What I find remarkable are the discrete logic hardware designs for early Atari games like Pong, Tank, Le Mans, etc. - no microprocessors! Special circuits for game functions like background, sound, score, explosions, etc..
A compelling feature of these games is that they all had unique and engaging physical controls like paddle dials (Pong), dual sticks (Tank), and steering wheel/pedals/gear shift (Le Mans.)
> In October of 1973, Bushnell decided to grab as much market share as possible by signing exclusive contracts with distributors in each geographic area to buy only Atari games.
Because most geographic areas had two distributors, Bushnell separately (and semi-secretly) created Kee Games, named after Bushnell friend Joseph Keenan who became president of the company. Kee would sign exclusive contracts with the second distributor in a geographic area. The games that Kee and Atari produced individually were eventually released by both companies with unique names and some cosmetic differences.
> Spike Was Kee’s copy of Atari’s Rebound. Kee’s products were mostly copies of Atari’s games with innovative features added to differentiate them from their Atari cousins, and create the feeling of a “rivalry” between the two companies.
> Tank was the game that saved Atari from bankruptcy in 1974. The game became so popular that the exclusivity agreements Atari demanded from distributors were thrown out the window. Everybody wanted it, and Atari made sure they got it. Bushnell’s cash flow problems at Atari were suddenly reversed. Atari and Kee merged at the end of 1974.
I have a pdf bookmarked that walks through the same schematics in a bit of a narrative, calling Pong "THE GREAT CIRCUIT TEACHER" [0] - the only drawback being the poorly scanned in drawing of the sub-circuits. I haven't worked through it yet but combining it with those simulations should be most illuminating.
My mom worked for a company that made chips inside the Atari cartridges and so we got a free VCS/2600 and a bunch of carts when they came out. Tank was, hands down, the best game! My brother and I spent hours really interacting with each other over the incredibly simple, blocky graphics. The "tanks" were made up of about 5 giant pixels. That's it! The planes were even worse and didn't look like planes at all. We had more fun competing and really playing with those terrible graphics.
I wonder if all the high-end game qualities today take away some of that genuine player interaction? I do love modern games and I doubt I'd enjoy Tank today, but it was special in its time.
Pension funds own all large industries as a total, most competition today outside of startup crechee fields is non-existing. Turns out, giving state functionality to free market participants does not make the state more dynamic, it makes the market more like a state, introducing a command economy like central structure and a aversion to change.
The market hurt itself in its victorious confusion. So yeah, that lack of innovation and capability of western economics, your private pension does that.
Atari was acquired in 1996 and I still see Atari t-shirts regularly. The brand has notoriety with generations that have never used the console. I don't think it's comparable to an active company like Nintendo.
I had the same exact thought. Nintendo don't even have a 'logo' as such, do they, they use a logotype, the word 'Nintendo' outlined in a rounded rectangle.
Are you European or UK/IE? I notice that despite selling well in Europe the Nintendo product has a lot less 'consumer enthusiasm' there compared to in the US where people are absolutely cuckoo for the stuff.
In the UK, at least, the original NES was marketed/distributed by Mattel as a Mattel product, and they did an incredibly poor job. The Sega Master System was distributed expertly by Virgin Mastertronic who got much better retailer agreements in the UK. As a result, it was far more popular than it ever was in the US.
I think the ubiquity of the NES in the US impacted sales (and therefore software availability) of the Amiga and Atari ST as well.
Sega only began to gain mindshare with the Genesis (the US counterpart to the Mega Drive.) So, Atari has a very old retro cachet, and Nintendo has a solid hold on nostalgia from the late 80s on.
Right. In the US market Atari never mattered again after the VCS/2600. The successor 5200 didn’t do well. Neither did the 7800 which they inexplicably held onto for a few years before release until it was up against the NES.
I can’t speak authoritatively to the micro computers, but I’m under the impression that the Atari line of 8-bits was never very popular in the US. I’ve always gotten the feeling computers played second fiddle to consoles once the NES arrived until the IBM clones started to get good at games much later.
Yeah I had only ever seen one Atari 80bit PC, maybe an 800 and one Coleco Adam. I also saw Atari STs at Toys R Us but only knew two people in the US with one that I met through BBSes.
I know the Commodore 64 was somewhat popular. There were other computers with games but I don’t think any of them had the capabilities the C-64 did (Apple-II, TRS-80). The ZX was released under the Timex brand but like the Atari I’m not sure it ever went anywhere.
From the history I’ve read I think part of it may be that Atari was just kind of a disaster here. The fact that Atari actually had popularity in Europe plus they could probably make their own decisions without interference from Atari US may have been what allowed them to succeed in Europe. But that’s a guess.
Over here they’re basically synonymous with gaming. They are the company that brought gaming back after the crash with the NES and sold a ton. Then we got the GameBoy which just cemented things further. The Genesis (MegaDrive) was kind of their first real competition here but they released the super Nintendo and it sold a much better (roughly 50m vs 25m).
Of course they’ve been around ever since. The GBA, the DS, the Wii, and the Switch have all been massive successes. they’ve never really disappeared in the US.
They’re kind of the brand for all of gaming history here after the Atari crash. Sega came later (Genesis/MD) and went (so long Dreamcast), Sony came in ‘95 and Microsoft in ‘01. That’s basically it for the big brands.
There’s a reason that tons of people called all video games “Nintendos“ for a very long time.
I think it's just a design/image thing. Nintendo logo doesn't catch the eye as much. Atari has a strange esoterism, dynamic quality (a bit like Nike) to it.
The part about not being able to just jump into games really spoke to me. It had been a while since I picked up a new game, but my wife got a switch and over Christmas I was playing some new games.
I got super frustrated clicking through to get to the "good part" of actually playing. I just wanted to play! Maybe that was because my first games were all Atari games.
But my kids felt the same way. They were 4 and 7 at the time, and they just wanted to play too and didn't want all the intro crap either.
w.r.t the "good part", there is a difference between games as toys and games as a story.
a lot of games today are "story games", even if there isn't a fixed story, there is some progression and different parts of the game open up at different times and result in different emergent gameplay. even something sandbox, toy-like like cities skyline and minecraft has a progression.
i am reminded of gta V, which i thought had a really good story, where the game jumps you into a bank heist in the first scene of the game, it was a huge scenario with lots of set pieces, a lot of mechanics are introduced right away, it's pretty intense, and thwarts the RPG baby-crab-killing trope, thank goodness.
games as toys, like pong i guess, where you begin the game immediately having access to every single feature of the game, still exist - apex legends, cs go, rocket league. but you still won't be able to jump into it at a decent competitive level right away. in most popular competitive FPS games, you will be rocked for a good first 20-50 hours of gameplay until you build understanding.
w.r.t to what nolan means when he has to go through an hour of things before he can start playing the real game, sadly that's a historical era. games today have so much more features, so much more complications, a mix of meta thinking, hand-eye coordination, and mechanical practice that it's hard to simply jump into a game and be comfortable right away. a lot of games today need some amount of practice, whether 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 months.
I wanted to jump right into exploring the city and driving cars around, but instead it threw you into this scene full of terrible characters and forced you to murder a bunch of people. There is literally no way to start playing the game until you prove you know the shooting mechanic by executing a dozen police officers.
I’m normally fine with violent games, and I had a blast with Vice City and San Andreas, but this intro was so awful that I just put the game down and didn’t come back.
gta's sandbox is the most "famous" part of the game to non-gamers, but the series since the beginning when it was a top down shooter has always been story driven, now more than before. if you want the sandbox experience, it is in GTA:O, not the single player mode.
Ironically, the reason I picked it up was to play the online version with some friends. The only was to unlock online mode was to go through that mission.
>games today have so much more features, so much more complications, a mix of meta thinking, hand-eye coordination, and mechanical practice that it's hard to simply jump into a game and be comfortable right away
That's demonstrably false! Have you never picked up and played a game part-way through with a friend?
Can you demonstrate it? Games that are accessible to the average non-video-game-player to just jump in and play are the exception rather than the rule. Fall Guys, maybe Mario Kart? What else?
> Have you never picked up and played a game part-way through with a friend?
never games that i'm not familiar with. it seems downright unfair to the person who is half-way through it.
i have seen my friends who've mostly played J-RPGs try to jump into a coop Gears of War at a party and it wasn't good at all, in fact, it was extremely embarrassing.
On the flipside, my formative video game experiences involved reading the instruction booklet to a new NES game, cover to cover, while being driven home from Toys R Us. They were essential to knowing how to play and appreciating the storyline.
The Atari 2600 was no different: You needed the manual to know what the weird symbols onscreen meant, or what the switch settings would do for that particular game.
I'm the same. May be biased, as I sell retro games for a living, but I really miss the era where you could just chuck in the disc/cart and play.
PlayStation and Xbox are even worse in this regard. Not only do you have the long intro, but a solid half-hour of installation and patching before you can even launch the game!
Indeed. The first experience of getting a new game on Xbox is always updating it. Sometimes it takes hours! Where is the fun in that? They need a better system for updates.
Depends on the game. If you pick up a strategy game you can just jump in just fine. If you want to play Counter-Strike, just start up, join server and start shooting.
same. as I get older....I want story...but not at the beginning...and I don't want a tutorial. I want gameplay...with cutscenes like breaks...the cutscenes should be skippable and pausable.
as for Multiplayer....Less loading screens, lobbies and loot crates.....and maybe just maybe there is hope.
