ATARI - The Beginning, The End And Beyond.......................

A true story by Richard Gore.

For Atari it all started way back in the late 1970's, not to steal anybody else's thunder as the story of Atari has been documented many times before, but to cut a long story short three friends got together applied some technical know how, some money and hey presto - Pong! Stuck for a name after exhausting all the traditional ways of naming things, you know writing your name backwards, using your initials, they resorted to playing a word game and cross referencing a dictionary, their first two tries were rejected by the authorities, then try number three, Atari was accepted and the name passed into folklore and gaming history. Much happened after that, including many triumphs, many lows, many sales, corporate splits and more before finally being reborn from nowhere in 2003.

For me it all started 8th February 1986, my thirteenth birthday and no I don't consider 13 to be unlucky. For the start of my teenage years I was given a present, a brand new Atari 800XL computer bundled with a Phonemark cassette data recorder, five games and a joystick (retail price; £79.99 for reference). Just prior to this event Christmas 1985 was the start of a turning point for Atari in the UK, prior to that the VCS console had been a great success and the Atari computers had been selling in small numbers but at high prices. Now this time was a few short months after the start of the Tramiel era for Atari, big Jack had bought the company and was obviously looking to take it places, the result Christmas 1985 truck loads of Atari 8-bit computers were bundled into packs and sold cheaply via the big multiple electronic stores like Dixons and Currys, some reports were saying 100,000 Atari computers were sold over that joyous season. So my birthday was just after this, stores still had stocks and the prices were favourable compared to other machines and I was given the gift, one that would make so much difference to my life and take it in a direction I never imagined.

The next step? I had this lovely new computer but what could it do? In no time at all it was setup (initially on a black and white portable TV via the RF aerial cable, UK PAL system), and the tape games were being loaded. What were those games; Eastern Front (1941) a war style strategy game, Atari Chess doesn't really need any further explanation, European Countries and Capitals an educational game of guess the Country and its capital city, The Lone Raider an arcade style game (more later), and the fifth title? I can't remember! Anyway my favourite was The Lone Raider an arcade game of several different styles, I played for hours and hours but never completed it. I later found out this game was written by a guy at home who had entered a competition run by Atari UK to find the best home written program. One outstanding feature that will haunt me forever is it is one of the very few games that played music whilst it actually loaded from the cassette tape, one very unique feature of the Atari tape system is ordinary audio could be played at the same time as loading data and the tune was catching, very amusing reaching a crescendo just as the loading was finished. Ok so I was up and running but I had played the VCS version of Pacman at a friends house and I wanted that and more but where to go? I was new to all this, so the following Saturday my Dad and I set off for Doncaster town centre, first stop WH Smith stockists of magazines and books, a search through the magazine section yielded a copy of a magazine called Atari User, that was purchased. Then off to a local computer shop, Doncaster only had one, "The Computer Store", very American sounding, we use shop, they use store. Anyway, wow!! In there was about three rows of computer software for the Atari 8-bit machines, there was much more for other computers like the BBC, Spectrum, and Commodore, but I was spoilt for choice. After much deliberation I chose a game called Spy Hunter on tape for £9.99 which was about the cheapest at the time, I loved it and still do, a great James Bond style car chase game, nice graphics, smooth action and more great music.

Atari User? A magazine full of news, reviews, type in listings and so much more, especially adverts. The adverts showed there was much more to Atari than what I had seen, disks, cartridges, disk drives, printers, modems. The magazine itself was a proper commercial magazine printed on glossy paper, some colour pictures and a full colour cover. Every issue featured several type in listings and I can tell you I spent many, many hours typing all of them in. Of course they never worked first time and many more hours were spent checking the listings to see what I had done wrong. All this time I was picking things up, syntax, loops, arrays, graphics modes and so much more. I read the programming articles back to front, upside down several times over. I was going to crack this programming thing BASIC! Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instructions Code, it wasn't long before this beginner was instructing. Just like everybody else I started with;

10 PRINT "RICHARD IS GREAT"

20 GOTO 10

My first program, press "Break" to stop it, but hang on when I press break on bought games nothing happens, something odd was going on here. I was missing something. Anybody that bought one of these Atari bundles will know the manuals that were supplied were not exactly thorough, and thats a bit of an understatement. Just a list of kewords and some very short description of what they actually do. Anyway Atari User can be credited with peaking my interest in programming and providing the necessary tools to learn and seek further materials to aid my learning.

