Chronicling the early history of video games with mini-documentaries focused on a particular game or topic. In addition to videos, I also write books: Atari Archive Vol. 1: 1977-1978 will be available soon through Limited Run Games and Amazon!
If you enjoy what I'm doing, consider becoming a backer on Patreon! www.patreon.com/atariarchive
I also run www.atariarchive.org, where I write essays about these games and maintain a master list of release dates for games on classic consoles.
"Name contains themes not appropriate for targeting to kids" "Changes name to *DEMONS* instead" I really wonder who was in charge back then, and the obsession with demons, Satanic imagery and naked women and marketing this to 11 year old boys.
Demons to Diamonds was the first game I owned, and the sole reason why ET was the first game I could actually play. Post crash, it wasn't obvious to a dumb kid that I need more than one controller to play a game. Indiana Jones also suffered. But back then, I didn't know that. I just knew that anything with demons in it was usually banned by my fundamentalist family. I still don't know how I got away with it. But it took me to gamer Hell.
Controversial name to another controversial name sure is something. There was somewhat of a religious fervor about demon references in games around this time. I remember a neighbor who’s parents wouldnt buy Demon Attack or or Demons to Diamonds because of the name.
It's funny. Your videos drop about once a month, as did Atari's games in 1982. And since these two games don't impress me much (despite DtD being a decent two-person play), I'm starting to feel the waves of what will seal Atari's fate, 42 years after the fact.
I wonder if the word "demons" worked against them at all. I could see it being received poorly in some households in an America that had recently elected Ronald Reagan and was on the cusp of 'satanic panic.' Would be ironic, considering the rationale for the late name change.
I was looking forward to this month's episode, then these two games showed up. I imagine a sales campaign saying, "Give the 2600 to your little brother." And these are the games for him, along with those Sesame Street, Muppets, Road Runner, and Snoopy games in 1983. If they had mostly retired the Atari 2600 after Christmas 1981, and only put out Pac-Man and arcade conversions for the 5200 and computers, I think they'd have done better long-term. But I read they got the manufacturing costs down for the Atari console in Taiwan and/or Hong Kong, so they could drop the price and still make more money per console. Since Pac-Man sold something like 8 million carts and help sell ~5 million consoles in 1982, they made some money in the short term. Unless they did make 10 million Pac-Man carts (about the same number as Atari consoles sold 1977-1981?) and those extra 2 million were bundled with Combat in 1983 consoles? I didn't know they stopped bundling paddles with the Atari 2600! Was it the NES that decided to only bundle one controller a few years later?
I’m honestly astonished at the reception for “Demons to Diamonds”. I’ve always really liked this one a lot, even since getting the Atari Anthology collection on the PS2 as a kid.
What I learned from this channel is that nearly all the simple, early games for the Atari were play-tested in the real world with quarters at the arcade in the 1970s before being converted.
I took mine apart to clean based on a how-to instruction, then won Breakout on 1 ball, but couldn't do fantastic on Super Breakout or Kaboom! before they got jittery again.
I went into our local Walmart back in the day, and of all games they had Math Gran Prix in their Atari 2600 as a demo for customers to play. That’s the last time I played it
I love how you tell the stories of the folks that develop these lesser celebrated games. Folks talk about David Crane and Howard Scott Warshaw all the time, but you're the only one seemingly covering the devs who have made games like Demons to Diamonds and so on. Keep up the good work.
I thought Demons to Diamonds looked like absolute shit when I was 12. I was into arcade ports like Asteroids and Berzerk. The green background and big blocky sprites made this look like a baby game.
It was one of their last games they put in the red catalog, "Availability July 1982" and wasn't in the blue logbook of challenges. I was 11 then and it did not look good. Both of these games look like games from 1977-8. So many of games from those years should have been retired, because they made the system look bad, but they continued to take up shelf space. They wanted to say they had more games than the competition. I got it either on the cheap at the thrift store or with a hand-me-down Atari in the 1990s. Are these games Atari's version of shovel-ware? The count from this channel is 9 Atari releases in 1981. I count 15 of theirs in 1982, but 100 3rd-party games!
