Atari Turns 40 Today 162
harrymcc writes "On June 27, 1972, a startup called Atari filed its papers of incorporation. A few months later, it released its first game, Pong. The rest is video game history. I celebrated the anniversary over at TIME.com by chatting with the company's indomitable founder, Nolan Bushnell. From the article: 'Like everyone else who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, I played them all: Pong, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Millipede, Battlezone, Pole Position, Crystal Castles and my eternal favorite, Tempest. The first computer I bought with my own money was an Atari 400. So when I chatted with Bushnell this week to mark Atari’s 40th anniversary, I felt like I was talking with a man who helped invent my childhood.'" I spent my fair share of time playing Warlords with friends on my 2600.
Happy birthday Atari! (Score:5, Interesting)
I always like to point out that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:frosty (Score:5, Interesting)
Until Commodore produced the Amiga.
Of course the Amiga really had Atari blood running through it, having been designed by Jay Miner -- the same man that help design previous Atari machines.
I can't believe Atari let the Amiga design get away from them.
Instead they came out with a machine that had a dumb frame buffer and simple syth chip attached to a CPU. The ST was more Radio Shack Color Computer than a next generation Atari machine.
I guess I can blame Commodore for that since they gave Atari Jack Tramiel. That guy seemed obsessed with undermining his old company. He basically helped Atari and Commodore destroy each other while IBM PC compatibles slowly took over.
At last (Score:5, Interesting)
Real News for Nerds!
Re:Another winner from the 6502 family (Score:5, Interesting)
I upgraded to an Atari 7800 "prosystem" which also had a Commodore Semiconductor 6502.
Ordered it online! (Yes kids Atari had an online store in the 80s.) That was a really nice system with great near-arcade perfect games..... 128 sprites (no damn flicker)..... 256 colors at 320x240..... too bad it barely sold.
Re:I always like to point out that (Score:5, Interesting)
Never thought of it that way. You think we'll see a Linux distribution that fits on 128 bytes? ;-)
Of course the Atari didn't actually run on just 128 bytes. It was hard-programmed with 4K of internal ROM commands, plus the 2 or 4K in the cartridge that the programmer had full control over. The biggest cartridge ever made was 32K (Jr.PacMan; a great game). ----- The 128 byte RAM limitation meant the background was only 40 pixels wide! That same resolution was later used in their 1979 computers: 40x240, 80x240, and so on.
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Re:frosty (Score:4, Interesting)
As much as I was a chickenhead in my youth, I gotta say that the Atari 8 bit family had better video. I think. I haven't thought much about it in ages. If I had the room, I'd get an Atari 800 to play with.
I don't know how the Atari 800 compared to the Commodore 64, but when I was a kid my parents got me a used 800XL originally owned by possibly the biggest pirate ever. I've yet to find a video on Youtube of a game on that machine that I haven't played!
It was great machine to have at the age of 10. I remember some of the games I had were written in BASIC, I had fun going in and editing them. Heh.
Recently I went on a Youtube spree to check out some of the games I used to play, and I gotta say I was impressed with what I found. Check out this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh5b8jcwLk&feature=related [youtube.com]
This is Goonies, I suppose you'd call it either an adventure or possibly a puzzle game. I remember firing that one up over and over again and spending all this time trying to figure out how to progress to the next screen. I can't think of a modern day equivalent of that game.
Fun stuff. I really don't regret that this is the machine I had while all my friends had NES. (Although I was perturbed at the time...)
Re:frosty (Score:5, Interesting)
And don't blame Atari. Blame the idiots at Warner Communications who decided in 1983 to sell-off the company on the belief that videogaming was a "fad" whose time had passed.
Interesting, I remember when laser disc arcade games like "Dragon's lair" [wikipedia.org] came out. They were supposed to revitalize a slumping arcade industry. I just looked it up and Dragon's Lair came out in 1983. I was an arcade addict at the time and remember it well, arcade games had stagnated and computers lacked the "horse power" to get to the next level of visual effects. I believe it was Gauntlet [wikipedia.org] that was one of the first big hits, post laser disc, that really "rescued" video games. It didn't need great graphics (although we all thought it was really cool at the time), it just needed to be massively addicting and awesome to play. I couldn't count how many hours I spent shoving quarters into that game.
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