In between my sessions of programming, I still loved to play games, a few weeks later with a fist full of dollars, okay a pocket full of pounds, well a few quid anyway I visited "The Computer Store" again and I was in for another shock. There on the shelf were two games priced at £1.99 each, the era of the budget game had begun. Clumsy Colin Action Biker and One Man And His Droid from a company called Mastertronic at £1.99 each on tape, well it would have been rude not to, I bought them both and shot off home immediately to play them only to experience my first downer, one of many to follow. After waiting for 10 minutes for Clumsy Colin to load it wouldn't run, so I tried again and again, no joy so it had to go back to the store as faulty, I lost count of the number of times I had to do this subsequently but you always remember your first time! The Atari tape drive system was not all that robust. The assistant, who had quite obviously had this before said to me, "I bet your are running it on an 800XL, it won't run on that machine you'll have to pick something else.", so I did, several tape based Atari magazines called Atari Computing for 95p each, I soon found out why they were 95p each, but I'm too polite to comment. Clumsy Colin did eventually work on an 800XL, several months later I bought another copy after being assured it did now work on an 800XL and it did. It did however fail to turn off the motor drive on the data recorder, which lead to the demise of my first piece of hardware, my Phonemark data recorder died and was replaced by a brand new XC12 which didn't even have a power supply, it drew all of it's power from the computer via the SIO cable, what an advancement. Actually that tape drive is still working today so I think I got my moneys worth. Mastertronic became the king of budget games, over the next few years they released tens of budget games and started the market revolution to be followed by many others. Some people say this killed the disk based market as disk sales started to fall, less and less were produced leading to a downward spiral, even though disks were far more robust and could hold more data and bigger and better games. They were however more expensive to produce. It wasn't until right near the end when tapes had died out that disks started to make a come back, one of the last games to make it out on disk only was Hawk Quest, a giant game spread over 4 sides of two disks, more on that later. One Man and His Droid, a title inspired by the BBC2 sheep dog trials television program "One Man and His Dog" was a great game, basically think of hearding sheep through a maze of rock tunnels, digging as you go, quite inspiring. My third budget game some weeks later was a title called "The Last V8", a car game, again from Mastertronic under it's MAD banner, Mastertronic Added Dimensions for £2.99. TLV took ages to load, however the graphics were fantastic, only 1/3 of the screen was used for game play, the remaining 2/3 was a car dash board type display, the game was supposed to feature voice synthesis but I hever heard any, also it didn't support joystic control with only one joystick, so you had to use the keyboard and it was damn difficult to control, so much so that I rarely played it and never got very far. This went on for a while, 3 years in fact, buying Atari User every month as well as games regularly and doing some BASIC programming, always saving to tape, sometimes not successfully, eventually I resorted to saving everything twice to different tapes just to ensure I had a working copy of my labours. I needed to resolve this as my creations were getting bigger and bigger.

My problems were solved sometime shortly after my 16th Birthday, by virtue of me not dying, an insurance policy on my life matured, yielding to me, at the time a massive £869. My parents generously gave me the money, they said I could buy something with it but I had to save most of it as it would become useful later in life. What was I going to buy? I had no hesitations, I knew immediately what I wanted, a disk drive. And not just any old disk drive, Atari had not so long ago released the XF-551 disk drive, their first double sided, double density drive out of the box without the need for a Happy Mod or US Doubler, okay so the software DOS was not available to make proper use of it and it shipped with DOS 2.5, the most renowned and compatible DOS of all time for the Atari machines, but could still only use enhanced mode (130K) and single sided. Any way I wanted one but where could I get one? Locally, forget that, nobody in or around Doncaster sold hardware! So back to the adverts in Atari User, I scoured the adverts and found a few people selling them and found a shop in Preston, Lancashire called Ladbroke Computing International, a 2 hour drive from my home. Anyway I gave them a ring to check they had stock, they did, so Saturday morning my Dad drove me to Preston to buy one of these drives. What a shop, dedicated solely to Atari, they had some ST stuff as well but I had never seen so much 8-bit stuff in my life in one place. I bought the XF-551 (which is still in good use today, albeit with a different drive mechanism) for £150, I also bought my first disk based game, Rescue on Fractalus for £10, more on that later. Going home we also called in the local Argos and picked up a pack of ten blank disks and a disk holding box, total around £20. That disk drive changed my life, and I really mean that, but it wasn't without it's problems! However everything started great, I could save my creations in seconds, games would load in seconds, oh what joy. My programming went from strength to strength, I was introduced to the joys of machine code and assembly language, something I never mastered beyond simply DLI and VBI code to manage colour swaps and PMG movement. I also acquired several programming aids in the form of books, "Mapping The Atari" was perhaps the most useful book I have ever seen or used, a complete list of every memory location in the computer and how to use them. De Re Atari, a more insightful and detailed book was also useful for certain tasks like PMG mastery and audio control. Between these two publications and the ever helpful Atari User articles things progressed well, a couple of my programs made it onto magazine disks and type ins, plus a few more made it in Public Domain libraries and eventually full blown commercial software, 8-PRINT, PRINT-LAB, SUPER PRINT LAB XE, DEVILS DOMAIN, TAG!, DEMO MAKER and ALIEN BLAST were some of the titles I created. The next most powerful helper to me was a program called Turbo BASIC, as an upgrade from the slow, cumbersome Atari BASIC, Turbo BASIC, was as it's name suggests, fast and much more suitable for programming arcade games. Not only that but it could also be compiled to make it run even quicker, very soon all my programming was done in Turbo BASIC, with the arcade games being compiled to run as proper arcade fast paced games.

