The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (30 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Kassar was ready to fix Atari’s problems, but he demanded rewards for his work. He filled his office with expensive furniture and converted the executive
dining room into a place of fine dining. Chefs from many of San Francisco’s most expensive restaurants were brought in to prepare daily meals.
Ray came on board to run the company and, frankly, nobody liked him. He was just a totally different kind of guy. The tech guys used to wear shorts to work. Ray was a really high society type and people just couldn’t identify with him. Didn’t like him. I don’t think it was because of anything that he did overtly, it’s just that he was different.
He always wore very heavy cologne and you could literally smell if he had been through the area. People used to joke about that all the time.
—Alan Miller
Like Kassar or hate him, one fact that no one could dispute was that Atari grew exponentially under his supervision. In 1977, the year before Kassar became CEO, Atari had $75 million in sales. Under Kassar, Atari became the fastest-growing company in the history of the United States,
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as the company’s sales exceeded $2 billion within three years.
We went from $75 million to $2.2 billion and made a lot of money. They don’t talk about all the money we made for the company. One year we made $400 million after taxes. It was the most profitable company in the world.
—Ray Kassar
They decided that security was really important, so they installed one of those magnetic keypad systems. It was universally hated by all the tech types, who were sort of anarchists anyway. You had to have your little electronic key to get through the doors, and there was no way to get around it.
One night Warren Robinett went down to the cafeteria to get some food. It was late, and he had forgotten his wallet upstairs. His key, the little mag card he needed to get back in the office, was in his wallet [so he was stuck]. He started looking around the building for some way to get back in and he found that the tool room for the coin-op people was open, so he took some tools out and literally broke down the door to consumer engineering. The alarms did not go off.
It turned out that the security system recorded the comings and goings of legitimate employees. You could break down the door and it would not register a thing.
—Alan Miller
Atari’s coin-op engineers felt that Ray Kassar did not appreciate their accomplishments and accused him of paying attention only to the game designers in the consumer division. What they did not know was that the consumer division designers also disliked him.
By all appearances, Kassar did not trust his employees. Shortly after taking over, he had an extensive security system installed. Employees had to carry magnetic identification cards to enter buildings and secured areas. Though electronic-security systems were fairly standard in the computer industry, many Atari employees counted Kassar’s increasing security as one more step toward destroying the company’s relaxed culture.
Kassar’s policy about programmers not receiving publicity infuriated all of the company’s designers, but one consumer programmer, Warren Robinett, found a way around it. He had just finished his first game,
Slot Racers
, and decided to make his next project a graphic version of
Adventure
, the pioneering all-text computer game created by Will Crowther and Don Woods.
Like the computer game, Robinett’s
Adventure
would take place in a medieval world with dragons and caverns. The original game, however, took place in an enormous universe. In order to beat the game, players had to create maps. Because Robinett’s game was for the VCS, it was restricted in size to 4K of code. The VCS, with its memory limitations and joystick controller, was not suited for text-based games. Robinett had to draw his dungeon and dragons.
I played
Adventure
at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence lab. One of my roommates was a grad student. He took me over there and we played it and I thought that it was a really cool, great, amazing thing. I had just finished
Slot Racers
and I was trying to figure out what game to do next. I decided to do a video-game version of
Adventure.It presented several problems because it was all text. You’d get a text description of the room you were in and what was around you, and you’d make commands like, “pick up wand,” “take bird,” “go north,” “go south,” “wave wand,” and things like that. It was all noun-verb descriptions for movements or actions, and it took up quite a bit of memory to give these text descriptions.
I decided I’d do the “go north/southeast” thing with the joystick and I’d show one room at a time graphically on the screen. The rooms were all interconnected. If you drove your cursor off the edge of the screen, you popped into the next room.
—Warren Robinett
In the original
Adventure
, players found weapons and other inventory, much of which they carried with them throughout the game. Because Robinett had to show graphic representations of each item, he limited players to carrying one inventory item at a time. Making the proper selection for each situation was crucial, since a certain sword might defeat one enemy but be useless against another. Throughout the game, pesky bats tried to fly away with whatever objects players carried.
I made the decision to allow you to carry just one object at a time, and that turned out to be a good thing because it meant you had to make strategic choices. If you had a treasure and a weapon and you wanted to go somewhere, you had to pick which one you were going to take.
It was also a good choice because the graphics on the 2600 were so limited and it kept things from getting too cluttered on the screen.
—Warren Robinett
Robinett began
Adventure
in the days when programmers were expected to create their own artwork. He describes his dragons as looking like ducks and
admits that the entire game looked a bit primitive. When he was about halfway through, he got bogged down and started another project. He did not return to finish
Adventure
for nearly six months.
When he returned, Robinett decided to create a hidden room. The room would have a special surprise for anyone who found it, and the keys to open the room would be readily available, but Robinett made the keys and location of the room so obscure that he doubted that anyone would ever discover them.
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To access Robinett’s secret room, you had to find “the dot,” a single gray pixel in the center of a wall of the exact same color. If your cursor touched the single interactive dot on that noninteractive wall, it would indicate that you could pick it up.
I called it “the dot” and it was just one pixel. It was the smallest, most insignificant little object you could possibly have, and it was gray. It was the same color as the background. That made it even more insignificant because [even if you found it], you could lose it and maybe not find it again.
