Out of all of the panels that I attended at California Extreme, The Atarians was easily the most interesting. This three-part series gave an awesome glimpse into the history of Atari through the eyes of some of the people that designed their most famous games. The first two segments featured designers, Mike Hally and Steve Ritchie, who shared their own personal histories. The third segment was a Q&A panel with several of the big personalities, including Al Alcorn himself.

Want to learn more about Atari’s biggest successes and failures, about their unreleased bowling ball controller, and about the hidden Easter Eggs in Star Wars? Click past the cut.

Mike Hally

Even if his name is not quite as familiar to you as that of Miyamoto or Kojima, chances are that you have played a game designed by Mike Hally. Over his two decades in the gaming industry, Mike designed over twenty games, many of which were coin-op legends. It all started for Mike in 1982 with Gravitar. Unfortunately, he came in at a bad time for the arcade industry. Atari produced seven thousand Gravitar machines, which ended up being about five thousand too many.

His fortunes were completely turned around with his next game, the incredible Star Wars. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time in an arcade, you’ve played this. Its vector graphics are still easily recognizable today. It was one of the biggest coin-ops of all time, and netted Mike a $100,000 bonus check. Star Wars was also Mike’s first chance to sneak in as Easter Egg. If you zoom in on the Death Star and turn up the vector intensity, you can apparently see the ever-quotable “may the force be with you” followed by the designer’s names. His hidden note was eventually discovered (after they sold about eight thousand units) and he was scolded for it. This was still during the period where Atari forbid the designers from getting credit for their games, but the cracks were clearly forming in the institution. After they were done yelling at Mike, they thanked him.

The laserdisc craze swept through the arcade industry in 1984, and Mike had no choice but to include the technology in his next game, Firefox. The laserdisc players were incredibly fault-prone, Hally recalls seeing a warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with broken players. Still, Mike thinks that this was one of his favorite games to work on just because he actually got Clint Eastwood to come in an record lines for the game.

Hally’s next two years were dominated by LucasFilms, with Indiana Jones in 1985 and Empire Strikes Back in 1986. Sadly, Empire was nowhere near the success that its predecessor. It was only sold as a kit, an upgrade to replace the board in the original Star Wars cabinet. Arcade owners were reluctant to upgrade, the original Star Wars was still bringing in hundreds of dollars a week.

One of his last games of the eighties, Relief Pitcher, was pitched as a cheap kit for bars. Keeping this in mind, he designed a game for people who would probably have a beer or a cigarette in their hand. The game would recreate baseball, but limit the player’s actions. Suddenly, the company decided that they wanted a full baseball game with the full range of positions and actions open to the player. This suddenly became a huge challenge, the designers had no real knowledge of the sport. Still, they completed the game, which was much needed during this dark period of Atari’s history. Mike recalled taking the game to a trade show and finding out that it was the only Atari game there. Even today, Hally remembers the game fondly for one reason – Atari let him put a baseball card dispenser in the machine. It would give out cards based on the imaginary players in the game. Naturally, the player carrying Mike’s likeness was the best hitter in the game.

One of Mike’s biggest successes came in the mid-nineties with Area 51. This is the game that won’t stop selling. It is still out there making money in those remaining arcades. This was another huge challenge for Mike and his team, they had to choreograph every shootable object in the game, frame-by-frame. Hally continued to develop games throughout the decade, finally closing his career with Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy at Midway. Dark Legacy, Mike’s last game, was also his most successful. Its console versions sold over a million units combined.

Steve Ritchie

Steve Ritchie also started his thirty-five year career at Atari, but on the complete opposite end of the company than Mike. Ritchie, as he put it, saw this company full of beautiful young girls and just had to work there, even if it was only for $3.95 an hour. He was brought on to do electrical design, but was soon invited to be the second employee of the pinball division. He learned the ropes there, but was soon snatched away by Williams. Steve put it nicely, but bluntly, “Williams could never design video games like Atari, but they could pip out three hundred pinball games a day.”

More recently, Steve worked on licensed pinball tables for Sterns. Just in case you thought that there couldn’t be any drama in the pinball industry, Steve shared a story of the insanity that ensued over the Spider-Man pinball table. Of course, Gary Stern didn’t even want to take the license. He thought it was too childish. Steve finally convinced him that the money would be worth it, but that wasn’t the end of the trouble. Ritchie’s table design had all of the main villains of the movies, but Gary was sure that there were too many “toys” on the table. He ordered Steve to take out Doctor Octopus, calling the villain ridiculous. This led to a shouting match between the two men. Steve thought it was ludicrous to take Doc Ock out, there was an entire movie about him. He finally got his way, and the table went on to be one of their biggest successes.

