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Atari 2600 - The Home Gaming Revolution Explained · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: Hello Kelly.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Hi Alex.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: You sound tired.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: I would like to talk to you about something that we don't have anymore, but we used to used to be a big deal.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: Cheap goods and uh services from China?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Do you ever kinda do you do you ever think about those kind of things?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: The things that used to be everywhere and now they're nowhere.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's like when you reach uh end of the road and you have to turn around like a dead end.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, like a dead end.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: I know those.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Remember when we first came up with the idea of dead ends?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember what I first called them?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: And how you came up with the word dead end?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: I don't.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: How did that happen?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking, I was thinking like, oh, we should have something like think talk about not just people, because our regular show is called Dirt Knap City about people that don't exist anymore.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then we're talking about let's talk about other kinds of things that don't exist before.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, and I was trying to think of the Dirt Knap City motif of being a city, and I said, I have this idea about calling them cul-de-sacs.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, it just something doesn't sit right, but that's what I picture is like a cul-de-sac where you go in and you just come out and you go, Well, how about dead ends?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because that goes with the dirt the dead part.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: And but I actually came up with a cul-de-sac before the idea of the dead end, but dead makes it funny, and I was just you're a genius for coming up with the word dead end because that definitely thanks, man.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: I just didn't have the want to have the word sack in our um in our show name.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when when uh two people arrive at something that neither one could have done by themselves, yeah.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like Lennon and McCartney right here.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: So this thing that I want to talk about today didn't last as long as I would have thought before I thought a little research on it.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was around a lot longer because it was kind of in our childhood.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, when your kids things seem like they're your childhood seems like it lasts forever.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Really, when your your conscious childhood is only about like 12 years, right?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: From about the time you're four or five until you're like, you know, 16 or 17 or whatever.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's your what you consider your childhood, right?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not very long.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: Or 50 in my case.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or what?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: 50, yeah.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: Or 50 in my case.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to talk about something, and I'm guessing, this is just my guess, based on other conversations we had in the past.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm guessing you didn't have one of these, and you had the either a knockoff version or a better, or what you considered at the time a better version that is like a more lesser-known version.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: Are you gonna talk about Atari?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: I am gonna talk about Atari.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: How did I know that?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because when we talked about iPods, you were like, didn't you have like a Zune or something like that?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're always looking for the other alternative of like the not the thing that everybody has.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_02: You're wanting to you're always searching for a different version.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: I did not have an Atari.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: Did you have a Coleco?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, I I my neighbors had a Coleco vision.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have it in television?
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_03: I had in television.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: I still have I still have it in television.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: Did you have something against Atari?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: Were you just looking for like a better version?
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_03: No, I I I can actually remember this.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: This was like 1978, 79, something like that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: And my parents had bought a originally like a little Pong game.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: It was just, you know, two controllers that hooked up to the TV and you could play Pong.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that was pretty cool.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then they got this game system that had like bowling race cars, and I wish I could remember the name of it.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'll have to I'll have to see if I can figure it out.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_03: But it was it was like it was really wide, it was like the size of a keyboard, and it had nine buttons on either side.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and we played that all the time.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: We played the bowling game a lot on the TV, and then I think I asked for an Atari for Christmas, and then that George Plimpton guy, you remember him?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: He was on the Intellivision commercials.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: He uh he convinced my parents via TV that they should get an Intellivision for me for Christmas in, like I said, in the 79, 80, something like that.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_03: And we played that thing so much.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_03: We played I played Intellivision like a mad fiend.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: As a matter of fact, I know we're talking about Atari here.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: I was terrible at Atari, I didn't like the joystick, but most people hated the disc that Intellivision had.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: It had a little round disc that you used to move around versus a joystick.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so that was my advantage.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_03: I was a master at it because it was mine.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: So how much do you think uh Atari cost?
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna say$199.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, yeah, you're right.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was$199.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know how much that would be today?
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Uh no,$350 maybe?
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: $1,100.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: What year this was eight uh$70 something?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: $75.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: $75.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't think Xbox has cost$1,100 or PlayStation's cost$1,900.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that was more expensive than today's console.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it could play four, the the the the uh the appeal of that was that it could play four different games.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: So the so the 2600 though had cartridges.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: So it came with for$199, you'd get a console.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, wait, wait.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: Was it combat?
