Atari: Game Over documentary about the E.T game

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by PaulKTF, Jul 30, 2014.

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  1. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    It was disappointing, to say the least. I don't remember what the cartridge cost back in the day, but it was a LOT of money, especially when inflation is considered. The first weekend we had Pac-Man, everyone had to come over to see it and commented on the poor sound effects and graphics where Pac-Man only faced one direction. Ms. Pac-Man was a substantial improvement, but this was back in the day when magazines would carry advertisements showing how a game looked on the different systems, and we were in awe of how something like the ColecoVision could produce graphics similar to the arcade game.
     
  2. balzac

    balzac Senior Member

    I remember hearing about this documentary some time back. I’d love to see it. I remember hearing that it would begin as an Xbox exclusive, since they were the studio behind it.

    But I also recall not too long ago hearing that Microsoft was essentially shutting down the division that was making more films. Considering their “studio” won’t be a continuing venture, I was kind of hoping they would put whatever films were already in the pipeline straight into general release, since the exclusivity no longer serves to promote an ongoing line of films.

    Hopefully either way this will be available to stream or purchase for non-XBox users before too long.
     
  3. Agent57

    Agent57 Marshall will buoy, but Fender control

    Location:
    PA
    Most Atari carts at the time were 4Kb ROMS (early games like Combat were only 2Kb!) - some later games, like "Asteroids", used bank-switching to 'flop' two 4K ROMS to trick the VCS into seeing 8Kb of program space. Even while knowing that, Atari still insisted that Pac-Man programmer Tod Frye use only 4Kb and the rest is history. "Hey, it says 'Pac-Man' - ship it!"
     
  4. Synthfreek

    Synthfreek I’m a ray of sunshine & bastion of positivity

    This is what Pacman on Colecovision was supposed to look like (only made prototypes.)
    [​IMG]

    Check out these amazing screenshots from a homebrew cartridge that actually WAS released for the Colecovision a few years back.

    [​IMG]
     
  5. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    It's pretty amazing what they managed to do with 4Kb. I remember programming back then and running out of room quite quickly!
     
    Agent57 likes this.
  6. jriems

    jriems Audio Ojiisan

    Fantastic. Thanks for posting that! Much ado about nothing, after all. I feel better.
     
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  7. S. P. Honeybunch

    S. P. Honeybunch Presidente de Kokomo, Endless Mikelovemoney

    The thing about the 2600 Pac-Man is that once you bought it, you didn't have to drop any more quarters to keep playing it. Not the best adaptation, but the semi-fun was endless!
     
  8. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    Kind of like listening to the Monkees when you really want the Beatles.
     
  9. S. P. Honeybunch

    S. P. Honeybunch Presidente de Kokomo, Endless Mikelovemoney

    Nope: more like a ferry ride when a jet pack ride would be more fun.
     
  10. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    The problem is that the ghosts flicker so much it's almost impossible to see them. And Pac-Man is really difficult to control.

    Plus, the sound effects are vomit-inducing.

    I'd rather be playing Yars' Revenge, or Pitfall, or Space Invaders (which is a pretty great port of the arcade game), or... anything else. :)
     
    lbangs and DreadPikathulhu like this.
  11. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Wow!!! That home-brew looks stunning! I love it.
     
  12. Agent57

    Agent57 Marshall will buoy, but Fender control

    Location:
    PA
    Bingo, that's exactly why the cart should have been 8Kb - with the extra space, there would have been room in the cart to write a Kernel that does flickering in only one quarter of the maze at a time (see the 8Kb "Ms. Pac Man" cart for an example of that and notice how the flicker moves around the screen - much easier to live with).
     
  13. davidshirt

    davidshirt =^,,^=

    Location:
    Grand Terrace, CA
    I think its funny that the problem that plagued the ghosts in the 2600 port of PAC Man was actually called ghosting.

    But yeah it wasn't just E.T. that created the game crash, it was an over saturated market at the time. Looking back to the crash period years of 83 to 86 I can look fondly at some positive aspects of it.. Systems were being liquidated and my father purchased a few for real cheap and it was kind of fun playing some games, but some were just bad. On the flip side arcades were still pretty successful and arcade technology was growing by leaps and bounds through 83 to 86. Home computing was taking off as well and PC games were pretty cool at the time. Then Nintendo brought home console gaming back.
     
    Agent57 likes this.
  14. Synthfreek

    Synthfreek I’m a ray of sunshine & bastion of positivity

    Norm has done many really great short Video Game History clips...here's his take on:

    The Video Game Crash Of 1983
     
  15. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    This does look like a pretty annoying version of the game:

     
  16. bluenote

    bluenote Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    I think from our perspective now, that the 2600 version of Pac-Man was horrible, but I remember at the time I was amazed by it. I mean, you could play a version of Pac-Man at home, I didn't really consider how inferior it was to the arcade version at the time. In hindsight, sure, but at that time there wasn't many options available to you.
     
  17. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Probably true. The same was true for home video: we watched pan and scan mono movies on 13-inch TVs but were just so excited to be able to watch movies at home whenever we felt like it! :)
     
    Mark Nelson likes this.
  18. Daniel Plainview

    Daniel Plainview God's Lonely Man

    Absolutely. Pac Man was far worse than ET. Pac Man was total garbage. ET had issues....crappy game play (can't get out of this damn well!) but it did have a sort of charm to it. I'd always use the setting where there were no doctors or feds chasing you. Then putting the phone together and going home was like a walk in the park.

    Ms Pac Man was the one that brought the Pac-Man arcade experience home.

    There were lots of crap games out there. The worse one that ever crossed my path was something called "Firefly" which was the most putrid video game experience ever created. I mean...its like a joke or something. Look it up on youtube to see what I mean. I'm sorry I wasted my parents' money on such tripe.
     
  19. SonOfAlerik

    SonOfAlerik Forum Resident

    Location:
    Westland, MI USA
    Didn't K.C. Munchkin (The Odessey 2 Pac-Man ripoff) actually look more like Pac-Man then Atari's 2600 Pac-Man?
     
    McLover and Moonbeam Skies like this.
  20. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Yes it did!

     
    SonOfAlerik likes this.
  21. S. P. Honeybunch

    S. P. Honeybunch Presidente de Kokomo, Endless Mikelovemoney

    Duh! They're ghosts! What else do you want them to be?
     
  22. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    :nyah:
     
  23. Having also been there at the time, I can say that me and my friends fully recognised how lame it was but put up with it because, indeed, there weren't other options available other than the arcade game. But once they got it right with Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man 2600 went up on the shelf and stayed there.
     
    Agent57 and lbangs like this.
  24. kouzie

    kouzie Forum Resident

    Location:
    Batavia, IL
    On a related note, I took my kids last week to their school playground for a little exercise. Some kids had written with chalk on the blacktop all kinds of kid stuff (hopscotch, rainbows...). But in the middle of all the doodling, someone had written "Pac Man Fever." That's gotta be one of the weirdest and most random things to be written on an elementary school playground in 2014. I loved it!
     
  25. S. P. Honeybunch

    S. P. Honeybunch Presidente de Kokomo, Endless Mikelovemoney

    What they could have done with E.T. was make a sequel to Circus Atari. E.T. would have been the star of the circus and such.
     
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