Remembering CVG 101 and Classic Gamer Magazine

I no longer remember precisely how I got started writing for Classic Gamer Magazine. I seem to be missing my first e-mails on it and, unfortunately, I'm finding Google Groups completely unhelpful at the moment. But I believe the sequence of events was probably something like this. Chris "Cav" Cavanaugh published the first issue as a fanzine in 1998. It was a success, so he decided to relaunch it as a for-profit venture and put out the call for writers on Usenet. I'd quit my on-the-side job at Suite 101 a year before and was closing on my son's first birthday, so was beginning to feel like I had a handle on my new life with child. Also CGM was planning a bi-monthly schedule, giving me twice as long to write as I'd had on Suite 101's monthly schedule. Therefore, I volunteered.

I was relieved at the warm welcome Cav gave me. Reviewing the earliest e-mail I have from him, it looks like I probably referenced Suite 101 and he was not only familiar with my articles for them, but said he enjoyed them a lot. I quickly proposed a column called CVG 101 (for "classic video games") as a continuation of what I'd done at Suite 101 and he agreed. He introduced me to my fellow writers a few weeks later.

Our second item up for bid is: Lee Seitz.  Lee also knows his stuff.  He runs a great website at http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/nexus/ or better known as the "Classic Videogame Nexus" [sic].  His website is a great resource for information and I'm very thankful for having him along for the ride.

In addition to my column, I also worked with Cav on a classic video game newswire. My memories of this are fuzzy at best. I think we probably just agreed to make each other aware of news stories for our respective sites. I know I was running news on the Classic Video Games Nexus.

Looking through my old e-mails, it appears I gave feedback to all of Cav's e-mails about the progress on the latest issue or the magazine in general. I didn't mind giving my opinions, but tried to do it nicely and with the full understanding that I wasn't the one in charge. Which is good, because some of my suggestions were not the way the magazine went.

In addition to my CVG 101 column, I also conducted a couple interviews. They were both things I proposed to Cav and he thought were, indeed, good ideas. The (Buckner and) Garcia interview in #2 was the only time I got an article mentioned on the cover because you want news on the cover, not a recurring feature for newbies. Sadly, I never followed through on my proposed interview with former Atari programmer Dennis Harper. I still kick myself about that.

Things went okay. I say okay not because of any bad experiences -- Cav was incredibly nice and understanding -- but because I had a bad tendency to run up against and sometimes a bit past the deadlines. This was entirely my own fault. But when I did miss a deadline, I was typically given a bit of extra time because my work generally required little editing. I think part of the reason he was so understanding is that Cav had a tendency to blow his own deadlines, which is understandable since creating an entire magazine was, as best I know, an entirely new thing to him.

For #3, I wound up lifting a great deal of text from an article I'd written for Suite 101, with Cav's permission. I took the article I wrote on Sears labels and reworked it as an article on cartridge label variations with special emphasis on Sears labels.

I finally got to meet Cav at Classic Gaming Expo 2000. I also met his significant other (and later, wife) Sarah Thomas. It was a pleasure hanging out with both of them. It was also nice to hear Sarah, who was the one primarily responsible for editing all the submissions, say to me the same thing Cav had about my articles needing little in the way of editing.

Chris Cavanaugh and Sarah Thomas

I should point out that the magazine turned out not to be bi-monthly, but quarterly. After #4 was finished, Cav struck a deal with Tower Records to distribute the magazine on their newsstands! Unfortunately for me, there were no Tower Records stores in Alabama, so I didn't get the thrill of seeing a magazine with something I'd written on the racks. I suspect each store only got a handful of issues, as the one time I did find a Tower Records on a trip to Nashville, CGM was nowhere to be found.

I really blew things on my article for #6. That was when, because I hadn't finished reading a previous issue, I wrote an article very similar to one Leonard Herman had written for #4. Oops! Luckily, Cav gave me time to write another article instead. I've included that never-before-published article here, just for completeness.

I submitted an article for the seventh issue of CGM, but before the issue was published, Cav had to fold the magazine. Despite a major investment at the beginning, the magazine had continued to lose money due to lack of advertisers, so he had no choice. He later tried reviving it as a free, PDF-only publication, but only got two issues out before folding again. My article intended for #7 was included in Volume 2, #1 in 2004. But by then I had two kids and little spare time, so I was unable to contribute any more articles.

Cav has kept the Classic Gamer Magazine name around. He published a single issue of Volume 3, again as a free PDF, in 2010. He also still owns the www.classicgamer.com domain, although as I write this he's been having problems with his host and the site is down. However, he also runs an active Facebook page for it. And you can find a complete PDF archive of CGM at Digital Press. But for my own ego trip, here the articles I wrote for the magazine, which I'm proud to have been a part of.

• CGM #1, Fall 1999: Classic Video Games in a Nutshell
• CGM #2, Winter 1999–2000: Cleaning Your Cartridges
• CGM #2, Winter 1999–2000: Catching Up With Buckner and Garcia
• CGM #3, Spring 2000: When is a Combat Not a Combat?
• CGM #4, Summer 2000: Interview with Jerry Greiner
• CGM #4, Summer 2000: The Comic Book Connection
• CGM #5, Fall 2000: What I Learned Over Summer Vacation
• Unpublished: The Atari 2600-Hasbro Link
• CGM #6, Spring 2001: Please Don't Chew the Gum!
• CGM Volume 2, #1; April 2004: Em-yoo-lay-shun

CVG 101: Em-yoo-lay-shun? (originally for Classic Gamer Magazine)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. This article was originally published in CGM volume 2, #1 (April 2004). This is the article as I submitted it and does not exactly match what was published.]

