======================================================================= * 30 SECRETS OF ATARI by Steve Bloom ======================================================================= (c)1983 Carnegie Publications Corp. (c)1987, 1989 Public Domain media [Author's note: Here presents information I had compiled through research and interviews with people from Atari, Inc. (a.k.a. the "old" Atari)] While I wrote this article back in 1983, I felt that much of the information would be still interesting today. What is presented here is not an exhaustive list. I used only the information I felt was not common knowledge and some insight on others. Because the magazine that originally published this, Computer Games, (February 1984) is no longer in circulation, I felt that in the best interest of all that I re- acquire publication rights. This is why I have placed this in the public domain for everyone to enjoy. The entire article is unabridged and unchanged from the original published format. Steve Bloom, May 29, 1989. 30 SECRETS OF ATARI: The real story of Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Pong, and Pole Position. FORWARD In its 11-year history, Atari has become one of the biggest, flashy, most influential companies in history. They have had their share of incredible successes and embarrassing failures. Perhaps more than anything else, they have had their secrets. Atari is very tight-lipped. At one point employees were asked to sign confidentiality agreements and use magnetic ID cards to walk through the company's corridors. Aside from the actual cartridges, the public learns little about Atari's games and the people who created them. Until now. We have interviewed dozens of employees of the company, past and present. We have guaranteed them complete anonymity in exchange for a tip, an insight, a never-before-heard anecdote. From these interviews, we have compiled the following secrets of Atari, which are published here for the first time. 1. Nolan Bushnell, Atari's founding father, originally named the company Syzygy (the sun, moon, and earth in total eclipse). He renamed it to Atari because another company already owned the name Syzygy. 2. Bushnell is generally believed to be the author of Pong, Atari's first game. Actually, Magnavox released the Odyssey 100, the first home video game system, which included a game remarkably similar to Pong, several months before Pong's debut in the arcades in 1972. Years later, Bushnell admitted in court that he had seen an Odyssey prototype on display earlier in 1972. The Odyssey 100 was designed by Ralph Baer. 3. Bally/Midway rejected Bushnell's Pong when he demonstrated the game in its Chicago offices in 1972. Bushnell went back to California and started Atari. 4. Given a choice between Mappy and Pole Position, two arcade creations by the Japanese firm Namco, Bally/Midway amazingly opted for Mappy. Atari had to settle for Pole Position, which went on to become the biggest game of 1983. 5. Gravitar was one of Atari's worst-selling arcade games. So they took the game out of the cabinets and converted them all to Black Widow. 6. Mike Hally designed Gravitar. He recently redeemed himself as the project leader for Atari's spectacular Star Wars game. 7. Rick Mauer never programmed another game for Atari after he did Space Invaders for the VCS. He is said to have earned only $11,000 for a game that grossed more than $100 million. 8. Todd Fry, on the other hand, has collected close to $1 million in royalties for his widely criticized VCS Pac-Man. 9. The man for bringing Pac-Man home to Atari- Joe Robbins, former president of coin-op- was severely reprimanded by the chairman of the board Ray Kassar for making the deal with Namco without consulting him. It seems Robbins was in Japan negotiating a legal matter with Namco at the time, and Namco demanded that Atari buy the home rights to Pac-Man as part of the settlement. Pac-Man had yet to take off, but when it did, Robbin's gutsy decision paid off as Pac-Man went on to become the company's best-selling cartridge ever. 10. The man for bringing E.T. to Atari? None other than Warner Communications chairman, Steve Ross. So convinced was he that E.T. possessed video game star quality, Ross paid Steven Spielberg an enormous sum (did I hear $21 million?) for the rights to the little extraterrestrial bugger. Designer Howie Warshaw spun the game out in four months, only three million cartridges were sold and Atari began to announce million dollar losses. E.T. is now selling for as little as $5 in some stores. 11. Warshaw also designed Raiders of the Lost Ark cartridge, and Yar's Revenge, which started out as a licensed version of the arcade game, Star Castle. "Yar" is "Ray" Kassar backwards. 12. One of Atari's most popular early arcade game was Tank, only it didn't say Atari anywhere on the cabinet or screen. Instead, it said "Kee Games," which was another name for Atari from 1973-78. Atari and Kee (named after Joe Keenan, Bushnell's longtime partner) put out identical games in order to create more business for Atari. For instance, Spike (Kee) and Rebound (Atari) were volleyball games that came out a month apart in 1974. 