Was the XF-551 without problems, well no, the new DOS didn't properly appear, eventually I found SuperDOS from the Page 6 PD library which was great, fully compatible with DOS 2.5 but also supported double sided, double density disks. DOS 3.0 from Atari eventually showed up as Public Domain software but was so bad and so incompatible with DOS 2.5 that nobody ever took it seriously. SpartaDOS from OSS was much vaunted software but at £50 and command driven rather than menu driven it never took off with the masses, only the hardened coders and purists used it, I certainly never did. As a software developer you had to stick what everybody could use which meant DOS 2.5 disks in single or enhanced density but not using the extra space to ensure all drives could read it. The other Atari drives out there were the 810 and 1050, there were a few third party drives too like the Indus GT but they never made it to the UK. Anyway the XF-551 was the first Atari drive to use an 'Industry standard' (if there ever is or was or will be such a thing) 360K drive mechanism, that spun at 300rpm, the standard Atari drives used special mechanisms that ran at 288rpm, very close so no issues or so you would think, but sadly not. Piracy (a topic I will come to shortly) was rife and software companies were using more sophisticated means to prevent people copying their disks, one of these involved timing the drive roatations, thus some copy protection techniques meant the XF-551 had some compatability issues with certain pieces of software. One such item was the Parrot 2, sound digitiser software, I had just bought the same for £50 from the BaPAUG (Bournmouth & Poole Atari User Group), who imported such items and others from the USA to sell in the UK, of course the software wouldn't load and it took them six months to get to the bottom of it, they simply wouldn't accept my theory and kept my disk for 6 months saying they were waiting on a reply from the manufacturers. Eventually I got so fed up I bought a second hand 1050 drive and got them to send my disk back. So I now had a great setup, double drives, 800XL, tape deck, loads of games, some programming knowledge what was next?

Well lets talk about software for a while. Piracy, the act of illegally copying software and selling or distributing was rife on the Atari format, as always there are two sides to every story. Some end users argued the software was so expensive (over £50 on some early titles) and so hard to find that they had no choice but to copy what ever they could get their hands on. The producers and retailers argued that because people were doing this and not buying the original software they wouldn't support or develop for the platform, a vicious cricle! The budget tape brigade went some way to ease this, why pirate when you could buy for £1.99? There is no point in getting into this topic which has been widely debated and still is on the DVD and CD markets at the moment but I am proud to say all my software is and was originals only, I had numerous opportunity to obtain illegal software but I never did and never would. These days people still obtain technically illegal copies of software for porting to PC and home private use, the main arguement being that no company or individual is losing out anymore, nobody produces new stuff, so there is no harm in circulating what still exists for the amusement of our tiny community. To me this is much harder to argue against now, although there are still one or two retailers selling Atari related software and hardware so one does need to be careful, copyright law does still exist.

