Atari VCS / 2600 | The Console that Launched an Industry

this episode is supported by monster joysticks calm level up your Raspberry Pi with our all-in-one arcade kit using genuine San where arcade parts and one click print comm for your photos on canvas acrylic gifts and more local craftsman and global delivery every story needs a beginning and the story of home video game consoles is no different what we have today is not the first it's not even the first generation of video game consoles for the home as we'll discover but it is considered to be the console that kick-started the entire home console industry and something nearly killed it in the process this then is the story of the iconic Atari video computer system let me take you back to 1976 the world is starting to tire of the huge success that is Ataris pong we've all heard of it the 1972 arcade cabinet on one of the earliest examples of an arcade video game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics to simulate a two-player table tennis style game Atari founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney however had been beaten to the idea of pong in another electronic ping pong game built into the Magnavox Odyssey the very first commercial home video game console released earlier the same year in 1972 we'd all be able to identify the Odyssey as a games console by today's standards it has controllers and a console style form factor and it plugs into your TV set to display a mesmerizing three dots on the screen the Odyssey had an architecture of diode transistor logic comprising of only 40 diodes and transistors there was no CPU no scorer mechanism no color and no sound it also had what we'd recognize as cartridges offering 12 games on 6 cards but these weren't really cartridges as we know them they didn't hold games in ROM they were little more than jumpers connecting input pins to output pins in a different formation to set the logic and trigger the behavior of those on-screen dots different behaviors for different games which were complemented by an overlay you stuck on the TV one of those games was tennis looks familiar doesn't it you can now actually participate in television and not just be a spectator boasted the marketing and 100,000 order see buyers did just that Bushnell and Dabney were already invested in the idea of participating with the TV screen haven't created the first arcade video game computer space in 1971 in collaboration with syzygy engineering it was the first arcade video game as well as the first commercially available video game and was based on the 1962 program space war a program which made its way across institutes with the computing power to run it and students willing to sneak it onto the system's wanting to further explore this fledgling arcade market Atari allegedly instructed engineer Alan Alcorn to create a version of the Magnavox Odyssey stable tennis game as a training exercise after Bushnell played at a San Francisco tradeshow before its public release this story Bushnell firmly denies but the infringement of Magnavox his patents was never put to the test as Atari settled out of court for a one-off payment of $700,000 this on the condition that Magnavox agreed as part of the settlement they would pursue any other companies creating table-tennis clones for extremely high royalties the result then was Atari releasing over a thousand pong arcade cabinets in a bright and cocktail cabinet form sold at three times the cost of production it was a tidy profit for Atari and a smash hit with the players the pong cabinets earned four times the revenue of other coin-operated machines such as space war the 700,000 pounds settlement was quickly paid and Atari was on the map with the advantage there having paid the settlement figure they would incur no future licensing costs for pong unlike their competitors while computer space is considered the world's first video arcade game it was the simplicity and social aspect of the two-player pong game which Bushnell attributed to its success this however was still solid-state technology technology Atari didn't initially file patents for and by the time they had fouled them clones were on the market and it was soon estimated that Atari made only a third of the pong coin-operated machines in use clones made by competitors Bushnell referred to as jackals pawns dominance sess was such that Ari's competitors considered the returns were worth paying Magnavox their high royalty fees for and competition wasn't stifled quite as Atari had hoped Atari was fired up though an in response to the clones their solution was to produce more innovative games and new concepts to keep one step ahead in 1975 Atari released home pong selling around 150,000 units through US department store Sears in the holiday season these were initially sold exclusively through Sears under their telly games branding but were later sold as Atari branded devices and of course this too was followed by clones of home pong by competitors and even saw the re-release of that Magnavox Odyssey to ride at our ease wave of success with digital scoring variable speeds Telstar hockey each player controls a goalie plus a forward on the other side oops a gold and Telstar singles handball a game you play yourself the Telstar handball tennis hockey all three at an exciting low price for a great family fun hit your TV to a tell stark buy Coleco some familiar names expanded on the home pong idea including Nintendo's first entry into the home video game market with a color TV game 6 in 1977 six variants of electronic tennis and not a dungaree clad plumber in sight unsurprisingly though as wonderful as it was to participate in television and this first generation of home video games showed us it was possible the world grew tired of pong Atari was still a young and agile company chock full of ideas many of which would come from Ataris Grass Valley think tank in 1974 Atari acquired cyan engineering an electronics company founded by Steve Mayer and Larry Emmons former colleagues of Bushnell and Dabney and started a think tank to come up with new ideas for arcade games we're quite effective in in some ways because we we don't spend a lot of times in meetings and on dog and pony shows there's always getting on with the project Bushnell raised his concern about single game consoles or consoles limited to pong variants and they set