If you’re a classic gamer and are on the Internet, odds are you've at least heard of emulation and emulators. You may even have a hard drive full of ROMs and a computer desktop full of emulator icons at home. If that’s the case, you might as well go read this issue's “MAMExposed” by Scott Marriott. If you're the one saying, “what's a ROM?” (Yes, you! The one in the back!), keep reading.

An emulator is simply a program that lets one computer imitate a different computer. When I say “computer,” I mean it in almost the most generic sense. In this case, an electronic device that uses microprocessors to, er, compute. For example, there are emulators that let your Apple Macintosh act like a PC, your PC pretend it's a Sony PlayStation, and your PlayStation think it's an Intellivision. (And for some real fun, try running the Intellivision emulator on your PlayStation emulator on your PC emulator on your Mac.) Sounds simple enough, right? “So,” you ask, “how do they work?” I wish you hadn't asked that.

Creating an emulator is not a simple task. It takes a lot of technical know-how and programming skills. It's really more complicated that I can explain in this limited space, but let's see if I can cover the basics. Since this is Classic Gamer Magazine, we’ll limit our discussion to home video game consoles and coin-operated arcade video games. For all video games, there are four primary areas to consider: video, audio, controls, and central processing unit(s). These are collectively known as the hardware.

The CPU emulation is really the heart of an emulator. It's the CPU that runs the program that is the game, whether the game is contained in a chip on a cartridge (as in home consoles) or on several chips soldered to a printed circuit board (PCB) (as in arcade games). In order for an emulator to run a game, you have to make your computer processor run as if it were the console's or coin-op's CPU.

In addition to the CPU, there are probably other processors that handle the video, audio, and controls. When the emulator programmer creates these components, he must not only have them imitate the original hardware, but translate their input or output to the emulator's host system. For example, you can't hook up your Atari 2600 directly to your PC monitor. They simply aren't compatible. Similarly, your sound card isn't a TV speaker and there's nowhere to plug in the joystick. So the emulator has to convert what was once a TV (or arcade monitor) signal into something your video and sound cards can understand. Likewise, it has to convert certain presses of the keyboard into something that appears to the emulated CPU like pressing the joystick and buttons.

So, to reiterate, an emulator is a computer program that imitates the hardware of another computer. Now, when it comes to computers, where there's hardware, software usually isn't too far behind. In the case of video games, it's the game itself that is the software. When you plug a cartridge into your ColecoVision, you're actually connecting a Read Only Memory (ROM) chip to the CPU. When you turn the console on, the CPU then executes (runs) the code found in the ROM chip (or just ROM for short). Similarly, when you turn on an arcade game, the CPU reads the software in the ROM chips connected to it.

Now, most people don't have the hardware to connect a cartridge to their computer. This is where ROM images (or, again, just ROMs for short) come in. It is possible to buy or even make the proper cables and/or hardware to connect a cartridge or arcade game ROM chip to a computer. Then you can use special software to copy the software contained in the ROM to a file on your computer. This file is called a ROM image. The ROM image (or, say it with me, ROM for short) is identical to the code that the console or arcade game runs. Thus, when used in conjunction with a good emulator, you can get an experience that's almost just like playing the actual console or arcade game.

You might be wondering why you didn't hear about emulation until recently. [Author’s note: “recent” is a relative term here. This article was originally written for the non-existent seventh issue of CGM back in 2001.] This time, I’m glad you asked. The primary reason is that computer processors have only recently gotten fast enough to handle emulating other systems. There's a lot of overhead in getting one computer processor to emulate another. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that personal computers had the power to emulate a 1MHz CPU! And then programming an emulator generally required using assembly language. Assembly language is a very low-level language for directly programming a computer. It's basically only a couple steps removed from the actual zeroes and ones your computer uses. The advantage is, because you're practically talking the language of the computer, programs written in assembly are (generally) very fast. But because it's so rudimentary, few people take the time to learn it. Thus, there were few people that had both the interest and the ability to write emulators.

By the late 1990s, computers were powerful enough to handle emulators written in higher-level languages like C. A program written in a language like C is converted down to assembly language by what's called a compiler. But even the best compiler isn't going to create an assembly language program as efficient as that written by hand. (At least that written by the hand of an experienced assembly language programmer.) Thus, such programs run slower. This has been made up for in processor speed.

To give some early history, Digital Eclipse released their Williams Digital Arcade series for the Macintosh in 1994. The games of the series were Defender, Joust, and Robotron: 2084. These were the world's first commercially released arcade game emulators. The following year, Activision published their first Atari 2600 Action Pack, which was an Atari 2600 emulator accompanied by 15 games. This was the first commercially released home video game console emulator. These two programs, along with several independent efforts that happened to be taking place about the same time, started the emulator revolution. At the same time, the Internet was starting to really take off. This allowed programmers to better share their works and communicate with each other to compare notes.

It also made it easier for those few with the ability to make ROM images to share them with others. This brings us to a legal technicality. While there is (generally), nothing illegal about creating or using an emulator, most of the games they run are still the property of the companies and individuals who created them. Their copyrights won't expire for many years yet, and some companies are intent on defending them, as is their right under the law. Thus I feel I must point out that it is illegal to download ROMs from the Internet, particularly if you don't own the actual game.

The laws regarding “backing up” software muddy the issue some. Technically, the owner is supposed to back up his own software. However, since all copies are identical, once you've downloaded a copy, how could anyone tell that you hadn't done it yourself? Second, there are some questions as to whether laws allowing the backing up of software apply to software distributed on a robust medium like a cartridge. As best I know, these particular issues have not been tried in court because the companies that own the games don't generally go after the emulator users; they target those that distribute the ROMs on a large scale. Beyond the legal issues are the ethical ones, which I don't have nearly the space to go into here. Suffice it to say, you'll have to sort out for yourself whether breaking these laws is actually harming anyone or not. It's not an easy question to answer.

