The messed up history of ATARI! (PONG!, 2600, Asteroids & Centipede)

attention shoers the new Atari cartridge game is in the Atari 2600 is one of the most recognizable video game consoles of all time it was a dominant force in the Home console market during the second generation of consoles and before this Atari was also destroying the arcades 2 in today's video which is sponsored by G fuel's Atari 2600 plus collector's box link down below I plan to look into the history of how this company came to be there's a lot of unknown unfortunate and downright incorrect information when it comes down to the birth of Atari and some of their more popular first party titles such as pong asteroids and centipede and today again thanks to G fuel's awesome collector set which includes four incredible flavors inspired by the 2600 plus itself the company's first arcade game pong and a couple more popular titles those being asteroids and Centipede 2 which are all housed in this stunning 2600 plus box with a keychain and unique Tumblr which yes looks just like a cx40 plus joystick amazing yep thanks to those guys I'll be looking into the entire origin story of the original 1977 Atari 2600 as well as those free games but in order for us to do that exact thing we need to go back to the beginning back to the early 1950s where a young 14year old old Alan Alcorn from San Francisco who was still at Junior High School got himself a job at a TV repair shop fixing up burnt out vacuum tubes in TVs as the years went on Allan continued to hone his electronic repair skills effectively becoming the guy that could fix virtually everything that was sent his way which is how he eventually paid for college as those college Years went on Allan went ahead and got himself a what would be now known as an internship but back then it was nothing more than a a job a job that allowed him to continue paying for college for the next 6 months and the company he worked for during this time was Ampex a leader in audio tape technology developing many analog recording formats that remained heavily in use during the 1990s and as you can imagine for someone that had spent a heavy portion of their life fixing up TVs and radios this was right up Allen's Street working at anex gave Allan the drive he needed to not only try harder but more importantly to create create with the small team he was assigned to that included Nolan Bushnell and Ted [Music] Dabney now Ted was someone that came from the Marine Corp where he was able to take electronic courses which helped him blackag his way into a job at the Bank of America who at the time was one of the world leaders of electronic recording machine accounting it's essentially automated bankbook keeping all of this was very new in the 1950s before he moved on to a roll at HP and then of course aex himself and as for Nolan Bushnell well he was someone that after almost burning down his parents' garage as a youngster by unsuccessfully creating his own rocket fuel studied electronic engineering and at the same time was also switching out tubes in broken TV sets himself for a different repair company all of this before he got himself a job at an arcade at the Lagoon Amusement Park in Salt Lake City and this was all supposedly because he lost his tuition money in a poker game now when I say arcade I don't mean the typical retro arcade you'll probably thinking of you know ones filled with Pac-Man Space Invaders and obviously moon walker you know all the usual arcade Staples no unsurprisingly back then it was very different as obviously none of these games existed yet arcades were filled to the brim with pimble machines dartboards loud music and of course plenty of electr mechanical machines too better known in the industry as elers and back then he not only learned how to quickly fix these bowling horse riding baseball and rifle elers but he would also need to entice people up to play more typical ring toss Carnival light games too one interesting history piece that I absolutely door from this part of the story and it really does go to show what kind of a person that Nolan Bushnell was was when he would buy up broken old arcade machines from Lagoon Amusement Park he would fix them up and then put them in frat houses sharing the profits with the house manager Mr Bush now sure did know how to make money and as he became more and more interested in mechanical gaming it wasn't long before he discovered quote unquote video gaming too in the late 60s if you wanted to connect a computer up to a telephone or to a video screen you could only do it in three places the University of Utah MIT or Stanford Nolan Bush now interview next Generation luckily for him Stanford was the college that he attended and after he too moved to aex he decided to take that small Ampex team back to his college to show them one of the world's first video games space War a game that he had spent the last several years becoming completely addicted to now originally the plan was to show them this game and then try and work out how they could recreate it and turn it into some sort of ela but obviously with a screen and more importantly