Scott Stilphen
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Posts posted by Scott Stilphen
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Dropping the VCS in favor of the 400/800 hardware (prior to Kassar turning it into a computer) was the right choice. The VCS is by far my favorite console, but Jay Miner truly outdid himself with the 'next gen' VCS, and there's nothing the VCS can do that the 400/800 can't. Nolan had no plans or desire to make home computers; that was all Kassar's doing, so you had Atari's top game designers like Crane and Miller spending months writing the OS and DOS software for the 400/800 instead of making games. Ultimately Atari only sold about 2 million 400/800 computers (and only about 1 million 5200s). Diverting resources to create a computer division could have been put off until the 400/800 game machine was firmly established. Then you could release a computer version, or an add-on keyboard/module to upgrade it to a computer. But Rick Maurer's success with his VCS Space Invaders gave the VCS new life (after lingering in the marketplace for nearly 3 years), and inadvertently made Kassar appear to be a forward-thinking leader for sticking with the VCS, when he was anything but. Nolan was, and he wasn't trying to get booted for wanting to drop the VCS. The VCS wasn't designed to do much more (innovative-wise) than the original launch games. Nolan knew that because Cyan Engineering told him as much, as they only expected it to be relevant for about 3 years (which is why they started working on the 400/800 hardware immediately after finishing the VCS). The entire history of the early 80s would have been vastly different had the 800 console been released in 1979 as planned, or even by the following year. The Intellivision would have died a quick death, as would have the Odyssey2 and even the Colecovision (had Coleco pushed ahead and released it anyway). But that's what's fascinating about Atari's history, and how but a few alternate decisions with its flowchart would have drastically changed the outcome. Kassar's indifferent treatment of Atari's designers (lack of royalties and credit) led to the creation of 3rd-party software companies and the proliferation of (often) inferior games). Not that wouldn't have happened at some point, the fact remains it happened when it did because of Kassar.
FYI, the November/December issue of Atari Age magazine has this news blurb about the 5200 being produced in limited quantity, but then again it had just been released (in October).
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Yes, the 3600 was an early name for the 7800. Here's a photo of a prototype 3600 pcb that's very similar to a 7800 pcb, aside from the lack of an expansion port and different locations for the chips: https://consolevariations.com/variation/prototype/atari-3600-atari-7800-prototype
But the memo does mention the possibility of another machine priced between the 7800 and NES, the 3600. Perhaps that was a mistake on Don Teiser's part and that he was talking about another machine (the 3200/Sylvia)? The 3200/Sylvia/Super Stella was discussed as early as 1981 within Atari. But with Atari's irrational fear of the Intellivision (which at best had like 10% of the video game market at its peak) and the impending Colecovision, Atari stopped work on the project and instead rushed out the 5200.
Speaking of the 5200, I came across this news blurb in the June 1983 issue of Video Review that mentions Atari not being able to keep up with demand for the 5200. That's something I don't think I've ever heard about before. All I can say is, I'm in PA and I don't recall any trouble with getting one. A friend of mine had a 5200 when it was first released (late fall 1982) and I had one in early 1983 (which by then was revised to the 2-port model). Neither one had to be back-ordered - stores like Kmart had them. The same issue also mentions Atari apparently had plans for a computer add-on device similar to the VCS Graduate, which is just a crazy idea considering the 5200 was originally a reskinned 400 computer with analog controllers.
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21 hours ago, Justin said:
Nintendo had unreasonable expectations and demands of Atari which would've contributed to Atari failing anyway.
Atari and Nintendo met several times. They first met in April 11th, 1983 in Japan while the NES was still being developed. This memo, dated June 14th, 1983, outlines the deal: http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/documents/nintendo_famicom_6-14-83.txt
The memo mentions the Maria chip was being developed at the time:
"On 4/15/83, Messers Kassar, Groth, Moone, Bruehl, Paul, Henricks, Remson, and myself met in Mr. Groth's office to view the videotape and discuss what we had learned from the meeting on the 11th and what we knew to-date on the MARIA chip being developed by General Computer. As both systems were seen as being in the same price range with graphics capabilities superior to the 2600 and comparable (and in some features, superior) to the 5200, it was felt that we needed to see what could be done with both machines for an intermediate priced game machine .... the 3600."
Atari and Nintendo met again in Japan on May 17th, 1983. Atari felt the 7800 was the superior machine at the time, probably because all they saw running on the prototype NES at the time were incomplete versions of Donkey Kong Junior and Popeye, although the Maria was still not finalized. So Atari's plan was to stretch out the negotiations with Nintendo until the Maria chip was done and then make a decision.
