Atari revives unreleased arcade game that was too hard for 1982 players | Hacker News Reader

Atari revives unreleased arcade game that was too hard for 1982 players

engadget.com

103 pointsisaacfrond102 comments

This game is a great example of how piracy helps rightsholders. Because the original game was cancelled (and the multiple corporate restructurings Atari went through), the only copies of Akka Arrh in existence were in the hands of private collectors. Typically, these collectors act like they own the exclusive rights to a game simply because they got a hold of the board. This often makes it impossible for unreleased games to see a legitimate release, as the collectors will either not cooperate at all, demand far more money for the ROMs than the game is likely to make, or try to place restrictions on the release (must be digital only, the ROM files must be encrypted, etc.) in order to "preserve the value" of their collection. Meanwhile, if the ROMs are freely available online, the rightsholders can just download them and avoid all of this red tape entirely.

In Akka Arrh's case, the ROMs were leaked to a ROM site (supposedly by a vigilante repair tech) against the will of a number of collectors. While this pissed off the collectors who no longer had exclusive access to the game, it also meant that the game could now become a legitimately licensed part of several Atari compilations (such as the excellent Atari 50).

I wonder if there is a strange discrepancy between the perceived and actual value that is being derived for the cartridge from.

In my mind I can think of two main sources for the value: its rarity in ability to play (the rarity of the playable game itself) or rarity in ownership of the physical cartridge. While I think the collectors perceive the value is derived from the former, I’m skeptical that it’s where the actual value is derived because of the value of special editions of Super Mario Bros carts (which can obviously be played easily) and, in a different way, the value of art that appears in museums.

> the ROMs were leaked to a ROM site (supposedly by a vigilante repair tech)

Ha ha, a variation on the Neiman Marcus Cookie recipe story.

This kind of collector is so disappointing. They're very visible in games right now, but I've seen them in toys, and I'm sure you get them in everything from stamps onwards. They don't play the games, they don't play with the toys; they don't really care about the subject except insofar as it lets them feel superior to others with smaller collections or less thorough knowledge.

Pay attention to figure 3 in particular

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

When someone won't even help digitally preserve their rare physical game for some reasonable fee for time/disruption I can't bring myself to call them a collector, they're either speculating or as you say just want to feel superior.

Interesting https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/after-a-lost-atari-ro...

Who's Atari in 2022? Stories like this one seem to suggest that it's somehow the same entity that once was. However there's nothing left besides the name, is it?

Solution: Atari SA is the company formerly known as Infogrames. "As of 2022, the current Atari is pursuing several lines of business outside of video gaming, including cryptocurrency and video-game themed hotels." (WP)

Nolan Bushnell is on the board so I'm saying it's not completely just a shell

Nolan Bushness is probably on the board just for show. He's almost 80.

Warren Buffet is 92, plenty of 80 year old are still productive workers

> Warren Buffet is 92, plenty of 80 year old are still productive workers

when they are healthy. Let's not exaggerate by talking about outliers. Most men die before they even reach 80.

I was informed by Wikipedia that Bushnell is also on the board of Anti-AgingGames.com :-)

It this right? My at is 80+ and still does intensive gardening (forking land to grow crops) and mows his own lawn with a push mower.

He really should not be doing these things though because now he is suffering from carpal tunnel.

It’s right that most men die before 80, but I agree that if you get there, a high quality of life is still possible. My grandpa in his mid 80s gardens a large area and keeps bees, lives alone, and most impressively to me, fell on ice, got up, and shook it off like he was merely old, and not elderly (walked with a cane for a week after). For some, a fall like that is the beginning of the end. Otoh, his blood pressure is not really controlled, meds + diet usually but not always keep it down, so it could be over for him any unlucky day I guess. Still, hard to ask for better.

I would bet on his health rapidly declining if he stopped.

Here’s a video interview with Nolan from June this year

https://youtu.be/2A__XuCDgss

> Most men die before they even reach 80.