Weird take; I wonder what an alternate universe where the Jaguar didn’t rival the Saturn in terms of difficulty to develop for would look like.
I’m aware this wouldn’t have solved the other issues - such as the desperate need for a ‘Killer App’, and - of course - the big Sonic/Mario problem of the time, which was a major draw into SEGA or Nintendo’s camp.
The system - as is - is probably way more capable than what we were able to see from the software we got.
I read that a ton of Jaguar games actually abused the sound chip (I think this was it?) - which was a Z80, or something similarly simple to develop for, and thusly some of the software was literally using maybe 20% of its potential.
The previously-mentioned SEGA Saturn would often be similarly abused (though not nearly quite as bad as running most of your program code off the sound chip) where programmers would use only one of the core graphics chips or only of the SH2’s (or both…) which resulted, of course, in much; much poorer performance than the serious powerhouse the Saturn was during its lifetime.
Many PlayStation/Saturn ports of the same side by side make this difference brutally obvious. (The Saturn DOOM port is, sadly; a notorious example. It was Carmack’s decision not to run it on the 2 VDP’s - to which he later acknowledged was a mistake.)
The Saturn and Jaguar debacles really woke up the industry a lot to caring about developer needs - with documentation and follow through with developer support so poor that even at-the-time behemoth EA refused to support SEGA’s next console, the Dreamcast; in what would’ve been an unthinkable move 5 years before.
EDIT: after making some corrections, I realized on editing I pulled all this info from memory; which honestly makes me one hell of a geek, lol…
The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver)
Jaguar had two weird RISC chips (Tom and Jerry) meant to be used as DSPs, and one had a few more instructions for sound, and the other had something a teensy special for graphics. It had a 68000 that was meant to be used as a "manager" and "read the joysticks". To top it off you had the actual display chip (the "Object Processor") which was weird? flexible and programmable in some ways that almost seemed to me to hearken back to Atari's ANTIC chip in its 8-bit line.
The 68000 was the only "normal" thing about that whole system.
> The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver)
The Saturn had two SH2s, but yeah. Note that the Genesis's predecessor had a Z80 as the main processor, and the Genesis has a peripheral activated mode to disable the 68k, and use the Z80 as the main processor to play most of the Master System library. The Dreamcast went to a single main CPU (SH4), but in a twist didn't use the previous hardware iteration as its sound chip. :)
Of course, EA didn't skip the Dreamcast because it was hard to program, they skipped it because they wanted to be the exclusive sports game provider and Sega said no. (or that's the official story anyway)
I believe some of the early PS2 games were programmed in a similar manner. Devs had trouble getting their head around the Emotion Engine so they used the piece of the hardware they understood well: the older processor.
And we know the same thing happened with the PS3. The SPUs were hard to use so many early games practically ignored them, the same way many Jaguar and Saturn games ignored the other processors as much as possible.
For what it’s worth I also remember hearing that the Jaguar was incredibly buggy. If they had more time they probably could have corrected that so developers didn’t have to worry about it.
The main problem my team had is that all 4 primary chips in the jaguar shared the same bus, so you'd write code for one chip, but then it would run at <50% the previous speed once it was "in production" with code running on the other chips
Some of the games appeared to not have randomness (eg PacMan ghost patterns). Was this an intentional gameplay feature, or did the hardware lack a suitable source of entropy?
"This is the heart of the game. I wanted each ghostly enemy to have a specific character and its own particular movements, so they weren't all just chasing after Pac Man in single file, which would have been tiresome and flat."
— Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator
The ghost behavior is the real genius behind the game. Even if you don't realize it, your subconscious learns how each ghost operates and longer you play the more you learn how to exploit it.
I'm not sure how they achieved the (pseudo-)randomness, but I don't think the Ms Pac-Man conversion added new hardware other than new ROMs? Not sure about that assertion.
Even something as simple as seeding a PRNG with current uptime goes a long way, when there's human input available. I challenge you to insert coin on the 1 millionth clock oscillation multiple times.
Hardware entropy sources are more necessary for servers, or early boot-up.
I can't answer for Atari but I know that games from that time would usually derive randomness from user input timings. There simply wouldn't be a readily available source of (good) entropy available otherwise and using a complicated algorithm to harvest it and "mix" it would be prohibitively expensive. And who cares for crypto-grade entropy in a game anyway?
It's actually still common with much more recent games where there are viable strategies that involve putting the RNG in a known-state (for instance at init) and then performing very precise actions to trigger a normally random event with 100% certainty. Here's an example for Final Fantasy XII: http://www.fftogether.com/forum/index.php?topic=2778
Basically the strategy is that by using a "cure" spell several times in a row and looking at how much health it regenerates in the game you can guess the position within the RNG output sequence (that is fixed and resets when you power down the console). Then when you know where you are you can plan your actions knowing ahead of time what the RNG will output and whether it'll be favourable or not.
I believe that what you observed in Pacman was however due to a primitive AI: each ghost would have a simple strategy and stick to it, making them predictable and non-random by design.
Yes the movements in original Pac-Man were deterministic. There were books published back in the day that detailed the pattern you should take to beat each level. They were hard codes paths. There were a few variations and the only thing stopping you was your execution at higher and higher speeds. I got to the point on a Nintendo DS port of it where I could pretty much play forever (255 levels I think).
Ms. Pac-Man didn’t have this as the ghosts were not deterministic any longer.
Not hard-coded paths, per se. It's more elegant than that. Each ghost has a distinctive deterministic movement algorithm based on Pac-Man's current position - some target the square ahead of him, some target the square behind, etc. That's why they seem so smart; it's like they're trying to surround/flank you.
(If this seems underwhelming, I assume you it was a really neat trick back then - the ghosts had a level of personality and cunning not seen before. Combined with the cute, cartoony visual design of the ghosts themselves it was quite something.)
Original, arcade cabinet Pac-Man got an update after a while that eliminated the deterministic patterns. I'm sure the owners of 7-11 stores across the U. S. rejoiced, as I was one of those taking up space for quite a while for the price of a quarter (of a U. S. dollar).
In hindsight, was that an official Namco/Bally-Midway thing?
Or an aftermarket modification? I think that was common at the time... never heard of an official update to Pac-Man (but I could well be wrong)
I know that Ms. Pac-Man removed the full determinism but that was a total conversion and it seems like you're talking about an update to the original thing
In hindsight, was that an official Namco/Bally-Midway thing?
Ya know, it was over 40 years ago and I'm going from memory. But now that you question it, and after a bit of reading, it would seem that the patterns just changed (as sibling comment states). All I know is, I showed up for a round of Pac-Man at the local 7-11 in Danville, IN after my part-time high school job, and the patterns didn't work anymore (or quit working after a point a few levels in, don't recall).
There's a (solder) jumper that was commonly adjusted for 'hard' mode where the level progression is a bit different (starts at a later level and skips a few early on), you can tell by where pac-man dies during attract mode. There were also hacked roms to speed things up; those weren't official, AFAIK.
The 8 bit Atari measured electrical noise to create random numbers. One of the io Chips had that ability. It was the only one that had real random numbers, which as a 9 year old was important to make me feel superior to everyone else I knew with Apple or Commadore computers.
To be young again where such things were the most significant things in life...
Here's a great talk on a few strategies used to fake entropy on the NES, Kevin Zurawel "Game Development in Eight Bits" StrangeLoop 2021 [0]
To spoil it: Tetris does a sort of binary fibonacci sequence with XORs and bitshifts, Final Fantasy used a static lookup table it iterates through, and Contra counted idle cycles between drawing frames.
A good enough source of entropy is very easy for these games. Electrical noise, or player input for a few seconds is plenty as you don't need secure cryptography levels of entropy, you only need just enough to fool a human.
The ghost patterns in most Pac-Man gameplay are designed on purpose, but the directions they turn when running from Pac-Man once he’s eaten a pellet are intended to be random. From a broadly interesting look at the game’s internals (https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-pac-man-dossier):
“The PRNG generates an pseudo-random memory address to read the last few bits from. These bits are translated into the direction a frightened ghost must first try. If a wall blocks the chosen direction, the ghost then attempts the remaining directions in this order: up, left, down, and right, until a passable direction is found. The PRNG gets reset with an identical seed value every new level and every new life, causing predictable results.”
I don’t know how the initial RNG works (the source is available online, but my Atari ASM skills seem to be lacking), but more modern takes sometimes use a linear-feedback shift register, as seen here: https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-lets-make-a-game-sp...
Pacman uses a pseudo-random-generator in the frightened-ghost movement (to pick a random direction at intersections - but only for ghosts in frightened mode).
In general "randomness" and "balancing" don't work too well together.
PRNGs in arcade machines and home computers often used a variant of xorshift since that's easy to implement in hardware, but most often this was just for noise generation in the audio chip.
My father and I in the early 90s were lucky enough to come across a Tempest arcade machine that "didn't work" in a yard sale and bought it for 50$. I was going to make something out of the cabinet. I opened it up, and noticed the CRT was disconnected from the big white input on the center. Connected it, plugged it into a surge protector waiting for smoke... and had a working Tempest game in my room for my teenage years.
