> Aquaventure has never been spotted on internal Atari memos or status reports from the early 80s, so it has been a challenge to determine who was responsible for programming the game. For many years it was assumed that programmer Gary Shannon wrote Aquaventure during his short tenure at Atari. I first credited Gary, along with developer Tod Frye, with the development in my article about Aquaventure on atariprotos.com in 2008.
From Gary themself:
> “I had just come to Atari from Sega (coin op "Gremlin-branded" games) and was very new to the 2600, so I was definitely not the lead programmer and did mostly grunt work behind the scenes. After that I worked for a few weeks on another failed 2600 game, Miss Piggy's Wedding, which never got off the launching pad at all.”
Conclusion:
> while Tod Frye may have programmed the kernel for the Aquaventure, and Gary Shannon did minor updates to an already existing code base, the identity of the original programmer who was responsible for the majority of the code remains unknown.
Tod Frye is such an interesting guy. I had the luck to meet him taking an AI class in Berkeley a couple years ago- I don't think he'll ever stop learning.
Perhaps I am easily amused but this got a chuckle out of me. Its not the first time I have seen a lighthearted comment downvoted on HN, are they against the rules?
Jokes themselves are not explicitly forbidden, but the community quickly downvotes low-effort jokes like the one above. For more context, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30230497
In general, I think comments with jokes in them get a harder time, as the community doesn't want HN to go the same way as Reddit did, which is basically filled with low-effort jokes nowadays.
Not against the rules, but there are a good number of people on HN who will downvote a humorous comment because:
1. They don't get it.
2. They consider it off-topic.
3. They missed the whole era when the internet was fun and interesting.
4. They mistakenly believe that it's against HN rules.
5. They fret about people in different cultures not understanding one another's jokes, so they try to vote the jokes into oblivion, rather than understanding that being exposed to the humor of other cultures is one way to learn about other cultures.
6. They're just grumps who find no joy in anything, and nobody else is allowed to enjoy things. See also: "Stop liking things I don't like!"
As for your comment being downvoted, it's considered bad form to comment on downvoting, so yours is doing down, as is mine. But I just don't care.
> they try to vote the jokes into oblivion, rather than understanding that being exposed to the humor of other cultures is one way to learn about other cultures.
I don't think reading cryptocurrency jokes posted on HN is the best way to expose yourself to other cultures.
> “In a fast growing market, studios wanted to make it more difficult for competitors to poach talented programmers by keeping their identities hidden. This practice is why we don’t know exactly who conceived and programmed Aquaventure, along with many other titles from the early ’80s.”
I don't think Activision did that. I remember David Crane's name on Activision newsletters and maybe instruction manuals, too. Then of course there is the first Easter Egg ever - Warren Robinett's hidden name in "Adventure", but that supports this statement rather than refutes it.
You should check out the origin of EA / Electronic Arts. They were really about empowering artists -- the initial concept was pretty highminded and artist-oriented.
[Trip] Hawkins had developed the ideas of
treating software as an art form and calling
the developers, "software artists"
[...]
Their first such ad, accompanied by the slogan
"We see farther," was the first video game
advertisement to feature software designers.
EA also shared lavish profits with their
developers, which added to their industry appeal.
The square "album cover" boxes (such as the covers
for 1983's M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set)
were a popular packaging concept by Electronic
Arts, which wanted to represent their developers
as "rock stars"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts#1982%E2%80%931991:_Trip_Hawkins_era,_founding,_and_early_success
The name, "Electronic Artists", flowed from this idea.
Incredible to think of, in light of the microtransaction nightmare hellscape seen in most EA software.
I remember those ads. IIRC, they were two full page spreads in the most popular magazines for the Commodore, and I'd assume for Atari too. As a kid, I was confused why they were showing these people because no other company did this. From that time on, it stuck in my head from that computer games weren't some kind of magic that came down from the heavens but were created by actual humans. While I never wrote games that got published, I started experimenting and playing around with making them myself, which lead to a career in software development.
And at least in the beginning, they photographed the programmers in a way that made them look cool -- like rock stars or something. Not only were games programmed by actual humans but ones that didn't look like the stereotypical "nerd".
It's not like EA was a non-profit org. They were there to make money.
Think about the industry they were openly aping, with their "rock star" programmer-artists and their boxes that resembled the wonderful gatefold LP album covers of yore. The popular music industry is not exactly uh, averse to capitalism.
