While that’s a subjective boast, has any other game been so terrible that copies of it were taken out into the middle of the desert and buried? No. So I’m sticking with it.
Ronald Jardine was one of the very first employees at Atari. We’re talking the early 1970s here. Employee #159. Wonderfully, Jardine recently took photos of his old ID badge from his time there and uploaded them, giving us an insight into the cutting-edge security methods employed at the blossoming tech company.
Eden Games, makers of the Test Drive series, staged a symbolic one-day walkout last year when Atari moved forward on plans to lay off more than half the studio. Now it’s moving toward washing its hands of all of it.
In 1981, having left Atari three years previously, Bushnell founded Catalyst Technologies, a venture capital group designed to help invest in technology start-ups. Catalyst in turn went onto fund a company called Androbot, for which Bushnell served as chairman of the board.
It might be dusty, and the games might be more than a little dog-eared, but according to the photographer it all still works, despite having sat in a loft for over 30 years.
Thirty Years ago today, Atari had the balls to proclaim an entire day, hoping to lift its iconic Pac-Man character alongside the likes of other people who have their own day. Like, you know, Martin Luther King. And Jesus.
Video game historian Patrick Scott Patterson writes, “Anyone who claims video games cause child obesity might had more of a case in the 1980s.” Here’s more than eight glorious minutes’ worth of commercials that explain why we were fat in the 1980s.
If you’ve never seen 1979′s Starcrash, boy are you missing out. It’s basically a collection of awful special effects, Flash Gordon-style pulp science fiction, and a lot of attractive women in small bikinis and thigh-high boots. Of all the bad Star Wars clones that emerged in the wake of George Lucas’s classic, this was one of the best, and also one of the worst.