Always a fun game, and when I learned you could change game settings with DIP switches, that curiosity never really left and led me to coding. 30 years later, I'm still coding.
My business partner Tom, it was a 'cocktail' version of Asteroids. A glass-topped cocktail table with controls on two sides and the screen under the glass.
He ended up writing a disassembler for the roms and hacking it to give infinite lives. Still has it in his basement. 40 years of coding.
I've never really considered myself a 'gamer' (despite now working in the industry) but Tempest was my first favorite arcade game back in the day. I'm surprised there hasn't been an evolution of that game in some way/shape/form. Or perhaps there has been and I just haven't seen it.
Not much into games either, and not many games in arcades in the 80's appealed to me. Tempest was one. I do not remember having to wait to play it either. Either it was not very popular or it was past its prime.
I can’t think of another game before it or since that’s like it. It neither inspired a genre nor spawned any copy cats. It’s just plain unique! And really fucking difficult :)
And of course, JM has been responsible for all (OK, most of) the non-arcade ports since the Jaguar version, Tempest 2000 and (un-)official clones (such as space giraffe and T2K)
Regarding games "feeling hard" - I don't think video games would have survived and flourished so well if they were all so easy that you could plop a quarter in and just start playing.
And even then, easy was in the eye of the beholder. As a kid, i lost a lot of quarters wondering wth was going on in game and Atari had more bad games than good games. To think i paid $60 USD for Pole Position back in the day. I'd take Forza anyday over that old road wiggle experience.
Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview, that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you did need to let people plop a quarter in and just start playing!
> Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now.
Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter into a machine they hadn't played before!
On one axis the perfect coin-op is trivially easy to get into but almost impossibly hard to master.
On a related axis you trade off progress/satisfaction vs frustration. In a perfect game frustration at failure motivates the desire to make progress. The game produces just enough satisfaction - likely with intermittent reward - to keep players coming back.
Too much frustration and players give up. Too little and they master the game and their quarter lasts for half an hour.
The original PacMan is pretty close to ideal. It's immediately obvious what the goal is, and then you slowly understand how the game is designed and start to master each level.
Battlezone was a failure, because once you worked out (or were shown) the one trick - dealing with the saucer and missiles by staying in reverse - the game became too easy.
My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did everything and so game design (the act of worrying about making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn’t really exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)
The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a little bit of tutorial on them.
Eugene Jarvis: Crush, punish, kick the players ass!
Defender is a play on sight title because of that idea. Love that game and it is hard! But if you put out, really try, you are richly rewarded. When one gets I to the zone, or flow on that game, the world goes away, and it is amazing. Addictive.
I am building a cabinet for that one. Got my perfect low hour CRT and need to cut some wood, and yeah! Can't wait.
Whenever people complain about the difficulty of Fromsoft games, I just think back to the early days of Atari and the pre-battery-save NES. No continues, you just go as far as you can and if that's not good enough, you get to start from the beginning until you get past it.
They're both hard for the same reason (to me anyway).
The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up again.
Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11 and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle continues.
Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't play games like I used to. I have the same issues with fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic games, because they usually have the kindness to put a checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss.
I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it just means I'm probably not going to play them.
Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it to getting good.
It's an interesting psychological design challenge. Games are trying to do two things simultaneously:
1. Give you a deep sense of gratification when you succeed.
2. Keep the stakes low and make the game feel safe to play.
Humans experience things in terms of contrasts, so the easiest way to ramp up the gratification on winning is to punish the player if they lose.
But what punishments are available to a game? You could imagine a game that demanded access to your bank account and withdrew cash every time you lost. Or maybe it deleted a random file off your hard disk. Playing would definitely work up a sweat and give you a profound sense of relief if you won. But it would completely undermine the sense of safety needed to make a game feel like a game and not a job or task.
Because of (2), most games can't really take much from you. The main punishments they are able to mete out are:
1. Waste your time. Give you timers or cut scenes that have to be replayed before you can jump back in.
2. Bore you by making you replay stuff you've already played.
3. Destroy virtual items. If the game randomly generates treasure, then losing it on player death can be particularly anguishing because you don't know when you'll get it back.
But, really, that all boils down to wasting your time. Because you can always get back that lost item if you grind long enough.
That means that the cost model for playing the game varies widely based on player free time. Like you, I simply no longer have a lot of free time that I'm willing to pour into games. So, while I still like them, they're effectively too expensive for me to afford.
There have been so many clickbait articles about how Fromsoft games are "the hardest games in the world" or other nonsense like that. That's never even been Fromsoft's goal, and it's not even close to accurate. They're arguably not even the hardest games of their type, Nioh is a lot harder from my perspective, and its gameplay was largely inspired by Fromsoft's games.
My point was that virtually ALL games used to be harder than Fromsoft games. Even the idea that you could actually "finish" a game was rather rare in the Atari 2600 generation of games. "Flipping the score" was a widely known concept among kids at the time. It meant that you were able to play the game for so long and your score got so high that the score reset so that it didn't go negative.
It is just the opposite. Haha their when they are easy and anyone can play them. It is why there is such a large mobile game market today.
Pole position wasn't hard and didn't take to long to learn. You can't compare it to a game with superior graphics and controls. For the hardware pole position is pretty good.
Similar in that one could just start doing stuff. Then, just when it gets a bit boring, looking at the controls, and beginning to strategize brought one almost a new game!
> HTG: So let’s go the opposite way now. What did you do “wrong” at Atari that people could learn from today?
> Bushnell: I think that I—how do I put this without sounding like an asshole? I put up with incompetence more than I should have. I should have been quicker to fire.
I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to grow into a role and time to get really good at it. But you also need to watch closely and make sure that growth and expertise are occurring, and if not, get better people in. This is delicate. I think most orgs err on the side of grace. And the ones that err on the side of "asshole" and just do a lot of firing are also doing it wrong.
Having a fire fast culture creates a stressful atmosphere.
It's better to have high standards to begin with to avoid needing to fire people. If you're firing a double digit percent of your hires, there's something wrong with your hiring process.
Most companies use metrics that are weakly correlated with success on the job. When you've hired dozens of people, who will be successful or not becomes quite obvious.
> If you're firing a double digit percent of your hires, there's something wrong with your hiring process.
This feels a little optimistic. You expect more than 90% of hires to be a really good fit?
I feel like it's more normal to have 1 in 5 or 6 or so eventually not work out. Some will self-select themselves out, so you don't need to fire quite 16-20%.
It's very easy to achieve if your process is designed to be correlated with success on the job.
Most aren't though, they're designed as a contrived game that's tangentially related to performance on the job. Which works decent enough if you fire the bottom 20%, but is totally avoidable
Having an authoritative body to make the final hire/no hire decision is important too. Needs to be tightly controlled and consistent. Letting random HMs make the decision will inevitably lead to decline in quality.
If somebody who's good at their job can't do well on your interview without studying, it's a sign your process is not assessing what matters. A good process will select for people who are good, despite whether they study beforehand or not.
I've never had high conviction in a hire and have them underperform on the job. If you do, you need to reassess what criteria you're using to make hiring decisions.
I don't like the excessive puzzling and contrived interview processes with excessive whiteboard coding, grilling, etc.
I still think outperforming 1 in 10 is very hard. Especially since I've had to hire more people than I've had "high conviction" in.
And beyond that, you just can't assess work ethic, diligence, attention to detail, etc, from an interview. You can get some secondary indicators that are correlated with that on the job, but imperfectly so.
If you're hiring people you don't have high conviction in, then of course you'll get relatively worse outcomes. I would question why.
I do think companies need to set a target aptitude percentile they're trying to hire, as it has to be somewhat aligned with comp percentile to have success. You can't try to hire 99th percentile engineers with 50th percentile pay and expect to land any hires
But if you set a lower target skill percentile to match lower comp, then you're actively choosing to lower the bar, so there should also be a lower bar for considering somebody a poor hire.
At least in our case we were able to get by targeting ~80th percentile engineers at like 60th percentile comp. Mostly through hiring people that didn't know their worth in the market, but also being a good place to work, with low attrition (non comp factors)
It seems like you've been hiring in domains that are a bit less technically demanding than the ones I was in.
Even with a whole lot spent on recruiting and careful resume screens, about 5% of interviewees were people I was 95% confident could do distributed systems work; another 10% of interviewees were people that I was 90% confident could do the work. Turning the comp knob doesn't affect these numbers that much.
So the acceptance criteria to get a reasonable hire rate and not spend all of your time interviewing becomes that 90% bar and being able to imagine working with that person without any obvious toxic or crazy behavior. In turn, that becomes about 15-20% not working out after hire.
Setting the bar to 95% and really sure of cultural fit would be hiring at 1/3rd to 1/4th the pace, and you'd still have 7-8% not working out, which isn't that optimum of an operating point. I'd also have missed the absolute best performer I ever hired.
Sure the domain of the work matters a lot. But the concept of skill distribution applies to all domains.
You can hire a 10x engineer in a basic web dev role the same as you can hire a 10x in a distributed systems one. It's possible distributed systems work is inherently more difficult to assess, but I'm not sure. It seems the process just needs to be different to assess that skillset.
If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success.