It was hidden in part of one of the mazes in which you couldn’t see very far. The area was even inaccessible—you had to use the bridge to cross the wall to get into it. You had to make a map of the whole maze and then you would discover that there was one little tiny chamber that you couldn’t get to unless you used the bridge to cross the wall. And then if you went in there, you’d run into the dot and you could pick it up.
If you picked up this little dot, the one pixel dot that was hidden inside the inaccessible part of a large maze, and you brought it back and you messed around with it long enough, you found that it could get you through this wall and into the secret room in which I filled the screen with the words, “Created by Robinett.” It [the message] was in every color in the rainbow because I made the graphics go through the entire color palette. I wanted my name in colored lights.
—Warren Robinett
No one knew about Robinett’s secret room. He did not tell his friends at work about his little prank. If word got out, he would have been fired. It cost approximately $10,000 to manufacture games at that time. Robinett’s secret room took up 5 percent of the storage on the
Adventure
cartridge, and he was afraid that if Atari executives discovered it, they would insist on deleting it and remastering the game.
I was the only person creating the game, and nobody went through our programs with a fine-toothed comb to see what might be in there. The hard part was keeping it a secret for a year until the game came out. I didn’t even tell my two buddies, Jim Huether and Tom Reuterdahl. I felt that if I couldn’t keep the secret myself, how could I expect them to keep a juicy secret like that?
—Warren Robinett
Atari manufactured nearly 300,000 copies of
Adventure.
In 1980, after Robinett had left Atari, a 12-year-old boy from Salt Lake City sent a letter to Atari to inform the company about a strange thing he had discovered in the game
Adventure.
He had found the dot and opened Robinett’s secret room.
Robinett’s prank created a sensation. Arnie Katz, Joyce Worley, and Bill Kunkel, the publishers of a magazine called
Electronic Games
, reported the story. They referred to the room as an “Easter egg.” The popularity of Robinett’s hidden room was also noticed at Atari. In the future, entire games would be built around hidden surprises.
The 1978 introduction of
Space Invaders
ignited interest in consumer video games, as well as arcade games. Atari’s
Video Computer System
did not sell particularly well through the 1977 Christmas season, but its sales were better than expected throughout the rest of the year. As Christmas 1978 approached, however, a new competitor emerged.
Magnavox returned to the video-game industry with Odyssey 2: a game console that the electronics manufacturer hoped to pass off as something more by adding a built-in keyboard. The keyboard did not fool consumers into believing
that Odyssey 2 was a computer. Consumers did not see Odyssey 2 as somehow being on a par with Apple. It was a video game system, and despite having launched the first home game system, Magnavox could not hope to compete with Atari. By the end of 1978, Atari had sold its entire inventory of over 400,000 warehoused VCSs and had to step up the production of new units.
I had built the company and I had developed the marketing plan. They never advertised their products before, so we spent five million dollars in advertising and that’s when it started taking off.
—Ray Kassar
Early in 1979, Manny Gerard made a suggestion that further increased Atari’s leadership in the video-game industry. Like everyone in the industry, Gerard knew about
Space Invaders.
One day it occurred to him to license
Space Invaders
and convert it into a cartridge for the
Video Computer System.
Kassar loved the idea.
Taito agreed to license
Space Invaders
to Atari. It was the first time that an arcade game had ever been licensed for home use. Kassar, whose marketing sense proved nearly uncanny, predicted that a home version of
Space Invaders
would be such a major hit that people would buy VCSs just to play the game. He focused most of his advertising budget into promoting the game. The result was the bestselling game of 1980.
When they came out with the
Space Invaders
cartridge, all hell broke loose. There were contests. It was a big deal. That was the beginning of licensing coin-op games as consumer products.—Manny Gerard
With the success of the VCS, Atari expanded its consumer division as quickly as possible, but many of its employees were unhappy. Under Kassar, the executive team knew nothing about technology and corporate policy. Executives discouraged programmers from taking ownership of their games. Kassar would not even allow them to see sales figures.
Under the Kassar regime, management became sort of brain dead about technology. They didn’t know the limitations of technology.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was that we lost respect for Atari. They were not committed to doing great stuff anymore. That was a huge change from when we all started there. When we started, we were very idealistic, hardworking, and committed to creating great stuff.
—Alan Miller
Atari’s first and most significant defection began in 1979 when Alan Miller, one of the first VCS programmers, left the company. He wanted more money and more ownership of his products. He considered game designing an art and wanted to be treated like other popular artists. When he complained about this to a few friends within the company, they agreed. With the support of Crane, Kaplan, and Whitehead, Miller tried to renegotiate his job.
By this time, more than twenty programmers were in the consumer division. The VCS had already surpassed all sales projections, and Kassar and his staff felt extremely comfortable with the system’s future prospects.
I put together a closed contract based on contracts I had read about for [popular] writers and musicians. I presented it to management and told them I wanted to negotiate for more compensation, and we kicked that around for quite a while.
At some point, Larry [Kaplan], Dave [Crane], and Bob [Whitehead], who were my best friends at Atari, became aware of what I was doing and they wanted to try to negotiate on that basis, too. The four of us became a group.
We moved up through the ranks, talking with our boss, George Simcock, then John Ellis, who was first in command of consumer engineering, and then Ray [Kassar] directly. At one point they told George Simcock that they would come to some kind of agreement, but ultimately they just put their feet down and said no.
I remember one guy told us, “For the kind of money you’re wanting I can go out and hire six guys.”
My reaction was, “You can hire them, but I don’t think they can do the kind of job that we’re doing.” I don’t think I actually said that to him.
—Alan Miller