a coin slot again Nolan was always obsessed with trying to find the next ingenious way to make some money in fact Carnival type pizza parlors were one of the first business ventures that Bushnell and Dabney had explored venues that would be filled to the brim with El and cheap pizza where people of all ages would love to go and celebrate a grease filled birthday party but they soon realized just how expensive that would be so their sites went back to space War I'm sure they'll cover the pizzza arcade thing a little later on in the [Music] story it was around this time when Nolan convinced Dabney to try and recreate that space war game which is exactly what he did after kicking out his daughter from her bedroom to sleep in the living room and then turn her living quarters into his space wars HQ it wasn't an easy task as stated you could only ever run space War at three different places around the world and that was because of its extreme cost to run it either way they did it and as quick as Dabney could solder down that last diode Bushnell had already got a contract to make the first true arcade machine which is exactly what he did and and it was a [Music] failure you see the problem with scg's computer space which is the terrible name of their company and the name of their space war clone was that it was just too complicated to play you got to remember no one had ever played an arcade game before [Music] perhaps failure is a bit of a stretch sure it didn't make the money that they expected but it did sell just over 1,000 units which still validated Si's belief in the future of arcade games before the term arcade games had even been coined sorry now by this point as you may have already guessed Dabney and Bushnell had left Ampex they were working at Li their new company and that company was working with another company called nutting who were Distributing their space war clone but when the computer space didn't meet nutting's projected expectations the duo left and then started working on a simpler game this time contracted by Bal yes the pinball people and because of this that contract stated that they needed to make a pinbal game and a quote unquote video game too Dabney went off to create the pimble machine and Bushnell went back to anex and got his old team member Alan Alcorn to create the video game the plan was to create a driving video game of some sort but after playing a demo of the soon to be released Magnavox Odyssey the first commercially released home video game console where you control a paddle moving up and down bouncing a projectile back and forth and back and forth he decided to get Alcor to basically just recreate that in his mind if Alcor could go off and recreate this game he could then use this as a starting point to go off and make whatever this driving game would become and that's what Alor did after two to 3 months he created a table tennis like game that was controlled by two dials that would move paddles up and down bouncing a square white dot back and forth and back and forth until one side missed upon playing this dadne instantly knew they had something here when that dot hit the top of the paddle it would go up when it would hit the bottom of the paddle it would go down and if it hit the middle it would go towards the center this was a true game of skill it had a score to keep people interested and it even had variable speeds too all it needed now was sound and after alorn went back and added in some bleeps and bloops well that was the icing on the [Music] cake [Music] since I was under the impression that this was to be a real product I've worked hard to make it playable and inexpensive VG Network Al alorn interview now before carrying on with this video I think that this is a great place to stop and show off a few of the flavors found within this G fuel collector set first up is pong's blue raspberry and yes even though this is a history piece on the original 2600 the other flavor is based on the 2023 released 2600 plus and as this is a sponsored video I'm also obliged to tell you that gfuel is zero sugar and therefore provides heaps of Pure Clean energy without the horrendous crash that comes from those horrible knockoff energy drinks that I personally became addicted to a few years back so again for me personally that's great okay so uh yeah let's try out some of these flavors obviously I would be using this uh the Atari cup and is awesome it's so hard not to constantly move this around like a joystick uh but to save myself constantly having to clean this up we've got some glasses from around the world and let's start with this one here the Atari 2600 plus flavor which is the red explosive fruit gummy let's try it oh [Music] M yeah I like that that's nice that's nice it's um tastes very much like like um like like Penny sweets I suppose on the same level as I don't know kind of like love hearts I suppose it's nice it's nice I've got a lot to drink actually I'm going have a bit more of that one yeah that's nice yeah I like that I like that okay so that's what an Atari 2600 plus tastes like apparently now next up let's have a look is it this