As for any unreasonable expectations and demands of Atari, the contract offer seems pretty straightforward. Nintendo obviously wanted to keep tight control of the custom chips used in the NES, and didn't want to see the rampant piracy and 'shovelware' problem the VCS had, but they relaxed some of their demands later in the negotiations.
As we all know, Atari dragged out the negotiations long enough that Nintendo saw that Atari was clearly hurting from the crashing market and at some point decided they would release the NES themselves in the U.S. w/o Atari, which they did in 1985.
Dan Oliver mentions the Tramiels had a meeting with Nintendo in July or August 1984:
http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/articles/olivers_travels/olivers_travels.html
By that point, Nintendo was looking for software for the NES. The previous year, HAL Laboratory had ported 4 games to the NES:
Defender II (Stargate)
Joust (Frank Cifaldi found and released the prototype for this last year)
Kangaroo
Millipede (Atari Games was commissioned to do this, and Ed Logg programmed it).https://atariage.com/forums/topic/263324-kangaroo-for-the-nintendo-famicom-by-hal-laboratory/
This unconfirmed info from "Gazimaluke" is interesting:
"I heard that Richard Frick who was Director of Software development at Atari at the time was the source of the information that Kangaroo had been ported to the NES. Since I am researching the history of Sunsoft I am interested in finding out if this is true.
I contacted Richard and asked him about it. What he told me was that when Jack Trimel took over Atari in 84 they cleared out some warehouses. And during that process Richard saw a cart marked Kangaroo. And I guess since he was Director of Software development he could see the difference between a Atari 2600 cart and a NES cart. But this was basically all he knew about it."
From Frank Cifaldi:
"Both Joust and Millipede on the Famicom have a 1983 copyright, but came out much later (1986/1987 I think) I believe HAL made both of them on commission for Nintendo specifically for the Atari pitch, and when that fell through they were sat on for a while."
So Atari missed their chance to lock in exclusive U.S. rights to the NES for 4 years, with an additional 4-year option, for $5 million dollars. Considering all the money Atari pissed away under Kassar developing products that were never released, $5 million was a no-brainer of a deal. Unfortunately, Kassar and his cronies had no brains. Plus they were thinking of an 'intermediate' console to be released prior to the 7800, the 3600?
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On 3/3/2022 at 1:02 AM, Video 61 said:
the information atari had for programmers was built from scratch from what atari themselves figured out. they got no help from GCC because of how jack treated them.
Isn't that ironic, considering how Kassar treated GCC and funneled nearly every valuable title for development to them (because he has a financial stake in the company) and how he basically forced Atari's CED programmers to hand over all their source code to GCC to help jump-start their game development for the VCS, 800, and 5200.... but when Atari's programmers asked GCC to share their knowledge or software tricks, they got nothing. That's a good example of karma in action.
Then you have Jack take over Atari and refuse to honor Warner Atari's previous commitments and contract with GCC, and by the time he capitulated and paid GCC and released the 7800, it was 2 years later and the 7800 was already outdated compared to the current systems on the market. It was 2 years old and needed to have its own 'killer app' within a year of being released for it to have any chance to survive, and all Atari had was the initial titles GCC had designed 2 years prior, and with Jack laying off most of the company's employees, and the few in-house game designers that remained being reassigned to work on the ST, they had no in-house game development to support the 7800.
Less than 60 titles were officially released for the 7800, between 1984-1991 (7 years), and there's not a single 'killer app' in the bunch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atari_7800_games
From that list, only 10 are noted as being developed by Atari Corp.:
Galaga*
Xevious*
Asteroids*
Centipede
Barnyard Blaster
Crack'ed
RealSports Baseball
Tower Toppler
Planet Smashers
MeltdownWikipedia being what it is, is not 100% accurate because the first 3 were definitely done by GCC. Perhaps as a result of Tramiel paying off GCC's contract, Atari didn't legally need to credit GCC in the manuals for the games they did. Other than the handful of 3rd-party titles that were released by Absolute, Activision, and Froggo, I don't think Atari credited any 3rd-party developers for the titles they released. Regardless, 59 titles over 7 years is pathetic (less than 1 per month on average).
