, the 
Portfolio handheld, and the Falcon, a 16/32-bit hybrid system in 1992 
with the looks of the 520ST but much more advanced hardware underneath. 
All struggled against the MS-DOS juggernaut and soon faded from the scene.
Atari Jaguar
The Atari Jaguar (Image: Evan Amos/Creative Commons)

As Atari's various new product launches fizzled out one after the other, 
in the early 1990s the company sharpened its portfolio, cut its 
(copious) losses, and put all its chips behind the Jaguar, the first 
so-called 64-bit game console that could leapfrog Nintendo and Sega. The 
Jaguar, too, landed with a thud, thanks to its mediocre pack-in game, 
difficult-to-program architecture, and spotty cartridge lineup aside 
from Jeff Minter's stellar Tempest 2000. In 1996, JTS Corporation bought 
the remaining assets and rights to all Atari IP, eventually selling them 
to Hasbro in 1998. The Atari brand disappeared in a sea of cut-price 
overstock available via mail-order.
Atari Lives On

In 2000, French video game publisher Infogrames bought Atari's assets 
from Hasbro and began an even longer and more convoluted series of 
reorganizations and mergers. I remember being especially perplexed when 
I bought the excellent CRPG Neverwinter Nights in the early 2000s and 
saw the Atari logo on the box. This "Atari" had nothing whatsoever to do 
with the consoles and computers I grew up with. Today's iteration is 
hawking a crowdfunded microconsole with VCS branding, along with 
Bluetooth speaker hats and other apparel, a steady trickle of repackaged 
IP from decades ago, and an inexplicable push into hotels and 
cryptocurrency(Opens in a new window).
My Atari 800 and ST
My Atari 800 and Atari 1040STE setup at home (Image: Jamie Lendino)

But the real Atari can still be found alive in the forums and user 
groups of the internet, where thousands of enthusiasts continue to talk 
about old-school computers, consoles, and software. You'll find 
websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, subreddits, Twitch streams, and 
Facebook groups. Take your pick of Atari Inc., Atari Games, or Atari 
Corporation—there's room for fans of it all.

Even more impressively, hundreds of fans are coding up new 
"homebrew(Opens in a new window)" games on various Atari platforms, 
while hardware hackers develop mods that give the old machines new 
potential. My latest favorite mod is FujiNet(Opens in a new window), an 
open-source network adapter by Thomas Cherryhomes that enables wireless 
internet connectivity, flash storage, virtual printing to PDFs, and more 
to Atari 8-bit XL and XE computers.

With all the twists and turns in Atari's story over the years—and so 
many unforced errors—it’s amazing the brand is still around at all. But 
there's no other possibility for such a resonant name, enshrined as it 
was on a billboard in the dystopian 1982 sci-fi flick Blade Runner, and 
still affixed to aging consumer electronics filling up the basements and 
attics of millions of homes worldwide. After 50 years, the final chapter 
of Atari is yet to be written.

So what are you waiting for? Dust off all that old gear and start 
playing with it.
"""

-- 
Jesús Cea Avión                         _/_/      _/_/_/        _/_/_/
jcea at jcea.es - https://www.jcea.es/    _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
Twitter: @jcea                        _/_/    _/_/          _/_/_/_/_/
jabber / xmpp:jcea at jabber.org  _/_/  _/_/    _/_/          _/_/  _/_/
"Things are not so easy"      _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/    _/_/  _/_/
"My name is Dump, Core Dump"   _/_/_/        _/_/_/      _/_/  _/_/
"El amor es poner tu felicidad en la felicidad de otro" - Leibniz
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