Scott Stilphen

The manual for Gas Hog is on my site: https://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/manuals/vcs/vcs_manuals.html You can only shoot left or right, not up.

Missile Command was never a light gun game, and trying to adapt it to use one would have resulted in a completely different playing experience. Support for the trackball could have easily been done, and wasn't. No, Crack'ed wasn't a light gun game from the start, but both the VCS and 7800 versions of Crack'ed should have been designed to use one. The original version released for the Atari ST used a mouse, and supporting the trackball would have offered the same experience, but as you mentioned, using the joystick results in a terribly unfair and unpleasant experience for the player.

That's Spacechase. There's dozens of derivative Space Invaders ports for just the VCS alone (Deadly Duck, Beamrider, Juno First are a few others). SwordQuest FireWorld (the Fire-Breathing Dragons mini-game) and the 2nd screen in Gremlins are 2 more. Same in the arcade - countless knockoffs and variations of that same theme. Any game that restricts the player to movement in only one axis while shooting at enemies/targets covers a lot of games, such as Carnival, Shooting Gallery, Space Jockey, Wabbit, etc. Galaxian (and it's sequel Galaga) was a variation of Space Invaders and basically could be considered a separate category, where the 'invaders' would split off from the main formation and drop down to attack you, which of course spawned its own knockoffs (Condor Attack, Demon Attack, etc). Centipede and Millipede are essentially Space Invaders and Galaxian, that allow for a little movement beyond simply one axis (Spacechase and Time Warp are 2 more). Moon Patrol is another sub-genre that offers shooting in 2 different directions, and includes games like James Bond 007, Mission Survive, Space Cavern, etc. Games like Scramble (and its sequel, Super Cobra) are an 'evolution' of that same premise and allowed the player to move anywhere on the screen while shooting AND bombing enemies, so with those you get variations like Fantastic Voyage, Name This Game, Xevious, etc. Vanguard came out later in the same year as Scramble allowed for shooting in 4 directions, and Space Tunnel (re-released as Cosmic Corridor) is a very basic version of that. As you can see, there's a LOT of games that sprung from Space Invaders 🙂 So, if you're looking to make a list of all the Space Invaders-type games, you need to specify to which degree as to which games are included.

List updated.

Now expanded to include more home systems as well as arcade. https://www.ataricompendium.com/game_library/prototypes/prototypes.html

Found this on Instagram. Sent this to a good friend of mine who had this memory to share: "I paid 40 bucks for Asteroids, I'll never forget it. Went to 4 or 5 stores when it came out and they were all charging 45-50 bucks and already sold out. Ending up standing in a line in JC Penney's that went out of the store all the way out into the mail itself to get a copy, it seemed like they had hundreds of copies for sale. Same thing with Missile Command; that was also an expensive cart when it was new."

This is sold.

EDIT: Corrected price. Meant to say $100 shipped.

Everything works. Games are: Demon Attack Carnival TRON Solar Sailer Boxing Skiing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons $100 shipped. PM me if interested, thanks.

4-port model w/ power supply and TV switch box. Includes 2 joysticks and 8 carts (all working): Centipede CounterMeasure Galaxian + manual Pac-Man + manual + overlay Pole Position Space Invaders RealSports Baseball + manual RealSports Fooball (manual and playbook only) RealSports Soccer + manual $150 shipped to continental U.S. PM me if interested, thanks.

I don't see where to download the digital copies on Atari's site. Does anyone have a link to them?

The comparison video 'Sabertooth' did of Saboteur doesn't show any noticeable differences. I'm not aware of any bugs in the final version of that game. I'm not aware of any glitches in the original prototype of Aquaventure, either. Looking at the video Atari put out for Aquaventure, I don't see any differences with the colors, either (and this one definitely needs it with some screens). As for Yars' Return, that game was a mess on the Flashback. I know a fixed version was done and I'm guessing that's the version Atari is releasing now on cart. But that was a homebrew and not a real prototype from the Atari/Warner days. So what 'fixes' are supposedly being done with Crystal Castles and Haunted House? :)

Why pay for digital copies when these have been available online for free for years? Are these cart versions different?

They could do that, except the cartridge shells are custom painted for those games, and I doubt they would just throw the shell out to reuse the board for a different game. No, they'll just fix the carts and reseal them and resell them. With the Limited Edition carts, that plan would only work if they didn't already sell and ship all of them, and they're using the unsold carts to replace the ones they sold. And if they are limited as to how many were made, they should be numbered, otherwise how would anyone know exactly how many are out there?