about working on a console with multi game support that console would become our Atari video computer system [Music] II think tank quickly identified micro processors would be needed to give the Machine a more general-purpose reprogrammable approach which could adapt to different games and as yet an invented genres but $100 to $300 per CPU it would result in a completely unpalatable retail price undeterred the breakthrough came thanks to MOS technology 6502 cpu introduced at a trade show in san francisco in 1975 attending the show Mayer and Mona decided this was exactly what they needed and were able to negotiate a price of about $8 per chip we'd later see the CPU or variants of it in the Apple 2 Nintendo NES Commodore 64 BBC micro and many many more machines between the mos 6502 and the zilog z80 the touch paper of the home computer revolution would be ignited the newly sourced CPU then was at the heart of the prototype named Stella named after a bicycle no less engineer Jay miner yes that Jay miner considered to be the father of the amiga what is magic to create the TI a or television interface adapter on a single chip quite the improvement over the original wire wrap prototype and that would send the graphics and audio to the TV display a master class in chip size reduction Jay would repeat many times throughout his career this brings us back to 1976 on the next round of prototyping now the 6502 cpu had been swapped out for the 6507 model running up 1.1 9 megahertz this was a cutback variant of the 6502 and was a 28 pin instead of a 40 pin package which could only address up to 8 kilobytes of memory as opposed to the 6502 s 64 kilobytes but that was considered a suitable trade-off for the further cost reductions Atari could enjoy a cartridge slot was added with game stored on roms in interchangeable cartridges each of which could hold four kilobytes of data although 64 kilobytes could be accessed with banks which him and 128 bytes of RAM was present inside the 65 32 riot or Ram input/output timer chip yes that is an acronym within an acronym although additional RAM could be put into the game cartridges if needed J - TI a chip handled the graphics in sound as well as some input duties shared with riot chip to handle the input peripherals including paddles and those iconic Atari joysticks Stella takes all of Ataris boxes and with a little more development testing and refinement Bushnell's baby would be ready to meet the world he did however feel that once it was out in the wild those same jackals would try to clone it reaping the benefits of Ataris research and design costs costs from a fund which was rapidly dwindling as pond continued to lose popularity and the revenue stream dried up Bushnell didn't want the dingo to eat his baby and so made arrangements official or otherwise with integrated chip manufacturers such as MOS to withhold sales of their components to Ataris competitors and then in an instant in November 1976 before Atari system made it to market Fairchild semiconductors introduced the Fairchild video entertainment system for one hundred and $69 95 across North America played tic-tac-toe shooting gallery or just doodle switch video carts and play desert fox switch again its blackjack or play the two built-in games pro hockey or tennis champ channel F for fun the Fairchild video entertainment system just one 69.95 using their own fairchild f8 cpu produced in their own plan Fairchild were not affected by any attempts by Atari to squeeze the competition supply chain Atari had been beaten in marketing the first home video games console with a programmable ROM cartridge and if they wanted any chance of success they had to get stellar on the shelves and fast Atari needed to speed up development to complete the Stella and the only way they would do that would be with a large injection of cash nolan bushnell managed to raise the capital by selling Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 on the understanding that the cash infusion would be used to bring Stella to market and on September the 11th 1977 those very first units rolled out of the factory in Sunnyvale California codename Stella was named the Atari video computer system or VCS and it would go head-to-head with the Fairchild video entertainment system or ves only fetch out in a like Atari trying to pass off their system understandably with an aim so similar to its own so they renamed their system to the Fairchild channel F the second generation of home video games console now well underway let's just recap what we mean by second-generation so we could describe the first generation of video games consoles as having discrete transistor based digital game logic rather than micro processors games which are part of the hardware design and non removable media a gameplay field which occupies only one screen objects on the screen consisting of very basic dots lines or blocks graphics which are mostly black or white or later in the generation games with three or more colors and either single channel or no audio at all compare that then to the second generation in which we find microprocessor based game logic ai simulation of computer-based opponents allowing for single player gaming ROM cartridges for storing games so we're not restricted to the games built into the console gameplay fields able to span multiple flip screen areas blocky or simplistic looking sprites with a resolution of around up to 160 by 192 pixels basic color graphics generally between 2 and 16 colors and up to 3 audio channels what we didn't yet have in the second generation were features such as scrolling tile-based play fields which we find in the third gen so back to our story then the Atari VCS landed in the u.s. in September 1977 with a $200 price tag it wouldn't reach Europe until the following year in 1978 and Japan didn't get a release until May 1983 nine games are available on release including combat which is bundled with the system and the remainder where C battle blackjack indy500 starship streetracer surround video Olympics and basic math seed in me but it's for my schoolwork argument for generations to come two joysticks were also bundled with the system to encourage the two-player social gaming which Bushnell considered to be key to pong success uncertainty did surround the new generation of video game systems with consumers taking time to warm to the additional