But you're right that you can't know everything after an interview. Work ethic cannot be measured directly as you stated, but usually it can be inferred with a reasonable level of confidence through behavioral cues of the candidate.
A perfect correlation between hire confidence and performance on the job implies you have a perfect hiring process. Obviously impossible in practice, but you can get a lot closer than the average hiring process, or FAANG.
Obviously to iteratively improve your hiring process, it's important to view it this way. Unfortunately most confuse and forget about what the relationship between hiring and on the job performance should be, and see hiring as a separate siloed game and view signals in the context of that game rather than the job.
Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate. It's worth going through more interviews to limit the bad hires. But obviously the tradeoff needs to be quantified and deliberately decided on. If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong
> If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success.
I think it's unreasonable to think that you can guess so well as to how performance will be over 6 months-1 year+ periods in several hours of measurement.
> If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong
My average tenure was much higher than that. But again, about 1 in 6 didn't make it a year. Turnover rate past that year was very low.
I'm not sure why you think having 15-20% of people not working out in the first year (after which turnover drops) translates to an average tenure of less than 2 years. It implies one greater than 5 years.
> If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success.
If I had a fully tuned confidence function, it would output 1.0 for candidates that would work out and 0.0 for candidates that wouldn't. This isn't realistic.
Nor is it realistic for it to monotonically increase with candidate quality (in which case it could be transformed to the above function with a threshold).
> Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate.
I don't think getting up to 1 in 6 (first year) freaks people out too bad. Rates across a broad variety of industries and employers are more than 1 in 3 quitting or being fired in the first 18 mos. I think one can do significantly better than this, but I also think 1 in 10 isn't attainable and question your numbers.
The tech interview system employed by FAANG is an example of a weak correlation style interview. Actually the structure of the interview is mostly fine, but the criteria being judged is usually off.
1) Questions should be structured such that they're modeled in a real world context, and somewhat close to the nature of the type of problems your company/division solves.
2) For most companies, coding ability and quality is more important than CS theory strength. Success on a coding problem for these companies should be judged by pace of coding and quality of solution, rather than time complexity of the result. Run time complexity of an algorithm is almost 100% orthogonal to ability to write high quality code quickly, yet this is where 99% of the interview focus is for most companies.
That being said, if you're hiring somebody to design a database storage system, sure, theory is more important in that context. But 99% of jobs are not that.
Can't tell you how many people I've seen join FAANG that I've worked with who are actually quite poor performers in a real world context. It's very easy to grind leetcode and game the system as its structured.
Its true too that at scale the correlation is probably good enough to end up with a decent workforce though. But also very easy to tweak judging criteria to be more highly correlated to real world success. I've hired close to 100 engineers, and its immediately obvious to me who will perform well by how they carry themselves in the interview. I pretty much don't even take into consideration whether they reach an optimal runtime solution. One of the best guys I hired couldn't even implement a tree traversal/DFS/BFS in the interview
> I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to grow into a role and time to get really good at it. But you also need to watch closely and make sure that growth and expertise are occurring, and if not, get better people in.
I found the way you chose to frame this to be a bit disturbing. You framed the employer as a passive watcher of a process where they invest zero and provides zero input, except for the part where they feel entitled to terminate staff for the sole sin of not blossoming greatness in the vast desert of growth that was your creation.
How about this: if what you seek is growth and expertise, why not explicitly nurture that in the environment you create?
I agree about culture & environment. There are people though who barely manage to write fizz buzz, and I believe you wouldn’t want to pay them for programming work.
I'm sorry I wrote it in such a way to give you that idea. I fully agree with "explicitly nurture [growth and expertise] in the environment you create."
> Over the last week, Kotaku interviewed 12 of Atari’s earliest female employees, in the hopes of hearing their stories—good or bad—about working at Atari in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. The culture they told us about was certainly, as Playboy described it, one of “sex, drugs, and video games,” but one in which all 12 employees say they freely participated, if they participated at all. Many interviewees said it was the best job they ever had, adding that news of Bushnell’s rescinded award struck them as shocking or unfair.
My mistake. I think you’re right and it was Ray Kassar who was so dismissive of talent. Bushnell was around after Warner but likely in the typical ‘keep them on as advisor in case they have some piece of critical knowledge’ role.
They had to write code pixel by pixel, timing the beam generation as the TV signal swept across the screen.
My buddy Howard wrote one in just a few weeks, but normally it took months to finish a title. He did it as a challenge to meet a movie debut deadline. Not a great game, but it had a display and controls and moves and scores.
> Benj Edwards, How-To Geek: Do you think the video game industry has lost sight of any innovations from the early days of Atari?
> Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now.
> HTG: If you play a modern game, you have to sit and wait for loading, go through a tutorial, watch all the cutscenes, and it’s an hour into the game before you can finally play something.
I don't agree there. Some games are still like this. "Arcade" games are not the ones I like. I didn't like them when I had an Atari 800 XL but back then there wasn't really much else to play, due to limited system resources.
But even back then I loved "Adventure", the idea of a whole world inside that computer. Shooting endless waves of aliens had much less impact on me.
We have more types of games now, and some are approaching the complexity of the real world. Some are still not. This is a good thing IMO.
I mostly like shooters (like Far Cry) and skip every cut scene I can. I wish games had an auto-skip all cutscenes option. It drives me nuts to have to skip more than one cutscene in a row. Do they really think I’m going to want to skip three cutscenes and then watch the fourth?
How do you feel about games like the original half life, which mostly don’t have cutscenes separate from the game, just scripted events on rails you can observe?
For me half life wasn’t bad because you weren’t entirely railroaded - some grab control of your character and force you to look a particular way, which is a cutscene by another name.
I wish game intellect was far more advanced than graphics, by this point. Without good in-game AI and unless there's really good writing (which is rare on itself these days!), it all gets boring really fast. Talking about single-player here, of course.
personal experience dealing with this &#$&^$#@# -- overall rating, probably "proto-VC" is accurate, similar to other primitive life forms. Definitely a taste for publicity, cant deny that.
What I find remarkable are the discrete logic hardware designs for early Atari games like Pong, Tank, Le Mans, etc. - no microprocessors! Special circuits for game functions like background, sound, score, explosions, etc..
https://archive.org/details/ArcadeGameManualTankii
Apparently Tank (the #1 arcade game of 1974) saved Atari from bankruptcy. It was developed by Kee games, a fake "competitor" that was actually a subsidiary of Atari: https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/20/ign-presents-the-his...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kee_Games
A compelling feature of these games is that they all had unique and engaging physical controls like paddle dials (Pong), dual sticks (Tank), and steering wheel/pedals/gear shift (Le Mans.)
I dug up the citations for Kee:
> In October of 1973, Bushnell decided to grab as much market share as possible by signing exclusive contracts with distributors in each geographic area to buy only Atari games. Because most geographic areas had two distributors, Bushnell separately (and semi-secretly) created Kee Games, named after Bushnell friend Joseph Keenan who became president of the company. Kee would sign exclusive contracts with the second distributor in a geographic area. The games that Kee and Atari produced individually were eventually released by both companies with unique names and some cosmetic differences.
> Spike Was Kee’s copy of Atari’s Rebound. Kee’s products were mostly copies of Atari’s games with innovative features added to differentiate them from their Atari cousins, and create the feeling of a “rivalry” between the two companies.
> Tank was the game that saved Atari from bankruptcy in 1974. The game became so popular that the exclusivity agreements Atari demanded from distributors were thrown out the window. Everybody wanted it, and Atari made sure they got it. Bushnell’s cash flow problems at Atari were suddenly reversed. Atari and Kee merged at the end of 1974.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-history-of-atari-...
I actually fixed one of those games once. It was really easy since both tanks had duplicate hardware, so signals could be compared between both tanks.
There's this remarkable Pong simulator working at a circuit level:
https://www.falstad.com/pong/clkgen.html
It describes how all the subsystem works (horizontal ball movement, drawing the score, etc.) and allows to play with them in the real time.
Fabulous resource, thanks.
I have a pdf bookmarked that walks through the same schematics in a bit of a narrative, calling Pong "THE GREAT CIRCUIT TEACHER" [0] - the only drawback being the poorly scanned in drawing of the sub-circuits. I haven't worked through it yet but combining it with those simulations should be most illuminating.
[0] http://www.pong-story.com/LAWN_TENNIS.pdf
My mom worked for a company that made chips inside the Atari cartridges and so we got a free VCS/2600 and a bunch of carts when they came out. Tank was, hands down, the best game! My brother and I spent hours really interacting with each other over the incredibly simple, blocky graphics. The "tanks" were made up of about 5 giant pixels. That's it! The planes were even worse and didn't look like planes at all. We had more fun competing and really playing with those terrible graphics.
I wonder if all the high-end game qualities today take away some of that genuine player interaction? I do love modern games and I doubt I'd enjoy Tank today, but it was special in its time.
I always wondered if companies set up fake competitors, both for internal (rnd) and external (public perception) effects.
Pension funds own all large industries as a total, most competition today outside of startup crechee fields is non-existing. Turns out, giving state functionality to free market participants does not make the state more dynamic, it makes the market more like a state, introducing a command economy like central structure and a aversion to change.
