Characters like Jeffrey at Slipperyskip Computers have started cramming tiny motherboards into some very cool cases.
It's funny how anniversaries sneak up on us.
The monstrosity above is an early prototype of the Atari CX2600 Video Computer System that went into production in October 1977. The $199 system came bundled with Combat, two rubberized joysticks, a pair of paddle controllers and a handy dandy RF modulator to mangle your parents' TV reception.
The prototype was built by Steve Mayer and Ron Milner in 1975, and it's now part of the Computer History Museum's permanent collection. They relied upon a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer to cross-compile the system's software because there simply weren't any suitable off-the-shelf microcomputers; the Apple II, Commodore PET and Radio Shack TRS-80 were still years away.
The 2600 very nearly didn't happen. The early prototypes relied on a circuit board full of video circuitry which was miniaturized into a single IC, the TIA (Television Interface Adapter). Development costs skyrocketed, and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell realized in 1976 that the company simply didn't have the financial strength to complete the project as Pong sales plateaued. He sold the company to Warner Communications for $28 million, and it is rumored that the final development cost of the system was more than $100 million. It proved to be an insanely risky but shrewd gamble for Warner.
The custom TIA chip was the key to making the system commercially viable. Microcomputer hardware was phenomenally expensive in the mid 1970s, and the first production version was built around only three main chips: the MOS 6507 CPU (a low-cost version of the famed MOS 6502 processor that would eventually power millions of home computers), MOS 6537 RIOT (128 bytes of RAM, two bidirectional I/O ports and a programmable timer), and Jay Miner's crude TIA video chip. The only other significant component was the cartridge ROM.
Early games such as Combat were crammed into 2K of ROM - a mere 2048 bytes - because memory was incredibly expensive. At the time, no one could imagine using the full 8K that the 6507 was capable of addressing. Incredibly, a handful of later titles included a whopping 32K of bank-switched ROM.
The Atari 2600's impact upon the gaming world was immense. No less than eight variations were produced over its stunning 14 year lifespan, along with three Sears-branded models and over a dozen clones. The system sold in excess of 40 million units, and AtariAge lists well over 1300 different game titles. This is all the more incredible because the system was envisioned to have only a two or three year lifespan before being replaced by something more sophisticated. That day never came. Even though Atari made repeated attempts to surpass their initial design, the 2600 remained the pinnacle of the company's console gaming success.
The Atari 2600 prototype is part of the Computer History Museum's permanent collection in Mountain View, California. Special thanks to Atari Age for allowing us to reproduce their images as part of Atari Week. Happy Birthday, VCS.
As for you... Have you played Atari today?
The Atari cartridge collector crowd celebrates a number of rare games. Unfortunately their stunning costs (often several hundred dollars) do not indicate the fun value. My experience has been that rare games are mostly rare for a reason. The best games are mostly the ones that we know best; the ones that were very popular and you can find for a couple bucks on Ebay. But there are a few rare carts that capture an interesting moment, and Pepsi Invaders is one.
An original cartridge from that batch of 125 sold a few years back on Ebay for $1825. The ROM has since leaked out, and I got this reproduction (in a clear cartridge case no less) a few years ago for considerably less. As you've guessed, the game isn't all that fun, but it's enough of a curiosity to break it out at Atari parties. Especially if someone is drinking Pepsi; the choice beverage of alien marauders.
Atari completely underestimated the role their programmers played in the company's newfound success. The corporate executives still lived in a world dominated by hardware, and they failed to recognize that a handful of extremely talented programmers were almost single handedly responsible for over half of their cartridge sales. These creative software artists toiled anonymously to produce smash hits - usually working alone. Unknown ace programmer David Crane, who joined Atari in 1977, took home a modest professional salary of about $20,000 per year in return for his efforts, while Atari's management team pocketed astronomical bonuses.
Things reached the breaking point when the marketing department distributed a memo that systematically broke down the previous year's cartridge sales. Their goal was to let the developers know what was selling well, but Crane suddenly realized he was solely responsible for generating over $20 million in sales. In fact, four programmers - Alan Miller, Larry Kaplan, Bob Whitehead and Crane - were responsible for over half of the division's cartridge revenue that year. They approached Atari president Ray Kassar in an attempt to receive recognition and more appropriate compensation, but he turned them down flat.