expense of cartridges as opposed to having systems with games baked right into them the system itself though is iconic and it's simple but distinctive design with these earlier units comprised of black plastics and wood veneer given them the nickname the woody [Music] six witches power the machine on set the TV type to color or black on white select the difficulty for each player allow you to select the game and reset the game and the cartridge slot sits in the middle we computer slamming the game of your choice it is unmistakably an Atari VCS between 350,000 and 400,000 Atari units sold in 1977 before production was moved from California to Hong Kong where a further eight hundred thousand units were manufactured the difference in these models included a slightly more angular shape and a thinner plastic mold on the Hong Kong units our example which was made in Hong Kong weighs less than the earlier american-made unit HO into the thinner mold and therefore plastics it seemed like a good start but with slower than predicted sales in 1978 Atari were left with a surplus of 250,000 units by the end of the year this meant Warner had to bail out Bushnell once again for losses incurred and Nolan Bushnell departed Atari that same year it does seem a shame that Bushnell should have left Atari before the system really took off and the surplus stock came as a result of the numbers he thought the unit would be selling but kill a console isn't going anywhere without a killer app and that was yet to come first there was Warren Robinett game adventure developed in 1978 the action-adventure game introduced a game with virtual space that is to say a game which expanded beyond a single screen and could be explored one flip screen at a time it wasn't Atari's killer app but it certainly caught the public's imagination who collectively marvelled at what might be waiting for them to discover on the next screen just out of sight of the TV set it put clear air between the games of the first and the second gen systems and is credited as having the first ever Easter Egg in a game with this message looking in a hidden room meanwhile disgruntled by their treatment in the company the Fantastic Four Atari game designers David Crane Bob Whitehead Larry Caplan and Alan Miller who had made the system's most successful games to date decided to leave and form their own company to create third-party software for the Atari VCS they called their company Activision and despite many court battles over the years Atari failed to shut them down and they led the way for third-party developers to publish their own titles away from any quality controls which may have existed at Atari as the game's catalog grew so too did confidence in the system licensed conversions of titles in the coin-operated arcades which remember were kick-started by the popularity of Ataris pong and an abundance of third-party titles so a 1 million units of the Atari VCS sell in 1979 Atari grew from strength to strength on the increase in sales of the system and growing software library the Fairchild channel F meanwhile while that never exceeded 32 software releases on 26 cartridges fetch out decided video games was a passing fad and threw in the towel in 1978 although circum International did buy the rights to the system who redesigned it in 1979 to release the channel F system to it was little more than refinements to the original design rather than a true competitor to the more powerful Atari VCS and only six more titles were released for it for a spell then the second generation video games market was handed to Atari before stronger competition came along in the form of the Magnavox Odyssey 2 released in the UK under licence by Philips as this the video pack G 7000 Magnavox then up in their game with a successor to the original Odyssey and in 1980 the mattel intellivision came along but systems which could stand shoulder to shoulder with our Atari VCS and not the only examples of new devices which were now pouring onto the market but it was Atari who continued to dominate into the new decade a men.there killer app game [Music] in 1980 Atari licensed to tato space invaders which massively increased the unit's popularity its graphics and game logic were identifiable as the arcade smash and playable on the vcs's chunkier display sales doubled to two million VCS units for every VCS sold of course multiple cartridge sales followed and it was through the cartridge revenue from this ever-expanding user base that Atari grossed a whopping two billion dollars in 1980 cartridges set Atari back around four dollars fifty to six dollars to produce with an extra $1 thrown for marketing on top of that they then wholesaled them at $18.95 would double again for the next two years and by 1982 ten million units had sold and the best-selling game was pac-man which sold seven million units will come back to him shortly it was in the same year 1982 that the successor to the video computer system was released the Atari 5200 this was in line with Ataris new naming standards and so the VCS was renamed to the Atari 2600 video computer system or just the Atari 2600 as most of us know it today despite the release of the successor to the VCS or 2600 it's life was far from over in 1982 production costs were down to just 40 dollars per unit with a resale price of 120 dollars the mark-up was just too tasty to ignore an Atari would continue to drive down production costs all the way through to its official retirement on the 1st of January 1992 even here in the UK I remember Atari were pushing the 2600 jr. for 50 pounds in 1989 this at a time when the Atari ST Commodore Amiga or soon the Sega Megadrive would be fighting it out to be on your Christmas list but by then it was this system well past its prime an aging rock star scraping some money together for unpaid taxes and like an aging rock star it had a few facelifts along the way the lighter plastic molding of the Hong Kong model in 1977 was followed by the 1980 model which moved two of the six switches to the rear of the console 1982 then saw the release of the all-black model nicknamed Darth Vader when the 2600 name was introduced and can finding the woodgrain to the 1970s alongside Burt Reynolds mustache exactly where they belonged 1986 then solder cost-reduced Atari 2600 arrived nicknamed the junior in which the architecture was greatly simplified and