one okay so we've got pong here uh which is blue rasbery let's give that a go okay that's nice as well that's good I mean this is a sponsored video take take from this from what you want this what does that taste like I suppose if you've had other any of your drinks that are like that blue flavor that blue raspberry flavor I mean yeah that's kind of what this tastes like that's good I think I'm more of a fan of the Atari 2600 plus flavor um which is a good thing I've got more servings of that one um but yeah anyway there you go there are those two flavors let's carry on with the video and we'll get back to to centipede and asteroids they're back to centipede and asteroids a little later on in the video a long night of playing winner stays on between the three of them commenced as the trio got better and better at their new game however Bushnell as much fun as it was for him still wanted a driving game thankfully Dabney convinced him otherwise continuing to reconfirm that this is fun it took some convincing but they eventually wore him down the only thing left to do was to come up with a name it started with ping pong of course and then just ping which they decided against as that's the name of a golf club company which obviously left pong 12 machines were quickly manufactured of the classic game and now under their new company name Atari which is a term that came from the popular strategy board game go the duo started to send out test units to bars such as handicap's Tavern in California and if the legend is true shortly after installing that first ever pong machine Atari got an angry call from the tavern owner claiming that the machine was broken and that his patreons were upset because they couldn't play it anymore and when the engineers got to The Venue to repair it it was quickly discovered that the reason for this malfunction was because it was so full of money and that was the reason the machine stopped working in words pong was a massive massive hit now wouldn't it be great if that was true it's one of Gaming's greatest feel-good stories um but the problem is when I create these videos I try and go to as many sources as I can to get the correct information unfortunately with the history of Atari there are quite a few conflicting stories as to what happened and now it's basically up to you to decide decide which story is true because with that in mind according to the book all your base are belonged to us by Harold Goldberg it states that after speaking with Lonnie reita who was Bushnell's longtime assistant that the whole story was faked and according to her employees of Atari went to the bar themselves and filled up the machine with a crazy amount of quarters before sitting back and waiting for that bar manager to call and well the rest is history honestly I'm happy either way was this all just a madeup story to raise awareness on atari's first proper arcade game or was this game simply that popular well it doesn't matter either way because there was no getting away from the fact that just how popular and legendary pong would eventually become the entire first generation of video game consoles was pretty much nothing but variations of pong and even though technically atari's Edition wasn't the first similar to Doom in the first person realm it was so perfect at what it did that everything else whether it came before it or not was known the world over as nothing more than pong clones and arguably more impressive than all of this was that it ignited the arcade gaming scene but more importantly for this video it ignited Atari there was still some way to go before Atari would be come the household name themselves and even though pong was very much enjoyed the patent for the game took so long to clear that before you know it pong itself was copied in fact it's believed that the original pong and its various forms only made up for about 13 of the pong type machines that were out there in the 1970s which as you may have guessed severely undercut the entire Pon clone Market as a whole and of course by the tail end of the' 70s Bor The General en public too in other words there was about 1,000 variations of pongs in the arcades and eventually the same amount in the homes too hey Chris what are you doing playing a little handball now there's more to Sears Tel games than just Pawn hey Gramps you want to play some catch okay now Sears has a whole line of T games hi Gramps can I play sure let's play Super P doubles and some tele games have remote controls so up to four people can play a whole variety of games Bo you got it you got it t games electronic games sold only at Sears not only did Atari themselves release a pong home system at Sears under the tailstar name but it's worth pointing out that even Nintendo had jumped onto the pong bandwagon with their first ever console the color game six in Japan pong doubles rebound super pong ping pong these are not third party clones these are just just some of the official clones or sequels I suppose from Atari themselves who were losing the Public's interest more and more with every release there's no getting away from it as legendary as