Regardless of your answer, today you can find an emulator for practically any home console or computer that was popular in its day. And even some that weren't so popular. You can also find emulators for thousands of arcade games. By far, the most popular is the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or MAME (www.mame.net), which currently emulates over 2600 unique games. Can you imagine an arcade with 2600 different games??? Well, thanks to emulation, you don't have to imagine it. You can have it in your home, filling up your computer's hard drive.

Postscript (12 June 2013)

This article was originally written for Classic Gamer Magazine volume 1, #7 in 2001. Yes, the one time I managed to get an article written on time — or was it even ahead of time? — the magazine folded. Unfortunately, CGM wasn't the only one.  Syzygy and GameGo also disappeared about the same time. At first, CGM publisher Cav planned to publish the seventh issue on CD-ROM, but four months later, he realized that even that was to expensive a venture. So he planned to use our articles on the Classic Gamer web site to maintain interest until he could figure out what to do. Finally, in 2004, CGM was re-launched with volume 2 as a PDF document and this article saw "print." By then, however, I had other commitments and didn't write any further articles.  (See the "Remembering CVG 101 and Classic Gamer Magazine" entry for more information on the magazine.)

That note about the article being written in 2001 was not included and that part was re-written, possibly not by me. Also, Scott Marriott's column was renamed to MAMEusements and my article edited to reflect that.

CVG 101: Please Don't Chew the Gum! (originally for Classic gamer Magazine)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. This article was originally published in CGM #6 (spring 2001). This is the article as I submitted it and may not exactly match what was published. Some information is incomplete, so please see the postscript at the end.]

If you're a child of the '80s, you probably bought at least a pack or two of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or some other kind of video game stickers.  Remember those?  They came in wax packs with a piece of pink cardboard masquerading as chewing gum, just like baseball cards.  While there were later ones based on characters like Super Mario Bros., for the sake of this article, we'll limit discussion to video games "Golden Age."  (That is, the early 1980s.)

Although there were two different companies making video game related stickers during this time, Fleer and Topps, there are many similarities in the way they were sold.  All of them came 36 packs to a box.  (Super Pac-Man was also available in boxes of 48 packs.)  Each pack (except maybe Dragon’s Lair) contained three sticker cards, three rub-off game cards, and the previously mentioned stick of “chewing gum.”  The packs sold for 25 to 30 cents each.

Fleer started the whole thing by releasing Pac-Man stickers in 1980.  Back then, Pac-Man was on everything from mugs to shoes to bed sheets, so it’s only natural the trading card industry would try to get in on the action.  There were 54 stickers in the set.  The front of the stickers generally had black, yellow, or white backgrounds and featured either one or two Pac-Man characters with word balloons or one or two rectangular stickers with sayings on them.  The text on several stickers was taken from the lyrics of “Pac-Man Fever” by Buckner and Garcia.  (“Slide out the side door”/”I’m cookin’ now.”)  Others were just plain silly.  (“Happiness is a hungry Pac-Man.”)  This may also have been where the words “Waka!  Waka!” were immortalized, as they appeared on several stickers.

The backs of the stickers were rather plain.  They had the Fleer logo and said “Pac-Man Sticker No. X of 54.”  They also contained suggestions for holding contests using the rub-off games.  The interesting thing about the backs is that there were a few variations.  In my experience, most have blue ink on the back, but you can also find some that are black.  In the upper right corner is either the traditional circle-with-a-wedge-missing Pac-Man or the legged Pac-Man from the side art of the coin-op.

There were also two different styles of front:  those that had eyes and those that didn't.  That is, you could find the same sticker, but one would have eyes on the Pac-Man and another wouldn't.  The Pac-Men with eyes also had blue and red highlights around the edges.  My observations show that the cards with the circular Pac-Man on the back have a no-eyed Pac-Man on the front, while the side art Pac-Man on the back has a Pac-Man with eyes on the front.  (If you have examples that break this pattern, please let me know.) [There are, in fact, more than two variations. See the postscript below.]

As for the rub-off games, they were a simplified version of the Pac-Man maze covered in gold circles.  You “moved” through the maze by scratching off the gold circles that filled it, revealing either a dot; blue monster; red, orange, or pink monster; or a cherry.  The object of the game was to get through as much of the maze as you could before revealing three non-blue monsters, at which point your game was over.  All the other items were worth points, which determined how well you did.  There were 28 different rub-off games, so once you had an example of each, you were set to cheat your way through the rest of your rub-off games.

Apparently Pac-Man stickers were a success for Fleer, because in 1981 they released a set of Ms. Pac-Man stickers.  Again, they generally featured one or two characters with word balloons or a rectangular sticker with a saying.  Looking at them now, from an adult perspective, there was a strong undercurrent of sexual innuendo.  (“Ms. Pac-Man does it faster.”  Pac-Man saying, “I need it bad.”)  Most stickers had a blue or pink background.  The backs of the cards simply stated “Ms. Pac-Man Sticker No. Y of 54” in pink ink.  The Ms. Pac-Man stickers did not suffer from the variations that the Pac-Man stickers did.  On the fronts, both Pac-People always had eyes.  Pac-Man had the red and blue highlights around the edges while Ms. Pac-Man did not.