Also, their advertising was, well, hmm.
I think it's no accident that their image perfectly calibrated to appeal the sort of person who could actually afford a home computer in the early 1980s. The kind of guy who fancied himself a bit of an intellectual in one way or another. They weren't the first with this approach; Infocom had a lot of success with a similar corporate image and advertising campaign previously.
I do think there was quite a bit of genuine sincerity at the core of "early EA", but they were definitely chasing $$$ from the start as well.
The first few years of NHL and Madden titles for the Sega Genesis were revolutionary. They were the first games in their genres to somewhat accurately simulate their sports in a fast and fluid way.
Madden in particular was something like a tour-de-force of software engineering: a full 22 independent dudes characters on the field, actually playing their positions, following a realistic and deep playbook, nearly all of American football's arcane rules represented, and a nifty pseudo-3D playfield.
All written in assembly, on a 7mhz CPU. Mindblowing.
The first 3-4 years of annual updates were incredible. They were iterative, in the best possible software engineering sense of the word. Core ideas refined and polished, a few new key ideas added onto a strong base design.
Madden '93 (the third installment) is where it peaked for me; some say Madden '94.
Why do people get so passionate about $60 games that maybe would be fairly priced at $30, but then will blow tens of thousands on a car or house that doesn't provide much additional value compared to a normal price one?
I didn't complain about the price, I was complaining about the lack of originality. Ok, I'm not a huge sports fan, so the games I mentioned never really interested me, maybe that's why I fail to see the difference between FIFA 21 and FIFA 22...
The value is there if you play with friends. So, definitely not for everybody, but then again nothing is.
As a teenager, we definitely got $50 of enjoyment per year out of the 16-bit editions. Even back in the 90s it was actually a pretty affordable form of entertainment if you got a few dozen fun gaming sessions out of it with your buddies. There weren't a lot of other ways to spend $50 and be entertained for months.
Same with Capcom's hilariously incremental updates to Street Fighter II. We honestly did get full value from them. If you're putting dozens of hours into a game those incremental updates are super valueable.
These days, of course, I have nobody to play with.
So these games wouldn't be worth $6 to me today, let alone $60. =(
The current Activision and Atari each have nothing to do with the companies from the early 1980s - each shut down and ceased operations long ago, and the name was just bought out by successors.
Interestingly, Atari was bought by Jack Tramiel who was the founder of Commodore Business Machines that made the Commodore Vic-20, Commodore 64 and more.
January 1984, Jack Tramiel essentially got booted out of the company he founded (Commodore).
July 1984, Jack Tramiel bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.
It's even more interesting. Commodore hired a bunch of ex-Atari people for the Amiga while Tramiel was building his cadre for what became the ST. They basically swapped talent.
If you squint enough, there's a chain that looks something like this: Atari 2600 => Atari 400/800 => Amiga => Atari Lynx => 3DO.
It's not that there's a specific set of people or technological concepts running through all of them, but each one has a strong connection to the next.
Think 5200 is in the middle of your first two, since I believe architecturally it was a 400 without a keyboard (or more accurately, the 400 was basically a 5200 with a keyboard).
But yeah, that's super interesting too. I skipped Lynx in my console journey so wasn't as familiar with that, but I didn't realize the 3DO (which I did have) was loosely part of the talent family too. But yeah, now that I think about it, I guess Hawkins must have ended up tapping the talent pools freeing up from the ST/Amiga/GS generations since those died out right around the time 3DO was being developed.
Not only that: "Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer."
Growing up, that was the lens I always saw them through (and I had minor addictions to Laser Blast and River Raid, among others), so to see what they've become, well, you know. Not the same in any way from the David Crane days, just as it is with Atari from the Bushnell days through Warner, then Tramiel, then JTS, Hasbro, etc through present day.
They messed up the launch of that game pretty bad. I followed the project from the beginning. I wanted to get the limited VIP pack. I signed up on the site right when they announced it live on ZeroPage Homebrew. On launch day, I took a laptop to my nieces birthday party, watched the countdown and moved as fast as possible. I don't remember exactly what went wrong but it was impossible for me to make a purchase. Based on the AtariAge forum thread some other people had an issue but, other people were able to order just fine. A few days later it was revealed that there was a bug where if you tried to checkout while already signed in, there'd be an error. You had to create an account during checkout instead. So anyone who was enthusiastic about the project got punished for signing up too early :/
IIRC, Imagic was the second? Demon Attack was, again IIRC, their first, and was visually smashing compared to almost anything else on the Atari VCS at the time.