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Was that one of the games?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: You'd get two joysticks, two paddles.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember the paddles?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: They had the little pong.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it's two joysticks, the paddles, a console, and combat.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's one of the three games that it supported.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: And you had to buy the other, I mean, one of the four, you had to buy the other three as separate games.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: But it only they only had four games out.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that was 1975.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: They were able, our our guys at Atari, the guys that founded it, were able to sell that to Warner Communications a year later for$28 million.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: Which you know, you think about it, and then that's probably not a lot of money, but it if$199 worth$1,100,$28 million is a lot of money back then.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's like$100 million.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: And they only had to come up with one year of Atari with four games, and they got that.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: So that's pretty good, it's pretty good return.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the you know the term killer app, you know what a killer app is?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it generally just something that um something that everybody wants to use.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's the it's the thing when they talk about killer app, that's the thing that uh the reason that people buy that by the system is for Space Invaders, right?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: Space Invaders was the killer app.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: So everybody bought an Atari so they could play Space Invaders, and that was 1980 that Space Invaders came out.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Sales of Atari consoles quadrupled because of Space Invaders.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was the first video game to sell a million copies.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you think about a million doesn't sound like that much now.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure that I'm sure that uh you know some of the popular Call of Duty or I'm sure that sells a lot more than a million, but this is this is a a thing that didn't even exist, video games.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And you know how older people were back then about video games.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like this is basically for people 15 and under.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and selling a million copies of something that you had to buy a console wasn't like selling a record or you know, you you it was something you had to buy the console to then buy the thing.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and Atari had a 58% of the video game market share.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: So people like you had a television, but 58% of people that had video game consoles had Atari.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the other ones were the Odyssey 2.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: By by then, Magnifox had come out with the Odyssey 2, but it was like Odyssey Squared.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was like stylized to square television, ColecoVision.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, I remember that.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: Now ColecoVision had a cool thing where and I'm surprised this didn't take off more.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, they had an add-on where you could like an adapter where you could play Atari games too on the Coleco, and they had Donkey Kong, so you could play their their like their killer games plus all of the Atari games, and that eventually became a computer called the Adam Computer.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember okay?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Adam was a failure, and Adam Coleco was having all kinds of trouble with the Adam and with the ColecoVision.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: They disbanded it because there was another toy that Coleco came out with that was taking off.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know what that toy was?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: Was that the um the Cabbage Patch Kids?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Cabbage Patch Kids.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: All of a sudden, Coleco owned Cabbage Patch Kids, and Coleco was like this video game company, but they were trying a little everything.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: The Adam computer was doing bad, so they just discontinued all that to concentrate on the cabbage patch kids, which later on I think they sold to Ty or somebody.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Vectrex?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember Vectrex?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Vectrex.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I had a Vectrex um at well, I went to a summer camp where they had one and we could play it during like our breaks, and it was also a um uh vector vector graphics based.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: So they had um this game, they had asteroids that was big on Vectrex because Asteroids was a vector-based game, just lines.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: But then they had this game, um, and I'm trying to remember where what it was called, but you were like a spider going around a circle, and you were shooting down the tunnel, and then and things were coming up the tunnel, kind of in 3D space, and then you could push a button, it would shoot you all the way down the tunnel and destroy everything on the tunnel, and that was a Vectrex game.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I never had a Vectrex or even heard of a Vectrex until today, but when I Googled it, it looked like the it was a standalone console, too.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: It didn't hook to your TV.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I was just gonna say.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think the monitor was included.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: It was like it was like a yeah, didn't hook to your TV.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: It was like a correct TV in itself.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: Was it black and white or color?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was no, it's black and white, black and white vector, vector graphics.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so not a great, not a great deal.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: Not a lot of people are gonna buy a thing that's also a TV.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the part of the appeal of Atari was you hook it on your own TV.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it didn't even work as a TV, it only worked for the game side.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right, right.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: But it seemed like that's a lot to buy for for you know for your family.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: Vectrect.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Now, part of the problem with these any of these video game companies was most of them didn't produce games.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: There was uh there was third-party developers that didn't make a lot for making the games.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um they there wasn't a lot of synergy there, but then there was also like um Activision.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Activision was the big game maker, yeah, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: In 1982, Atari came up with the new model, like you already said, 50 the 5200, and it was incompatible with the 2600, so you couldn't use any of the games from the 2600, and so it was a failure, it did not do well, the the 5200, and then came what we call the video game crash of 1983, and I did not know about this um until recently.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: But I if you would have asked me, I would have thought that video games, you know, this was I was 13, I would have thought I aged out of video games, and I never knew what really happened to them.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: But actually, what happened to them is that everybody stopped playing them.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it was also called another term for this is called Atari shock.