Since the Ms. Pac-Man arcade game had four different mazes, there were four different mazes for the rub-off games.  In addition to the cherry, the Ms. Pac-Man games also had pretzels and bananas.  The basic premise remained the same.  The backs of the games came printed in either blue or black ink.  I have never seen a count of the unique game cards for any sticker series other than Pac-Man, so I do not know how many different Ms. Pac-Man games there were.  The same goes for all of the sets described below.

Fleer’s last set of Pac-Man stickers was Super Pac-Man in 1982.  It was more of the same on the front.  Once again, the Pac-People all had eyes.  The backgrounds were red, blue, purple or divided into three stripes of purple, white, and pink.  The backs this time all promoted a Pac-Man poster contest.  They featured either a child wearing a Pac-Man hat, a girl wearing a Pac-Man shirt, or a boy holding a Coleco Pac-Man tabletop game.  I’m uncertain if you could find the same sticker with different backs.  It was pointed out to me by Geoff Voigt at Classic Gaming Expo 2000 that if you turn all the fronts to face the same way, some of the backs will be upside down!  Because the stickers don’t tell you how many there were in the series, I’m not sure, but there were at least 40.  From the previous two sets, I’d say 54 would be a good guess.  The rub-off games this time were all the same maze, but there were gates in the maze that you were not permitted to go through unless you revealed a key nearby.  There was also a large gold oval in part of the maze that might direct you to the scratch-off “super speed button” at the bottom of the card for bonus points.

Nineteen eighty-two was also the year Topps got their chance to cash in on the video game phenomenon.  They acquired the license to produce Donkey Kong stickers.  There was no set layout for the front of the stickers, which featured various corny sayings.  (“Jump Man at work.”  “I’m ape over Donkey Kong.”)  The backs of each sticker featured a piece of one of two pictures.  It took 15 stickers to make a complete picture.  There was a 16th sticker for each puzzle that showed what it should look like when completed, so there was a total of 32 cards.

There are four different styles of rub-off games, one for each board of the arcade game.  The object is to get to the girl at the top without revealing a combination of three fireballs and barrels.  That’s right, there are both fireballs and barrels on every card, even though barrels only appeared on the first screen of the coin-op.

One thing about the Donkey Kong stickers people don't know is that a slightly different version of them were included in specially marked packages of Donkey Kong cereal.  The fronts are identical to those found in the packs.  The puzzle pieces on the back, however, are oriented vertically instead of horizontally, and it takes less of them to make a complete picture.  The two pictures were the same, however.  Each picture was made of only nine stickers, plus a tenth one showing the completed picture.  Thus, a complete set of these would be 20 stickers.  Good luck finding them, though.

The next year, in 1983, Topps released their Video City stickers.  Instead of featuring a single, highly popular video game, this series of stickers featured four moderately successful ones:  Donkey Kong Jr., Frogger, Turbo, and Zaxxon.  A complete set consists of 28 stickers:  seven for each game.  However, describing the seven is a bit complicated, so bear with me.  There were four stickers that had a portion of a larger picture on the back, similar to the Donkey Kong stickers.  Then there was a fifth sticker showing the completed puzzle on the back.  The catch is that front of this fifth sticker was identical to one of the first four.  For most of the games, it’s the same as the one with the lower left puzzle piece on it, but for Frogger, it’s identical to the upper right piece.  The sixth sticker front is the same graphic as the complete puzzle and has playing tips for its arcade game on the back.  Then, there’s a seventh sticker for each game that is also the same as the puzzle, but has a special subscription offer for Electronic Games magazine on the back.  The rub-off games are much simpler to keep track of.  There’s only one board design per game.  In the case of Donkey Kong Jr., which had multiple screens, Topps used only the first screen.

Finally, Fleer got back into the act one final time with Dragon’s Lair stickers in 1984.  I have to admit, I never even knew these existed until a few years ago.  Most of the stickers featured art from the game, some with an extremely corny word balloon (“Please don’t squeeze the Dirk.”) and some with a just label naming the featured character.  Some didn't feature any art from the game at all, just a saying.  The backs of the stickers featured playing tips for the game.  Some game tips were repeated on multiple stickers.  According to the front of the stickers, there were 63 in a set.

I’m not sure anyone knows how many Dragon’s Lair rub-off games there are.  They featured art from the game as their backgrounds.  The problem is there are at least two dozen different backgrounds used.  Unlike all the other rub-off games mentioned here, instead of circles, they have solid paths that branch.  A nice change of pace after all those circles.

Now that you know what’s out there, you might wonder where to find these stickers.  First, there are the usual sources:  other collectors and eBay.  You might also try comic book and trading card stores.  Geoff Voigt let me in on an online merchant that he doesn't mind sharing named Marchant Non-Sports Cards (www.marchantcards.com or www.nscards.com).  Their prices for Donkey Kong and Video City are very reasonable.  The prices on the rest might give you pause.  Just remember, no matter where you manage to find your stickers, please don’t chew the gum!

Sidebar

If collecting stickers isn't up your alley, but you’d like to give them a glimpse or know what they say, try these web sites:

Donkey Kong

• http://www.ohio.voyager.net/~ngsippel/cv/donkeykong.txt

Dragon’s Lair

• http://www.tomheroes.com/Video%20Games%20FS/Arcade/dragon's_lair_cards.htm
• http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/community/merch/ [Try this instead.]
• http://bioinfo.mshri.on.ca/people/feldman/vgmuseum/cards/dlruboff.html

Pac-Man

• http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/pac_stick3.html

Author note: Many thanks to Geoff Voigt for his help in researching this article. You can also thank (or blame) him for letting us use his title.

Postscript (12 June 2013)

As I mentioned in the previous Classic Gamer Magazine entry, this article was written quickly to replace one that was rejected. (You can read about the reasons in that entry.)

