Sabertooth

P.S. - we found 3 new eproms. theyre all for the xe. 2 of them i know what they are. one of them i can’t read. expect me to make another "raiders of the lost eproms" blog post about this sometime soon with the latest update for you.
thank you,
lance
www.atarisales.com

The IPL/Monitor label..looks exactly like the labels used on actual Parker Bros proto and WIP games. Same size lable...same looking dot matrix font printer used to print that label. 
So I'm wondering if that might not be something from PB? I know it looks a lot like my labels on my PB protos of SW:TAG WIP build and Rls1 of Gyruss that I own.
Also...IPL usually means Initial Program Load or Loader. So it could essentially be a firmware type chip for something unrelated?
 
 

I look forward to hearing more about this discovery. Thanks for sharing Lance!

hi everyone,
 
i did plug the riot eprom into my 7800 dual chip set cartridge board, and did get a reaction. bright yellow screen with background noise. so the 7800 is trying to read it, but lacks the second e-prom, i tried it in both sockets, worked better on the bottom one.
also got the atari logo on the xenophobe, but that's it. it requires the second chip also. it might be a beta version.
i found more eproms, nothing on the labels, they were so old they had fallen off. but it was dark inside the tube, so they may have survived. when i plug them in, like just about everything i ever had got out of atari, they show graphics and sound, only garbled. telling me they need more than one e-prom, and which board, and or which platform are they for?
a puzzle for sure.
lance
www.atarisales.com
 

I look forward to hearing more about this discovery. Thanks for sharing Lance!

Oh man, that is an excellent find!  Recently three "new" 2600 titles were found and now you have a "new" 7800 game found.  Amazing that so many year later, games that were never released continue to be found!

I'm glad that you made it safely and enjoyed the trip.  It's so rare to have this type of rain in Southern California that it would be impossible to plan around.  I authorized my staff to tele-work through today regardless of their schedules (we've remained hybrid since COVID.)  We're definitely waterlogged after several straight days of heavy rain. 

We still had a lot of fun.  But the rain made it pretty exhausting after a while. 
I've been to the Florida parks when it has rained.  The difference is that in FL, it rains HEAVY for a while and then stops.  This rain was different...it was heavy and never stopped.  While we had fun still, it was sobering to think that there was flooding in the area.  Hopefully, everyone in the area and their property are all ok. 
 

I heard about this.  Were you able to enjoy any of the park?  I went to Disneyland and California Adventure more than 10 years ago.  I had fun and enjoyed the differences between those parks and the Florida parks. 

PS - flights were good, hotel was nice.  We ate well.  Stayed healthy.  Very much to be grateful for. 

The Atari XE cartridges with the handles on the back remind me of the Atari Lynx cartridges with the ridges on the back. Not the curved lip game cards like most Lynx games, but the ones with the handles that stick out at a 90 degree angle. I feel like those would've been in production at the same time.

I always wondered why some of the XE style carts had that little lip on the back.  Great info, thanks.
 

Fascinating!

Next time we talk about money laundering an entire company  

Yes especially when you need to split the cost among a bunch of people, that extra stuff adds up.
The most vocal collectors seem to be Youtubers who want fancy games to look good on camera or in their shelf. So that probably drove things that way.
Sure they can afford it, but I sure can't most of the time. Growing up I'd buy maybe one new game a year brand new. The rest, I'd grab the cheap used copies the video store was liquidating.
CD-ROMs is a good point. One reason the Playstation PSX beat the N64 in sales. I remember PSX games were like $30-40 since they were CD-ROMs, and N64 games could be upwards of $70 because they were on cartridge. I would only get a new N64 game very rarely. $70 in 1996 that's like $136 for a game today. Luckily the video store had $10 and $20 N64 games back then. 

This was a great read!  Thank for sharing, Lance!

hi and thanks @Sabertooth that's a great great question! you just opened a pandoras box and gave me inspiration for my next two Blog posts which will answer your question in detail, and also go in to jack tramiel's sale of Atari through JTS to hasbro and how that all tied back to the Jaguar sales numbers and to what degree the Jaguar was a success or a failure.
and I should warn you: my answers to this question are seen as "controversial". you might not like my answers. you might debate and disagree with my answers. you might think I'm flat-out wrong. and that's okay if you do. all I can tell you is what Jack Tramiel told me and others at Atari, and what Atari was telling me directly. I have to go by my own first hand experiences with Atari and answer as best I can, and 
your question is a really good one @Sabertooth and I will answer it in much more detail in my next Blog posts. for now let me answer them as directly and to the point as I can:
 
