Nice Thread Concept!
I think I'll go pop culture for my first attempt...
Chapter 5
By the end of 1979, the only thing that could be said for the 2600 was that it had (barely) sold it's entire production run of 1 million units (827,375 to be exact) and that, in doing so, had ensured that Warner would go forward with Nolan's long planned successor console; the 5200 'Super System'. (Remember: We only had to sell 3/4 of the units to begin production of the 5200.)
That's not entirely true. It had one other thing going for it.
Nolan had convinced the higher ups to hold the home port of Space Invaders over as not only a launch title for the new machine, but also to make it the pack-in cart for the new system and 'a Super System exclusive'.
This decision would prove to be almost as important to the success of the Atari Super System as the care taken in it's development; from the custom graphics and display chips, to the dedicated sound generator (True story, some knucklehead actually suggested piggybacking a rudimentary sound generator on the pot controller, I shit you not.), to the on-board memory management chip, to the 8/16 RAM split; 8K of general purpose RAM, 16K of dedicated VRAM.
That, and using the Western Design Center WDC65C02S, rather than a second source MOS Tech 6502C as the CPU.
I wish I could say that we were all, totally, 100% confident that the 5200 was going to be what it ended up as right from the start, on Friday, May 30, 1980...
...but that would be a lie.
That, and Nolan admitted to Mike Wallace in '83 that we were all pretty much shitting our pants right up until the first store (a Crazy Eddie's in Brooklyn of all places) sold out it's entire stock- 30 units -in less than 30 minutes of the store's opening that day.
One unit a minute? Insane. Unsustainable. Nice, but watch, there's still going to be 2,499,970 units unsold at noon Eastern.
We had no idea just how wrong we were.
Within the first 72 hours of release, 2 million units sold.
72 hours.
2 million units sold.
That's
463 units per minute.
Did famed quarter magnet Space Invaders being sold- for the first time anywhere as a home port (And a damn good one at that; better than the arcade, as ours was in full color!) -and exclusively for the Super System probably have
something to do with those numbers?
Yeah. Nobody will ever convince me otherwise, because, while launch titles like Adventure (which begot Sword Quest, which begot The Godfrey franchise), Grand Prix (not bad, but landing that deal with Taito to port Pole Position a year later would be the bigger racing franchise and bigger seller by, oh, about a couple million units), Superman (that spring, gamers
would believe a man could fly), Star Raiders, and Nolan's personal favorite, Pinball Arcade, certainly helped keep sales strong going forward, the vast majority of Day 1 sales were Super System only.
Then again, at $200 a unit and $25 a game cart, that was to be expected, and besides, you got
Space Invaders with the machine! Who could ask for anything more?
(Not a lot of people for the first month or so.)
The rest, as they say, is history.
Approximately 4.5 million units sold by the end of calendar year 1980.
Approximately 10 million game carts sold by the end of calender year 1980.
White Christmas? Try
Green Christmas.
Nolan had tossed the dice and staked his position in the company to a very risky proposition and won. The brass at Warner wouldn't question him again until he and Jay and I rolled the first 16 bit, Motorola 68k powered proto-type system into the board room in July of '83, but I'll get to that later.
Aside from watching profits super nova, three equally pivotal events would take place later in the year.
The first came at the end of June, when Nolan went 180 on his home computer stance.
After Apple, Commodore and Tandy put the Apple II, PET and TRS-80 on the market in '77, the Warner guys wanted us to build a home computer. Nolan refused. We were a game company, not a computer company. We didn't have the hardware to do it, and nobody wanted to rush development of the Super System chipset just to build a computer while the 2600's weren't exactly flying off store shelves at a much cheaper price than a home computer would cost.
Three years later, however, with Super Systems flying off store shelves as fast as they could be stocked, Nolan began to view an Atari home computer very differently.
The hardware was not only where we wanted it, but we were further refining it into improved performance, more cost effective renderings; ANTIC and CTIA would end up combined into a single VLSI known as VISION (with 80 column display capability, among other improvments), MELODY evolving into HARMONY and the HAL MMU morphing into FREDDIE.
With that sweet WDC65C02S, running at 3.5 MHz, combined with the refined chipset and the
massive drop in price of RAM chips, Nolan saw the possibility for something bigger, even more revolutionary than a game machine.
A tool that could educate and enrich the masses.
It was there, in that meeting in Sunnyvale in late June of 1980, that the Atari 1200XL home computer was conceived.
It'd be about two years before it hit the general market, but we were shipping a precursor machine (the computers the crew at Atari Games had used to develop our own Super System games) to the guys from Activision and Imagic by November.
Then, just like the Activision and Imagic guys had left Atari Games to found
their companies, guys from Activision and Imagic were leaving to found companies of their own, like Epyx and Broderbund, two third party producers who would help cement the home video game console into the fabric of American popular culture and even make it damn near a household staple. (Five years, 30 million units sold? Maybe not a staple, but pretty damn impressive!)
The 1200XL, however, would have an even bigger impact on how games are made and who makes them.
There's a reason the initial production run of 1200XL's was 3 million units.
Sure, there were schools, and responsible adults looking for a solid home computer for home accounting and running small businesses and things like that, and these were two
really big parts of Nolan's grand vision.
The third part, however, was, as he put it (and I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wording this wrong) "For the college or tech school kid with $500 bucks and a dream. The future of our industry: The gamers themselves.".
I asked Brian Fargo once if he would have founded Interplay had he never gone to work for Imagic and been exposed to the versatility of our early 5200 development computers.
He said "Probably not.".
A world without Bard's Tale, Wasteland, Fallout and on and on?
I genuinely shudder to think.
Okay, so start up was a bit more than '$500 and a dream'...but it was close enough that guys like Brian were willing to throw the dice on it.
The second big event came at the end of August, when Jay took a hefty payout and left to create Hi-Toro Labs, his own chip development firm. While I was initially saddened by Jay's departure, I eventually came to look at it as a net positive- and now a flat out monumental moment in the history of the IT industry on the whole.
Jay and his crew developed chips that would change the way graphics and sound hardware would be produced, and, ultimately, how graphics and sound would be generated to this day.
Again, that's something we'll get to later.
The third big event happened in December.
See, there was this game released by Namco in 1980, called Pac-Man.
Maybe you've heard of it.
Anyhoo, in December, Nolan had landed a meeting with the honchos at Namco.
Now, while that initial meeting obviously wasn't going to produce 'Pac-Man by Christmas!', it
did score a major coup against our competitors at the time (if Mattel and Magnavox could really be called that).
It secured a preliminary deal that would ultimately lead to an exclusive license for Atari to port Pac-Man for our machine, leaving everybody else to twist.
It would also set a precedent that would (at least once) come back to bite us in the ass.
Again, we'll get to that later...
Excerpt from 'Atari World: The Incredible True Story of Atari', by Nolan Bushnell and George McCleod, Random House, 2000.