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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

> “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.

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Activision was formed by former Atari employees specifically because they didn't get the recognition they deserved.

Wow, if that's true, then my perception of activision has been wrong for a long time

[edit] it is!

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".

Yes! Those ads were so inspirational!

Will Harvey's Music Construction Set was the first EA title that I ever purchased.

They definitely gave this guy the aura of a rock star in the packaging that came with the title.

Yeah! I love it!!!

Same thing with Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set.

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-pinball-c...

Treat yourself to clicking on the thumbnails. The "liner notes" are incredible.

OMG this. That poster was the one poster I had on my wall in high school.

The original "Don't be evil."

It's amazing what happens when money starts being involved, isn't it?

Haha whoa.

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.

But still... then: "software is an art form"; now: cookie-cutter yearly versions of FIFA, Madden NFL, NHL etc. etc. etc.

Even the sports franchises started out nobly. =)

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm9fXnBF67g

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 car and house are status symbols, and the house might appreciate.

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.

https://dfarq.homeip.net/atari-st-vs-amiga/

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.

There is a lot of similarity between the Atari 400/800 display list and the Amiga copper list given they were developed by the same team.

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.

Days long, long gone. The memories are nice.

By the way, David Crane and others are making Atari 2600 games again!

https://adgm.us/portal/index.html

They don’t seem to be trying very hard. The Buy button yields, well, suboptimal results

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.

LaserBlast dedication page:

https://laserblast.neocities.org/

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.

Oh, don't worry. The Activision you're probably familiar with is the one purchased and revived by Bobby Kotick in 1991.

Cool origin story for sure, but they're not even close to the same company anymore :)

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.

That was common in CVS; there was a macro that'd expand into the entire changelog when you checked files out.

…still don't know why you'd want that.

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

> Then of course there is the first Easter Egg ever - Warren Robinett's hidden name in "Adventure"

Here's a really good video exploring very early Easter Eggs in video games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97TfAhDKGk It's not Adventure!

(I say this not to "well actually" you, but hopefully give you some fun new info!)

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.

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