You have heard some of my stories about purchased software, so lets just round up a few of the real good ones. Rescue On Fractalus (my first disk based game), an absolute cracker, fly around the hostile planet looking out the front of your ship rescuing stranded pilots, this game was released by Lucasfilm and must have been inspired by the film The Empire Strikes Back, pilots in orange suits with white helmets, snow speeder type heads up display. The game had one really great feature, as you were about to rescue a pilot he knocked on your door, (great sound fx), you opened the door and let him in, very occasionally the pilot wasn't a pilot but a monster, I tell you the first time this monster jumped onto my screen I nearly fell backwards off of my chair! Of course nobody can discuss Atari without the classics, Pole Position and Pac-Man, these entered my collection surprisingly late but of course I spent hours and hours playing them, they don't need any description and fair to say they were faithfull translations from the arcade originals. They can now be bought built into a joystick and simply plugged into a TV, needless to say I did, I don't know why but I did, and I can assure you nothing shows up the simple blocky graphics like playing them on a 42 inch Plasma TV! What other games are out there? Mr Do!, another arcade game, one of my favourites of all time. Many companies developed software for the Atari machines, US Gold bought a lot of US rights but also programmed Gauntlet (one of the first major ports from arcade to cross platform home computer release) themselves, Red Rat based in their Dungeon in Manchester sold software as well as releasing their own titles, Mastertronic were the king of budget software but did occasionally come up with some good games and at £1.99 who could argue. Activision, Prism Leisure, Microprose all entered the market with more targetted games, Microprose were big on strategy type (war)games, several companies were big on text adventure type games, Level 9, Adventure International - I hated these games, typing N, got go North was not my idea of a great game, I did eventually buy The Pawn just to see the great graphics that everybody talked about. One game that I never managed to get hold of was Alternate Reality, a supposed 7 part release of a mix of adventure and some of the best graphics ever, unfortunately the release scedule only ever got to part 2 before support was dropped, I saw my first real screen shot a couple of weeks ago on a web site and really wished I had bought the game. By the middle period I was collecting for the sake of collecting, I was intent on having a huge software library, which to be fair I did end up with. I played every game at least once, but some only once!!! Slowly the market started to die, budget tapes took over, disk sales slowed, then budget releases faded, shop support faded as newer machines took up the challenge. What was quite unique about the Atari market was it left a hardcore of enthusiasts, not only consumers and end users but also retailers and developers who probably knew they were no longer going to get rich off of the market but kept their support going and even one or two new companies appeared, basically run by the guys who had been coding for other companies but now had no outlet for their talents so decided to do their own thing. One such company was Zeppelin Games headed by Brian Jobling, a man of such prodigious talent it can bearly be described. The company's first forray into the market was a game called Zybex which only ran on 64k machines and sold for an incredible £2.99 on tape, words cannot describe this game, a horizontal shoot em up with everything, great graphics, wonderful sound and effects, plus really good game play and a whole host of features, bonuses, power ups, weapons, had this game been released three years before it would have made a fortune, as it was I presume every Atari owner in the Country bought it, if they didn't shame on them. Zeppelin produced a series of classic games, every one a masterpiece, then came an announcement they were going to try their hand at full priced games, what £9.95 for a game surely not! The end result was Draconus, available on disk at £9.95, you played the part of this dragon who could transform into a water lizard and travel on land and underwater, it basically a platform game like no other, with superb graphics and sounds and gameplay, it cost £9.95 but it was worth every penny. These were classic games written in the UK and beat everything that had ever been done before from the UK and the US, however around this time the cheap Atari computers were being used a lot in the emerging Eastern European countries and they were churning out some fantastic graphics demos and some even better games in term of grpahics and gameplay. I believe even today some of these guys still strive to out do each other. They used so much processing power that some of the titles won't work properly on US machines which don't have as much processing time in the vertical blank sequence as the PAL European machines, now that is programming and timing to the extreme! So what was the ultimate, well right towards the end two chaps from New Zealand, Andrew Bradfield and Harvey Kong Tin produced a game called Hawk Quest, a multi level arcade scrolling shoot em up come adventure, platform affair, however they had issues with somebody to release it for them. A article was written in the Page 6 magazine about games you may never see and this was included, within weeks Red Rat software had done a deal and were releasing this game on four sides of two disks for £16.95. I bought one immediately, I don't know how many others did, but it was worth it, this game was perhaps the last full priced commercial piece of game software ever released for the Atari 8-bit machines. Several weeks ago I was trawling the Internet and came across the story of Hawk Quest and Laser Hawk as told by Harvey Kong Tin, basically as a tribute to Andrew Bradfield who died a couple of years ago from cancer. Now I never knew either of them personally but I was very sad to hear that such a great mind and person was no longer with us, Andrew if you are watching from where-ever we go when we pass over, thank you for such a great game, you went far too soon, you are my inpsiration to go ahead and complete this little project.

