>> Except for the fact that it's chock full of errors. If you
>> read it with a grain of salt, yes, it's very entertaining and
>> still has a lot of nice info. It has a good story like
>> presentation as opposed to a more "here's the facts approach"
>> like Leonard Herman's Phoenix. I talked to Steve Kent about
>> corrections, updates, etc. He mentioned the publisher owns
>> the rights now, and he has no way to update it.
>
>That's weird, 'cos I spoke to Al Alcorn about it and he told me this:
>
>"The Steve Kent book is the most accurate source of history that I know of.
>He was tireless in getting his facts straight."
>
>Not that tireless then?
>
>Cheers
>
Tireless and factual are two different things. Steve's a nice guy and put
a lot of his own money in to travel for interviews and research. However,
he didn't have the background to do fact checking and relied on others for
the proofreading.
Some of the errors off the top of my head:
He mentions the Fairchild Channel F was released in '76, while it was
actualy the Video Entertainment System (VES) and not actualy changed to
Channel F until a year later after the relase of the Atari VCS. Did you
leave that out on purpose for flow? Also, the chronology for the Stella
section is bit off to me from my resources (which include extensive
interviews with Joe Decuir). He promotes the Stella name (Joe's bike)
but mentions that way before Joe's introduction to the team. Likewise,
the chip used was a modification of the 6502 called the 6507 - the entire
console project itself was called Stella, not the chip. The name was
brought in when Joe (who was working as a liason between Grass Valey and
Consumer) had to pick a password for his mainframe account and chose the
name of the bike. Someone found out and it eventually started sticking as
the name of the project itself (which was already in debugging stage by
the time Joe came on). He also mentions Don Valentine was the major
investor in Apple, when it was Mike Markkula. Valentine declined
initially (changed his mind later) but passed it on to Markkula. (When I
mentioned this to Steve he didn't know much about Markkula or his
involvement with Apple, because he only interviewed Valentine).
Also there's the Vectrex section, which is completely wrong. His
assertion that the story regarding the the 9" monitors is untrue, is
an interesting one (by the way, I had never heard that version of it
before). The problem is that it fails to take in to account that GCE did
not develop the Vectrex console - Western Technologies/Smith Engineering
did. And in fact, the Vectrex (originally called the Mini-Arcade) was
created by Mike Purvis and John Ross in early 1981 at WT/SE after trying
to come up with a way to use a 1" CRT that Ross had picked up at the time
from a local surplus store.
WT/SE first licensed the "Home Arcade" to Kenner in the Spring of '81, and
the screen was moved to a 5" CRT, but Kenner decided to pull out by July.
How Ed Krakauer comes in to this, is he saw the concept and early workings
when WT/SE shopped it to GCE and decided it was a potential goldmine.
Consequently GCE licensed the system in September of '81. And while he
states "GCE used revenues from the lucrative handheld games...to develop
a console", the truth is that while they had input in to the development
after they licensed it (GCE had suggested the move to a 9" screen) they
did not develop it. Likewise, WT/SE designed and licensed the game
watches to GCE as well. As Bill Hawkins stated in a keynote address,
GCE was a startup created to sell itself, which it eventually did to MB.
Secondly, GCE did market and sell the Vectrex system on their own for
several months (November '82-March '83). The Milton Bradley buyout
occured in March of '83 after (as is also quoted in the passage by Hope
Neiman), they felt they "missed the boat" and wanted to aquire a company
that would allow them to enter in to video games quickly. As collectors
all know, there is a difference in pre-MB Vectrex labeling.
Thirdly, MB did not show the Vectrex at the Winter CES '82 show. The
prototype system first debuted at the Summer '82 CES (you can see pictures
of the proto at the keynote address article listed below). MB didn't buy
GCE until March of '83 (negotiations began in late '82) and then disbanded
it completely by that summer to manufacture and release the Vectrex on
it's own. It was finally phased out completely in March of '84 and all
rights to the manufacture/marketing/ etc. of the Vectrex were returned to
WT/SE. In the 90's, WT/SE (which is still around) released all the game
roms, overlays, etc. to the public for non-commercial reproduction and
use.
If you're interested in sources, feel free to check out the Classic Gaming
Expo 2000 Vectrex Keynote Address by Tom Sloper (if Tom sounds familiar,
it's
because he was in charge of the 2600 Jr. and 7800 at Atari Corp. and was
at the helm of Activision for almost 15 years) and Bill Hawkins, two
of the original programmers for the Vectrex:
http://www.classicgaming.com/features/cgexpo2000/vectrexkeynote/
also:
The 1999 Vectrex Keynote by Jay Smith, Tom Sloper, Patrick King, and
Michael Cartabiano. This page has the actual recordings of the speeches
in RealPlayer format (the first one, Jay Smith's, is the one most
applicable to this discussion):
http://www.classicgaming.com/vectrex/po_cge.htm
Fourth, the passage "This scheme might have come across as completely
ridiculous had Cinematronics not use a similar scheme to add color
to the arcade version of star castle a few years earlyer". That passage
seems to assert that Cinematronics was the first arcade game to use
colored overlays. However, it was a very very common coin-op technique in
the 70's. Before the move to color generating hardware with Namco's
Galaxian in 1979 (the first color raster coin-op), just about all coin-ops
used some form of colored overlays (sometimes just cellophane strips as in
the case of Atari's Breakout) to add color.