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that it was basically in a market saturation, the idea that and we see this a lot in the last few years with certain technologies, right?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: Where everybody that wants one at some point already has one.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: I would say that cyber trucks are in that category right now, right?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Totally market saturation that everybody who wants a cyber truck has already got a cyber truck, and good luck trying to sell it because um they're not appealing to people that don't have one.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Also, in 1983, PCs started coming out, personal computers, yeah, which had their own video games, and you could do a bunch of other stuff with them.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And why would I buy this plus this?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so in 1983, video games were a$3.2 billion industry, and by 1985, video games were a hundred million dollar industry.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, that is a huge drop.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: Boo, boo, poop, poop, poop, poop.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was like exactly like 90% of its it was crazy in 1983.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_02: Atari, I don't know if you've ever heard about this, but they sent 14 truckloads of unsold Atari cartridges to the landfills in Mexico.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know which game was the worst one?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was the E.T game.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that the E.T.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: game almost crashed Atari.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen a number of references today to ET game being um something that people blame for that, but it was more than that.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: Overproduced and and uh overproduced as in made too many of them and very poorly like never finished.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_03: I I was just having a conversation with somebody about this um because Nintendo just released the new Switch.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_03: So the Switch is like a portable handheld game, um, you know, kind of has a HD monitor built into it.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: And um, I think the original Switch came out in 2018, so it's been seven years since the Switch came out.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_03: But what um what's interesting about games now, first of all, there's no physical cartridge, right?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Did you if did you ever blow into a cartridge when it didn't work?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: So no physical cartridge, no disc, it's all download.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: But also now, because all these systems, you know, the Xbox, the PlayStation, the Switch, the Wii, they're all connected to the internet.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: The games can be updated um anytime.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_03: So you can release a game that isn't even quite finished, you know, that still has some bugs or still has some things to add on.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: And did you know that most games today don't make money off the selling of the actual game, they make it off the add-ons, the skins, the in-game the in-game purchases.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: But you know what else you can't do these days?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: You can't just go to the store, buy a game, come home and start playing it.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: Even if you buy it online, you have to wait until it downloads to play it.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: You have to wait and wait.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: You got to set up an account, register.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, you can play you can play online with your friends, but you know what you can't do is have your friends come over and eat pizza rolls and play a game together.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I guess you can.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: But like there's some part of that that's like, yeah, we've improved, but have we really improved?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: I I get so frustrated when a new game will come out and my son and I would be ready to play it, and we have to wait like three hours to play it for it to download.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um well that AOL dial-up modem of yours didn't really do the trick for that.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, these things are enormous, some of these the memory on some of these games.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: So there were 700,000 cartridges, you're saying mostly ET, um, sent to a New Mexico landfill.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: They actually excavated that landfill in 2019 and found because there were rumors that it was like 25 million.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: It was only 700,000, but they excavated all that like in 2019.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Atari took a$500 million loss for 1983 and a$400 million loss just for the second quarter of 1984.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh nobody can survive that.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh uh, I was looking at some of the worst video games of all time here, and there was one here that uh that there was uh one that that uh struck my fancy.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's the Journey Escape video game based on the album.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, Escape by Journey.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_03: I remember that.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: Do you remember that?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: It was an Atari game released in 1982.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: It stars the rock band Journey, and here's the plot for here's from the game's manual.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'll read this from the game's manual.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: You're on the road with Journey, one of the world's hottest rock groups.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: A spectacular performance has just ended.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's up to you to guide each journey band member past hordes of love craze groupies, sneaky photographers, and shifty-eyed promoters to the safety of the journey escape vehicle in time to make the next concert.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: Your mighty manager and loyal roadies are there to help, but the escape is up to you.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the spaceship that you're in looks like the coverage.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, that that's awesome.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's a little piece of nostalgia right there.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: It said the intro tune, when you turn it on, is an excerpt from Don't Stop Believin, but the in-game music is just like generic music that has nothing to do with journey.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: So you get this this game, and the only time you get to hear journey is when you boot it up, and then the rest of the time it's just this lame 1982 video game.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: So are you familiar with emulators?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: The emulators that you can emulators, oh, yeah, emulators.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: So you can play, you can find a lot of these games.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: What's what's interesting also about those games is the the amount of space you were just talking about having to wait three hours to download a game on Xbox or PlayStation or whatever, um, the or on a PC, the amount of space those took up was less than one megabyte, usually.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: It was it was kilobytes.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, these were tiny, tiny files that didn't require much space at all.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: So you can, and by space I mean drive space or memory storage space, you can get these emulators that will play all these old video games.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I have to say, that's my favorite.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like, did you ever play?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: This was an arcade game, but I I have an emulator for it on an Xbox.