Some of the information above, while maybe not inaccurate, is incomplete. If you have any interest in stickers for the various Pac-Man games, you must visit The Pac-Star web site by Kevin Jay North! It is the end-all and be-all of information on these stickers. (And Russ Perry, Jr. and I helped provide some bits of information.)

CVG 101: The Atari 2600-Hasbro Link (previously unpublished)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. I submitted this article for CGM #6 (spring 2001), but due to an error on my part, it wasn't published. See the postscript at the end for details.]

As a Classic Gamer reader, it’s a safe bet that you’re aware that, up until recently, Hasbro owned the rights to Atari’s console-related properties. This, of course, included their Atari 2600 games. What you may not have thought about is just how many third party Atari 2600 games Hasbro also has the rights to. While I could simply list them for you and be done with it, that wouldn't be much of an article, would it? Although considering I’m writing this the night before my deadline, it would certainly be easier on me. (Writer’s block is a terrible thing.) So, let’s examine just how Hasbro wound up with the rights to so many Atari 2600 games in its holdings.

First, let’s start with Atari itself. Atari, incorporated in 1972, was the first of many companies founded by Nolan Bushnell. Although successful from early on, Bushnell had to call in debts every pay period to keep the payroll checks from bouncing. In 1976, Warner Communications paid Bushnell $28 million for Atari. Bushnell realized there was no way Atari would be able to afford getting their latest project, the Atari Video Computer System (VCS, later the Atari 2600), designed and into stores without the capital provided by a major company.

Unfortunately, the laid back atmosphere of Atari, Inc. and the more traditional corporate culture of Warner were like oil and water. In 1978, Bushnell could tolerate no more and left Atari. Atari went on to successfully launch the VCS and, after just a few years, became the dominant player in the home video game industry. In 1981, Atari’s annual sales were $35 million and a significant portion of Warner’s total annual income. Just two years later, in 1983, Atari posted losses of $536 million! Looking to get rid of the albatross that was Atari from around their neck, Warner sold majority interest in the home video game and computer divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel, recently fired president and founder of Commodore. Tramiel called the new company Atari Corporation. Atari’s coin-op division was renamed Atari Games and went on, forevermore separated from the home division.

Fast forward to 1996. After the video game crash of 1983-84, Atari never recovered its former glory. Their last effort in the home video game market, the 64-bit Jaguar, was a failure. Tramiel had Atari Corp. do a “reverse merger” with hard drive manufacturer JTS Corporation. Two years later, in 1998, Hasbro bought the Atari properties from JTS for a paltry $5 million. Classic video gamers and Atari fans saw a glimmer of hope once again. Here we pause to look back at some of the other companies that created Atari 2600 games.

First, there’s Milton Bradley. Mr. Milton Bradley first started making jigsaw puzzles in 1880, beginning what would become his namesake company's entry into the toy and game business.A century later, in 1983, Milton Bradley published a whopping two games for the Atari 2600. A year later, in 1984, Hasbro acquired Milton Bradley.

Next is Parker Brothers.  Founded in 1883 as the George S. Parker Co., George Parker’s brother Charles joined him in 1888 and the company was renamed Parker Brothers.  Exactly 80 years later (1968), General Mills bought the company.  In 1982, Parker Brothers began releasing video game cartridges for multiple platforms, including the Atari 2600.  In 1987, Tonka Corporation acquired Parker Brothers.  A few years later, in 1991, Hasbro acquired Tonka, and thus Parker Brothers, too.

Then we have Tiger Electronics. In 1982, they hopped on the bandwagon with, it seems, half the companies in the world to create video game cartridges. They sold their games under the Tigervision label. In 1998, the same year they acquired the Atari Corp. assets, Hasbro also acquired Tiger Electronics.

Lastly, there’s Avalon Hill. Avalon Hill was the publisher of many strategy war games. They also formed a computer game division early in the establishment of the home computer market. In what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, they too entered the home video game market in 1983. Today, their Atari 2600 cartridges are among some of the hardest to find. Timing is everything; Avalon Hill’s was bad. In 1998, determined to be the Borg of the toy and game industry, Hasbro assimilated, er, acquired Avalon Hill as well.

So, in 1998, Hasbro has acquired Atari Corporation’s assets, plus four companies that published Atari 2600 games as third parties. What does Hasbro do with all of these assets related to the Atari 2600, once the best selling video game console of all time? Absolutely nothing. Instead, from 1998 to 2001, they concentrated on Atari’s classic arcade games. They updated them for today's gamers and slapped the original name and Atari logo on them for brand recognition. The Cyberpunks even attempted to get Hasbro's permission to do an emulation package during this time, but Hasbro was simply not interested.

In fairness, I should point out that all of Parker Brothers' and some of Tiger Electronics' 2600 games were licensed in some fashion. Publishing them would have required new licensing deals that were unlikely to happen. While no one could seriously expect re-releasing the Atari 2600 version of Spider-Man or the Star Wars games would have any impact on sales of current games featuring those properties, legalities are legalities. Companies tend to give exclusive rights to their properties for a number of years when they license them, and exclusive means exclusive.

Resuming the tracing of the acquisition of the rights to Atari's assets we come to the present. Early in 2001, Hasbro sold their entire Hasbro Interactive division, including the Atari assets, to Infogrames for $100 million in stock and cash. What will become of the Atari properties now? That’s uncertain. Both press releases concerning the sale specifically mentioned Atari. One even mentioned that Hasbro had 60 titles in development at the time, but failed to include any classic Atari properties in the short list of specific titles.  All that can be said for certain is . . . uh . . . er . . . um . . . . that writer’s block is a terrible thing.