Surprisingly, this isn’t true. It is true in the US that male life expectancy at birth is less than 80 years, but that doesn’t actually mean that more than 50% of men die before 80. The reason is because the death age is being averaged, it’s a mean not a median, and it falls off faster above 80 than below, so when you average them it’s below 80. Think about it this way: for the average age of death to be 80, you could have as many people dying at 1 year old as dying at 159 years old (80*2-1). Then the average is 80. But since nobody makes it to 159, the actual average is 1. Repeat for every pair of ages that sum to 160; only ages ~50-80 even have a counterpart between 80 and ~110, so all death under age ~50 skews the average down (and babies skew the average much faster than middle-age people). If 45% of people died at age 20 and 55% of people died at age 90, then life expectancy for someone at birth is 58.5 years, even though most people make it to age 90.

For proof of this, see the Social Security actuarial table: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Look at the “Number of lives” column, and scroll to the 80 year olds. Notice that more than half are still alive.

On top of all this, remember that life expectancy changes as you get older. Note how the men who make it to age 50 are expected to live to age 80. Men who make it to 80 are expected to live to 88 1/2.

that drop between 85 and 95 is brutal. This is probably going to move forward soon. The boomers are really the first generation that never smoked and exercised as a lifestyle from adulthood.

The town my parents live in is full of old people (houses built/bought in the 1980s) and every time I go there the park is full of them jogging with their dogs, doing stretches, powerwalking... it looks like an antihistamine pharmaceutical commercial.

I don't know anything about public companies and the related info but according to this he is not: https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ATARI-S-A-2168735...

(Although Wikipedia says he will be but that info is from 2010)

I think one takeaway from Theranos should be this: People are willing to rent their names for large sums of money to be listed as board members.

What exactly did the Theranos board accomplish? How much did they make?

Much as "Long Term Capital Management" used the fame/prestige of its members as a marketing tool, Theranos did the same with her board of directors.

The difference is that no one is willing to pour billions into Atari. Atari, SA really struggled to find investors.

Also, the problem with Theranos was exactly that the board members were not from industry, but retired politicians or diplomats.

I think you entirly missed the point.

As others in this thread have posted, sometimes board members are just "window dressing".

Sometimes big names put there to attract investors/show stability of the company, etc.

Perhaps Nolan contributes, perhaps not - i dont follow the issue that closely to speak on that. My point is just to do your due diligence and not depend on "so and so is on the board".

Nolan Bushnell was the founder of Atari.

You're right that board members don't necessarily do anything, but the argument here is whether or not the current Atari has a connection to the old Atari. I would say Bushnell's presence on the board means that it does, even if he doesn't do anything.

IIRC, Nolan wasn't involved with the many various holders of the Atari brand name rights for decades between now and when he originally left. I don't know if that matters to others but for me it does somewhat weaken the meaning of him being on the board again now vs if he'd been a presence on the board continuously from back in the day to now (which would have been lovely but unfortunately not the way the world worked this time).

That said, hopefully the current incarnation of Atari can create products which further the retro renaissance. The Atari 50 retrospective was a nice start in that direction (though it was made by a retro-focused specialty publisher who licensed the rights from Atari, both Nolan and the current CEO did appear in an interview in the package).

Wayne Gretzky shills online gambling for MGM, so beware of any hero association hinting towards anything more than burlap sacks with dollar signs on them.

If Wayne Gretzky was known as one of the greatest gambling moguls of all time I don't think that would be a problem.

I'm under the probably false assumption that Nolan Bushnell has enough money that bribing him to do something he doesn't believe in would be quite unreasonable.

But really I've got no idea. He doesn't have a history of lending his name to things so he is probably not easily bought. Then again he exited Atari way early and got caught up in the NFT hype so who knows

Unlike e.g. Nintendo with its (until recently) clear "succession" line and internal promotion, Atari's always been a Ship of Theseus company. Rapid executive transition from Bushnell to Warner to Kassar to Tramiel, the star developers leaving to form Activision, the separate VCS vs. PC vs. arcade divisions (imo sad how little attention was paid to the post-VCS arcade side in Atari 50!) It's been pieced out and put back together half a dozen times; it's surely dead by 2008 but did it die in spirit in 2001, 1999, 1996, 1993, 1984, or arguably even as early as 1979?