The market hurt itself in its victorious confusion. So yeah, that lack of innovation and capability of western economics, your private pension does that.
Pension funds need to be stable, not fund moonshots
Innovation death of a whole society is a stable condition
Now you just let them flourish and buy them up and/or Sherlock them
HTG: What did you do “right” in the early years of Atari that people could learn from today?
Bushnell: We did really good branding.
Yep, they were great at this, and that’s why Atari is still famous, rather than just the individual games.
How is that different than Nintendo?
Edit: Other than obviously coming before Nintendo
Atari was acquired in 1996 and I still see Atari t-shirts regularly. The brand has notoriety with generations that have never used the console. I don't think it's comparable to an active company like Nintendo.
This ignores though that they were practically dead the moment the NES came out.
They were first and that was the secret sauce. That is why people wear those shirts too.
Combat was a mind blowing experience in the moment but that is just proof anything would have been mind blowing in that moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LxPEdUZOkE
I've literally never seen anybody wearing a Nintendo logo tshirt. The Atari logo is iconic. Nintento has IP, Atari has the brand.
I see Nintendo hoodies 5 or 10 times a day here in Boston.
Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a Nintendo branded anything (other than the consoles and games).
Come to think of it, without looking it up now, I have no idea what the Nintendo logo even looks like!
Whereas Atari is ultra-recognizable even so many decades after being dead as a platform. So they must've done brand marketing right.
I had the same exact thought. Nintendo don't even have a 'logo' as such, do they, they use a logotype, the word 'Nintendo' outlined in a rounded rectangle.
Are you European or UK/IE? I notice that despite selling well in Europe the Nintendo product has a lot less 'consumer enthusiasm' there compared to in the US where people are absolutely cuckoo for the stuff.
Huh. Nintendo is a very American thing, I guess.
In the UK, at least, the original NES was marketed/distributed by Mattel as a Mattel product, and they did an incredibly poor job. The Sega Master System was distributed expertly by Virgin Mastertronic who got much better retailer agreements in the UK. As a result, it was far more popular than it ever was in the US.
I think the ubiquity of the NES in the US impacted sales (and therefore software availability) of the Amiga and Atari ST as well.
Sega only began to gain mindshare with the Genesis (the US counterpart to the Mega Drive.) So, Atari has a very old retro cachet, and Nintendo has a solid hold on nostalgia from the late 80s on.
Right. In the US market Atari never mattered again after the VCS/2600. The successor 5200 didn’t do well. Neither did the 7800 which they inexplicably held onto for a few years before release until it was up against the NES.
I can’t speak authoritatively to the micro computers, but I’m under the impression that the Atari line of 8-bits was never very popular in the US. I’ve always gotten the feeling computers played second fiddle to consoles once the NES arrived until the IBM clones started to get good at games much later.
Yeah I had only ever seen one Atari 80bit PC, maybe an 800 and one Coleco Adam. I also saw Atari STs at Toys R Us but only knew two people in the US with one that I met through BBSes.
It was before my time.
I know the Commodore 64 was somewhat popular. There were other computers with games but I don’t think any of them had the capabilities the C-64 did (Apple-II, TRS-80). The ZX was released under the Timex brand but like the Atari I’m not sure it ever went anywhere.
From the history I’ve read I think part of it may be that Atari was just kind of a disaster here. The fact that Atari actually had popularity in Europe plus they could probably make their own decisions without interference from Atari US may have been what allowed them to succeed in Europe. But that’s a guess.
Over here they’re basically synonymous with gaming. They are the company that brought gaming back after the crash with the NES and sold a ton. Then we got the GameBoy which just cemented things further. The Genesis (MegaDrive) was kind of their first real competition here but they released the super Nintendo and it sold a much better (roughly 50m vs 25m).
Of course they’ve been around ever since. The GBA, the DS, the Wii, and the Switch have all been massive successes. they’ve never really disappeared in the US.
They’re kind of the brand for all of gaming history here after the Atari crash. Sega came later (Genesis/MD) and went (so long Dreamcast), Sony came in ‘95 and Microsoft in ‘01. That’s basically it for the big brands.
There’s a reason that tons of people called all video games “Nintendos“ for a very long time.
We bought a Nintendo T-shirt for our child recently, here in Finland.
A picture of the NES controller, with the word "Nintendo" written above it.
Makes me smile, but he has no idea what it is, or what it represents.
Nintendo is Japanese.
I know that. I mean it's something that Americans seem to be enthusiastic about to a much greater extent than Europeans.
I think it's just a design/image thing. Nintendo logo doesn't catch the eye as much. Atari has a strange esoterism, dynamic quality (a bit like Nike) to it.
Well Nintendo also had good branding. But they still exist and still create games.
The part about not being able to just jump into games really spoke to me. It had been a while since I picked up a new game, but my wife got a switch and over Christmas I was playing some new games.
I got super frustrated clicking through to get to the "good part" of actually playing. I just wanted to play! Maybe that was because my first games were all Atari games.
But my kids felt the same way. They were 4 and 7 at the time, and they just wanted to play too and didn't want all the intro crap either.
w.r.t the "good part", there is a difference between games as toys and games as a story.
a lot of games today are "story games", even if there isn't a fixed story, there is some progression and different parts of the game open up at different times and result in different emergent gameplay. even something sandbox, toy-like like cities skyline and minecraft has a progression.
i am reminded of gta V, which i thought had a really good story, where the game jumps you into a bank heist in the first scene of the game, it was a huge scenario with lots of set pieces, a lot of mechanics are introduced right away, it's pretty intense, and thwarts the RPG baby-crab-killing trope, thank goodness.
games as toys, like pong i guess, where you begin the game immediately having access to every single feature of the game, still exist - apex legends, cs go, rocket league. but you still won't be able to jump into it at a decent competitive level right away. in most popular competitive FPS games, you will be rocked for a good first 20-50 hours of gameplay until you build understanding.
w.r.t to what nolan means when he has to go through an hour of things before he can start playing the real game, sadly that's a historical era. games today have so much more features, so much more complications, a mix of meta thinking, hand-eye coordination, and mechanical practice that it's hard to simply jump into a game and be comfortable right away. a lot of games today need some amount of practice, whether 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 months.
I felt the opposite way about gta v.
I wanted to jump right into exploring the city and driving cars around, but instead it threw you into this scene full of terrible characters and forced you to murder a bunch of people. There is literally no way to start playing the game until you prove you know the shooting mechanic by executing a dozen police officers.
I’m normally fine with violent games, and I had a blast with Vice City and San Andreas, but this intro was so awful that I just put the game down and didn’t come back.
gta's sandbox is the most "famous" part of the game to non-gamers, but the series since the beginning when it was a top down shooter has always been story driven, now more than before. if you want the sandbox experience, it is in GTA:O, not the single player mode.
Ironically, the reason I picked it up was to play the online version with some friends. The only was to unlock online mode was to go through that mission.
>games today have so much more features, so much more complications, a mix of meta thinking, hand-eye coordination, and mechanical practice that it's hard to simply jump into a game and be comfortable right away
That's demonstrably false! Have you never picked up and played a game part-way through with a friend?
>That's demonstrably false!
Can you demonstrate it? Games that are accessible to the average non-video-game-player to just jump in and play are the exception rather than the rule. Fall Guys, maybe Mario Kart? What else?
Wii Sports (or now Nintendo Switch Sports) is a big one.
> Have you never picked up and played a game part-way through with a friend?
never games that i'm not familiar with. it seems downright unfair to the person who is half-way through it.
i have seen my friends who've mostly played J-RPGs try to jump into a coop Gears of War at a party and it wasn't good at all, in fact, it was extremely embarrassing.
On the flipside, my formative video game experiences involved reading the instruction booklet to a new NES game, cover to cover, while being driven home from Toys R Us. They were essential to knowing how to play and appreciating the storyline.
The Atari 2600 was no different: You needed the manual to know what the weird symbols onscreen meant, or what the switch settings would do for that particular game.
Of course, things were different in arcades.
I'm the same. May be biased, as I sell retro games for a living, but I really miss the era where you could just chuck in the disc/cart and play.
PlayStation and Xbox are even worse in this regard. Not only do you have the long intro, but a solid half-hour of installation and patching before you can even launch the game!
Indeed. The first experience of getting a new game on Xbox is always updating it. Sometimes it takes hours! Where is the fun in that? They need a better system for updates.
Depends on the game. If you pick up a strategy game you can just jump in just fine. If you want to play Counter-Strike, just start up, join server and start shooting.
Agreed. Contra is my go to when I think of this experience. Just dropped into a war zone and you start shooting. No explanation necessary.
same. as I get older....I want story...but not at the beginning...and I don't want a tutorial. I want gameplay...with cutscenes like breaks...the cutscenes should be skippable and pausable.
as for Multiplayer....Less loading screens, lobbies and loot crates.....and maybe just maybe there is hope.
Weird take; I wonder what an alternate universe where the Jaguar didn’t rival the Saturn in terms of difficulty to develop for would look like.
I’m aware this wouldn’t have solved the other issues - such as the desperate need for a ‘Killer App’, and - of course - the big Sonic/Mario problem of the time, which was a major draw into SEGA or Nintendo’s camp.
The system - as is - is probably way more capable than what we were able to see from the software we got.