Some high priced consultant walked into the halls of Atari in its halcyon days and said, "you guys are doing great at this video game stuff, but you really need to diversify". That's what consultants do - if you're really good at one thing, they tell you to spread that knowledge to other areas - if you're stretched too thin, they tell you to concentrate on your core competencies. There - you're all consultants now.
AtariTel - eager to make their mark in the world of telecommunications, Atari researches toiled for two years in secret to come up with a line of what we'd now call home networking products. At least one actual product came of this, but it wasn't sold by Atari. After AtariTel was shut down, Atari sold their design for a slow-scanning video phone to Mitsubishi who sold it as "Luna". I actually have one of these monsters, and unless one of you out there also has one we'll never know if it works!
Atari Healthcare Systems - Atari had some interesting ideas to create a modular hardware system to simplify hooking up multiple pieces of diagnostic gear to hospitalized patients. They got as far as creating non-functioning mockups of the proposed gear, but the whole idea was scrapped after the Atari takeover by the Tramiel family. One product near completion was the Vidicom, a handheld LED text display for patients unable to speak.
Remote Control Atari - the gaming division had it share of vaporware too. One famous example was this wireless Atari. Sure they all do it now, but Atari had this in mind decades ago, though with inferior cordless technology). There is at least one prototype of this monstrous unit that recently changed hands for lots of money. Not bad if you like your Atari to look like that doorstop-shaped clipboard thing that Captain Kirk seems to sign at the end of every episode of Trek.
The Atari 2600's hardware was designed with just a few games in mind - pong games, and combat type battles. Because the 2600 was only ever designed to support two moving objects on screen at a time, it took really clever programmers to expand the play abilities to the amazing point we've seen. 
Rob Fulop was a 1981 Atari staffer who managed to shoehorn the game mechanic of Missile Command into the meager computing resources of the 2600. The game became a killer app, selling 2.5 million copies - shattering all previous sales records. Fulop hoped that his bosses would show their appreciation via a fat Christmas bonus envelope, or perhaps the keys to a new car. After all, his programming chops made Atari millions.
Fulop's Christmas bonus was the same as every other Atari employee received in that year of historic profits; a gift certificate for a free Armor Star turkey. After framing his turkey ticket (it hangs on his office wall to this day), he helped form Imagic; the second independent publisher of Atari games. Two of his games have become Atari classics; Cosmic Ark & Demon Attack. After a period of phenomenal growth, his company went down in the video game crash of the mid 80's and Activision picked up the rights to their 24 classic games.
Fulop went on to work on the notorious 
1. The original name chosen for Bushnell & Dabney's fledgling enterprise was Syzygy (an astronomical term meaning 'unity' or 'alignment'). Fortunately, it was already taken and Atari Inc. was incorporated in California on June 27th, 1972. It's based on the Japanese 'ataru,' which roughly means "prepare to get your butt kicked."
8. Things really took off for the console industry (and Atari) when they ported Taito's arcade hit 
It's Atari Week here at Retro Thing, and all week long we're going to looks at some lesser known aspects of the video game company that started it all; Atari. Poor old thing has fallen on hard times - after years of being bounced around, Atari's current owners have incurred huge financial losses over the last few quarters... so it seems like a good time to remember a lot of those things that made Atari great.
It's still weird to me that current game systems only include a single controller and almost never include a pack-in game. The 2600 included Combat and four (count 'em!) controllers. Two were paddle controllers (rheostats to all of you solder jockeys out there) for spinning game elements from side to side. The paddles lay bare the 2600's heritage as a 
The rheostat style controller more or less disappeared after the 2600 (
Some of my favorite games for the 2600 are paddle games. Super Breakout is still awesome after all these years, the superlative Warlords, the underrated Circus Atari. Dual Shocks be damned... the closest a gamer gets to Zen is with a paddle controller in one hand and the classic Kaboom in the other.
We can all bewail the loss of drive-in movie theaters, but perhaps some of our more enterprising readers will invest in a theater of their own. This Remco toy might be a little smaller than you were thinking, but here's a drive-in theater that's ready to go... no messy dealings with movie distributors, and no cleaning up after your little plastic patrons.