And despite the cryptocurrency and pop culture mess, if it's a Jeff Minter reworking of Mike Hally and Dave Ralston game how could it not be Atari?

What changed at Nintendo recently?

Satoru Iwata, the president, died relatively suddenly and (at least publicly) very unexpectedly of cancer. This led to a rapid reshuffle of the leadership board and two new presidents in a short period, both of which which did not come from the development side. Kimishima in particular seems to have not done very well.

If the current Atari owns the intellectual property of the original Atari, is that all that different than the current EA being able to trace itself to the original Electronic Arts that made Archon, M.U.L.E., and Pinball Construction Kit? How many of those responsible for creating those early games are still with EA?

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

I was thinking that too, but there's possibly a distinction between repairing a ship and buying a new ship and naming it after the old one.

I don't know. I just wanted to raise that point because it bothered me. What could be a required property for a successor company to be "legitimate"? Some kind of merit that's in the spirit and the culture of the original company? Maybe the revival of unreleased arcade games could be it. Then again there should be more than this single event. Or maybe the even need some hardware of their own.

A nitpick, but I feel it's worth noting EA didn't "make" any of these, but published them. These were all developed by 3rd party developers

I remember digging its most recent history after a brief encounter with their latest CEO, a few years back. I vaguely recall that it was essentially a big mess of changes of control, copyrights, name rights, etc.

People don't appreciate how hard old games are. Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy as well but consistently I find old games much more difficult than modern ones.

The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.

> The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.

No, "every gamer" doesn't expect that.

The industry pivoted to these (frankly infuriating) tutorials because the term "gamers" now encompass a much larger number of people. Including those who only play very, very casually.

And there are many games that are extremely challenging and brutal.

Games were brutally hard back then because they wanted you to spend more quarters. And they did have tutorials, either written on the side of the arcade cabinet, or via the main screen showing a little bit of game play to give you the idea of what you were doing.

And those games were simple enough that seeing a few seconds of play was enough to explain pretty much the entire game, whereas now many games have entire wikis (DF, Stardew, etc.) because there are tons of things to keep track of, whether that be how to make soap or when you can catch a squid.

Most NES games were silly hard too though. Not just arcade wanting your quarters.

I believe the difficulty has more to do with what the market looked like. Once you bought a game, it would have to last you a long time - even if there were other games around, you could only afford so many before your allowance ran out.

Furthermore, they were very limited in terms of how much content they could fit on a cartridge. So what content they did put in had to last.

Yeah, but they got steadily easier as time progressed. I remember when people started complaining that games were "too easy" after that, because RPGs went from games like Ultima or Wizardry where you might have to keep your own detailed maps and notes, to having the game do almost all of that for you, giving you waypoints, quest journals, etc.

It's ironic that they call it "Nintendo hard". Because Nintendo were early to realize that hey, people aren't actually putting pennies per play into our consoles, we can give players stuff like codes to save their progress, maybe we'll even win over some kids who don't enjoy doing the same thing over and over.

A lot of the “brutally hard” games were just bad with crude RNG that created unavoidable or not predictable behaviors though. Most games that are regarded as good were pretty more reasonable.

Modern games want to give you progress at every step, but the reward for high skill tends to be much higher and there are more extreme difficulties.

It's funny you say that because in some of the more beloved games like Pac-Man, the ghosts follow definite patterns to the point where you can learn a route through a level such that the ghosts will never catch you.

Yes, exactly. Do you really want every RPG to be harder than Dark Souls where you die every minute so the non existent cabinet can steal another quarter? It’s a silly argument that ignores context completely. I love the hell out of Robotron, but do I want every game to be that way regardless of genre?