Sidebar

One of the nice things about writing articles for a magazine like Classic Gamer Magazine, as opposed to a college paper or article for a scholarly journal, is that I don’t have to give a reference for every little fact I site. Still, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the following sites for their help in researching some of this article.

• The Atari Timeline by Robert A. Jung – http://www.digiserve.com/eescape/atari/Atari-Timeline.html
• The History of Hasbro – http://www.hasbro.com/consumer/history.htm
• The History of Toys and Games by the History Channel – http://www.historychannel.com/exhibits/toys/inventors.html
• I.C. When by Don Thomas – http://www.icwhen.com/

You might also be interested in the timeline at my site, the Classic Video Games Nexus.  It can be found at http://home.hiwaay.net/~lkseitz/cvg/nexus/features/timeline/.

Postscript (12 June 2013)

It is ironic that as I post this to my blog, Infogrames renamed itself Atari several years ago, but has now gone bankrupt and has its properties up for auction. And sadly, every single one of those pages I referenced in the "sidebar," including my own, are now gone. (Although you can find my timeline archived at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) I.C. When actually still exists and is still run by Don Thomas, but it no longer contains the wonderful timeline of video game history that it used to.

I wasn't kidding about writing this right before it was due back in the opening. I barely squeaked it in in time. Two days later I get an e-mail from Cav, the publisher.

We kinda have a problem. Your latest CVG 101 while good is extremely similar to Leonard Herman's "Ultimate Videogame Company" article from #4. I also had Sarah read them side by side and she also felt they were very alike.

He went on to ask if I had any suggestions or another spin on it. Uh-oh! I respond.

 Oops.  I never finished reading #4. Sorry! In my defense, maybe great minds think alike?  (Or maybe I did read the article and have forgotten about it. Regardless, I didn't intentionally set out to write an article similar to one already published.)

I went on to make some suggestion for new articles, wondering if I can write them fast enough. Cav offered me a choice of the video game sticker article I suggested within a week or "[taking] the time to research a real good article about emulators for the next issue." I took him up on the stickers article, which I managed to finish in the week I was given, and made a note of doing an article on emulators for the next issue.

CVG 101: What I Learned Over Summer Vacation (originally for Classic Gamer Magazine)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. This article was originally published in CGM #5 (fall 2000). This is the article as I submitted it and may not exactly match what was published.]

I learned many things and got to meet many people at Classic Gaming Expo (CGE) 2000. You probably don’t care much about who I met in person for the first time (although it included the illustrious duo of Chris Cavanaugh and Sarah Thomas), so I thought I’d share some of the things I learned while there. There was so much to see, do, and learn at CGE that I’m doubtless leaving out many interesting things, but Chris will only give me so much room. Most, but not all, of my new knowledge came from the discussion panels and keynote speeches. I primarily attended the Atari 2600 related ones, so this article is biased toward it. My apologies for that. By covering what was new to me, I’m sure there will be something new here for every reader, even if you're Leonard Herman (whom I also met).

Atari 2600 Panel

• Steve Cartwright was Activision employee number 26.
• A two-man salvage team named Seaquest sued Activision after seeing the Atari 2600 Seaquest game, thinking it had been named after their business.
• Bob Polaro is currently writing games in Java. He feels this has a lot in common with the old days of video games where the games were one-man creations.
• It took an entire day for Steve Woita to record the speech in Quadrun and get it under 700 bytes.
• Approximately 10,000 Quadrun cartridges were manufactured for the Atari 2600.
• Mike Albis’ (Atari Games employee for 24 years) corollary to Nolan Bushnell’s theorem that "a game should be easy to learn but difficult to master": You should be able to play the game with one hand in order to hold your beer or girlfriend in the other.
• Brad Stewart played a game of coin-op Breakout against newly hired Ian Shepherd to decide who would program the Atari 2600 version. Stewart cleared the board with his first ball, thus winning the contest.
• Someone in marketing at Atari actually asked Rob Fulop where he’d gotten the idea for the Atari 2600 game Night Driver. (It was an Atari coin-op first.)

Howard Scott Warshaw

• Most of the information listed under here actually came from the Atari 2600 keynote, but he was the liveliest panel member and contributed enough information to warrant his own section.
• Although Yars’ Revenge was planned to be a Star Castle port, at no time did the programmed game actually resemble Star Castle any more than the final game does. Warshaw immediately realized that the 2600 wasn't capable of reproducing the game well. (And besides, Atari ended up not getting the license for it.)
• The original name for Yars’ Revenge was Time Freeze.
• Steven Speilberg asked Warshaw if he couldn’t just do something like Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game. Warshaw said no, saying there was no point in rehashing someone else’s game. In retrospect, he quips, it may not have been a bad idea.
• The comic book packaged with Yars’ Revenge is a simplified version of the story Warshaw created for the game. He was given a choice of taking credit for the game or the story, as credit for both was too much, he was told by Atari.
• According to Warshaw, Yars’ Revenge was the first game Atari produced with official credit to the programmer and an officially approved Easter egg.