Furthermore, while he does mention Sega's 3D glasses later in the book,
he didn't mention Vectrex's color 3D glasses (they actually added color
to the Vectrex without the need for overlays). These were the first
3D glasses for any console. In fact, Sega had run an ad for a time
claiming they were the first and were forced to pull it.
Regarding the Tramiel buyout, there's a lot of problems as well.
Just glancing, here's a passage -
"On January 10th, 1984, the board had met to discuss the company's future.
Tramiel went to the meeting planning to unveil his dream of brining his
sons together to run Commodore. He wanted to name his oldest son, Sam,
as president. He wanted his next oldest, Gary, to run the company's
finances, and his youngest son, Leonard, who had just earned his Ph.D.
from Columbia, to work in Commodore's software division.
Gould had other ideas. He wanted Marshall Smith, a 54 year old finance
specialist from the steel industry to take over the company. According
to one report, Tramiel threatened to quit the company, and Gould said,
"Fine." On Friday, January 13, 1984, Jack Tramiel officially resigned as
the CEO of Commodore International."
None of that makes any sense. Commodore was a public company and Jack
owned only about 10% of the stock. He didn't think of it as "his". Sam
was working for Commodore in early 1984 but nowhere near the president
level. Garry (note it is spelled with two 'r's) was quite happy as a stock
broker and he didn't want to work at Commodore and he was never CFO of
Atari so there was clearly no plan for that in either company.
Leonard is not the youngest son, Garry is. He didn't get his Ph.D. until
May of '84. Jack resigned before the board meeting due to a disagreement
that he and Irving Gould had during a discussion at CES in Las Vegas.
Jack asked asked Leonard about joining him after he decided to get back
into business. This was before Atari was bought and even before he
formed TTL.
Also from the book:
"In the beginning, Atari Corporation and Atari Games were headquartered
in adjoining buildings, and the people working in the newly independent
coin-op company silently watched as the former associates were
demolished."
"I sat there and watched Atari go from 5,000 people in 25 buildings back
down to like 200 in coin-op, 200 in consumer in three of for buildings.
It was the Tramiel fire sale of Atari. It was an interesting split. He
[Tramiel] had control of his side for probably a day or two before he
realized that we were two different companies. Our buildings had
connecting door and they decided to seal them up. It became a very "us
and them" kind of atmosphere, which was too bad.
I hated watching the consumer people have to go through interviews because
it was a bloodbath. I was happy to be at coin-op.
-Kelly Turner"
This is wrong. The coin-op division was in Milpitas across 6 locations
(715 Sycamore Drive (#201), 735 Sycamore Drive (#202), 790 Sycamore Drive
(#209), 1501 McCarthy Boulevard (#210), 675 Sycamore Drive (#226), 765
Sycamore Drive (#227)).
The only thing Atari Corp. took over in Milpitas was the computer
warehouse at 601 Vista Way (#219), which was nowhere near any of the
coin-op buildings. Feel free to look it up on Mapquest.
Also, as Leonard mentioned to me - "The "us and them" atmosphere existed
long before the companies split. Yes, it was a blood-bath. It was really
hard to fire around 1000 people. I feel bad about to this day. It was the
right thing to do and the generous Warner lay-off package even had some
people cheering the decision to be laid off but it was still hard to do."
It also seems to gloss over over the 6000+ people Atari had fired months
before the sale, but dwells on the Tramiel's layoff of 1500.
The following passage in that part of the book (also attributed to
Kelly) is also incorrect:
"Everyone was expected something draconian to happen. When they [the
Tramiels] first walked in the building, someone got on the PA system and
line from The Eppire Strikes Back. I think it went, "Attention,
Imperial strom troops have entered the base."
This actually happened in a completely different setting and happenstance.
Again, there was no adjoining building, it was not when they "first walked
in" and it wasn't even Jack. This happened sometime after they settled in
and were evaluating who they wanted to keep, what projects would stay,
etc. Leonard and another person from Atari Corp. went to Milpitas to the
coin-op building to interview the programmers. One of them did get on
the PA and announce: "Imperial Storm troopers have entered the building."
He and the other Atari Corp. person could barely hear it from the lobby.
After a few weeks the guy that did it told them about it.
As Leonard said it to me:
"He was (obviously) one of the guys we hired and he was one of the most
valuable employees that we had. A brilliant programmer, a hard working,
self motivated, helpful, honest employee that I can't say enough good
things about."
Again, this is all just stuff from glancing through and recalling off the
top of my head. The book is full of problems like this, and what Al was
most likely refering to was Steve's attempt to get as much behind the
scenes stories as possible. He certainly accomplished that, and the book
does have a lot of good behind the scenes stories in each era it talks
about (including the early Atari era thanks to Al and Steve Bristow).
But as a factual reference, it's lacking. As I said, read it with a grain
of salt and just enjoy it as a "good read".
Marty
Received on Fri Apr 23 2004 - 14:25:50 BST