Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market

VonGuard writes "I was at the flea market in Oakland yesterday when a pile of EPROMs caught my eye. When I got them home I found that they were prototypes for Colecovision games. A few were unpublished or saw limited runs, like Video Hustler (billiards). Others were fully released, like WarGames. But the crown jewel is what look to be a number of chips with various revisions of Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari 2600. This game was never released and has never been seen. It was a port of the version for Colecovision, and this lot of chips also included the Coleco version. So now I have to find someone who can dump EPROMs gently onto a PC so we can play this never-before seen game, which is almost certainly awful."

Re:Origins

[PhantomHarlock]

Sometimes people are very careless about their trash. Notice the WTC plans that showed up in the dumpster trawled by the homeless guy the other day.

Dumpster diving has become both an art, a business and industrial espionage.

Also, it's quite likely that a programmer just took them home after an office cleaning or cancelled project or mass-layoff.

What happens to today's games?

[wandazulu]

The great thing about the age of carts is just what the article touches on...here's a game that never made it to the store shelves but clearly a copy or two was made on actual hardware that somehow made it to this flea market.

But what happens to games today when they're cancelled? I read about games being put on "indefinite hiatus", or just being cancelled with the company essentially throwing their hands up in the air and saying "ain't gonna happen." What becomes of all that code? Since it just sits on the developer's machines, does it just get wiped when they start on a new project?

Maybe someday someone will find a hd in a flea market labeled "Shenmue 3 SVN Repo", but it doesn't seem likely, sadly.

So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.

Re:What happens to today's games?

[FiestaFan]

But what happens to games today when they're cancelled? I read about games being put on "indefinite hiatus", or just being cancelled with the company essentially throwing their hands up in the air and saying "ain't gonna happen." What becomes of all that code? Since it just sits on the developer's machines, does it just get wiped when they start on a new project?

Maybe someday someone will find a hd in a flea market labeled "Shenmue 3 SVN Repo", but it doesn't seem likely, sadly.

So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.

I'm sure a lot of these programmers aren't going to just erase something they may have spent months or years on.

Sometimes they even risk their jobs and lawsuits to see the game get played: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill [wikipedia.org]

You never know what might turn up on a DVD-R at a tag sale someday. Maybe the first 3 versions of Duke Nukem Forever. Heres hoping...

Re:What happens to today's games?

[somersault]

So while we revel in the curios of the past, we ourselves have none to give to future generations.

I'd say we're more likely to get stuff like this in the future, rather than less likely.. old backup tapes.. possibly stuff the developers took home to show their friends/family (well, maybe that's strictly forbidden or something, it certainly would be with DNF :P ). But I doubt developers just wipe old projects as soon as they start a new one. They probably keep backups of all their code on a network fileserver, that's what any sane person/company would do.

Thanks to the internets, it's easy to find stuff like this online too - I wrote a game when I was 12/13 and sent it into Amiga Format. A couple of years ago in a fit of nostalgia I tried searching for it online, found a website mentioning the name, got in contact with the author, and he sent me a copy (I dont have an Amiga any more and if I still have the floppies for the game they're at least 10 years old and probably corrupt, although the version that I sent into Amiga Format wasn't my final version, so there are little touches that are missing :( ). I can now play my game on an emulator. Kinda cool.

Usually if a project is canceled, it's because it was no fun to play anyway, so don't feel like you're missing out or anything! Some companies just release their boring games anyway.. others, like Valve or 3D Realms, only release games that they know are worthy.

Re:Games Better Left Buried...

[dosun88888]

Cabbage Patch Kids was actually one of the best games for the Colecovision. If you google reviews the only one you'll probably find is a bad one, but I assure you that the reviewer in question never actually played the games. If he had, Donkey Kong would have been given far less than an A.

Re:What happens to today's games?

[korbin_dallas]

The developers take it home.

I worked for a small company back in the mid90s(biz sw not games). When we folded, I took all my code home with me.
My co-developers did the same.
I viewed it as my library of work, and for a while it was my reference material since it was full of generalized code for basic business apps. Now of course its quite antique.

So why should we care?

[LS]

If this were any other item (visual art, books, songs, etc), no one would care that some shitty unreleased piece of work was found by some unknown author. Why is it any different because it's a video game?