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_03: Did you ever play Robotron?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: I loved it.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't really much of a video game guy.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I played with Atari in when it first came out.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: I played the ski, the ski had the skiing.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_02: That was my favorite one.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I liked Space Invaders a lot.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: I I you know became obsessed with Space Invaders.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Later on, I I would play uh Sega Genesis at my uh uh then girlfriend, now wife's uh house.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: I play you know Tetris um Sonic the Hedgehog.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: We play and and Mike Tyson's uh Mike Tyson's uh knockout, that was a classic.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then now, you know, on the Xbox, I play Madden and um some of that stuff, but mostly sports games.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um have you ever heard I I'm I'm debating on how much I should really talk about this because it's a lot of this is inappropriate.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm maybe maybe if you're listening, maybe just Google this.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um have you ever heard of the game called Custer's Revenge?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: No, but there was another one called it was somebody's name, but yeah, it was was it a was it like you you had sex with care characters in the game and had to basically, but it's so like the four-bit, you know, the graphics are so bad.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: They weren't graphic, they weren't graphic graphics.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: No, but it was like banned and everything, and it was yeah, it was all this people were going crazy, and then you look at it and you're like, how is this banned?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_02: Leisure suit Larry.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: Leisure suit Larry, yeah.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: Same same kind of deal.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if you want to go, if you want to Google Custer's Revenge, um, you know, that uh that you might be interested in in that, but I'm not gonna get into it because it's both it's both uh sexist and racist at the same time.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right, right.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: There were there were all kinds of all kinds of allusions to different types of people, and yeah, I I do remember hearing about that.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think I think I did play Laser Suit Larry at one point, but maybe that was a PC game.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: Just stupid.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I have a list here of the best-selling Atari uh 2600 video games.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: You want to see if you guys can I take a guess?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, let me ask you real quick did you ever play Adventure?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: No, you were like a little square and you had to slay dragons and find keys.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: So, one of the things I was really into in in middle school and high school was Easter eggs.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: And are you familiar with that term in a game?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: So little hidden things that the programmers would put in.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um adventure had a bunch of Easter eggs in it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I remember I didn't have an Atari 2600, but I had a friend, Chris Schilling.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: He had a he had a I think he's been mentioned on this show before.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: He had a Atari 2600.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I went over there and he like was confused why I didn't want to just play the game.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_03: He had already won the game.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: It was one of these games where once you won it, it was kind of over.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_03: But I wanted to do the Easter egg stuff.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so he was like really annoyed because I'd keep getting stuck in this one spot and he's like, let's do something else.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um and then there was this game uh by um uh it was on the Sega Genesis called Toe Jam and Earl.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_03: Did you ever play Toe Jam and Earl?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well that sounds familiar.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: I I I feel like we might have played that with Alfred, with Al Big Al or Al from Austin, uh and and some of the people that we hung out back then.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: That game had all kinds of Easter eggs in it, and you could actually jump down levels, and if you went down and went through the secret door, you would end up in a hot tub with all the characters from the game, which was which was kind of funny because they all the characters that were trying to kill you in the game were all like chilling in this hot tub, and you could get in the hot tub with them.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: And it would and it would bring your life, your little health meter back to 100%, and then you could get out and go back.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was like a little secret way to yeah.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: I loved it.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_02: You must have gone crazy when you found that.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: So so Top Atari's 2600 games.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'll say Asteroids.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: Asteroids was number six, sold three point eight million.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: Space Space Invaders, of course.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_02: Number two sold six point two million.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, uh, and you said Adventure was you never played Adventure?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_03: Was it on there?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Adventure was number sixteen.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_03: Sold a million copies.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I guess I you know the sports games on a television were way better than the sports games on Atari, but football was that was that one of them?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't see any sports games on this list of the top 25 that I know to be sports games.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what was number one?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: Pac-Man.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, of course.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: And it was terrible.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: It was terrible on the 2600.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: And that's and that's I I read that that was one of the downfalls, too, is that everybody loved playing on the arcade.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but it was nothing.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_03: Sold eight million copies.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: The biggest problem with Pac-Man, and this is getting really specific on the Atari 2600, in the arcade, when you let go of this joystick, it would stop.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_03: Your your little Pac-Man would stop.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: When you when you let go of it on the other game, it just kept going whatever direct we were going until and that really threw you off on that game.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_02: Plus, uh, I feel like when you were snacking, it would mess up your joystick a little.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, some of that food would get in there.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: The home joystick.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: So Pac-Man, Space Invaders.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: Number three was Donkey Kong.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, of course.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: That was also terrible on the 2600.