components consolidated to reduce production costs even further retirement comes to the best of us and after 14 years and four months of service the Atari 2600 was officially retired in 1992 a record it held onto until the Sega Master System surpassed it owing to that system's seemingly immortality in Brazil an Atari held the record for the best-selling american-made console with 30 million sales in the US until Microsoft's Xbox 360 surpassed it with 84 million units the final licensed Atari 2600 game in North America was secret quest in 1989 and in Europe it was acid drop in 92 although there have been subsequent releases of previously unpublished games unearthed in more recent years such as pick up and action notes by Rob full-up so this one leaves an important question what was the legacy of the console was it a game changer or was it simply game over we know it made the company a lot of money and that it proved video games were a serious and profitable business and not just the passing fad Fairchild mistook it for but was it all positive there are very few systems of which it can be said shape to the industry but that's exactly what the VCS did not just its approach to hardware which Fairchild proved wasn't unique to Atari but in marrying that hardware to software people wanted and survive in those initial years after release to capitalise on the new wave of mega hits in the coin-operated arcades space invaders pac-man Mario Brothers Missile Command centipede Galaxian asteroids defender pole position they all made it from the bustling arcades into your home on Ataris console but there was another library of games for the system those third-party games we mentioned not necessarily by Activision as they were proven and professional programmers looking for deserved recognition but by enabling third-party developers to produce titles for the system without the quality control system Sega and Nintendo would introduce for their later home consoles well anything goes and anything did go including a range of pornographic games by the company mystique the most notorious being Custer's revenge which depicted General Custer performing unspeakable acts on tied up Native American women it was distasteful in the extreme and as Atari was strongly associated with all cartridge releases and not just his own titles it was very damaging to Ataris brand but the biggest trauma Atari suffered was of its own making hot off the back of the successes of space invaders and asteroids Atari ported pac-man so confident were Atari of pac-man sales potential then they produced 12 million cartridges of it in 1982 this at a time when the total console sold was 10 million 12 million carts for 10 million systems what could possibly go wrong and perhaps making it a good game would have certainly given it a fighting chance but it was critically panned even so it did manage to shift an impressive 7 million copies making it the best-selling title to date but that left Atari with two major issues 5 million units of excess stock and rising as customers were returning the game in its droves and a large user base was now disenfranchised by a terrible port of a massively popular arcade hit this was followed up by the infamous film adaptation of ET the extra-terrestrial which was written in just five weeks despite costing Atari twenty five million dollars to get the license it was rushed out because they wanted it released in time for the holiday period Atari produced five million cartridges of which 1.5 million sold and huge numbers were once again returned because unsurprisingly the five-week development time made for a shockingly bad game this loss of confidence from gamers combined with Ataris overconfidence in production played no small part in the perfect storm which we call the North American video game crash and the Japanese call it atari shock in 1983 and the Atari VCS being the most popular system bore the brunt of it there were of course other factors including the increased competition from the new console manufacturers entering the market which saturated it and greater interest in the personal computer market with the Apple 2 Commodore pet trs-80 and the Terry's own home computers gaining traction in North America whatever the reason it shook the industry in the US for two years and it took the Nintendo NES and the third generation of video game consoles to restore consumer confidence in the u.s. games industry in 1985 in the UK and much of Europe well life and gaming continued as we'd leaned more towards microcomputers for both work and gaming but we would soon benefit from the lessons of the crash learned by say you're a Nintendo as their third generation systems gained popularity in our region Atari and the VCS did make it out the other side of the crash and it continued to sell at a slower rate as a previous generation cheaper alternative to current tech through to its retirement in 1992 the Atari VCS for 2600 will always be remembered as the system which brought the gaming industry to the masses in their homes the system which proved it was better than its pong heritage and that programmable microprocessor based consoles with interchangeable cartridges were definitely the future if unlike Fairchild you put out the games people actually wanted to play and the marketing through which to sell them it gave players immense pleasure in bringing arcade smashes into their homes and occasionally the disappointment of not quite pulling it off we're talking about you pac-man and whatever party played in creating the storm of the u.s. videogames crash he did emerge battered and bruised but it lived on for another seven years post crash and you can't deny that style in that joystick and that wood grain it would always look incredible the Atari VCS wasn't the first of its kind but it was the most influential of the 70s and early 80s shaping a brand new multi-billion dollar industry which lives on today and whose heritage can be traced back to it and the efforts of the team who created it and for that I think it deserves our appreciation thank you for watching and take care [Music] you [Music]

Channel: RMC - The Cave

Views: 137,151

Keywords: Atari vcs, Atari 2600, video game crash, Atari shock, console history, Atari history, Nolan bushnell, retro man cave, retro gaming

Id: ELGQZF1xRVE

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 01 2018