Although Steve Ritchie didn’t tell the stories behind every one of his games, I found him to be just as fascinating as Mike Hally. Steve truly believes that game designers are no more special than anyone else. Throughout his career, he made it his goal to become friends not just with his fellow creators, but with everyone that worked in the company, from the secretaries to the factory workers. Again, Steve put it best, “Pinball is a great business to get into if you want to meet guys.” Ultimately, he believes that the gamers are just as smart as he is. At one point, he actually walked over to his laptop and opened up a CAD program just to show us the designs for each component of the recent 24 table. Honestly, even if you had no idea what he was showing you, his enthusiasm made it the coolest part of his talk.

Q&A Panel

For the final portion of the Atarians panel, Ritchie and Hally were joined by Atari legends Al Alcorn, Owen Rubin, and Steve Bristow for an interesting Q&A panel. A number of incredible Atari facts and stories came pouring out. For instance, how did Gravitar make it to market in such a broken state? Mike Hally hired this seventeen-year-old to test the game out. Neither Hally nor his tester thought the game was all that hard. Turns out that his tester was a genius. Atari once designed a programming language for pinball tables called Pinbol (presumably it was based on Cobol). The goal was to enable pinball testers to program their own tables, sparing actual programmers for the full games.

Why did they stop making vector games? The reason was simple, the hardware was very expensive and incredibly prone to failure. This was incredibly clear during the design of Star Wars. When the Death Star was blown up, the machine would draw the debrees flying off into the distance. It would keep trying to draw them once they were off the screen, which would literally make the vector monitors explode.

Think Wii Fit was a revolution in game design? Atari got a complaint from the US government. They thought that people weren’t exercising enough and Atari was to blame. They were asked to design a healthy game. This led to the design of the Atari joyboard, the first balance board controller. Speaking of strange controllers, Atari had a bowling ball controller lying around the office for years. It was basically a trackball for your feet. They never found a game to use it with, so it never made it out to the public. This is probably for the best, it was apparently incredibly uncomfortable.

Atari designers have a lot of problems with doors. After the success of Stat Wars, they created another space shooter. This game had a massive bubble with a rotating seat. The problem? They couldn’t get it out of the office it was designed in. Another time, they designed an eight-player driving game. They intended to take it to a show and were told that the elevator would be big enough. It wasn’t. They had to actually disassemble the machine right there in the hallway and bring it upstairs piece-by-piece.

Anyone familiar with arcade history knows that Breakout was one of the most widely cloned games of all time. When Atari executives visited Japan, they were amazed to find the game everywhere. After all, they weren’t even selling it in the country. Interestingly, the Italians were also very good at copying Breakout. Their machines were actually more accurate than those made by Atari. There was a sticker with the company’s address on it. On the real machines, that address was out of date. They could tell which machines were fake because they had the correct address on them.

The Atari designers really went out of their way to try and prevent copies of their games. Sometimes this backfired. At one point, they put in the programming to detect power cycles. The games would refuse to run in countries that didn’t use the same 120 volt, 60 hertz electricity cycle as the United States. They forgot that this programming was in there when they took an arcade cabinet to Japan for a trade-show (Japan’s electricity uses the same voltage as the US, but cycles at 50 hertz). Ultimately, they had to apply some quick hackery to trick the machine into thinking that the correct voltage was being applied.

Atari has made its fair share of mistakes throughout its history. One of the biggest? Although Atari and Namco eventually had an incredibly close relartionship, Atari actually turned down Pacman when it was first offered to them. Want an even bigger one? Back in the seventies, this dirty little kid worked at Atari. He wasn’t even allowed on the factory floor because he refused to wear shoes. This kid’s name? Steve Jobs. He approached Al Alcorn with this idea for a company selling personal computers and asked for a meeting with Nolan Bushnell for start-up funding. Al liked the idea, but he didn’t see it as reasonable. After all, who would want a computer in their home? Al refused to set up the meeting, fearing that Nolan would be unable to turn Jobs down. As we all know, Jobs and his friend, Wozniak, went on to form Apple Computer and revolutionize the computing industry. Atari wasn’t so lucky.