Of course many games have come and gone but hardware and paper support from magazines also played a huge role in supporting the format. Antic and Analog were big in the USA, Atari Classics came along after the death of Atari, both of these early titles were very clever unlike the bog standard "Atari User" title from the UK. However the UK magazine Atari User was by far the better magazine, the US titles had adverts on every other page, whereas whilst carrying adverts of course the UK magazines had much more content. By the time Atari User died I had every copy ever produced, when it did die it was bought by a company called Page 6, run by Les Ellingham in Staffordshire. I had never heard of Page 6, but they had in fact been running far longer than the Atari User magazine and Les had been offered the chance to edit the Atari User magazine when it was launched but prefered to stay with his own title and work for himself, and in the end he bought Atari User anyway! Page 6 magazine, again a very clever title, inspired by the page 6 memory locations within the Atari computer so useful for programmers, was in fact a very good magazine, filled with useful content, reviews, articles etc and indeed they published some of my stuff. Page 6 also ran a huge Public Domain software library, I remember the first piece of software I bought from them was a text based cricket game. Cricket is my other love and no software simulation of cricket was ever produced for the Atari 8-bit machines, probably an artefact of the US origin of the computer, however this text based game appeared, written in Australia, many more followed. Public Domain software never really lived up to the proper commercial stuff, you always ended up disappointed, which is why I guess it was essentially free! I did enjoy playing the cricket game a few times though, it was actually very well written with loads of options, including making up your own teams. The only real exceptions were Turbo BASIC, and some of the late European games and demos which were certainly of commercial stature. As the Atari format continued to die away Page 6 struggled on, eventually ending up as an A5 based paper 'magazine' before disappearing with my money still owing for outstanding subscriptions, something they always promised they would never do given the history of this happening with every other Atari magazine. By the time this happened I had every copy of Page 6 apart from the very first one which was apparently a collection of photocopied pages. I once had the chance to buy it for about £10 which was ridiculous at the time as the new issues cost about £1.50 each, do I regret it? well as a collector yes, as in all things collectable the earliest and first items are always the most valuable and sought after. To be fair Page 6 did a lot to support the Atari community for as long as they could, and they do deserve the thanks of everybody who enjoyed their magazines and software, if it's any consolation I certainly don't worry about losing a few quid at the end. Apparently the issues were created on Atari ST computers, so it's just like keeping it in the family. Some of the stuff is still available at www.page6.org a great resource run by Paul Rixon (a former contributor to the magazine) under authority from Page 6 Publishing, the copyright holder. See our links page for more links to other great Atari web sites.