Ye the difference is insane ...

Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it?

As an adult I managed to finnish Sonic 2 after trying like 4 times. I could only pass one level in Mega Man.

The difficulty level were really hard core. And no easy mode either.

I beat SMB3 and MegaMan 2 as a kid several times. I can't make progress in Dark Souls :(

Kids has the benefit of the brain being in active learning phase. They notice the things (often subconsciously) what the adult brain misses or need more repetition or just shown slowly.

I sunk many many 10s or 100s of hours into games like Shining Force, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Illusions of Gaia, etc.

Now I get bored of games after a few hours :(

> Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it?

Of course we did. We also didn't have hundreds of games to play at the same time.

Correct, yeh, this is a matter of both a captive audience and the situation that a family might be able to purchase two or three games a year tops, so the games that they were able to acquire needed to have that difficulty in order to make sure that the players would not blaze through the content too quickly while at the same time ensuring that the hefty challenge was enough to entertain them for as long possible

This is why rts games from my perspective will not return as we used to know them, they relied on that captive audience side of things, which faded away during the early 00's

There are plenty of very difficult old games, but Super Mario 3 is definitely not one of them.

I agree. I would say it’s the easiest of the first 3 (4) titles

I did (mega man), but as others point out it was a diff time. Basically we would rent the game (remember that lol) and play it solid non-stop for 2-3 days trying to beat it.

As a kid, I played Mega Man for months before I had the patience and muscle memory to beat the yellow cyclops boss, and a few seconds after the first time I beat it, our area got hit with a power brownout. Wily ended up an easier fight.

Now that I think about it, at that point, I’d played countless hours of games on the Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600 and C64, how were my reflexes back then?

Do you always play on the highest difficulty? Do you play challenging single player games or competitive games? If so, and you're not satisfied, then you can always load up Super Mario on your Switch and spend most of your time replaying the same portion of the game before you get to the part that you don't have muscle memory for yet.

> Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy

First I’m hearing of that. I usually see the difficulty chasers complaining that modern games are easy, never the old ones.

> The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.

nothing even remotely new. That was already the case since the Playstation 1 days. It's just become worse since then, but that has happened as soon as video games went mainstream because you had to make the bunch of uneducated people want to play games.

Oh please, that’s just plain old elitism. Let me guess, the internet stopped being cool once it became accessible to ordinary people, uneducated cretins trying to act all lordly, not like the filthy peasants they are? Who don’t have such a highly refined taste just as yours, and skill sharpened through years of serious gaming?

I’m so glad it doesn’t belong to people like you anymore.

> Let me guess, the internet stopped being cool once it became accessible to ordinary people, uneducated cretins trying to act all lordly

I'm sorry if you are hurt by actual facts. People who played video games in the early 80-90s where either kids on the NES or other 8 bits systems or college graduates on microcomputers and early PCs. The Playstation was really the first format that opened up the market to a lot more people.

Oh and you are the one who added "cretins" to uneducated. Nice strawman.

> The Playstation was really the first format that opened up the market to a lot more people.

The absolute courage to write this in a thread about Atari, man.

I rather not play a game for hours just to get to a part that I cannot get past because I didn't do something in a previous section of the game(Resident Evil Code Veronica).

People expect tutorial levels because nothing has a manual anymore games have a dozen buttons two sticks a d pad and half of them have multiple actions mapped to them.

Old arcade games had the tutorials on the idle screens.

True, games like Robotron: 2084 and Space Dungeon are on another level difficulty-wise. Great games, too.

It wasn't discovered until recently but Robotron will actually ratchet down the difficulty level, silently, if it sees that the player is struggling on the first wave.

Can you share a link going into this? My college roommate dissessembled the ROM and examined it extensively. We played on Level 10 constantly and had friends over (with the machine set to Level 10 - default was 3, 'normal' arcade difficulty was 5). The level never seemed to be easier when we had non-'pros' over (we routinly exceed 2.5 million even on Level 10).