I read that a ton of Jaguar games actually abused the sound chip (I think this was it?) - which was a Z80, or something similarly simple to develop for, and thusly some of the software was literally using maybe 20% of its potential.
The previously-mentioned SEGA Saturn would often be similarly abused (though not nearly quite as bad as running most of your program code off the sound chip) where programmers would use only one of the core graphics chips or only of the SH2’s (or both…) which resulted, of course, in much; much poorer performance than the serious powerhouse the Saturn was during its lifetime.
Many PlayStation/Saturn ports of the same side by side make this difference brutally obvious. (The Saturn DOOM port is, sadly; a notorious example. It was Carmack’s decision not to run it on the 2 VDP’s - to which he later acknowledged was a mistake.)
The Saturn and Jaguar debacles really woke up the industry a lot to caring about developer needs - with documentation and follow through with developer support so poor that even at-the-time behemoth EA refused to support SEGA’s next console, the Dreamcast; in what would’ve been an unthinkable move 5 years before.
EDIT: after making some corrections, I realized on editing I pulled all this info from memory; which honestly makes me one hell of a geek, lol…
The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver)
Jaguar had two weird RISC chips (Tom and Jerry) meant to be used as DSPs, and one had a few more instructions for sound, and the other had something a teensy special for graphics. It had a 68000 that was meant to be used as a "manager" and "read the joysticks". To top it off you had the actual display chip (the "Object Processor") which was weird? flexible and programmable in some ways that almost seemed to me to hearken back to Atari's ANTIC chip in its 8-bit line.
The 68000 was the only "normal" thing about that whole system.
> The Saturn was the one that had SH2 for a main CPU and a 68000 for a sound chip (the predecessor Genesis had a 68000 as main CPU and Z80 as a sound driver)
The Saturn had two SH2s, but yeah. Note that the Genesis's predecessor had a Z80 as the main processor, and the Genesis has a peripheral activated mode to disable the 68k, and use the Z80 as the main processor to play most of the Master System library. The Dreamcast went to a single main CPU (SH4), but in a twist didn't use the previous hardware iteration as its sound chip. :)
Of course, EA didn't skip the Dreamcast because it was hard to program, they skipped it because they wanted to be the exclusive sports game provider and Sega said no. (or that's the official story anyway)
History repeats itself a lot.
I believe some of the early PS2 games were programmed in a similar manner. Devs had trouble getting their head around the Emotion Engine so they used the piece of the hardware they understood well: the older processor.
And we know the same thing happened with the PS3. The SPUs were hard to use so many early games practically ignored them, the same way many Jaguar and Saturn games ignored the other processors as much as possible.
For what it’s worth I also remember hearing that the Jaguar was incredibly buggy. If they had more time they probably could have corrected that so developers didn’t have to worry about it.
The main problem my team had is that all 4 primary chips in the jaguar shared the same bus, so you'd write code for one chip, but then it would run at <50% the previous speed once it was "in production" with code running on the other chips
Ooh this is interesting! Which team was this? Care to share any more information on developing Jaguar games?
Some of the games appeared to not have randomness (eg PacMan ghost patterns). Was this an intentional gameplay feature, or did the hardware lack a suitable source of entropy?
"This is the heart of the game. I wanted each ghostly enemy to have a specific character and its own particular movements, so they weren't all just chasing after Pac Man in single file, which would have been tiresome and flat." — Toru Iwatani, Pac-Man creator
https://gameinternals.com/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavi...
The ghost behavior is the real genius behind the game. Even if you don't realize it, your subconscious learns how each ghost operates and longer you play the more you learn how to exploit it.
Atari 2600 Pac Man is an entirely different game than Pac Man in the Arcade. It was incredibly unpleasant, even at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600)
Agreed, yet I remember my parents signing up on a waitlist to get the game for me because it was sold out everywhere.
In Pac-Man, each ghost has a distinct movement algorithm that is entirely deterministic.
In Ms. Pac-Man, initially an aftermarket hack of Pac-Man, each ghost has its own distinct movement algorithm but there is some randomness.
Interview w/ the creators of Ms. Pac-Man: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-cre...
I'm not sure how they achieved the (pseudo-)randomness, but I don't think the Ms Pac-Man conversion added new hardware other than new ROMs? Not sure about that assertion.
Even something as simple as seeding a PRNG with current uptime goes a long way, when there's human input available. I challenge you to insert coin on the 1 millionth clock oscillation multiple times.
Hardware entropy sources are more necessary for servers, or early boot-up.
I can't answer for Atari but I know that games from that time would usually derive randomness from user input timings. There simply wouldn't be a readily available source of (good) entropy available otherwise and using a complicated algorithm to harvest it and "mix" it would be prohibitively expensive. And who cares for crypto-grade entropy in a game anyway?
It's actually still common with much more recent games where there are viable strategies that involve putting the RNG in a known-state (for instance at init) and then performing very precise actions to trigger a normally random event with 100% certainty. Here's an example for Final Fantasy XII: http://www.fftogether.com/forum/index.php?topic=2778
Basically the strategy is that by using a "cure" spell several times in a row and looking at how much health it regenerates in the game you can guess the position within the RNG output sequence (that is fixed and resets when you power down the console). Then when you know where you are you can plan your actions knowing ahead of time what the RNG will output and whether it'll be favourable or not.
I believe that what you observed in Pacman was however due to a primitive AI: each ghost would have a simple strategy and stick to it, making them predictable and non-random by design.
Yes the movements in original Pac-Man were deterministic. There were books published back in the day that detailed the pattern you should take to beat each level. They were hard codes paths. There were a few variations and the only thing stopping you was your execution at higher and higher speeds. I got to the point on a Nintendo DS port of it where I could pretty much play forever (255 levels I think).
Ms. Pac-Man didn’t have this as the ghosts were not deterministic any longer.
(If this seems underwhelming, I assume you it was a really neat trick back then - the ghosts had a level of personality and cunning not seen before. Combined with the cute, cartoony visual design of the ghosts themselves it was quite something.)
http://gameinternals.com/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavio...
Original, arcade cabinet Pac-Man got an update after a while that eliminated the deterministic patterns. I'm sure the owners of 7-11 stores across the U. S. rejoiced, as I was one of those taking up space for quite a while for the price of a quarter (of a U. S. dollar).
In hindsight, was that an official Namco/Bally-Midway thing?
Or an aftermarket modification? I think that was common at the time... never heard of an official update to Pac-Man (but I could well be wrong)
I know that Ms. Pac-Man removed the full determinism but that was a total conversion and it seems like you're talking about an update to the original thing
In hindsight, was that an official Namco/Bally-Midway thing?
Ya know, it was over 40 years ago and I'm going from memory. But now that you question it, and after a bit of reading, it would seem that the patterns just changed (as sibling comment states). All I know is, I showed up for a round of Pac-Man at the local 7-11 in Danville, IN after my part-time high school job, and the patterns didn't work anymore (or quit working after a point a few levels in, don't recall).
There's a (solder) jumper that was commonly adjusted for 'hard' mode where the level progression is a bit different (starts at a later level and skips a few early on), you can tell by where pac-man dies during attract mode. There were also hacked roms to speed things up; those weren't official, AFAIK.
The 8 bit Atari measured electrical noise to create random numbers. One of the io Chips had that ability. It was the only one that had real random numbers, which as a 9 year old was important to make me feel superior to everyone else I knew with Apple or Commadore computers.
To be young again where such things were the most significant things in life...
Here's a great talk on a few strategies used to fake entropy on the NES, Kevin Zurawel "Game Development in Eight Bits" StrangeLoop 2021 [0]
To spoil it: Tetris does a sort of binary fibonacci sequence with XORs and bitshifts, Final Fantasy used a static lookup table it iterates through, and Contra counted idle cycles between drawing frames.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPbroUDHG0s
A good enough source of entropy is very easy for these games. Electrical noise, or player input for a few seconds is plenty as you don't need secure cryptography levels of entropy, you only need just enough to fool a human.
The ghost patterns in most Pac-Man gameplay are designed on purpose, but the directions they turn when running from Pac-Man once he’s eaten a pellet are intended to be random. From a broadly interesting look at the game’s internals (https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-pac-man-dossier):
“The PRNG generates an pseudo-random memory address to read the last few bits from. These bits are translated into the direction a frightened ghost must first try. If a wall blocks the chosen direction, the ghost then attempts the remaining directions in this order: up, left, down, and right, until a passable direction is found. The PRNG gets reset with an identical seed value every new level and every new life, causing predictable results.”
I don’t know how the initial RNG works (the source is available online, but my Atari ASM skills seem to be lacking), but more modern takes sometimes use a linear-feedback shift register, as seen here: https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-lets-make-a-game-sp...
Pacman uses a pseudo-random-generator in the frightened-ghost movement (to pick a random direction at intersections - but only for ghosts in frightened mode).
In general "randomness" and "balancing" don't work too well together.
PRNGs in arcade machines and home computers often used a variant of xorshift since that's easy to implement in hardware, but most often this was just for noise generation in the audio chip.
Each ghost was designed to be more or less aggressive based on their colour.
Red was always coming straight for you and you better be watching for that guy!
"HTG: What is your favorite Atari game ever published by Atari? Bushnell: Tempest."