So what else happened in my great history of Atari 8-bits, well one thing that played a huge part in my path of Atari was AMS, originally the "Alternative Micro Show", run from the Staffordshire Show Ground. The first year I attended with my Dad, I think I was 16, it was great loads and loads of stalls all selling Atari stuff, ok so there were other stalls as well offering support for other "alternative" formats but I rememmber Atari being by far the most supported format. All the chaps were there, Page 6, New Atari User, Red Rat software, BaPAUG, DGS and so many more that I have forgotten the name of! What a fantastic day, I bought loads of software all at really good prices. There was one stand, DGS (Dean Garraghty Software) that thrust some piece of paper into my hand offering a piece of software called Digi-Studio, I put the paper in my bag and thought nothing more of it, until later, so much more later. Upon rediscovering this piece of paper I was amazed to find that DGS were based in Doncaster, about 5 minutes drive from where I live! I hope Dean doesn't mind me spilling the beans, but he was simply a University student operating and writing software out of his parents house, as indeed was I! At that time we had no contact, but things were to change a couple of years down the line. The AMS shows came round every year, usually early November, the following year having learnt to drive me and my brother attended the show, still as visitors, and the year after that me and a friend from School, this was for the last time as a visitor only and by this time the name had been changed to the "All Micro Show", the Atari support had dropped off and most formats were now being catered for, the fast emerging PCs were all the rage and selling for around £1,000 each as they always seem to do, but anybody who went to these shows would have been crazy to spend and even take that much money! They were no frills shows, the stalls were simply set up in squares in a concrete floored building on trelis tables, for an extra £10 you got a power supply to show off your wares! You simply wouldn't have risked your hard earned £1,000 on some of the cowboys that were in attendance by this time, of course some of us were far more reputable. Atari was still much in demand by the hardcore enthusiasts and many thousands of Atari users still attended this event religiously. I don't recall the precise year, but the next time I visited the AMS I would be on the other side of the fence, by this time I had made contact with Dean at DGS and bought a few items from him, boy did his eyes light up when he saw me turn up on his door step, late that September, the reason? Well, I turned up in my Dad's van and Dean was fretting about how on Earth he was going to get all his growing stock to AMS this year, I was the answer to all his prayers, in return for petrol costs and free entry to AMS I would take his stuff down to AMS and help on his stand. Come 4:30am on that cold and rainy Saturday in November I was beginning to wish I hadn't been roped in, I didn't even know there was a 4:30 in the morning! Away a two hour drive to Staffordshire in pitch darkness, followed by standing for 12 hours straight and talking to hundreds of people inside this big shed with little natural light, doing my best to sell Dean's gear and then driving two hours back to Doncaster, again in pitch darkness, did rather take it out of me. I slept until 1:00pm the next day! It was great, really it was, I met many Atari users, loads of whom came back year after year, after year, the faces became familiar and they always bought something. I don't remember too much about that first day apart from the extreme pain in my feet and the odd feeling of not seeing any daylight at all for a whole day. The second year was much more eventful, by this time the Eastern European market was in full flow, Dean had left University and was trying to make a living from supporting Atari and had just started distributing software from a German company called PPP (Power Per Post), the highlight of this show was going to be visitors to the DGS stand would be able to see and speak to the Author of most of this software, Harald Schoenfeld (apologies if the surname is quite right, we just called him Harald). DGS flew Harald over from Germany for the weekend, we roped in an extra driver and my van to get us all and our gear down to Stafford, the day went well, I think people enjoyed meeting Harald, although financially it wasn't so great, taking away the expense of getting Harald over we only made a couple of hundred pounds which wasn't really enough for all the work that went into it, but you could never say we were in it for the money, by this time Atari 8-bit was on its last legs and looking back, financially it was never going to work. Harald was a nice enough chap, a quiet sort of person, with his German accent, apparently a Physics student at University in Germany. Now I didn't know this and at the time I was studying Chemistry at University, during our first meeting we got talking I explained myself and spouted this saying that we science students had at the time, "If its Chemistry it smells, if its Biology it moves and if its Physics it doesn't work", as you can imgaine it wasn't a great start! It wasn't a great finish either, on the way home the second car broke down, so we had to pile more of Dean's stock (he wouldn't leave it behind) and Harald into the back of my van and leave the other poor driver by himself to wait for the AA! This AMS show was also note worthy as the big entry onto the scene of Derek and Pam Fern of Micro Discount, Derek had been supporting the Atari 8-bits for a while now but on this occasion he turned up to the AMS show in a big 7-ton lorry and proceeded to unload a huge number of helpers and mountains of software and hardware, and by mountains I mean mountains. There were rumours that he had just cleared out Atari UKs warehouse of 8-bit gear and I could well believe it, that day he took thousands of pounds and was the big star of the show for Atari 8-bit users. Derek, a big brummie, continued on for many more years and always came back with more and more stuff, by the time the last show came round at the end of the day he was off loading cartridges for £1 each, brand new, sealed in boxes, for only £1 each. Derek and myself had several dealings and spent many hours on the telephone, he even ended up distributing some of my software as indeed did DGS, and Page 6. As the AMS moved on it went twice yearly, once in April and once in November, we did these shows a couple of times then they died away, each year less and less support appeared and I think at the last one we (thats DGS and myself did) there were only 4 Atari 8-bit stands, even Page 6 missed the last one.

