Hey everyone, after positive responses on a thread about Donkey Kong 3 I made a some days ago, I decided to go full on with these more intricated threads that aren't all just sales.
During my high school - college years I wrote plenty of essays about videogames, mostly about its history so, here you got the first one of them all, I wrote over a dozen of them so I'll try to post them here every other week. Its quite a mouthful, but I'd appreciate if you read it all.
So, Atari was one of the fastest growing companies ever in America, nobody had ever seen nothing like it and it was this new exciting bussiness and people for the first time realised videogames were going to be big thing, but the implosion was so massive and so quick that nearly destroyed videogames entirely.
Atari was sort of like the dark side of hippie culture, bunch of dudes working at warehouses, bunch of stoners, some really talented programmers. Come in 1976 they're already in production of the VCS which was later named the Atari 2600.
They had this idea for a console with interchangeable cartridges and they want to get it out on the market, but Fairchild Semiconductors, this other million dollar company obviously into semiconductors, pulls one out (called the Fairchild Channel F) and Atari sees it and they say we gotta get out there now before this hits it big, this is our idea.
That's Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs when they worked for Atari.
So what they did is, they went to Warner and they said, hey! come in with us, buyout our company and puts some money and we can put out this thing, we'll make a lot of money together, so Warner puts like $30m to buy the company and around $100m to get this thing out on the market before the big holiday season.
So ultimately Atari selling themselves to Warner worked because you've never heard of Channel F, but, that sales and tha success came with a price. Realistically hippie culture that permieated Atari wasn't conducive to making profits and the needed to go through some changes, so Nolan Bushnell, he's the founder (he also started Chuck E. Cheese) he gets forced out, Warner then beams in Ray Kassar from corporate HQ and he's a total butt down suit and tie guy and he's going to turn everything around and make this a traditional by the numbers company, no more cooming in at noon, no more smoking the reefer in the office.
It was a culture clash and in a lot of ways it destroyed what made Atari so great in the first place.
So, from this starting irritations, like having to wear socks in the office, other probles grew out of that, the guys that were making the games, they were getting paid maybe 30 grand a year and they would say, hey I'm making this game, you just made $10m dollars off of it, can I get a little bonus, something extra? No, nothing.
Kassar wouldn't let the people who made the games take any credit for their work , like their names weren't mentioned on the game anywhere, they were just basically programming monkeys and the credit went to Atari.
Game design at this point is maybe not appreciated as the art it is today, even today some people see games as just programing, but its not there's a lot of choices to be made on a creative level and they didn't really understand that at the time, so the designers weren't particularly well paid or respected.
Atari's top game makers went to the brass to try to get more money, royalties off of the games they made and it never worked out, so a lot of the top designers left Atari and went to make their own company, the result was Activision, then under Activision they start to make games for the Atari 2600, which nobody saw coming, Atari certainly didn't see it coming, this had never happened before and mind you it was a big thing. Atari never thought that that could happen, that the designer could leave.
Its not like it was just some guys leaving Atari, it was the best guys leaving Atari and they were making some great games, like RiverRaid, like Pitfall, Activision was making better Atari games than Atari. And now the creators earned royalties on the sales of their games, so people were more invested in the work they were producing, it all seems like a no brainer.
David Crane that created Pitfall, the game's actually called Daved Crane's Pitfall just like Francis Ford Copolla's The Godfather, he put his name on it, it was his work.
The crazy thing is, within 2 years after showing up Atari became the fastes growing company in history the US, and in 1982, Activision replaced Atari as the fastest growing comapany in the history of the US.
Well that just opened the floodgates, then everybody in their cousin started a gaming company and started making games for the Atari 2600 , once Activision's out there and people realize hey! I can get rich making games for the Atari, they still needed to learn the same lesson Ray Kassar did, videogames are an art form, you can't just make one with no thought, you need the right people to do it, and there's just a flood of terrible, terrible games for the Atari to the poing where it becomes impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, you don't know which are the good ones and which are the bad ones, people start to think that Atari is garbage, because that's what most of the things on their system were, garbage.
With all this really bad games flooding the market, Atari says, we need to do something to cut through the clutter, we're gonna pull out the big guns to do some really big A-list titles, the first one is Pac-man.
People were psyched, retailers were clearing shelves for this game, they produced 12 million copies when only 10 million systems were in existence, thinking that Pac-man was going to sell more systems, that it was going to be that big.
Unfortunately they thought the name Pac-man was enough, that that was enough, the product itself was not that good, it flickered, it had slowdowns, it didn't even look remotely close to the arcade version , the sound effects were awful, everything that could've failed, failed.
So that was their first up they're sleeve, which went boom!, nowhere, their second second ace turned out to be the second nail in the coffin, it was E.T. The Videogame.
When did they decided to make the E.T. game? It was around June-July of 1982.
When did they wanted it to come out? Christmas of 1982.
This is a classic example of the artist vs. the corporate guys, corporate guys say hey! we got to get an E.T. game out there and the artists say Ok, we'll make a game, it'll take six months give or take and the suits go, six months!? eff that, you got six weeks, we got to get this thing on the trucks and on the shelves so we don't miss a day of the holiday shopping season.
It'd be insane if a movie producer bought the movie rights to a book and was like we have to make a movie about this, we have eight hours, now that's basically what they did with E.T.
Six weeks go by, and they end up with something, I don't know if you can call it a game, but it was on a cartidge, and had something that look a little like E.T. that walked around and fell in some holes, but really it was one of the worst games of all time. The root of all this problems is just a lack of respect for the design of the games, they look at them and are like, moving blocks and moving blocks, what's the difference? They thought everyone has to have this game, but when the game's garbage noone needs to have it. They were basically selling a box with E.T. on it.
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Atari was left with more than 2 million unsold cartridges returned from retailers which they dumped in a landfill in New Mexico along with other unsold items.
So just like that the golden age of Atari was over, they'd lost the hearts and minds of the people, by 1983 Atari had completely tanked, initially the forecasted a $50m dollar loss, by the end of the year, they'd lost more than $530m.
After all this Warner's all like, we have to get out of this bussiness, its killing us, so they break up the company and sell certain divisions off and the Atari named bounced around for years being bought and sold before being bought off by a French, where it is today and people don't realize that the Atari today has nothing to do with the original Atari company, its just the name.
I guess the lesson of the whole story is just to look at video game design as an art form, its not something that you just put out like a factory it needs smart and creative people to do it right.
That's a main rule of thumb in a company, do not crap on employees because make them unhappy and they're gonna leave and they're gonna come up with other ways to make money doing what they do.
So, treat your employees right, or you risk dying.