pong was it was time to move on San engineering was the company that Nolan had purchased to help make something new and after they did that exact thing with the buggy mess of a release that was Grand track 10 which was finally the driving game that Bushnell had always wanted game that was accidentally sold for less than it cost to make due to an accounting error it looked as if the Atari company was on its way out in a desperate attempt to save his company Nolan Bushnell who had now parted Ways by this point with Ted Dabney started setting up short Retreats for his Engineers filled with booze and marijuana in an attempt to help them relax and hopefully come up with some new ideas and plenty of fresh ideas came from these sessions including that earlier mentioned tailstar console the precursor to Simon which was atari's touch me yes Simon was a stolen idea too and even an arcade game that included a rifle where you would shoot ducks a Whole Decade before Nintendo did the same thing on the NES one of the more impressive things that Nolan did during this time was to form yet another company called key games it was named after his neighbor called Joe Keenan and Joe Keenan was the manager of that company however the connection between the two was done in secret and was done to get around exclusivity deals held by Arcade owners as well as giving Atari control over some of the Clones that key games would secretly produce you see whilst satari were struggling to come up with new game ideas that would be on the same level as pong key games were doing great selling pong Club loans and then giving that money back to Atari it got so good for key games that they even eventually started making a few games of their own including tank tank was one of the games made by the company and was just simply so popular that it did what Atari was struggling to do it saved the company and it was partly because of this that Atari knew better than they ever did before that video games good video games were going to be the company's strong points just as long as they were good because of this that chilled out booze and drug filled party-like nature became even more commonplace at Atari so that they could come up with these new Fantastical and fresh ideas before you know it word would spread and Atari became known as a pretty awesome place to work with its motto work hard and party harder the following years were great great for Atari they pumped out some real Stoners arcade gaming was alive and Atari was leading the way however one thing bugs Bushnell and that was the cost of making these games spending upwards of $100,000 to produce and manufactur just one game that more often than not was old news a few months later because of this San engineering who was now a subsidiary of Atari started working on another home system that would allow for inter changeable games as early as 1975 the problem was that chips like the Motorola 68,000 which would have been the best to use for this project cost roughly $100 each and therefore would have been way too expensive for the general public thankfully in September of that same year Chuck pedal a former employee of Motorola made a deal with San to sell his newly designed MOS 6502 microprocessors for only $8 a piece and with that they finally had what they needed to work on the Atari VCS then known simply as Stellar named after a bicycle one of the guys was riding As Time moved on it was apparent that Atari was going all in on this new reprogrammable console they ended up moving the team that were working on it over to California to work directly with the Atari R&D team it was all systems go over time that 6502 got replaced with an even cheaper chip the 6507 and before you know it it was evident that Atari was once again running out of money tank and most definitely pong by this point along with all of their sequels was simply just not bringing in the money needed to keep this thing afloat add that with the fact that the Fairchild channel f system had just been released which was the first ever console that allowed the player to change games with ROM cartridges and Nolan Bushnell was once again panicking he was almost out of money and now his Stellar project was no longer first to Market because of this he reached out to Warner who at the time were looking for new Ventures as their 7-in record sales had been declining for many years and before you know it Atari was sold to Warner for $28 million and as soon as the acquisition was complete 100 million instantly got injected into finishing Stella it was very much a match made in heaven a AR's rock and roll nature were now being looked after by a well predominantly a rock and roll music company and then in 1977 Stella was finally released under the new name the Atari video computer system better known as the Atari VCS and I mean it did all right the Atari video computer system is 20 cartridges with 1300 game variations you play on your own TV set don't watch television tonight play it surprisingly out of the gate the Atari VCS wasn't the runaway success that bush now and Warner had predicted in those early days sure it stood