I don't know the answer to this for sure. The faxes from Atari stopped coming in just prior to the release of Jaguar. By the time the Jag came along Atari wasn't as adamant about sharing some of this sales information, but I did get it from time to time. Atari had made $50 million in profit and it was mostly off games, they made almost no profit off hardware.
I don’t know what the production/sales rule was for the Jaguar. They never told me about that. I’m pretty sure it was 100,000 units per game on the Atari Lynx, at least in 1989-1991. I remember some numbers like 45,000 units to 50,000 units on some Lynx games.
But the Jaguar was a whole different story. They were very quiet about that machine. I mean VERY quiet. It was like pulling teeth getting information about it. And the reason why my own personal opinion was Jack Tramiel was getting ready to retire was that if the Jaguar didn’t go he was getting ready to pull the plug. He could’ve sold the company but if they looked into his past business practices they may have been very leery of buying the company, he may not have been able to sell it. We'll get into that theory later in another Blog.
 
See @Sabertooth you're onto something. I don't think those sales numbers are accurate. That's not to say that you're wrong. I just don't think those sales numbers or that "150,000 Jaguars" sales figure that's been reported out there is accurate. At all. I think it's much higher than that worldwide, and I'll tell you why
 
Yes. That's the number I have too, I think that number is probably right. 
Let's look at this scenario in context. When I was receiving their sales history, a game like Crystal Castles on XE would be made 100,000 at a time and sell out. These XE games were made to work on all 64k Atari computer systems, and when combined with the XEGS itself was a huge user base. In the many many many millions of systems. So Atari would release 64k Crystal Castles for The Atari 8-bit family and they sold 99,993 units of XE Crystal Castles. They had 7 left.
So think of that with Alien vs. Predator, 85,000 units were sold, but on an installed user base of 150,000 consoles worldwide? That doesn't add up to me. Let's do+the=math. To get that number on Crystal Castles you’d have to have big sales on a huge installed user base. None of that ever made sense to me because A.) Atari was consistently telling me there were 2 million Jaguar units but they did not tell me if that was the United States, or Europe or worldwide, and B.) because some of the Jaguar games sold really well, and that takes a large enough user base.
That’s another thing that’s wrong but I can’t refute it because I was told personally that they moved 2 million units. There were 2 million Jaguars sold. Now, I said that about the Atari Lynx and I got shot down and called a liar. I believe there were actually somewhere around 10 million Lynx units sold world wide. There was even a programmer at Atari who did a Lynx game who said that’s not true. If you go on the Atari Lynx Wikipedia page it says that there were rumors that there’re 6-8 maybe 10 million units sold worldwide. That’s what I believe to be true, because I had insider information and that's what Atari was telling me personally.
I truly believe there are more Atari Jaguar units worldwide than officially documented. Certainly more than that 150,000. 
You see Jack would run these machines through other countries so he didn’t have to pay taxes on them. And he would say "yeah we sold 1 million units in the US" and that’s what Atari would report to the IRS and that's all they paid taxes on. Privately Atari would tell us there were more units offshore. That's how there are all these XE machines down in Mexico that are being sold on eBay and re-imported to the US.
This stuff got shipped off shore pronto and then sold in other countries and that’s how Jack Tramiel evaded taxes, allegedly. That’s not what they told me, Atari told me flat out there were 2 million Jaguar systems. If you think about it 85,000 AVP that’s a lot of one title for such a small user base. Doesn’t that seem awfully odd to you?
 
