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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

What I find remarkable are the discrete logic hardware designs for early Atari games like Pong, Tank, Le Mans, etc. - no microprocessors! Special circuits for game functions like background, sound, score, explosions, etc..

https://archive.org/details/ArcadeGameManualTankii

Apparently Tank (the #1 arcade game of 1974) saved Atari from bankruptcy. It was developed by Kee games, a fake "competitor" that was actually a subsidiary of Atari: https://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/20/ign-presents-the-his...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kee_Games

A compelling feature of these games is that they all had unique and engaging physical controls like paddle dials (Pong), dual sticks (Tank), and steering wheel/pedals/gear shift (Le Mans.)

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I dug up the citations for Kee:

> In October of 1973, Bushnell decided to grab as much market share as possible by signing exclusive contracts with distributors in each geographic area to buy only Atari games. Because most geographic areas had two distributors, Bushnell separately (and semi-secretly) created Kee Games, named after Bushnell friend Joseph Keenan who became president of the company. Kee would sign exclusive contracts with the second distributor in a geographic area. The games that Kee and Atari produced individually were eventually released by both companies with unique names and some cosmetic differences.

> Spike Was Kee’s copy of Atari’s Rebound. Kee’s products were mostly copies of Atari’s games with innovative features added to differentiate them from their Atari cousins, and create the feeling of a “rivalry” between the two companies.

> Tank was the game that saved Atari from bankruptcy in 1974. The game became so popular that the exclusivity agreements Atari demanded from distributors were thrown out the window. Everybody wanted it, and Atari made sure they got it. Bushnell’s cash flow problems at Atari were suddenly reversed. Atari and Kee merged at the end of 1974.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/the-history-of-atari-...

I actually fixed one of those games once. It was really easy since both tanks had duplicate hardware, so signals could be compared between both tanks.

There's this remarkable Pong simulator working at a circuit level:

https://www.falstad.com/pong/clkgen.html

It describes how all the subsystem works (horizontal ball movement, drawing the score, etc.) and allows to play with them in the real time.

Fabulous resource, thanks.

I have a pdf bookmarked that walks through the same schematics in a bit of a narrative, calling Pong "THE GREAT CIRCUIT TEACHER" [0] - the only drawback being the poorly scanned in drawing of the sub-circuits. I haven't worked through it yet but combining it with those simulations should be most illuminating.

[0] http://www.pong-story.com/LAWN_TENNIS.pdf

My mom worked for a company that made chips inside the Atari cartridges and so we got a free VCS/2600 and a bunch of carts when they came out. Tank was, hands down, the best game! My brother and I spent hours really interacting with each other over the incredibly simple, blocky graphics. The "tanks" were made up of about 5 giant pixels. That's it! The planes were even worse and didn't look like planes at all. We had more fun competing and really playing with those terrible graphics.

I wonder if all the high-end game qualities today take away some of that genuine player interaction? I do love modern games and I doubt I'd enjoy Tank today, but it was special in its time.

I always wondered if companies set up fake competitors, both for internal (rnd) and external (public perception) effects.

Pension funds own all large industries as a total, most competition today outside of startup crechee fields is non-existing. Turns out, giving state functionality to free market participants does not make the state more dynamic, it makes the market more like a state, introducing a command economy like central structure and a aversion to change.

The market hurt itself in its victorious confusion. So yeah, that lack of innovation and capability of western economics, your private pension does that.

Pension funds need to be stable, not fund moonshots

Innovation death of a whole society is a stable condition

Now you just let them flourish and buy them up and/or Sherlock them

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