My roommate went on to work at Bally Williams directly under Eugene Jarvis (who wrote Defender, Stargate and Robotron, amoung others), who I met at my buddies wedding. Anyway, this is news to me, and likely my buddy that dissembled the rom off the arcade machine.

My friend went on to write the engine for World Crusin; if you hold down the view 1 and 3 button at the same time it will bring up the thank you page on the arcade machine; my name is the second on the page.

Funny side note: the reason my room-mate got onto Eugene's team was because Eugene saw him playing Robotron at lunch on the company machine. After watching him he approached him and they became fast friends. Eugene told him he'd never seen anyone play at the level my roommate demonstrated; that's when he mentioned we played on Level 10 and typically exceed 2million. He was shocked.

One source:

http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=59...

Was your friend Eric Pribyl?

No Scott Posch, he and Eugene split out of Williams and started Raw Thrills but then things kinda went south, I lost touch with him as did Eugene (I think?) but I could Be mistaken on that point.

Ah ok.

FYI I should have referenced the dissassembly that Scott and Sean did, you can see the actual algorithm better.

Start here http://seanriddle.com/robomame.asm and jump to the player start routine at $2B0B.

Actually, Super Mario Bros does have a tutorial - it's baked right into the level design. The opening map was specifically designed to ease the player into the world and expose gameplay elements and mechanics gradually, giving them a chance to learn at their own place. It's not explicitly called as a tutorial - there's not even any text - but it still functions as one.

I think many modern computer games are too easy, and I don't like forced tutorial levels (or many of the other forced explanations, sometimes they have). Including good documentation to explain the game rules, is a good idea.

Jeff is a true eccentric genius and I meant that in the most complimentary way. I remember spending endless hours on his games when I was younger. His sense of humor is great.

He innovates and he squeezes more out of a computer than what should be possible.

At least in the Atari ST days :)

I think 'too hard' is not the right way to look at this. It's a qualitative rather than a quantitative issue. My wife is really good at pattern matching (Tetris style) and platform games. I am just adequate at the former, and useless at the latter, I've never completed the first level of Super Mario Bros and though I've enjoyed some other platformers like Little big Planet I'm really just Not Good at them.

Some time back I installed a Jeff Minter game, Space Giraffe I think. I was a fan of both his games and his eccentric personality from my home computer experience in the 1980s (I had a Vic-20 and JMs games were the only thing ones that delivered an exciting game experience on that machine's limited hardware). Well, my wife attempted and couldn't cope with it at all, playing for more than 10 minutes would give her a headache, whereas she play things like Tetris near competitive level. She just found it overstimulating and with way too many audio and visual signals coming in. for me, it was (unexpectedly) a breeze. I could just sit there and play and play and cruise through levels with ease; it's comfortable because that's how the real world living in a city is for me, constant sensory overstimulation from people, cars, billboards, graffiti, messages etc. etc.

So Jeff Minter's new game looks like a relaxing meditative toy rather than some some psychedelic torture device. It's not a question of hard vs easy, as if all games can be ranked along a single dimension. It's something to with how the human brain works. Why do I find Jeff Minter games easy when I'm bad-to-mediocre at many other simple videogames? The other simple games* I am good at are ones that require a lot of attention splits and/or tended to be unpopular with many players because they were 'too frenetic'. So in terms of classic games I was poor at Galaxians but did well on Tempest.

* I mean simple in the sense of being 2d and not elaborate discovery/open world games like RPGs or FPS, which require a whole different set of skills.

Video of the original arcade game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQ5wpa2eD0

Also you can play it on MAME.

I kinda prefer the simple, focused esthetic of the original. The remake has a lot of distraction going on. But the music is cool.

Agree; sounds like there is a setting to turn that down/off, and hopefully restore the original arcade graphics.