@Justin now we're getting into it arent we? They only sold worldwide 900 Fight for Lifes. The company that did Ultra Vortek was in Salt Lake City. They told me they did fairly well with that game so the sales numbers were actually pretty good! It was Fight for Life was what triggered things. After Ted Hoff was fired by Jack Tramiel Atari went 5 whole months without releasing a Jaguar game. Ted Hoff came to work in January of that year and he was locked out of the building.  A lot of us who were still in the Atari business were so dismayed by this. Because there were a lot of games still in the hopper! 
What Ted Hoff did was reorganize the company and he paid off all the back bills, and Ted had gotten Atari quite profitable because he was keeping things on pace with a release schedule. That gave retailers confidence in the life of the system and in Atari's consistency and business practices, it helped their reputation. Ted Hoff had gotten Atari onto a regular release basis as far as games are concerned, you could see what was coming out. Jaguar was selling in Walmart at this point. They were getting 1-2 games a month on the Jaguar which was phenomenal compared to Jack Tramiel. Some of them were done real well. And even though they didn’t sell like AVP they did sell, and many of them did sell good enough. Ted Hoff had resurrected The Atari Lynx too. The Lynx games started selling again because Lynx had a huge installed user base and it never should’ve been done away with.
Well once Ted Hoff was fired and kicked to the curb, I called up Atari right way because I had a feeling of what was going on, and I said are you going stick to your release schedule because it was working. I warned Atari that if they abandoned their release schedule and abandoned their dealers, the dealers would abandon Atari. This is what had happened after the crash. “Well were’ looking things over and deciding what we’re going to do” and I warned them that if they didn’t keep to the schedule they were going to loose whatever ted Hoff had built up, and I knew it was good because Atari had $50 million in the bank and there was a lot of profit.
5 months go by and no new releases from Atari. So they brought out Fight for Life and released it after 5 months had gone by without a peep from Atari to their dealers. Atari called me a few days later and they were just steaming about it and they said you were right. I got a phone call from Atari one day and they said "Lance you were absolutely right that we should have stuck to the release schedule or people would abandon us." And I said that was their past record, that Atari didn't talk to people, they didn't communicate with their dealers or with distributors or buyers for retail stores like Toys R Us, KB or Babbages, nobody had any idea what was going on, they don’t care about support, and when Atari brings stuff out a lot of times it doesn’t sell because they don’t support it.
They only sold worldwide 900 Fight for Lifes. And my order was for 55 of them. Atari said I placed the largest order in the world for fight for life. Right after that they merged with JTS that hard drive maker in India. And that’s all she wrote.

Atari is the sole reason why I wanted to get into programming. To hear all of this from an insider perspective is priceless. Thank you for sharing.

thanks @Justin and yeah I want everybody to do well and the future is unknonw right now for many. its not just independent developers and homebrewers but the people in the atari community who buy these games also. its my hope this Blog post gets the word out to all atari developers that there are ways to do this and succeed and stay in the game for a long time delivering good games at good prices.

hi @Jinroh yeah! thanks and im glad you remember the days when they did that! I mean here’s my thing about packaging today: when i release a new game for an Atari system I keep prices down to make it affordable for me to make and you to buy. some new games are $50-$60 dollars if not more and not everybody can afford that. Jack Tramiel would say they make computers "for the masses, not the classes". And when I put out a game and keep the costs low, they scream about my boxes and scream about my clamshells but what about a CD rom jewel case? that thing's under a buck. It’s got a little glossy thing in it but it’s real small. Some manufacturers only have a glossy picture of the game on the front not on the back. This obsession with fancy glossy boxes and packaging, its fine and looks nice but you have to have the numbers for that, a lot of numbers sold, to keep the cost down. otherwise people are paying $50 and there's not much left for the developer to survive.

hi @RickR yeah! the cassette games were great, many times you could break into them and list out the source code and learn about them. but yeah that’s how they made a profit they didn’t have the huge numbers atari had and that’s how they remained in business. if you want to get in there and make a big library of games that give you some sort of cash flow you just have to do things like that, ziploc baggies and very inexpensive packaging is just the only way you could do it.

Great info as always @Video 61 I always love reading about your tales from the trenches. 😉 I remember the days of ziploc backs pinned to the board at the computer store too with a photocopied sheet with a 5.25" floppy in there. I really lilke your packaging. 🙂 It's unique and fun. 

Same here, this blog post is awesome.  I remember riding my bike to a computer store as a kid.  I was a VIC-20 owner at the time, not yet Atari.  And I was astounded at all the games available on tape in a ziploc baggie!  I think I bought a few that looked like fun, but was pretty disappointed with them when I got home and tried them.  Well, the good news was that my disappointment turned into "I could do this better".  And the best thing about tape games was you could actually see the source code.  So I ended up learning a ton. 

Thanks for sharing these fantastic insights! I wonder if the 100k rule held true for Atari under Sam during the Jaguar's run? With such a limited installed user base, that's nearly a 70 percent attach rate for each sold out title based on 150,000 Jaguars sold during its commercial life. I've read AVP was the best seller at 85K.

Thanks for sharing these fantastic insights! I wonder if the 100k rule held true for Atari under Sam during the Jaguar's run? With such a limited installed user base, that's nearly a 70 percent attach rate for each sold out title based on 150,000 Jaguars sold during its commercial life. I've read AVP was the best seller at 85K.