Tod got a 10-cent royalty per cartridge. I guess that helped assuage some of the hurt of the criticisms. To my way of thinking, his only mistake was wasting the memory space for two-player games.
If Tod Frye hadn't insisted on two-player, he could have had the memory for Pac-Man to face up and down while traveling up and down. Other than that, the low quality is understandable, given the hard deadline before Christmas and Atari's mandate that only space games can have a black background.
To my knowledge only Frye has ever claimed that mandate existed so I kind of suspect he is either making it up or misunderstood an offhand comment as a requirement
Demons to Diamonds became our postermark of the crash when discussing it on the Video Game Newsroom Time Machine. It dropped in value far faster than the more infamous releases of E.T. and Pac-Man; it was a feature of 1983 bargain bins. Whether or not you think that's deserved, it hasn't held up in popular memory!
If little kids at the time liked it, I can respect that. But it seems like a poor version of Air-Sea Combat. They'd have done better making a Combat 2 with a one-player option that would cross Armor Ambush with Time Pilot.
Astonishingly enough, Math Grand Prix was one of the old Atari IPs that got sold off via auction during Atari SA's bankruptcy sale in 2013. The sale of Battlezone to Rebellion is obviously the most notorious one, since that was a major IP for Atari, but Math Grand Prix was sold off to Tommo, alongside the Accolade, MicroProse, & GT Interactive stuff. Amusingly, while the current Atari eventually bought back Accolade & GT in 2023, they apparently didn't bother to buy back Math Grand Prix.
Atari did actually buy Math Gran Prix back in the Accolade/GT Interactive/MicroProse deal. I hounded multiple Atari employees about this specific game until they finally confirmed they bought it back. It can also be found on the recently released Atari ip list.
@@jeremiahthomas8140 I never even knew that Atari had a publicly viewable IP list! Wow, that's really neat & I found some stuff in it that I never even knew was now Atari's.
Demons to Diamonds is a good game. However I played for hours and hours Snoopy and the Red baron. Even today it makes me forget about interest rates and mortgage payments.
Having recently added my 2600+ to the collection and finally able to play 2600 games on a modern TV, I’ve been giving this regular play. It’s still great fun. I thought if there was one man who’d be able to explain the jump height mechanics it would be you. It looks like you’re as baffled as me on that, though. Perhaps it’s random? Keep up the wonderful work.
There's a kind of sad, cosmic irony in how the Astrocade almost had the first home ports of both Space Invaders AND Pac-Man, only for their parent company to license those out to their rival, Atari.
Educational games are difficult. Probably Hangman is the only good one that kids like to play, though they can use pencil and paper. Atari did an ugly version of Mastermind with numbers instead of colors to promote the keypad. They also did Concentration and a primitive version of Simon, again without the colors. Wouldn't have worked on the 2600, but could they have done a version of Mad Libs on computer to teach noun, verbs, adjectives and adverbs? I could see them offering a new story each month if you had a modem.
My parents bought a Atari 2600 in 1983. And it included 2 cartridges - Pac-Man & Combat. I played so many hours of Pac-Man. My hands would look like shriveled up tomato from holding the joystick for so many hours
I had Auto Racing as "Rally Speedway" on the C64. Tons of fun, played it with my brother a lot. That "Ahead/Penalty" mechanism made for specific tactics, and it really paid off to know the course well. That version also had a track editor and funny crash animation.
Here's what I find interesting... Omnigamer has proven that a 5.51 isn't possible, but yet Activisions Newsletter 1983 shows that at least 3 people were capable of achieving the time. So either Activision is lying or Todd Rogers was telling the truth.
20:11 - Regarding the "short musical tune" of Star Voyager, rather than it being based on the Close Encounters tune, isn't it based on Zarathustra of 2001 Space Odyssey? That's what I always thought.
¡Excelente estuvo este pequeño documental sobre el magnífico juego The Empire Strikes Back! Todavía lo conservo con su caja y manual en buenas condiciones, desde que me lo regalaron para mi cumpleaños en 1982... ¡Saludos cordiales!