As far as the 7800's hardware, a POKEY chip should have absolutely been incorporated. You had a system which was basically a 'super' VCS, with improved graphics on par with the 800, and the ability to move a lot of sprite around w/o the dreaded flickering (thanks to the Maria chip), but with the original 1977 TIA sound chip. The 800 and 5200 incorporated the POKEY chip, so it's truly baffling why the 7800 didn't. In hindsight, Atari should have released something like the 7800 in 1982, not a re-release of the 400 in a different case (the 5200), so the 7800 was already a bit dated in 1984. Plus Atari already had previewed the NES as early as 1983 and had the opportunity to release it under their name; they saw the future, and ignored it. So why did the 7800 even get to the point of nearly being widely released in 1984? Again, Kassar had a personal investment with GCC, so why look into a licensing deal with Nintendo when they already had GCC developing a new system for them?
Granted, there have been some excellent homebrew games released for the 7800. Robert DeCrescenz has done more to keep interest in the 7800 than anybody else by far, but without a serious hardware investment made to improve games to be equal to what's found on the NES, as PenguiNet did with Rikki and Vikki, it's pointless to think it ever had a chance to compete with the NES. And no, the 7800XM wasn't going to change that. Everything the 7800XM promised to offer could easily been included inside the cartridge, and already has been, with the XBoard (which was created in 2006! - http://www.x-game.se/products/xboard.htm) and VersaBoard (which was created in 2013).
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https://atariage.com/forums/topic/36432-i-officially-like-karateka/
From Mike Feldman: "Jack Sandberg was the lead programmer on the Karateka and Hat Trick Atari projects. I believe Jon Turner was lead on Choplifter. I was their boss at the time and I remember doing the PC version of Hat Trick that Jack ported to the 7800. As the leader of the team at Ibid Inc who did these games, all I can say is the specs were tightly controlled by Atari -- they bought the rights to the game and subcontracted the conversion out to us. There was no room to improve, change or modify. The Tramiels (especially Jack's son) kept us on a very short leash. I do remember that we had to create the development environment from scratch. We had had a lot of experience with C64s and Apples so we were familiar with the 6502. At that time, we wrote most of our stuff in Forth. This gave us the advantage of being able to develop debug on a PC and then port the results to the Atari. Forth is fairly portable and has the advantage of easily integrating with assembler code. The final product was probably mostly assembler, but the main control loops were written in Forth. I vaguely recall having some kind of card that plugged into the cartridge slot that allowed us to download stuff our binaries and we also burned eproms and mounted them into blank cartridges. We also had a PAL 7800 and a PAL TV with some adaptation so it worked on US current. I do not remember the work on these games as enjoyable. The environment was difficult, the 7800 is a pretty limited machine and the client was equally difficult. I clearly remember one trip out to Silicon Valley (we were Hartford based) where Len Tramiel spent an hour yelling at me because he didn't like the shade of blue used in the Choplifter sky."
I have some more info about Karateka on my site: http://www.ataricompendium.com/game_library/easter_eggs/7800/78karateka.html
- 7800 Pro Gamer, RickR and Justin
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Came across an article in the June 1983 issue of Video Review magazine that offered several scenarios and asked if it constituted breaking the law: http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/magazines/video_review/video_review.html
Here's 2 video game-related ones. The "copying a video game" question is actually asking about videotaping a video game, as copying games was and is still illegal (except if you're making one backup copy for yourself). Ron Goldman from Mattel seems to think videotaping games could be illegal if copies of the tape were sold. And yet, the year before, Vestron released their 3-volume "How to Beat Home Video Games" VHS tapes: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/49167/late-movies-how-beat-home-video-games-1982
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@RickR Asteroids Deluxe arcade came out first (March 1981). VCS Asteroids came out a few months later (July/August 1981).
I remember getting the game and reading about the shield option and thinking the cart included both Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe! Which of course it doesn't, but it was neat to see that feature from Asteroids Deluxe included. None of the arcade sequels (Asteroids Deluxe, Space Duel, Blasteroids) included hyperspace. Shields was by far the superior feature of the two.
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The last CGE I went to was in 2007 and he was still very much banned at that point. Obviously it wasn't a lifetime ban (and I never said it was) if he was there in 2010. Or perhaps he was there as part of AA's booth and the organizers decided to un-ban him? Don't know. You'd have to ask them. Doesn't change the fact that everything I said about him being banned is correct. I was there at the 2004 and was outside the alumni dining room and saw Santulli physically stop Reichert from trying to get in.