Joe Decuir

• Decuir, one of the primary designers of the Atari 2600 hardware, didn't know there was an Atari 2600 light gun game released (Sentinel), but knew it was possible to create one.
• Decuir wishes he had patented the color-cycling used in Atari 2600 games to prevent burn-in, but in his words, they didn't think you could patent software back then.
• Decuir's mother was proud because color-cycling was the reason Consumer Reports gave the Atari 2600 the highest ranking when they reviewed home video game consoles.
• Decuir's then 13-year-old brother "kicked his ass" at Combat, even though Decuir had created the game.
• In retrospect, Decuir admits saving five cents per 2600 console by using a 24-pin instead of 30-pin chip was a mistake. Using a 30-pin chip would have allowed the creation of games larger than 4K without having to resort to bank-switching.
• The Atari 2600 used chips with 15 micron circuits. The Microsoft X-Box, which Decuir is currently helping design, uses .015 micron chips. That’s 1000 times smaller!
• The original Atari 2600 consoles were heavy on purpose. Atari felt consumers would feel gypped if they paid $200 for it and it weighed almost nothing.
• Atari ultimately decided not to build speakers into the 2600 for two reasons. First was the extra cost. Second was that by using the television speaker, consumers had built-in volume control.

Ralph Baer

• It was not until 1967 that Baer, who is called "the father of video games" for his invention of what eventually became the original Magnavox Odyssey (the world’s first home video game console), had the idea for a machine-controlled ball. Up till then, it was controlled manually by a person.
• The original use of what would become the Magnavox Odyssey light gun was for quiz games. Each spot on the TV could be encoded somehow so that the machine new which answer the user selected (or at least if it was correct or not).
• Ralph Baer said his idea for sending games via cable (TV) was 30 years too soon. (He was comparing it to playing games via the World Wide Web.)
• Approximately 20,000 Odyssey light rifles were sold compared to 95,000-100,000 consoles.
• In court, some companies claimed that because their "pongs" were digital, they were therefore completely different from the analog Odyssey. (This didn't hold up.)
• According to Baer, Bushnell preferred to have Magnavox keep "the riffraff" out of the video game industry rather than fight their lawsuit.
• Magnavox was still in litigation with other companies for video game patent violations (related to the Magnavox Odyssey) as recently as 1997. (Notably Taito and Data East.)
• Baer is hesitant to donate the "Brown Box" Odyssey prototype to the Smithsonian because they have so many exhibits. However, there's an inventor's museum that he may donate it to. He believes it should be available to be played by visitors wherever it ends up.
• It was two Scottish men who had the idea for "pong-on-a-chip" at General Instruments.
• Sanders Associates, the company Baer worked for when he invented the home video game console, made about four arcade games that did well. They then made elaborate plans for the future that fell apart in the end.

Miscellaneous

• Hasbro Interactive was approached by Columbia (or whoever owns it now) about including a copy of the Krull Atari 2600 game on the upcoming Krull DVD. I don’t know how they plan to use it (an emulator on a DVD player?) or what the results of this request were.
• You may have noticed interesting happenings at Twin Galaxies, such as a redesigned web site and the advent of shooting their own video footage. It turns out that Twin Galaxies now has a billionaire investor. Before this individual came along, Twin Galaxies was on the verge of going under.

And there you have it. A concise list of the things I learned at CGE 2000, from the trivial to the slightly less trivial. I hope those of you that attended learned many things as well and that both those who did and didn't will benefit, in some bizarre way, from this article. Even you, Leonard.

Postscript (12 June 2013)

Leonard Herman is the author of Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames, the first and possibly still most comprehensive history of video games and systems. I don't believe I ever thought to ask him if he learned anything from the article or not, assuming he read it. Sadly, CGE 2000 is the only one I've been able to attend, but I had a blast!

CVG 101: The Comic Book Connection (originally for Classic Gamer Magazine)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. This article was originally published in CGM #4 (summer 2000). This is the article as I submitted it and may not exactly match what was published.]

In the early 1980s, video games were everywhere as everyone was trying to cash in on the booming video game business. This included the comic book companies. First of all, both DC and Marvel, two of the largest publishers at the time, were licensing their characters for use in video games, the primary examples being the Superman and Spider-Man Atari 2600 games. (For more examples, just flip through the previous issue.) When it came to linking video games and comics, DC may have had an edge because both it and Atari were, for a time, owned by Warner Communications. Atari included several small, DC-produced comic books, called "pack-ins" or "in-packs," with their Atari 2600 games. What I believe was the first one, however, was apparently produced without the help of DC.

Yars’ Revenge: The Qotile Ultimatum was a short, eight page comic that served as a prologue to Howard Scott Warshaw’s first Atari 2600 game. It explained the origin of the Yars, the reason (more or less) they were fighting the Qotile, and even how to play the game. If it had included the game version matrix, it could have almost been substituted for the instruction manual. The story by Hope Shafer was rather simplistic, but the art by Frank Cirocco, Ray Garst, and Hiro Kimura was well done. It was not a bad first effort, but apparently Atari’s new parent, Warner Communications, decided it would be more expedient to have another Warner company, DC, handle the pack-ins from then on. (This is conjecture on my part as Yars’ Revenge and Defender, the first game to include an Atari Force comic, were both released in 1982, so I’m not 100% certain which came first.)

DC pack-ins debuted with a series of comics about a science fiction team named Atari Force. The use of the name "Atari" was explained as standing for "Advanced Technology And Research Institute." The series opened in 2005 on an Earth recovering from the Five Day War. This war irreparably damaged the Earth’s ecosystem. As a result, ATARI sent a group of five international adventurers out in Scanner One , a starship that could travel to parallel universes. There they searched for a new planet to which Earth’s population would be moved. As you might guess, these comics were more involved than the one from Yars' Revenge. They featured the talents of known comic book creators. The writers were Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas, while the art was handled by Ross Andru or Gil Kane, and Dick Giordano.