I played Laserblast when I had the chickenpox and I scored one million and all the numbers turned into explanation points. I took a picture but had flash on so it didn't take.
Way back in the day at Microsoft it was a common practice to add the author's name, email and a small description of changes in the header comment at the top of source files. Then management started making us scrub all of them before release when vendors/competitors started using our source dumps as their recruiting database.
I've seen a fairly old codebase (started in the late 1980s) where the tops of the files have author details and changes but the author details are just initials.
Ah right - not sure what version control this project started (in 1989 I'm guessing "none" is a high probability) and I think it recently got moved from SVN to git.
I am not a programer, but I always regarded this practice as weird. Every time I saw such headers in my company the header would feature a name of some long-gone employee. So no point of knowing the author's name since you cannot reach him for help.
And if I really wanted to know the author's name, then git log --follow would help me anyway
Nothing but a someone's ego boost and a theft of my screen space
Is that why the room of names was created? I can't recall which game it was, but being able to view everyones names within the game when a developer/publisher didn't want them credited.
> According to a blog post written by AtariProtos’ Matt Reichert, “Until the mid 1980s, most games were only credited to the company that published them. In a fast growing market, studios wanted to make it more difficult for competitors to poach talented programmers by keeping their identities hidden. This practice is why we don’t know exactly who conceived and programmed Aquaventure, along with many other titles from the early ’80s.”
Oh that's rich, coming from the company that pioneered the responsible policy of suppressing developer credits from the games they made.[0]
This latest Atari has no corporate lineage to that Atari. Just like when the OG Atari picked the name, because it sounded cool and had something to do with games, so did this one --- but this one had to pay into the estate of the previous name holder to do it.
I have one of those. Picked it up for six bucks at Goodwill about 5 years ago, specifically because you can add a cartridge slot and run actual 2600 games.
Kind of ironic considering Atari was super against letting their programmers take credit for the games they created, and this lead famously to a group of them leaving and forming Activision. It also lead to Warren Robinett hiding his name in the classic 2600 game 'Adventure' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJFao67acks)
I mean that was 40+ years ago, all the leadership who ran the company like that are either long retired or passed away.
Atari is now just a trademark that gets sold left and right. I don't know why this is happening but no one from the 80s is making this call. Those people went from cradle to grave engaging in anti-worker action and giving into the worst and most perverse incentives capitalism has to offer. They retired wealthy and all of this awfulness paid off. This is why modern video companies are run similarly. As a dev or artist, you're not getting ownership either. You're work for hire and will be treated as such.
The division asking for this author is Atari XP, which sells rare and unreleased games, which is most likely looking for this author because this might have a copyright claim. The profit incentive drives this question, not any sort of altruism. Atari XP doesn't know the contract signed by this person and Atari and if they try to release this game commercially they could be sued if they infringe on his rights. If there's no contract at all, then this author would probably have the full life of copyright on their side.
If this person is found and also found to not have a claim, then this game will be released with the creator getting nothing that isn't specified in the contract. This is not done for the love of old video games, but to create and maximize profit. Doing things like this is how the leadership of Atari XP got there and maintain their position there and how they will advance their careers past it.
The author remaining anonymous stops Atari XP from monetizing this old work and might be intentional to keep this game from being published. If published it will enrich some company they havent had a relationship with in decades and most likely don't care for (Atari ex employees seem very bitter about their time there).
Or considering this person has never spoken up all this time all this time, perhaps they passed away long ago, well before most of HN was even born. The hypothesized copyright would move to their heirs, who may be entirely unaware they own this game.
Atari needs to help itself first. What a great example of having something amazing at the right time and burning it all down. Do the research- its a crazy spiral.
You know, if someone is astroturfing something around an Atari 2600 prototype, I want to know about it.
When and where and by whom was the cartridge discovered? The screenshots have an almost too pitch-perfect 19A0 vibe. I guess that isn't impossible for 1983, which is later than most of the best known Atari games.
https://atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=855 https://www.arcade-history.com/index.php?page=person&name=Ga...