out amongst the competitors but again the majority of its games were not too far away from tank and pong games which as great as they were they were old news Atari needed a new killer app and as more and more programmers jumped on board they continued to look for said app eventually that so-called app did come in 1978 although it wouldn't affect the Atari VCS until 1980 the arcade phenomenon that was Space Invaders was that game but of course in those early years it was still an arcade exclusive and before it single-handedly tripled the sales of atari's Home console just like every successful game before it it spawned a whole heap of copycats and space themed games one of which was of course the 1979 classic asteroids again originally started its life in the arcades asteroids is a game where you dodge and shoot down well asteroids that float about in a wraparound screen until you take them all down and it was a massive massive hit for Atari in the arcades unsurprisingly the game was heavily inspired by the earlier mentioned computer space game and a stated Space Invaders and just like the oscilloscope that displayed earlier versions of space War asteroids was also designed in the arcades to use vector graphics too it truly was a sight to behold and like all vector-based arcade games it just can't be replicated even to this day even on the highest End video game console if you're ever in a retro arcade make sure you do yourself a favor and go and check out one of these games like asteroids [Music] in fact this game was so popular that it did The Unthinkable by 1980 asteroids had taken over Space Invaders as the dominant arcade game making it atari's bestselling arcade game of all time thankfully that same year Space Invaders did come back in a big way but this time in the homes on the Atari VCS making that console a household name and only one year later asteroids also hit the console and was once again a massive seller for the now dominant force in fact Asteroids for the Atari VCS for the time was also quite legendary it was one of the first games ever for the system to use Bank switching a technique that increases the ROM size from 4 kilobytes to a whopping 8 kiloby the only sad thing about all of this was that Nolan Bushnell had already left the company by the time all of this had blown up as he was looking into Ventures new remember that old Carnival Pizza idea he had before pong was even a thing well when Warner took over Atari whilst they were looking around at what they could acquire Noland opened up the first ever chuckecheese in 1977 but when the company refused to open up anymore he bought the rights off them left the company and well that's a story for another [Music] time and I think that's a good place to stop so in the War of the World Cup which you can't really see cuz this is a very dark color we have one that I made way too much of I don't know how much energy drink I'm supposed to be drinking tonight but yeah this is the asteroids flavor the actual flavor is sour grape sour grape um yeah that's what asteroids taste like apparently so let's uh this a going oh wow okay that's my favorite flavor oh I could drink that I could drink a lot of that that's that's nice um sour grape I don't know how else to take explain the taste it's kind of what I expected that's really nice that's a good one I really that's that's the best one anyway let's move on to uh the final one on here uh which also may be my favorite actually uh the centipede flavor which is strawberry pineapple and coconut let's have a look uh in carsland from California let's have a look oh no that's that's the best one that is the best so it goes like this that is that is without a doubt a best that that tastes like a a really good high quality fruit juice um sort of mix flavors that you get you know like those smoothie mixes that's really nice I could drink that one all day long so you've got first place second place third place and that was my favorite for a while and then fourth place uh and I mean they're all good um but yeah this this one's beautiful that is what centipede asteroids pong and the Atari 2600 plus tastes like thank you g fuel for sponsoring this video um not going to keep you guys any longer than this um there are links down below All That Jazz as described but for now let's carry on with this video if you guys want to get this there it is right there it's an awesome box set an amazing collector set for any Atari 2600 and 2600 plus fan um yeah this is awesome thank you guys uh let's carry on with the video centipede once again started its life in the arcades and was partly created by Ed long from asteroid Fame and Connor Bailey one of Gaming's first ever female superstars now in all fairness she wasn't the the first female full-time video game designer that honor is believed to have gone to Carol Shaw who also worked at Atari and created the game tic-tac-toe for the VCS but still it's quite the achievement upon arriving at the company Donna looked over a notebook of game ideas most of which were heavily space and shooting themed thanks asteroids however when looking over she did see one