Akka Arrh comes with the Tempest 12-in-1 cabinet produced by Arcade1up. Much to my dismay, the attract mode on this cabinet defaults to a demo of Akka Arrh, instead of Tempest. It seems like Atari wants to push more recognition of it, otherwise - what an arbitrary choice for a cabinet that also has Centipede, Crystal Castles, Missile Command, and other more celebrated titles.

I have that machine! Akka is... weird. And slightly ugly as the default attract mode. I normally select millipede and let that run in attract mode.

I thought it was default because it was just alphabetically first...

If it was too hard for players in 1982 then there's no way today's players stand a chance.

At least now you don't need to plug in a quarter (nearly a dollar in today's money) to keep practicing.

True, but you do need the ~500€ console and ~50€ game.

The remake platforms include PC, Switch and the last gen Playstation, nobody needs to pay €500 to run it.

It's not the same game

Here's the original https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2r9Pt01ruF8

I'm thinking the payoff wasn't good enough to be a quarter eater. A hard game people don't want to play that much isn't good profit

Looks like a circular Space Invaders, but with less variation and less fun. And a weaker narrative for your imagination to latch onto.

It was pretty similar to Tempest (1980) and by 1982, games had moved on from this mode

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sv28sYUZc

Platforms and diggers like Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Qbert, and Mario were all the rage by 1982

The older Atari ones are vector based and not pixel based. If you can see them in person on old hardware they look great

In 1982 you were playing $/minute for a small local group to learn how to beat it. Today online communities share tactics. Many of the hardest ever games are routinely speed run.

I tried to play this on the Atari 50th on PS5 but the controls were very difficult as it was made for trackballs. I hope this remake takes into account that as it looks promising. Tempest on PS5 is also awful for the same reason.

I always thought Tempest played fine with controller.

I'm really glad I picked it up on Steam Deck, the trackpads work pretty well as trackball replacements although it takes a bit to dial in the sensitivity. Can you use the PS5 trackpad as awkward as that may be?

Can you plug a mouse or trackball into a PS5?

> Can you plug a mouse or trackball into a PS5?

It'll depend on the software developers to support trackball/mouse inputs.

For example, Code Mystics's Atari Flashback Classics Vol. [0] contains a version of Centipede (1980) by Atari which used a trackball for a controller.

However, users cannot use a trackball or mouse as a controller because Code Mystics did not build support for anything except PlayStation controllers.

As a then-contemporary Centipede high-scorer, the play experience is awful.

I'd like to find more space- and money-affordable ways to play Centipede than a cabinet replica. [1]

[0] https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/developers/games/5013

[1] https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/pdp/arcade-1up-arcade1up-a...

I want to play Tempest using my mouse's scroll wheel. I think it would be quite close to the original. However, I haven't found a version that lets me map it properly.

What makes this special is that the remake is by Jeff Minter, who is famous for, among other things, his multiple trippy remakes of Tempest on multiple platforms.

Looking videos of the original it honestly looks more like a sketch for a game than an actual game. The giant mandalas filling the screen beg for much trippier themeing than the generic blips and "the Atarian Federation vs the Xablartian Empire". The only reason it's really interesting to anyone is because the three people who ended up with the prototypes refused to let the ROMs get dumped for a while.

Minter is a total wizard, and I hope Atari gave him enough leeway to turn this napkin doodle of a game into something that can reach into your brain and give your visual cortex a really soothing, satisfying massage. He's good at that. Scary good.

Having played the version on Atari 50 some parts definitely could've spent more time cooking, but on the other hand for 1982 I think the two different scales alone would've made this stand out. (But part of the reason it was cancelled was apparently it was not just too difficult but "too complicated" - I assume primarily because of the scales.)

The name sounds like the grunts of frustration from those who played it.

Fed up of the actor model? Wait till you tried this game!

I assumed it was named after this guy:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Akaar

Alas it appears to be a coincidence:

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=akka-arrh&page=detail&id=3...

> The name Akka Arrh is an an pseudo acronym for : Also Known As Another Ralston Hally production.

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