LS

Re:Somebody is getting their comeuppance

[Anonymous Coward]

That somebody is Ed English, who also wrote the Atari 2600 versions of Frogger, Mr. Do, Roc'n Rope, Front Line, and Looping. He's now the CEO of Intermute, an Internet security company that's owned by Trend Micro.

http://www.intermute.com/company/management.html

Re:Cool

[MrEkted]

2 words: Warlords [wikipedia.org]

That's funny

[wwphx]

I used to work for Flying Buffalo (the makers of the Nuclear War card game and Tunnels & Trolls RPG) and they had an agreement with Coleco for Coleco to produce a T&T game for their system. Coleco gave FBI a Colecovision, it was an amusing little game. What was funny was that perhaps our favorite game to play was the Smurf game as it had an amusing little bug at the end.

Now I live in New Mexico, originally near Alamogordo, which is famed for being the dumping ground for Atari's ET game cartridge. Apparently they trucked thousands of the unsold cartridges, dumped them, ran over them with a bulldozer, then covered them with concrete. I wish I could find out where that was, that'd be a cool place to explore and maybe find one.

Re:Cool

[Jason Levine]

My favorite Atari game was Star Raiders. It was a complex, 3D space simulator years before X-Wing and the like. Sure the space ships you were battling were basic shapes, but you still could fly around in space, fire at them, watch your fuel level, refill at the service station (or blow it up! ;-) ), travel in hyperspace (trying to keep from veering off course) and toggle your shields/weapons/etc to save on power. I only wish I could play a version of that on my PC today.

Re:That's funny

[patrixx]

http://atari.digital-madman.com/content/part4/part4-index.html [digital-madman.com]

A large subculture

[sharopolis]

There's a large and fairly obsessive subculture associated with videogame prototypes. The ultimate goal for most people involved is to find prototypes 'in the wild' like this, but a lot of ultra rare video game stuff is found through dodgy deals and allegedly, bribery and outright theft.
http://www.atariprotos.com/ [atariprotos.com] is a repository of Atari stuff and http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/ [assemblergames.com] is a message board discussing the subject.
The big area for debate around prototyes is wheather or not they should be realeased. Regardless of the fact that this game never saw commercial release, it's still likely to be someone's intellectual property, and they may not be keen on seeing it spread around freely.
A lot of prototypes are worth serious money, this one as an Atari game will be too. A lot of collectors refuse to relase prototypes they've discovered incase it lowers the value of them.

Re:Cool

[ah.clem]

Best Atari games?

M.U.L.E. - 'nuff said.

ah.clem

Re:Cool

[Hatta]

Since we're going off topic anyway, I'll mention that the NES [clara.net] port [clara.net] of Elite is recommended by the authors as the best Elite experience.

Re:Cool

[poot_rootbeer]

Imagine trying to port GTA3 to the original Nintendo system and you'll have some idea how bad this game probably is.

You could imagine it, or you could actually do it [archive.org].

I find back-ports of game titles from more to less powerful hardware to be fascinating -- paring down a complex premise into something more simple really exposes a programmer's cleverness, and it really does give credence to the idea that it's gameplay, not high-quality graphics or sound, that makes a game fun.

Re:Where do you live ?

[IdeaMan]

I did a mask rom project once. That was scary business.
It was a voice activated clock, and after it was released they found a bug in it that made it off at the end of every day. However, there was a non-mask rom chip in the game, and we happened to have a communications protocol from it to my LCD that allowed reads and writes to anywhere in ram. My co-worker that was writing the voice chip (mine was the LCD microcontroller) wrote up a little patch that checked for the bug and patched it up when it occurred.
Felt so relieved that they wouldn't be throwing out 50,000 chips because I goofed.

Tempest #1

[Squeedle]

I love stories like this.

A friend of mine and I went to an ex-Atari developer's house in South San Jose to pick up a few old things he was selling. He just happened to have an old Tempest game . . . with a paper printout overlay. The serial number was 001. Yes, he let us play it. It was in near-perfect condition.

He also sold my friend another old (pinball?) game, unreleased, which previously had been thought to have only one model of. Wrong, there are definitely two. Wish I could remember what it was :P

Anyway, I hope he's able to recover the game. Even if it's a piece of crap, it's a piece of historical crap :) And you never know, it could be good (for kids) - sometimes games get canned for all the wrong reasons.

Re:It's much better on the real thing

[SpiceWare]

I've modified my Atari with S-Video and Stereo and it generates a crystal clear [spiceware.org] picture on my old C= 1084S. The other key thing is Medieval Mayhem is a paddle game and paddle emulation leaves much to be desired. Something like the Stelladaptor [atariage.com] helps, but I only have one of those which limits me to 2 players and Medieval Mayhem really shines when played with 4 players.