I was involved with CGE from 2000 to 2007, and the show was always run by the seat of their pants, and never made money. They didn't even have the venue for 2007 locked in until a few days before the show (because they failed to prepay for it)! I was out there in Cali with Hardie and saw first-hand him scrambling to make it happen. I was done with it after that. The organizers sold it to someone (i.e. suckered someone) in 2013, who held it in 2014. The new owner redesigned the website and logo (which can be seen here: https://twitter.com/cgexpo). The show was never held again, and the website disappeared in 2016 or 2017.
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We've had Tod Frye's and Gary Shannon's names attached to Aquaventure for years. Reichert has been in contact with both of them for years. The only mystery is, why is this currently newsworthy? Apparently Reichert convinced the current Atari that this was some huge, unsolved mystery worthy of headlines. Even the real mystery about Aquaventure getting lost in the corporate shuffle isn't much of a mystery. Atari was pretty much in chaos by the end of 1982. They had so many games and projects under development, and without any real leadership from Kassar or his underlings, they were literally and figuratively just running around in circles w/o any solid plan on how to recover. Reichert should have been interviewing people he's talked to for the past 20 years, instead of focusing on getting prototypes from them and getting a few crumbs of info about them and running with it to brag about it as fast as possible. He's always been someone who enjoys bringing attention to himself, and these articles are just another example of that.
Reichert also has the distinction of being the only person to be banned from the Classic Gaming Expo:
https://forum.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?38373-The-Trouble-With-AtariAge-(drama-alert)
In the above thread, Santulli mentions Reichert trying several times to sneak into the alumni dinner at the 2004 show. I forgot about the whole 'sinister' drama posts Reichert made prior to the show that year! He came off like a damn terrorist, as if he was going to be carrying a bomb or something to the show.
I was part of the staff and as such, I had the option to go to the alumni dinners, and didn't (I chose to spend Friday nights playing the arcade games on the show floor, since I had so little time for myself on Sat and Sun). The alumni dinners were the show's way of thanking them for coming and for all of their contributions to the video game industry. Any family members that came out to the show with them were of course welcomed to attend the dinner as well. There was a separate banquet room just down the hall from the show floor where the dinners were held. I know seating was always a balancing act because there were some 'cliques' that you wanted to make sure shared a table. For example, there were a few Atari cliques, and of course the Activision folks were their own clique. It was basically the high school lunch room all over again :) It wasn't as bad as say, "If any of these people sit next to Dave Crane, we might have a food fight", but the last thing you want to do is help to create a situation that causes some of them not to return. So once all of that was figured out, there'd usually be just enough tables and chairs for everyone (staff included), since they had to let the catering staff know how much food to provide. There was one door in and out of the banquet room, and there was always at least one staff member at the door to check and make sure only those allowed in got in (basically everyone with either an alumni or staff badge on them).
But then you had some knucklehead like Reichert deciding he was going to get in there. What he planned on doing, who knows, as there wasn't going to be an assigned seat with a meal waiting for him. Was he going to go around the room from table to table and start questioning the alumni about some game they made 30 years ago? Well, that's what the keynote speeches are for... right? Right. Not good enough for him, I guess. He couldn't wait 12 hours until showtime, so he made repeated attempts to get in the room. It was Santulli who eventually came over and made it abundantly clear to him not only was he not wasn't getting in to the dinner, that it would be the last CGE he'd get in, period. AFAIK he was the *ONLY* person to have been forcibly turned away from the banquet room. Anyone else who tried and were told why it was a 'closed' dinner understood it. In other words, normal-brained people got it. Reichert is not one.
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On 2/1/2022 at 7:46 PM, Justin said:
I wouldn't put it past them to do any of this.
Love the positive attitude, Justin :) But the harsh reality is, these guys were in their 20s and 30s when they were at Atari. Outside of the Audacity Games guys (Dave Crane, Garry Kitchen, and Dan Kitchen), we have Bob Smith at the 2015 PRGE claiming to have made a new VCS game (but it still hasn't been released AFAIK), and Tod Frye, who at the same show claimed he was rebuilding some/all of his VCS tech demos (and again, nothing more from Frye about it). We might see Smith's "Dungeon" game some day, but despite what Frye and Warshaw have said (and Warshaw has states several times over the years he has zero interest in coding on the VCS again), I wouldn't count on either of them doing anything. As Rob Zdybel mentioned in that video, unless you're able to sell enough copies to make it worth the effort, there's no reason to do it unless it's something you personally want to do, and not motivated by financial concerns... which is the only reason Audacity Games exists (and if they didn't make enough from releasing Circus Convoy, we won't be seeing anything else from them). Btw, Warshaw has been talking about his ideas for a followup to Yars' Revenge ever since I asked him about it 25 years ago:
Q: Was there any talk of doing a sequel?