It was all very well writing software and having somebody else sell it for you but you don't get most of the profits, the other way to do it is do all the work yourself and take all the profit yourself, at this point it is fair to say it was almost impossible to make a living out of writing software for the Atari 8-bits, most of the commercial distributors had stopped supporting the Atari 8-bits and most of the support was firmly in the hands of 'amateur' enthusiasts like DGS and Derek Fern, with Page 6 still flying the flag as the central hub. How did I start down this road? Well as previously discussed I was studying Chemistry at the University of York, during one of my long chats with Derek Fern the topic of conversation turned to memory upgrades, Derek mentioned to me that the Yorky 256k memory upgrade was actually designed by a University lecturer at the University of York, I don't know how he knew that, but I also know he didn't know I was a student there. Pure coincidence! I set out to find the man, after several e-mails and notices posted on the University computer systems I found the man responsible, Dave Malham, a lecturer in Music Technology and a friend of the owner of the York Computer Centre, hence they put two and two together many years before and came up with the Yorky 256k plug in memory upgrade for the 800XL. By this time the York Computer Centre no longer sold any Atari 8-bit stuff but Dave still had some components and the circuit boards, enough boards for 20 units. I spent many hours with Dave when he would take great delight in telling me just how far advanced the Atari 8-bits were for their day, especially the sound and graphics chips. He was now using the ST range of computers as MIDI and music control interfaces and indeed I saw one of the very first Atari Falcon computers in the UK in his hands, his face alight like a child on Christmas Day. Dave was a late middle aged man, top side of 50, with a big beard, typical computer science type professor of the day but he was a good man and a great help to me. We quickly arranged a deal for me to acquire all his components and the rights to once again retail the Yorky 256k memory upgrade. Within a couple of weeks I had built a couple more units, one for myself and more to sell for £50 each, Dave was a continued help in sourcing more components and programming some of the programmable chips required, he was on a small royalty fee, but I'm sure he did it more to be friendly and a help than for the few quid it brought him. The limiting factor on these were the circuit boards, I had 20 from the original deal, one of which was damaged and unusable, so that meant 19 more Yorky units could make their way onto the market and they did over the course of the next two years to many far away places including the USA and Iceland. The circuit boards would be too expensive to produce again in small numbers and some of the chips were becoming older, harder to find and more expensive, with some searching of the Maplin and Farnell catalogues I had managed to buy enough components to complete the lot and spent many, many hours soldering everything together. Thus my first marketable product was the Yorky 256k memory upgrade, which I had decided to market myself and thus gain all the profit. At the time Page 6 owed me some money for one of my programs they had published, unfortunately they were going through a bad patch and couldn't afford to pay me at the time, so we arranged a free of charge advert in their magazine in return for them not paying for my software they had used, a mutually agreeable deal that kick started my sales. By the time I left University I had more money than I started with, which was unheard of back then (and is almost impossible now), mind you part of that is down to the fact I didn't spend all my free time in a pub, I had Yorky's to solder!

So what else did I do? During my exploration of the Internet I came across other authors of Atari Software, John D Harris who wrote some early software for Sierra-on-line in the USA, Jawbreaker (a pac-man clone) and Mousekattack a maze game variation on Pac-man. I added these to my catalogue of software under a licensing agreement with John, these were older titles with very basic graphics running in 16k, but I sold them cheaply and did a bit of trade. Also other authors were submitting software for possible sale and I picked up a series of games and utilities from Visionaire Software; Arena, Bubblezone (both games) and the GTracker series of sound manipulation software. But my crowning glory has to be the titles Black Lamp and Tube Baddies, Black Lamp was orginally released by Atari UK some years before in one of their final gestures of support for the Atari 8bits and Tube Baddies had never actually made it onto the market but had been advertised in several magazines. These programs were written by Ivan Mackintosh with excellent music and graphics by Richard Munns, this duo have produced several classic games for the 8-bits including Cavernia, Little Devil and more. Ivan and I agreed a deal (a very generous deal for him actually in terms of percentage fee but sadly not in yielded income) and these games were on the market, and in the case of Tube Baddies for the very first time. This was a great feeling for me, I had made available for the first time a great game that would otherwise never had seen the light of day. Several days later I received a call from my pal Derek Fern, the conversation went how the h*** did you get those games, Atari offered them to me weeks ago but they wanted £1,000 each for them! Derek had apparently turned down the chance to buy these games because £1,000 at that time was silly, silly money, he would never have generated enough profit to cover that. This set me in a bit of spin, what Atari owned the copyright? not the author? oh dear I was about to get sued (or threathened and not for the last time either but thats another life time and story away)! Quickly I contacted Ivan, don't worry he said, everything is legal I have the contract here, when we wrote the games the copyright was granted to Atari for a number of years (5 if I remember correctly) and after that the copyrights reverts to me. Indeed he sent me a copy of the contract and that is indeed what it said, and all the dates checked out, so Atari had been trying to sell software for a ridiculous price when they didn't even own the copyright to do so! Once this was ironed out I did actually agree a re-licencing deal with Derek to allow him to sell these games too, he was a far bigger retailer than myself and would surely generate more sales than I could and thus help everybody in the chain. By the end together we had sold about 100 copies of each title at £5 each, you do the maths; £1,000 to buy the rights!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I also bought some clearance software from the USA and sold that on in the UK, concentrating on titles that had never made it to the UK in the first place, I kept it small to ensure I didn't have lots of money tied up in stock (not that I had lots of money) but it never really got going and I still have some of it left around today. I continued my love of programming, moving from Turbo BASIC to QUICK!, a language from PPP in Germany which was very structured and offered simple commands for complex tasks. It was great to program with this software, my first published item was a game called TAG!, inspired by Games World on Sky TV, with origins in the school yard game of tig or tag you're it. This appeared on a late Page 6 disk, and was perhaps my greatest programming achievement. The gameplay and graphics were good (well I thought so) and I had even integrated some genuine stereo sound effects for those people who had modified their computers to give off stereo sound, with independent left and right speaker control. This was a bit of a quadry for me, should I sell this game myself or submit to Page 6 for mass publication, in the end I plumped for the Page 6 option simply because I knew it would gain far more exposure, however I did retain the copyright on this software and always intended to follow it up with a second more advanced version or a sequel game and bundle them together. This never happened and TAG! was my last piece of software (to date - I'm not dead yet) before my life moved on.