Looks like that was meant for the Yars Return box, so I wonder what the credit info is on that box. I also heard the Aquaventure manuals are misprinted, with the Limited Edition manuals are missing a whole paragraph, and the Standard Edition manuals are missing a whole page! As for the carts having the pcbs incorrectly mounted, considering the price of these carts, somebody should have at least taken 1 second to plug it into a console to test. And someone on AA even said having one of those carts might make it more valuable. As if I needed any more proof that some collectors in this hobby are nutzo...

Yep. It came with that cartridge. They also sold another custom controller called the Cosmic Commander that came with Survival Run.

Works. Missing battery cover and light bulb lens. $35 plus shipping. PM me if interested, thanks.

That version of CC is awful. Stuntman for the Atari 800 was better, and that was a BASIC type-in program from ANALOG magazine. Here's the ROM if anybody wants to try it: https://www.cvaddict.com/profile.php?gameid=426

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/15/1092804764/video-games-developed-to-treat-cognitive-disorders

This article from the February 1982 issue of Video magazine is but one of countless examples back then of how some towns passed laws and ordinances regulating or outright banning video games, even though usually there wasn't anything but unfounded rumors regarding the negative influences they had on kids.

I call it a mistake, and one of Atari's costliest. Look, the 400/800 hardware was the best to have been created from the 1970s, and was years ahead of its time. As much of a fan of the VCS that I am, the 400/800 hardware was designed to be the true successor to the VCS and should have been released as a console in 1979 as originally planned. Had it been, we wouldn't be talking about the Intellivision or Colecovision. But taking a superior concept and making an inferior one out of it is always a mistake. The home computer 'boom' was still a few years away and the home video game market had yet to reach its peak (pre-crash). Not that the crash still wouldn't have happened, because the reshuffling of address locations did nothing to prevent 3rd-party companies from making games for the 5200 (Activision, CBS Electronics, Parker Brothers, etc). Look at the thousands of programs that were created for the Atari 8-bit computers :) Atari released the 400/800 computers without any documentation on how to program it, but much like the VCS, people figured out how to do it. Hell, Nintendo had a lockout chip in their NES, and Atari (Tengen) figured out a work-around for it. Atari wasn't breaking new ground with the 5200 analog controllers, they were trying to reinvent a wheel that didn't need to be. Atari's Marketing was calling the shots at that point, and for some inexplicable reason, they 'feared' the Intellivision with its 16-position joypad. They took one look at it, and made the correlation that the 'advanced' Intellivision controller with its keypad was something Atari needed to surpass. The problem was, people in Marketing aren't gamers; they just look at 'numbers'. To them, a controller that offered 360 degrees of movement beat one with 16 degrees of movement. Had they all be ushered into a room and been forced to spend the day playing both Atari's games and their competitor's, they would have realized (maybe...) how awful Intellivision's controllers were, and how much worse an analog joystick was for games that were designed for digital joysticks. But that's a 'what if', alternate universe discussion, because in this universe, that didn't happen. The membrane keypad tech was used in earlier systems (Intellivision, Odyssey2, etc). Atari's mistake was in trying to improve it (again, trying to reinvent a wheel that didn't need to be). I get that you're a fan of the 5200, but you're in the minority. History has already judged the system for what it is - a mistake. No amount of revisionism will change that.

They made the same mistake when they changed the OS for the XL computers and dozens of games were instantly incompatible: http://www.ataricompendium.com/game_library/easter_eggs/a48/a48xlxe.html