13. Tank was designed by Steve Bristow, who is still with the company after all these years. Most recently, he has been in charge of Ataritel, Atari's telecommunications project which had been code named, "Falcon." 14. Code-names have always been popular at Atari. The VCS was "Stella," the 400 computer was "Candy," the 800 was "Colleen," the 5200 was "Pam." All were named after well-endowed female employees working at Atari (except for Stella, which was a bicycle trade name). 15. And there was "Sylvia," the 5200 that never was. Pam, as everyone by now knows, was a stripped down 400 computer for the sole purpose of game playing. Sylvia was intended to be Atari's answer to Intellivision and was in the works long before Pam was born. But problems developed largely because the 5200 was projected to be compatible with VCS software, which limited the design of the hardware. When push finally came to shove, Sylvia went out the window, and Pam walked in the door. 16. Cosmos, Atari's experiment with holography, was a battery-operated game system that was introduced at a New York press conference in the spring of 1980. Created by Al Alcorn, Cosmos was never to be seen again. 17. Alcorn was the first engineer hired by Nolan Bushnell. His first project was Pong. His second project was Space Race, the forerunner to Frogger. 18. Another project announced was a remote-control VCS. Since it was wireless, you could play games at 30 feet without having to hassle with the console. It too mysteriously disappeared from Atari's catalogue. (Note: it looked almost exactly like the 5200). 19. Nobody in Atari coin-op liked Dig-Dug, the company's first Japanese import, except for Brian McGhie, now with Starpath. It was McGhie who added the finishing touches to Dig Dug. His latest game is Rabbit Transit. 20. Quantum and Food Fight were not designed by Atari. They were the work of General Computer Corp. of Cambridge, Massachusetts. GCC broke into the business selling kits that would speed-up Missile Command. Atari sued and settled with GCC for the above mentioned games. 21. Tempest was originally intended to be a first-person Space Invaders -type game. Then Dave Theurer came up with idea for tubes on the screen. Theurer also designed Missile Command. 22. The first 200 Asteroid machines were actually Lunar Landers. Atari was so hot on Asteroids, that it cut short the production run on Lunar Lander- Atari's first vector game- and released the 200 complete with Lunar Lander art. 23. Asteroids had two incarnations before it achieved its spectacular success. The first, Planet Grab, simply required you to claim planets by touching them with your spaceship. The second version, allowed you to blow up the planets and duel with another ship, Space-Wars style. Only in Asteroids, which came along two years later, did Atari engineer Lyle Rains introduce the concept of floating rocks. 24. Many at Atari, past and present, dispute Rains' claim that he was solely responsible for Asteroids. Ed Logg, who programmed it, and who also had his hand at the design of Centipede and Millipede, is said to be the true mastermind behind Asteroids. 25. One of Ed Logg's game that has never been released in the arcades is called Maze Invaders. 26. Battlezone Ed Rotberg left Atari after he was forced to convert his favorite game to Army specifications. Dubbed the MK-60 by the Army, it included 30 game variations, improved steering and magnification, and simulations of Russian and American tanks. It sold for $30,000. 27. Rotberg joined two other Atari engineers, Howard Delman and Roger Hector, and formed Videa, which not too long ago was bought by Nolan Bushnell for more than $1 million amd renamed Sente Technologies. 28. President of Apple Computers Steve Jobs began his high-tech career at Atari. He was known to walk around barefoot, kick up his dirty feet on executives' desks, and talked continuously of going to India to meet a guru. Not only did he do the latter, he designed Breakout before leaving Atari for good. 29. Before they left Atari, designers Al Miller, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, and Bob Whitehead were working on games that would later become Activision cartridges. Crane's Dragster was a spin-off of the Atari coin-up Drag Race and Kaplan's Kaboom was based on the Atari coin-op Avalanche. 30. Warren Robinett, tired of Atari's policy of no author credit for game designers, decided to sign his game, Adventure, in an obscure secret room in the program. He never told his fellow designers about this for fear of word getting out and he being reprimanded. Ultimately, a 12 year-old in Salt Lake City discovered the room where it was written: "Created by Warren Robinett." To his surprise, Robinett was never punished. He too left Atari shortly thereafter.