Of course much more happened than this and I could write as much again with the details I have missed, I haven't even talked about printers, TWAUG and many, many fine pieces of software, disasters and hardware acquisitions, but life goes on and it did move on, maybe one day I'll put all this and more into a book but would anybody want to read it? After I finished University I got a job (at another University) and furthered my passion for playing cricket which was now taking up a lot of my time. Working at a University I had access to the Internet,10 years ago, before the huge explosion it has had today, one day whilst doing some exploring on the Newsgroups I came across the reported sale of Atari Corporation to another computer company (can't remember the name), one whose speciality was disk drive mechanisms. Atari Corporation had long since dropped it's support for all its computers even its last attempt at commercial viability the Atari Jaguar hand held Colour games console and existed soley in name only, now Atari was finally dead. Early in its history the original Atari company had split into Atari Games and Atari Corporation, the Games did games and Corporation did home computers as totally independent companies, Atari Games being a division of Warner Bros, Atari Corp being a privately owned company (by Jack Tramiel). I'm not entirely sure exactly what happened inbetween but Atari Games disappeared being ousted by the likes of Sega and Nintendo in the arcades, and now Atari Corp had gone. I had listened to people saying Atari was dead or was dying for many years and I mean many years, right back to a couple of years after I had originally got the computer but now I finally believed it. I made one last attempt to contact the new owners to see what, if any plans they had for the name and whether there was anything that could be done or sold to me in terms of software and hardware rights, designs etc, but they never replied. Atari was indeed dead. Not long after this even the hardcore, hardcore disappeared; Page 6, Derek Fern, BaPAUG all went, onto what I don't know but they went. DGS moved on into the commercial world, Dean was employed by somebody else. My interest in support disappeared, I still kept playing a few games, but less and less as time went by, then months apart, then truely Atari was finally, completly and utterly dead. Nobody cared, nobody knew, death......

Is there life after death? I don't know the answer to that mystery of life but for Atari or at least the name I would say yes there most certainly is. Early into the new millennium , 2001 to 2002 ish there started a phase for "Retro gaming", Pong and Pacman were no longer forgotten words, new versions of the classics appeared on the PC, Sega and SNES platforms, then Microsoft paid a fat wedge of cash so it could include new versions of these classics in its Windows packages and addons. You can even buy replica arcade cabinets for a couple of thousand pounds and best of all several exact copies of the early games built into a replica joystick that you can plug into your television, five games and a joystick for £25! Then one day a familir name burst onto my TV screen, Atari was back as a games developer, that old faithful fuji symbol was once again at the forefront of home computer gaming. A french company called Infogrames had bought the name and was using it publish new, modern games, the year 2003 and Atari was back from the dead. I had goosebumps, the name I had known and loved so much was back for another crack at the gaming market, with a whole new generation of gamers that weren't even born the first time round. Plus there is still a small community with the love for retro who still own the original gear, people are still selling software, the Eastern Europeans still do what they did best, continue to push the limits, you can even connect your Atari to your PC or have your PC emulate your Atari, but unless you know precisely where to go, you wouldn't know these places existed, hopefully thats what this web site is all about, a bit of nostalga, a bit of support and a bit of if you want more I'll point you in the right direction, enjoy.

And there endeth the tale, Atari, The Beginning, The End and Beyond..................what there is in store for me, Atari and you, nobody can say, but it was a great ride. Atari was a great big part of my life and always will be, now let me shift all that cricket gear and boot that drive once again, Mr Do! where are you?

Richard Gore - 09.11.2004