Howard Scott Warshaw: I actually had designs for a Yars series. The next game was going to be Yarian Olympics, which was a game that Yars had to participate in that would develop the skills that they would need to be able to go up against the Qotile. I was already under development to do them when I got pulled off to do Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.
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Going through AA means giving them 50% of the profit. Plus if you design your own pcb (as David Crane did for Circus Convoy), you don't have to buy boards from anyone else. And as we see, Atari is certainly capable of doing cartridge releases themselves.
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Here's the Atari Super XE specifications in case anyone is interested.
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On 11/16/2021 at 8:59 PM, Justin said:
I get the feeling we may see SwordQuest AirWorld released, or possibly a nice little box set of all four games.
What would be really nice is if they could "fix" E.T. and release something incredibly fun and engaging for the 2600
What little code there was for SwordQuest AirWorld is likely gone at this point, so unless Tod Frye decides to sit down and recreate it - and complete it - I wouldn't hold out much hope for that one :)
As for E.T., that won't happen due to licensing costs. And since HSW has no intention of ever programming for the VCS again, I wouldn't be interested if a fixed version was ever officially released.
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On 1/28/2022 at 3:40 PM, CrossBow said:
I'm more curious why they didn't reach out AA to get boards for this purpose? AtariAge already has the Melody boards that can pretty much do what their board design claims to do so I'm not sure why they went to reinventing the wheel. Unless the current Atari just has NO idea about the existence of AA?
Who else is using Melody boards? Who else has means to even program (flash) them? There's a reason no such information about them has ever been made available, or that you can't even purchase them for your own projects. The Melody is (unofficially) exclusive to Atariage.
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Btw, the photo of the black XEGS is from 2011:
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/181654-custom-recolor-for-xegs-case/
Some decided to repaint their XEGS black. It's not a prototype, nor does it have anything to do with the Super XE. Speaking of the video from the original post, that's from Kieren Hawken, who's rather infamous for peddling misinformation. The Atari Mirai prototype shell that was found back in 1996 is still a complete mystery as to what it was intended to be, and Hawken's video adds nothing to suggest it might have been for the Super XE.
@Clint Thompson Is this the 7800 poster you were looking for?
- MaximumRD, Sabertooth and Clint Thompson
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The Atari G1 light gun was intended for the 2600 and 7800, and the black + red coloring scheme matches the 7800 joypad. The overseas releases of the XG-1 version were packaged in the G1 boxes :)
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Some Supercharger games have issues with certain 7800 variations:
http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#software18
There's a mod you can do to the 7800 to make it fully compatible with the Supercharger, but I don't know of any mod for the Supercharger.
VCS Star Raiders was certainly adequate at the time. Not the best, and not the worst. That, Starmaster, and Phaser Patrol all got rave reviews back then, with Star Voyager, Space Attack, and Star Ship bringing up the rear (http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/reviews/reviews.html) No, none of them are equal to the original 800 Star Raiders. The entire VCS package was impressive for the reasons you mentioned. I had hoped Atari would have utilized the VTP for more games, but much like the Driving Controllers, it was another 'one and done'. Although Star Raiders wasn't the first "1st-person cockpit" space game (Atari's Starship 1 and VCS Star Ship get the nod), Star Raiders was the 800's first 'killer app' and influenced a slew of similar games, with 800 Rescue on Fractalus and VCS Solaris being the best for those systems IMO (XTAL for the 800 also gets my vote).
- Sabertooth, AtariSphinx, DegasElite and 1 other
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263. Had a perfect game until the 9th frame.
- Justin, TrekMD, Sabertooth and 5 others
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239 with Harmony. I'll try an actual cartridge next time.
- Gianna, Marco1019, Sabertooth and 5 others
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Btw, did anybody know there were 2 different versions of Cybermorph? The 1994 cartridge version is different from the 1993 version. The 1993 cart is a 2mb cart and the 1994 cart is 1mb. Atari had them cut speech and animations out of the later version so they could fit it onto the smaller cart.
http://www.atarijaguar.co.uk/2014/10/a-tale-of-two-cybermorphs.html?m=1
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Btw, I have some spare TI99/4as for sale. I also sell reproduction Munchman II carts -
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On 1/11/2022 at 11:43 AM, RickR said:
According to what I've read, it was Ray Kassar who suggested the Space Invaders license/port. If so, he deserves a lot of credit. He made a lot of horrible decisions and probably wasn't the right guy to run Atari...but that one was a home run.
