"
Video Games: The Future of Entertainment"
--Title on the cover of the December 17, 1979 issue of
Time Magazine
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Asteroids was Atari's answer to Disney's
Black Hole. All of Atari's (and, to a lesser extent, Universal's and MCA's) eggs were in the game's basket. While the gaming titan was no slouch in sales, it certainly was playing second fiddle to Walt Disney and Jak Strachan, and Michael Eisner and Raymond Kassar weren't having that. It was all or nothing.
Everything was riding on
Asteroids being a success.
Released to the world on November 12, 1979,
Asteroids was just that. While never quite reaching
Black Hole's sales (somewhere between 90,000--100,000 cabinets), it wooed players with its fancy new vector graphics and supplanted
Space Invaders as Atari's best selling arcade game of all time, hovering at around 75,000 cabinets sold. It was the win Atari desperately needed on the heels of a year of being slapped around by the House of Mouse.
Asteroids' success was followed by more good news. The first item was
Adventure, a game for the Atari 2600 that caused gaming to explode in the amount of things that could be accomplished on just one little cartridge. With the brand-new ability to take the game's action across multiple screens, new worlds were opened and the medium could shift from making minigames to crafting epic adventures. While it didn't sell as well as something like the 2600's
Space Invaders port,
Adventure received unreal critical acclaim, even getting a spotlight in the "Gaming Watch" segment of rival company Disney's
Walt Disney Fun Club News. It also would inspire many mainstream magazines and newspapers to take notice of the new medium of video games, with the most notable event being
Time Magazine's featuring of
Adventure on the cover of their December 17, 1979 issue.
But Atari's best news would be from Disney themselves. While they had slated their first-person vector graphics
Star Wars game to debut in the arcades in 1979's holiday season, the company admitted to getting their hopes up too high and needed a few more months to finish the game, now set for a February/March 1980 release, after
Galaxian debuted in January. This meant that Atari wouldn't be facing as harsh competition during the winter as they had initially feared, turning the tide in their favor (with two excellent games compared to just one) in their war against Disney.
Universal rode this wave of success right into the box office, when on Thanksgiving Day they released
Woody Woodpecker. Walt Disney was suddenly nervous about his position on top of Hollywood, and set out to make sure Eisner stayed put in second place.