My father and I in the early 90s were lucky enough to come across a Tempest arcade machine that "didn't work" in a yard sale and bought it for 50$. I was going to make something out of the cabinet. I opened it up, and noticed the CRT was disconnected from the big white input on the center. Connected it, plugged it into a surge protector waiting for smoke... and had a working Tempest game in my room for my teenage years.
Always a fun game, and when I learned you could change game settings with DIP switches, that curiosity never really left and led me to coding. 30 years later, I'm still coding.
My business partner Tom, it was a 'cocktail' version of Asteroids. A glass-topped cocktail table with controls on two sides and the screen under the glass.
He ended up writing a disassembler for the roms and hacking it to give infinite lives. Still has it in his basement. 40 years of coding.
Tempest is a very difficult game after the first 8 levels or so. In a good way.
I zeroed in on that comment too.
I've never really considered myself a 'gamer' (despite now working in the industry) but Tempest was my first favorite arcade game back in the day. I'm surprised there hasn't been an evolution of that game in some way/shape/form. Or perhaps there has been and I just haven't seen it.
Not much into games either, and not many games in arcades in the 80's appealed to me. Tempest was one. I do not remember having to wait to play it either. Either it was not very popular or it was past its prime.
I can’t think of another game before it or since that’s like it. It neither inspired a genre nor spawned any copy cats. It’s just plain unique! And really fucking difficult :)
You need to check out Space Giraffe by legendary hippy coder Jeff Minter https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2J9SxTp0UbE
And of course, JM has been responsible for all (OK, most of) the non-arcade ports since the Jaguar version, Tempest 2000 and (un-)official clones (such as space giraffe and T2K)
That looks really interesting. Unfortunately I don’t have an Xbox.
Same, and maybe someone should try expanding on that idea.
It just isn't the same to me without the legacy video game controller. That spinning wheel made Tempest that much better.
I agree. And, like Defender, Robotron, Gravatar, is a style of gaming I really like. Williams and Atari both delivered titles like that.
Regarding games "feeling hard" - I don't think video games would have survived and flourished so well if they were all so easy that you could plop a quarter in and just start playing.
And even then, easy was in the eye of the beholder. As a kid, i lost a lot of quarters wondering wth was going on in game and Atari had more bad games than good games. To think i paid $60 USD for Pole Position back in the day. I'd take Forza anyday over that old road wiggle experience.
Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview, that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you did need to let people plop a quarter in and just start playing!
> Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now.
Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter into a machine they hadn't played before!
There have been studies.
On one axis the perfect coin-op is trivially easy to get into but almost impossibly hard to master.
On a related axis you trade off progress/satisfaction vs frustration. In a perfect game frustration at failure motivates the desire to make progress. The game produces just enough satisfaction - likely with intermittent reward - to keep players coming back.
Too much frustration and players give up. Too little and they master the game and their quarter lasts for half an hour.
The original PacMan is pretty close to ideal. It's immediately obvious what the goal is, and then you slowly understand how the game is designed and start to master each level.
Battlezone was a failure, because once you worked out (or were shown) the one trick - dealing with the saucer and missiles by staying in reverse - the game became too easy.
Having the deterministic patterns helped a lot. People could strategize and would drop coins and see progress!
My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did everything and so game design (the act of worrying about making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn’t really exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)
The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a little bit of tutorial on them.
Yea, but in general that's 3 or 4 lines of simple text.
Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated underpinnings of things occurring.
Agreed, I'm just pointing out that not only were they generally simple, they had controls & instructions on the cabinets.
Yeah, they really missed that with I,Robot which made you choose between the game and the ungame. If you just pressed a button and oops!
I feel that way. Drop the quarter and have enough of an experience to really want more.
The people who designed Williams arcade games apparently had a different philosophy.
Eugene Jarvis: Crush, punish, kick the players ass!
Defender is a play on sight title because of that idea. Love that game and it is hard! But if you put out, really try, you are richly rewarded. When one gets I to the zone, or flow on that game, the world goes away, and it is amazing. Addictive.
I am building a cabinet for that one. Got my perfect low hour CRT and need to cut some wood, and yeah! Can't wait.
Whenever people complain about the difficulty of Fromsoft games, I just think back to the early days of Atari and the pre-battery-save NES. No continues, you just go as far as you can and if that's not good enough, you get to start from the beginning until you get past it.
They're both hard for the same reason (to me anyway).
The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up again.
Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11 and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle continues.
Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't play games like I used to. I have the same issues with fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic games, because they usually have the kindness to put a checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss.
I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it just means I'm probably not going to play them.
Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it to getting good.
It's an interesting psychological design challenge. Games are trying to do two things simultaneously:
1. Give you a deep sense of gratification when you succeed.
2. Keep the stakes low and make the game feel safe to play.
Humans experience things in terms of contrasts, so the easiest way to ramp up the gratification on winning is to punish the player if they lose.
But what punishments are available to a game? You could imagine a game that demanded access to your bank account and withdrew cash every time you lost. Or maybe it deleted a random file off your hard disk. Playing would definitely work up a sweat and give you a profound sense of relief if you won. But it would completely undermine the sense of safety needed to make a game feel like a game and not a job or task.
Because of (2), most games can't really take much from you. The main punishments they are able to mete out are:
1. Waste your time. Give you timers or cut scenes that have to be replayed before you can jump back in.
2. Bore you by making you replay stuff you've already played.
3. Destroy virtual items. If the game randomly generates treasure, then losing it on player death can be particularly anguishing because you don't know when you'll get it back.
But, really, that all boils down to wasting your time. Because you can always get back that lost item if you grind long enough.
That means that the cost model for playing the game varies widely based on player free time. Like you, I simply no longer have a lot of free time that I'm willing to pour into games. So, while I still like them, they're effectively too expensive for me to afford.
I got good at DS1 by using a trainer so I could replay each boss instantly.
Now I can manage the game in an afternoon without it.
There have been so many clickbait articles about how Fromsoft games are "the hardest games in the world" or other nonsense like that. That's never even been Fromsoft's goal, and it's not even close to accurate. They're arguably not even the hardest games of their type, Nioh is a lot harder from my perspective, and its gameplay was largely inspired by Fromsoft's games.
My point was that virtually ALL games used to be harder than Fromsoft games. Even the idea that you could actually "finish" a game was rather rare in the Atari 2600 generation of games. "Flipping the score" was a widely known concept among kids at the time. It meant that you were able to play the game for so long and your score got so high that the score reset so that it didn't go negative.
Mobile games today seem to have Atari’s “easy to learn, difficult to master” design philosophy.
(Which is also the title of a great documentary on Atari on Amazon Prime video)
It is just the opposite. Haha their when they are easy and anyone can play them. It is why there is such a large mobile game market today. Pole position wasn't hard and didn't take to long to learn. You can't compare it to a game with superior graphics and controls. For the hardware pole position is pretty good.
(nitpick: Pole Position was created by Namco. Atari was the distributor in the USA)
I remember having pole position as a cartridge for my Atari 800XL, plug it in, turn it on, and instantly into the game! I played that game a LOT.
On a different Axis, "Star Raiders"
Similar in that one could just start doing stuff. Then, just when it gets a bit boring, looking at the controls, and beginning to strategize brought one almost a new game!
I played that and Missile Command a lot.
Pole position started that crappy trend of pay per time vs pay per lives, but otherwise i did play that cart a lot too :)
> HTG: So let’s go the opposite way now. What did you do “wrong” at Atari that people could learn from today?
> Bushnell: I think that I—how do I put this without sounding like an asshole? I put up with incompetence more than I should have. I should have been quicker to fire.
I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to grow into a role and time to get really good at it. But you also need to watch closely and make sure that growth and expertise are occurring, and if not, get better people in. This is delicate. I think most orgs err on the side of grace. And the ones that err on the side of "asshole" and just do a lot of firing are also doing it wrong.
Having a fire fast culture creates a stressful atmosphere.
It's better to have high standards to begin with to avoid needing to fire people. If you're firing a double digit percent of your hires, there's something wrong with your hiring process.
Most companies use metrics that are weakly correlated with success on the job. When you've hired dozens of people, who will be successful or not becomes quite obvious.
> If you're firing a double digit percent of your hires, there's something wrong with your hiring process.
This feels a little optimistic. You expect more than 90% of hires to be a really good fit?
I feel like it's more normal to have 1 in 5 or 6 or so eventually not work out. Some will self-select themselves out, so you don't need to fire quite 16-20%.
It's very easy to achieve if your process is designed to be correlated with success on the job.
Most aren't though, they're designed as a contrived game that's tangentially related to performance on the job. Which works decent enough if you fire the bottom 20%, but is totally avoidable
Having an authoritative body to make the final hire/no hire decision is important too. Needs to be tightly controlled and consistent. Letting random HMs make the decision will inevitably lead to decline in quality.
If somebody who's good at their job can't do well on your interview without studying, it's a sign your process is not assessing what matters. A good process will select for people who are good, despite whether they study beforehand or not.
I've never had high conviction in a hire and have them underperform on the job. If you do, you need to reassess what criteria you're using to make hiring decisions.
(Never recently, in the early days, yes)
I don't like the excessive puzzling and contrived interview processes with excessive whiteboard coding, grilling, etc.