Rick Maurer had already been working on VCS S.I. a few months before Kassar supposedly asked about it. So regardless of whether or not that story is true, S.I. was going to come out for the VCS :) Given how clueless Kassar was about the video game business, he'd only request a version be done because the arcade game was such a phenomenal success. That would have been a decision ANYBODY could have made, but I'm guessing the W-B brass were happy to credit Kassar for the VCS's success because of S.I. For Kassar, it's simply a case of being in the right place at the right time, because 2.5 years after S.I. was released, Atari was 'on fire and sinking fast' because Kassar obviously didn't have a clue how to run Atari.
But to answer the OP's question, VCS Space Invaders was the first 'killer app' for that console, or any console for that matter :) Sales of the VCS were tepid the first few years, but when S.I. came out, sales were red hot. Millions of people bought a VCS strictly for S.I., so there's no doubt about it.
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Here's the source of that old rumor:
The article doesn't mention its sources, and nobody has ever come forward to claim credit. Personally, I think the rumor is nonsense. For one thing, every other system on the market at the time was inferior to the Colecovision. Coleco could have given Garry Kitchen 16K to port Donkey Kong, and it still would have been vastly inferior to the Colecovision version, so there was no need to 'sabotage' their versions for other systems. Think about the logic behind such a plan. Coleco didn't have any in-house programmers, and they sub-contracted out to other companies to do games for other systems. Now, imagine Coleco offering a job to a company with the explicit demand to do the worst job programming it as possible. No company would have accepted a job with that requirement if they wanted to be in business for long. Well, the better the game turns out, the more copies they sell ,right? If they wanted to sell the least amount of copies as possible, they could have chosen to .... not release it :) Also keep in mind Coleco debuted the Colecovision at the 1982 Summer CES show, along with carts for both the Atari VCS and Intellivision. So the first 4 VCS games Coleco released were either already done or in the process of being:
Donkey Kong - July 1982
Venture - September 1982
Mouse Trap - October 1982
Carnival - November 1982Now, could Coleco have allocated 8K for VCS Donkey Kong and other titles? Absolutely (and of the 13 titles they released, only the first 4 were 4K; everything else was 8K). And considering Coleco sold more copies of VCS Donkey Kong than anything else they released (approximately 4 million VCS DK carts were sold), they could have easily afforded to, and Donkey Kong's success in the market likely convinced Coleco to step up to using 8K. Donkey Kong was the hottest arcade license after Pac-Man. To Garry Kitchen's credit, he tried to convince Coleco to use an 8K ROM since they were available by that time, but they refused due to the added cost. Had they offered him 8K and a few more months development time, he's sure he could have included the other 2 screens.
As for the author's comments about DK Jr being "absolutely swill", that's a bit harsh. No, it doesn't have the gameplay that DK has, even with the addition of a 3rd screen (thanks to being 8K). But it doesn't play the same for the reason someone else here mentioned - there's no fruit to drop! That's a gameplay element that's on every screen in the arcade version. That would be like omitting the hammer in Donkey Kong or the energizers in Pac-Man. It's a crucial element of the game for dealing with enemies, and without it, you're just running for your life with no way of going on the 'offense'. Garry knew that and made sure the hammer was included in his DK. He's mentioned he set out to make the best version he could, and the public drubbing Atari got for their VCS Pac-Man was even more of a reason he wanted to do his best. For only being 4K and spending all of 3 months programming it, it's really an impressive effort. Garry mentioned including the slanted ramps on the barrel screen was a real challenge, and he said he spent a lot of time on the game so that it looked and played as close to the arcade version as possible. The game had to be finished by a specific date w/o question and he spent the last 72 hours straight (no sleep, no breaks) sitting in a cubicle in Hartford, Connecticut with the owners of Coleco standing over his shoulder waiting for the finished game.
Why was Karateka so bad?
in Atari 7800
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Mine broke after a few months of use. Absolutely one of the worst controllers ever created. People inside Atari were telling them they were a problem, and yet Marketing got its way and saw that they were released anyway. But when the complaints from customers started complaining, they STILL didn't do anything about them. A fix to make the joysticks self-centering was done, but it wasn't released. But yet they eliminated the all-in-one RF switch box and went back to the standard design. They also redesigned the motherboard, which included a revised OS that made several games incompatible, similar to the revised 400/800 OS for the XL that caused the same problem with some programs.