Atari Introduces Star Wars

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Written by Administrator | 08 March 2010
Posted in Document Library - News Articles

When you take command of Atari's newest coin-operated video game, Star Wars, you become Luke Skywalker, the young Jedi warrior, at the controls of Red Five, the rebel hero's X-Wing fighter. As Luke, your mission is to blow up Darth Vader's Death Star before the awesome battle station uses its frightening power to eliminate the forces of the rebellion. To destroy the Death Star, you must torpedo its small exhaust port to cause a nuclear chain reaction...

User Forums Now Online

Written by Administrator | 23 February 2010
Posted in Site Updates - Atari News

I have reconfigured the forums and brought them back online.  You can use a single login (after you register) to access both the main site, and the forums.  In the future, certain content will require you to register.

July 1983 Mike Hally Interview

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Written by Administrator | 22 February 2010
Posted in Document Library - News Articles

When Mike Hally started working for Atari in 1976, the movie Star Wars had just been released. “I always dreamed that we would have the technology to do that sort of stuff”, he said.

No one did at the time; and besides, strange as it may sound today, "I don’t think seven years ago anyone really thought about the movie media and the game people getting together. Tron really kind of sparked it."

Ever since the game Tron came out—and made more of a profit than the movie of the -same name- manufacturers have been hunting for movie tie-ins for their games this summer. Krull goes with a movie to be released at the end of the month, and Atari is working on an E. T. game.

But the biggest movie series of all time didn't spawn an arcade game until this month, when Atari released the first of what will be three Star wars related games it has licensed from the movies owner, Lucasfilm Limited.

Hally, supervisor of the pro ject office at Atari, was head designer on the Star Wars project. He said the six people in the

The Soul of a Video-Game Designer

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Written by Administrator | 20 February 2010
Posted in Document Library - News Articles

(this is a vintage 1983 article from a magazine titled 'Across the Board' )

Owen Rubin is one of perhaps 200 people who work full- or part-time designing games for Atari. In the increasingly tight organizational structure of the company, he and his colleagues represent the last outpost of unencumbered creative energy. They are considered above and beyond such mundane concerns as appropriate dress and punching a clock. "If they told me I had to come to work wearing a three-piece suit and sit at my desk and be proper, my creativity would go right down the tubes," says the boyish. 29-year-old Rubin

They are well compensated for their creativity. Top designers in the industry earn between $30,000 and $100,000 plus various bonuses, putting them in the top I5 percent in the engineering profession.

Rubin joined Atari seven years ago right after graduat­ing from the University of California. Berkeley, in electri­cal engineering/computer programming. He was the fifth programmer hired by the then fledgling Sunnyvale company, at a starting salary of $12,000.

For Rubin, like many computer-crazed kids, the bug bit early. "The first time I saw a computer was in high school." he recalls. "It stood four-and-a-half feet high. This was before solid-state even. The most elaborate game it could play was ticktacktoe. I used to stay up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning playing with it, writing programs, experimenting."

He is what is known in the trade as a "typical hacker." "Give me access to a system and I will find out how to break into it," he admits. He once broke into what turned out to be a Defense Department system via com­puter. Finding several programming errors, he left cor­rection notes and was called back by government offi­cials who