The scant cart sales info I have came from Warshaw's "Once Upon Atari" documentary. I have 2 screenshots of what's shown on my site at: http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#software26 According to at least that listing, Adventure isn't in the top-23. I never heard any story about VCS Adventure selling 1 million copies a month for 11 straight months. That's complete bunk. Whoever told you that is incorrect about both the game in question and the number of carts sold. If any game was going to sell that many copies, it would have been Pac-Man, and from the sales info I linked to, that topped out at around 8 million copies. On a related note to Atari's figures, the best-selling 3rd-party game, Coleco's Donkey Kong sold about 4 million copies. Activision's Pitfall!, sold about 3.5 million copies, which was probably the 2nd best-selling 3rd-party game. The stories about Atari's warehouses are legendary. I seem to recall reading about some details about how some of those were sold off at the time, but I don't recall where I read that (either newpaper or magazine articles, or perhaps old usenet posting). As one of the lucky 3 who were able to purchase some of that inventory from Jack/Atari Corp., can you talk about your experiences with that transaction? Did you guys purchase entire warehouses full of items, or were you given the option to purchase 1 or multiples? There's also the matter of Brad/Best Electronics selling unofficial copies of Atari VCS prototype carts. It's well known he used leftover/excess prototype 'T' pcbs and programmed EPROMS for them, and then put them in cart shells either from other games or production/test shells (often having clear plastic top half shells. He also would put an oval Atari 'warranty void if opened' sticker over the screw hole in an attempt to dissuade people from opening them (and realizing there weren't any official labels on the EPROMs). It recently came to my attention that he did a similar thing with reproduction 'prototype' carts of Bruce Lee for the Atari 800; https://atariage.com/forums/topic/279186-bruce-lee-crashes-on-altirra/?tab=comments&_fromLogin=1 Brad was using a cart image that someone made (the game was only released on cassette and disk, and by Datasoft) and selling them as prototypes. He's using XE Super Cart pcbs, but the earlier 800 cartridge shells and not XEGS shells. Turns out the game image crashes at some point, but since he's selling them as "prototypes" and with the assumption the game isn't 'complete', he's under no pressure to take any responsibility for them. This of course has absolutely nothing to do with you. I've dealt and purchased items from Brad several times over the years (including some of those 'fake' VCS prototypes). I'm just not sure why he would bother selling these. The VCS carts were pretty cheap at the time (I'm going back 20+ years to when I bought them), but he's *still* selling copies of Bruce Lee for $40 each: https://www.best-electronics-ca.com/xe_game.htm#8bit AFAIK Atari had no plans to release an XEGS cartridge of Bruce Lee, and if they did, they would have really had a problem if they released this particular cartridge image :)

I mention Steve Ross is the person to blame for the VCS E.T. debacle: http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#general25 Ross basically left Kassar to run Atari for the most part. Apparently Kassar thought rushing out E.T. was a bad idea, but Ross was determined to have it on store shelves that Christmas. The whole E.T. deal and the absurd money Warner paid Spielberg for the rights was only because Ross desperately wanted to win Spielberg over to Warner to make movies for them. And Ross needed E.T. to be a big hit for Atari in order to cover the licensing deal, which is why some 4 million carts were produced. Prior to that, these were Atari's top sellers (not including Pac-Man): Asteroids - 2 million Berzerk - 2 million Breakout - 1.5 million Circus Atari - 2 million Defender - 3 million Night Driver - 2 million Space Invaders - 6 million Warlords - 1.5 million Ross didn't stop to think that E.T. wasn't an action movie, and the most-successful games were action games. But just like Pac-Man earlier that year, all that mattered was the name of the game. E.T. was the most-successful movie at that point, so he figured having ANY kind of E.T. game would be highly successful. So besides Pac-Man and Space Invaders, the only other cartridge to top 3 million carts was Defender, but because of the licensing deal, Ross needed to sell at least 4 million copies of E.T. for it to be successful. Well, Atari's Marketing went into overdrive and marketed the hell out of it and they sold 2.5 million carts by the end of 1982 (in 5 weeks!), and another 1 million by the end of 1984, which is actually pretty impressive for a non-action, original game. But people wanted action games, and E.T. was a 'bad' game mostly because it wasn't one. In the end, the only thing Ross got from Spielberg was Gremlins, and E.T. became the 'poster child' for the industry crashing. Atari's December 7th Wall Street announcement was just the start of all of Atari's mistakes coming back to bite them, and for the large majority of those, I put the blame squarely on Kassar. Yeah, Ross' deal with E.T. was a costly mistake, at a time when Atari needed to prove to everyone (as well as themselves) that they knew what they were doing. But regardless of how many copies of Pac-Man and E.T. they sold, the negative press they created for themselves was far more costly than any licensing deal. By 1984, Atari's losses were such that had Ross stuck with Atari and it kept losing money, Warner was at risk of a hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch. He was desperate to unload Atari to the point he gave it away for nothing. Jack Tramiel didn't pay a single penny for it; he gave Warner $240 million in promissory notes, which are basically IOUs. He also set up his Tramel Industries company 2 months before that thanks to $75 million he got from unnamed investors. In other words, Tramiel got back into the business after being ousted from Commodore mostly based on his reputation for being responsible for the C-64's success.

Jack Tramiel bought Atari in July 1st 1984. Tramiel started his own company, Tramel Technology, Ltd, in May (17th). He renamed it Atari Corp when he bought Atari.