game design where you would shoot bugs she thought to herself it doesn't seem bad to shoot bugs so she went with that it was this different approach to game making that would ultimately make centipede stand out against the competition working similar to Space Invaders to a degree a game that inspired Donna to create games in the first place you take control of the bug Blaster at the bottom of the screen and shoot up through a mushroom field play field in order to take down the centipede that is bouncing back and forth and back and forth towards you with great speed if you shoot the head of the centipede it will get smaller but if you shoot the center the centipede splits in half forcing you to fight against multiple centipedes at the same time and if that wasn't unique enough after testing the game with buttons similar to Ed log's Asteroids game she quickly discovered that buttons and eventually a joystick was just not the best way to go about controlling the bug Blaster countless hours of testing bought with it the track ball which was perfect for a quick game like this add that with the theme and pastel like colors that sent a is known for and what you have is a title that not only stands out but attracts one of the biggest demographics since pong itself centipede became one of the bestselling arcade games for Atari ever released and has now become a staple of the golden age of arcade games going up alongside things like Frogger Pac-Man and of course Donkey Kong [Music] Atari were forc to be reckoned with not only in the arcades which was a pretty tough fight for them to be fair but as the competition grew in those sweaty grimy and of course now those cheap pizza of fied venues the Home Market was completely dominated by Atari and the vast vast majority of that competition in the arcades did eventually find their way into the home onto the company's now rebranded Atari 26 00 video computer system better known these days as simply the 2600 thank you once again to atarian gfuel for supporting the channel and allowing me to make this not so short history piece once again if you want to go get yourself the Atari 2600 plus collector set from gfuel links can be found down below once again that set includes 40 servings of Atari 2600 plus red explosive fruit gummy flavor and 15 servings of pongs blue raspberry asteroid sour grape and centipedes strawberry pineapple and coconut energy tubs add that with the incredible display box the 24 oz double wool stainless steel cx40 plus joystick Tumblr and the Atari system keychain and what you've got is one seriously cool [Music] set it's beautiful three out of this world games from Atari the number one video computer system with more games than any other everyone's atar and as stated thank you g for sponsoring this video and allowed me to make this history piece on Atari I really really enjoyed uh looking into the history of Atari and I'm really proud on how the video turned out thank you guys so so much if you guys want to check out the Atari 2600 plus collector's box there's a link down below it's not a affiliate link or anything like that but it does tell them the fans of the show are actually clicking that link so go and check it out it really does help the show uh if you guys go and check that out thank you so so much um but yeah on top of that let's also give a massive shout out to all of the patreons and the YouTube members that allow me to make videos every single month with an extra big shout out going to uh boots and Bop the sneaky feret vus vanes James de action Saxon uh R VP Jay's Manchild Clan Bob Mike valin Nicholas burner Chev Matic Jabba Al Aiden uh Benjamin guy Richard aldii shadow dragon wobbles and be the Wonder Ducks Dena Ye Old hamburgler Jeff meowski bran Perez Conrad Constantine um Andrew doton retro to NextGen AKA Lou Paul float Ryan berford Casey samples VPS data siril son Steven Derek Cuda atima 84 John Rogers Matt Jackson Ian quell Arista Dina 81 mind of the unsane and vik Echo I didn't put it in alphabetical order and it threw me off look thank you guys for supporting the show for as long as you have I really really do appreciate it if you guys want to get your name shown uh that you see like down there on the bottom of the screen plus the videos like this early I think this one went up like almost a month early for patreons uh and YouTube members then yeah links are down below anyway thank you guys for supporting the show for supporting the show this is DJ slope signing out and hopefully I'll see you all next time [Music] [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Slope's Game Room

Views: 11,998

Keywords: slopes game room, dj slope, SGR, Review, Opinion, the complete history, daniel ibbertson, slopes gaming room, franchise, atari 2600 music, atari 2600, atari vcs, atari history, history of the atari 2600, nolan bushnell, retro gaming, video games, atari 2600 games, atari 2600 commercial, atari 2600 plus, pong, asteroids, space invaders, centipede, millipede, atari 2600+, g fuel, gfuel, atari 2600+ review

Id: HipJrFXYtEU

Length: 35min 56sec (2156 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024