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: Number four was a game called Pitfall.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: That was Activision.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: So that was a game where you were a little adventure, like an Indiana Jones kind of guy, and you're running along.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: It was a side scroller.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: It's called a side scroller, and you're running along, going from screen to screen, and you had to jump over logs and alligators and swing on um vines.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: Did you ever play that one?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Number five was Froger.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Number six was Asteroids.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: Number seven was Defender.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that was also terrible on the 2600.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: Number eight was E.T.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: Number nine was Mispac-Man.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'll take that.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then number ten was a game called Demon Attack.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, I played that.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: Let's see how far I can go before I've come up with a game you haven't heard.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Night Driver?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um Berserk.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_03: Centipede.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_03: Of course.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: Warlords.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: Heard of it?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: Don't know that I played it much, but I'm familiar with it.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: Breakout.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: That was sort of like uh the ping pong game with the ball.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: The aforementioned adventure.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Laser Blast.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_02: Freeway.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's the one where I you have chick- I remember this one.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's like Frogger.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: You have chickens that have to cross a 10-lane highway.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why eggs are so expensive.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Kaboom?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, yep, I remember Kaboom.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yar's Revenge?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yars.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: I yeah.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: That was a very deep game.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and what we haven't talked about is the cover art for the Atari games was really really interesting.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_02: It was like they were like album covers.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: And way better than the actual games looked.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_03: Very disappointing when you looked at the game.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_03: Atlantis?
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_03: And and here's the thing, I think Atlantis was also uh an Activision game, or it was made by a third party.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_03: iMagic.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: iMagic.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: And and so that game was Imagic.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: That was also made for the Intellivision.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: So so the so like Pitfall was on both platforms as well, which was kind of cool.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_03: Cosmic Ark?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_03: Nope.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_02: Mega Mania.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: Raiders of the Lost Ark?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: That was terrible.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah?
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: And and River Raid.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: River Raid?
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um was it like logs you had to jump across?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: Kind of like uh you control a fighter jet over the river of no return.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a fight.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: Flying behind enemy lines.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: You had to navigate the flight by destroying enemy tankers.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: You're right though.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: The the pictures of these really looks cool.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then you plug it in and it's just a bunch of bleeps and bloops.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the the problem was the problem was with Intel or with uh Atari is the processing I think what I think it was an 8-bit processor and and a television was, or maybe it was a 4 and a television was like an 8.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: And television had double the amount of processing power, which still wasn't very much, but that's why and then ColecoVision had double that, and then Sega had double that.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so you got into like a 16-bit and a 32-bit and a 64-bit.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_03: That's why the Nintendo 64, you know, the N64, that was called the N64 because it was a 64-bit processor.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: So they were doubling the speed of the processor every time they'd release a new game system.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_03: But Atari was the original one, so it was dealing with I mean, it was like driving in a F1 race using a you know uh smart car or yeah, Model T, exactly.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, this has been Kelly's salute to Intellivision.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: 100%.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_03: If you if you hey if you own an Intellivision, really woke you up.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: If you own an Intellivision, please uh let me know.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: If you own an Atari, let us know too.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: Not at Dirtnap City.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: I would play anybody in Intellivision baseball, Intellivision, uh pretty much any Intellivision game.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_03: I'll kick your butt.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: This reminds me of the time you wanted to talk to me about Satchel Page.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: As you just totally woke you up, you got super excited.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's thank you.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for it's funny.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: In television, it's actually on my list.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_03: So I was like, oh, should I do that now?
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Cola was on my list, so you got your chocolate in my television.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_03: Bye, everybody.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember that 2600?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Not much more than a circuit board in a wood grain box.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you had a television, you could play it off.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't much, but it was a start.
• 30:12
  unknown: There was a television and the colloco vision.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: The game of backtracks and on and on.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Xbox and PlayStation are so much better.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Atari didn't have the power, but it had the heart.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Atari, it wasn't much, but it was a start.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Atari didn't have the power, but it had the heart understanding.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Tory.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't have the power, but it hurt the heart.