I still think outperforming 1 in 10 is very hard. Especially since I've had to hire more people than I've had "high conviction" in.
And beyond that, you just can't assess work ethic, diligence, attention to detail, etc, from an interview. You can get some secondary indicators that are correlated with that on the job, but imperfectly so.
If you're hiring people you don't have high conviction in, then of course you'll get relatively worse outcomes. I would question why.
I do think companies need to set a target aptitude percentile they're trying to hire, as it has to be somewhat aligned with comp percentile to have success. You can't try to hire 99th percentile engineers with 50th percentile pay and expect to land any hires
But if you set a lower target skill percentile to match lower comp, then you're actively choosing to lower the bar, so there should also be a lower bar for considering somebody a poor hire.
At least in our case we were able to get by targeting ~80th percentile engineers at like 60th percentile comp. Mostly through hiring people that didn't know their worth in the market, but also being a good place to work, with low attrition (non comp factors)
It seems like you've been hiring in domains that are a bit less technically demanding than the ones I was in.
Even with a whole lot spent on recruiting and careful resume screens, about 5% of interviewees were people I was 95% confident could do distributed systems work; another 10% of interviewees were people that I was 90% confident could do the work. Turning the comp knob doesn't affect these numbers that much.
So the acceptance criteria to get a reasonable hire rate and not spend all of your time interviewing becomes that 90% bar and being able to imagine working with that person without any obvious toxic or crazy behavior. In turn, that becomes about 15-20% not working out after hire.
Setting the bar to 95% and really sure of cultural fit would be hiring at 1/3rd to 1/4th the pace, and you'd still have 7-8% not working out, which isn't that optimum of an operating point. I'd also have missed the absolute best performer I ever hired.
Sure the domain of the work matters a lot. But the concept of skill distribution applies to all domains.
You can hire a 10x engineer in a basic web dev role the same as you can hire a 10x in a distributed systems one. It's possible distributed systems work is inherently more difficult to assess, but I'm not sure. It seems the process just needs to be different to assess that skillset.
If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success.
But you're right that you can't know everything after an interview. Work ethic cannot be measured directly as you stated, but usually it can be inferred with a reasonable level of confidence through behavioral cues of the candidate.
A perfect correlation between hire confidence and performance on the job implies you have a perfect hiring process. Obviously impossible in practice, but you can get a lot closer than the average hiring process, or FAANG.
Obviously to iteratively improve your hiring process, it's important to view it this way. Unfortunately most confuse and forget about what the relationship between hiring and on the job performance should be, and see hiring as a separate siloed game and view signals in the context of that game rather than the job.
Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate. It's worth going through more interviews to limit the bad hires. But obviously the tradeoff needs to be quantified and deliberately decided on. If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong
> If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success.
I think it's unreasonable to think that you can guess so well as to how performance will be over 6 months-1 year+ periods in several hours of measurement.
> If your average tenure is < 2 years, there's something wrong
My average tenure was much higher than that. But again, about 1 in 6 didn't make it a year. Turnover rate past that year was very low.
I'm not sure why you think having 15-20% of people not working out in the first year (after which turnover drops) translates to an average tenure of less than 2 years. It implies one greater than 5 years.
> If your best hire is somebody you had less confidence in, then it's a sign your confidence function is not fully tuned to what's causal to success.
If I had a fully tuned confidence function, it would output 1.0 for candidates that would work out and 0.0 for candidates that wouldn't. This isn't realistic.
Nor is it realistic for it to monotonically increase with candidate quality (in which case it could be transformed to the above function with a threshold).
> Finally, it's pretty bad for company culture and morale to have a high fire rate.
I don't think getting up to 1 in 6 (first year) freaks people out too bad. Rates across a broad variety of industries and employers are more than 1 in 3 quitting or being fired in the first 18 mos. I think one can do significantly better than this, but I also think 1 in 10 isn't attainable and question your numbers.
> It's better to have high standards to begin with to avoid needing to fire people.
Which leads to the job interview system that doesn't satisfy anybody either.
The tech interview system employed by FAANG is an example of a weak correlation style interview. Actually the structure of the interview is mostly fine, but the criteria being judged is usually off.
1) Questions should be structured such that they're modeled in a real world context, and somewhat close to the nature of the type of problems your company/division solves.
2) For most companies, coding ability and quality is more important than CS theory strength. Success on a coding problem for these companies should be judged by pace of coding and quality of solution, rather than time complexity of the result. Run time complexity of an algorithm is almost 100% orthogonal to ability to write high quality code quickly, yet this is where 99% of the interview focus is for most companies.
That being said, if you're hiring somebody to design a database storage system, sure, theory is more important in that context. But 99% of jobs are not that.
Can't tell you how many people I've seen join FAANG that I've worked with who are actually quite poor performers in a real world context. It's very easy to grind leetcode and game the system as its structured.
Its true too that at scale the correlation is probably good enough to end up with a decent workforce though. But also very easy to tweak judging criteria to be more highly correlated to real world success. I've hired close to 100 engineers, and its immediately obvious to me who will perform well by how they carry themselves in the interview. I pretty much don't even take into consideration whether they reach an optimal runtime solution. One of the best guys I hired couldn't even implement a tree traversal/DFS/BFS in the interview
> I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to grow into a role and time to get really good at it. But you also need to watch closely and make sure that growth and expertise are occurring, and if not, get better people in.
I found the way you chose to frame this to be a bit disturbing. You framed the employer as a passive watcher of a process where they invest zero and provides zero input, except for the part where they feel entitled to terminate staff for the sole sin of not blossoming greatness in the vast desert of growth that was your creation.
How about this: if what you seek is growth and expertise, why not explicitly nurture that in the environment you create?
I agree about culture & environment. There are people though who barely manage to write fizz buzz, and I believe you wouldn’t want to pay them for programming work.
I'm sorry I wrote it in such a way to give you that idea. I fully agree with "explicitly nurture [growth and expertise] in the environment you create."
Atari treated their employees poorly, which is why Activision was formed. I give Bushnell zero credibility on this point.
In fact, it could be argued that Bushnell’s poor treatment of employees was the harbinger of the first video game crash.
It really couldn't.
https://kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-pioneers-what-atari-was-real...
> Over the last week, Kotaku interviewed 12 of Atari’s earliest female employees, in the hopes of hearing their stories—good or bad—about working at Atari in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. The culture they told us about was certainly, as Playboy described it, one of “sex, drugs, and video games,” but one in which all 12 employees say they freely participated, if they participated at all. Many interviewees said it was the best job they ever had, adding that news of Bushnell’s rescinded award struck them as shocking or unfair.
My understanding is that Bushnell treated developers better than Warner. Activision was founded after Bushnell left Atari.
My mistake. I think you’re right and it was Ray Kassar who was so dismissive of talent. Bushnell was around after Warner but likely in the typical ‘keep them on as advisor in case they have some piece of critical knowledge’ role.
You have your history wrong. Activision's founders were upset with Warner Communications, not Bushnell.
They had to write code pixel by pixel, timing the beam generation as the TV signal swept across the screen.
My buddy Howard wrote one in just a few weeks, but normally it took months to finish a title. He did it as a challenge to meet a movie debut deadline. Not a great game, but it had a display and controls and moves and scores.
> Benj Edwards, How-To Geek: Do you think the video game industry has lost sight of any innovations from the early days of Atari?
> Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now.
> HTG: If you play a modern game, you have to sit and wait for loading, go through a tutorial, watch all the cutscenes, and it’s an hour into the game before you can finally play something.
I don't agree there. Some games are still like this. "Arcade" games are not the ones I like. I didn't like them when I had an Atari 800 XL but back then there wasn't really much else to play, due to limited system resources.
But even back then I loved "Adventure", the idea of a whole world inside that computer. Shooting endless waves of aliens had much less impact on me.
We have more types of games now, and some are approaching the complexity of the real world. Some are still not. This is a good thing IMO.
I mostly like shooters (like Far Cry) and skip every cut scene I can. I wish games had an auto-skip all cutscenes option. It drives me nuts to have to skip more than one cutscene in a row. Do they really think I’m going to want to skip three cutscenes and then watch the fourth?
How do you feel about games like the original half life, which mostly don’t have cutscenes separate from the game, just scripted events on rails you can observe?
If it lasts less than about 3 seconds, I'm fine with it.
I love movies and I love games, but I mostly hate movies based on games and games that want to be a movie.
For me half life wasn’t bad because you weren’t entirely railroaded - some grab control of your character and force you to look a particular way, which is a cutscene by another name.
I wish game intellect was far more advanced than graphics, by this point. Without good in-game AI and unless there's really good writing (which is rare on itself these days!), it all gets boring really fast. Talking about single-player here, of course.
This was a good podcast with Bushnell where he talked about the his personal backstory and founding of Atari. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/atari-with-nolan-bushnell
Anyone interested in building hardware for modern pong?
That's an entry level FPGA challenge:
https://www.fpga4fun.com/PongGame.html
must be nice to have the luxury of talking about branding and not having to pay 4k for an apartment every month.
personal experience dealing with this &#$&^$#@# -- overall rating, probably "proto-VC" is accurate, similar to other primitive life forms. Definitely a taste for publicity, cant deny that.