The first two issues, which introduced the team members, came with the Defender and Berzerk cartridges and had little to do with the games. The third pack-in came with Star Raiders and was more directly related tot he game. Issue number four, which came with Phoenix, was something of an oddity. Whereas the rest of the issues weighed in at 48 pages, this one was only 16 pages long. And Atari Force only played a minor role. This story also appeared as a bonus feature in New Teen Titans #27 and DC Comics Presents #53. There were several differences between the pack-in and the bonus feature. The biggest was that in the bonus feature, the featured ship was called the Liberator instead of the Phoenix. Atari actually went on to create a coin-op game called Liberator, which was based on the story and has been called a reverse Missile Command, that same year. It even featured the Atari Force logo on the marquee! Finally, the fifth pack-in came with Galaxian and featured the story of Atari Force finally finding a new planet to colonize. According to articles that appeared in Atari Age magazine, the magazine of the official Atari Club, there were actually more stories planned. It would appear that someone decided to cut the pack-ins short in order to prepare for the debut of the full-sized Atari Force comic.

This series debuted on newsstands and at comic book shops at the end of 1983. It featured two children of the original Atari Force, Martin Champion (leader of the original team), and an interesting cast of aliens. They fought against a reincarnated Dark Destroyer, who had also been the recurring enemy of the original Atari Force. The series lasted for 20 issues, was brought back for a Special the following year, and has not been heard of since. The primary creators for the first dozen or so issues were Gerry Conway, writer, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, penciller. Wrapping up the series were Mike Baron as writer and Eduardo Barreto as penciller. Ricardo Villagran inked the majority of the issues.

The reasons for the title's cancellation were unclear. In the final issue, editor Andy Helfer stated DC knew when they started that the story would have a definite ending. However, one can’t help but wonder if the break-up and sale of Atari by Warner and the video game crash of 1984 didn't also factor in. I don’t have sales figures, but Amazing Heroes, a magazine about comics, included Atari Force in its list of the ten best books of 1984. Regardless, because the series was short-lived and independent of any major superhero "universe," today you can find back issues in the bargain bins of comic book stores, if you can find them at all. You can find out more about Atari Force at my own Atari Force Headquarters web site.

Atari Force was not DC's only attempt to bring video games to comic books. They also produced two graphic novels based on Atari's games. The first was Star Raiders by Elliot S! Maggin, writer, and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, artist. This was actually DC’s very first graphic novel and it predated the full-sized Atari Force series. It had a brief cameo appearance of the original Atari Force from their adventure in the third pack-in. From there it went on to tell the story of what happened after they left. It’s an entertaining read and worth searching out at comic book shops.

DC’s other video game-based graphic novel was Warlords . (Not to be confused with their unrelated comic book series called Warlord.) This fantasy story by Steve Skeates, writer, and David Wenzel, artist, told of a troll named Dwayne and his somewhat reluctant efforts to unify his world, which was divided into four kingdoms. The leaders of the four kingdoms were a set of brothers who were constantly at war. Beyond that, the story has little relation to the video game it was based on. Overall, it’s not bad, but I personally wouldn't spend a lot to get it. I was able to get my copy fairly cheap on eBay, although you may also find it at comic book stores.

Returning to the topic of DC’s pack-in comics, shortly after Atari Force debuted, Atari began their series of SwordQuest games. The idea behind these games was that players could win valuable prizes by buying and playing the games. During game play, players would get clues for where to look in the accompanying comic book for a piece of the puzzle, which was a word phrase. Sending in the complete puzzle to Atari got one considered for the contest. The creators behind the comic books (which were much better than the actual games) were largely the same as those handling the Atari Force pack-ins. Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas again wrote the series and Dick Giordano inked it. The penciller this time, however, was fan favorite George Perez. Together, these creators told the story of twin thieves, Torr and Tarra, and their quest through four worlds for the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery. Unfortunately, the sale of Atari Corp. to Jack Tramiel caused Atari to stop the contest. The third game and comic, WaterWorld, is very difficult to find while the fourth game, AirWorld, was never started. The AirWorld comic was started, at least as far as plotting goes, but it’s unknown whether any art was done or where any of this work is now. You can find scans of all the released comics on the Internet at http://www.tripoint.org/sq/sq.html.

The final pack-in DC did for Atari was Centipede. This comic was much more cartoonish than the previous ones. The story, by Howard Post and Andrew Gutelle with art by Howard Post and Robert Smith, was about a young elf named Oliver who lived in a forest and was friends with a centipede, spider, flea, and scorpion. An evil wizard turned the elf village’s mushroom supply into toadstools and Oliver’s arthropod friends against him. The most likely place to find this and the other pack-in comics is the same place you find cartridges and instruction manuals: thrift stores, flea markets, garage sales, and the Internet. Because of the full-sized Atari Force series, you can sometimes find the Atari Force pack-ins in comic book stores, but it's unlikely.

While DC Comics went the more traditional route of adapting another medium (in this case, video games) to comics, Marvel created a comic book-sized magazine called Blip . Blip was a mix of interviews, news, playing tips, cartoons, reviews, and more. In other words, a fairly typical (aside from the size) video game magazine from the early 1980s. It was apparently not a success, however, as it only lasted seven issues. Given lead times in the comic book industry, this means the series was probably canceled almost as soon as sales figures from the first couple of issues were obtained. Although when you look at the timing, this is not particularly surprising. Blip ran from February to August of 1983. Due to "The Crash," many video game magazines either ceased publication or reduced their frequency at the end of 1983. You can sometimes find back issues of Blip in comic book stores, but because it was a magazine not dedicated to comics, this is a rare occurrence.

As you can see, there is plenty of material for classic video game collectors who also happen to be comic book collectors to find. I've actually been surprised by the number of video game collectors who are current or former comic book collectors. No doubt, the marriage of these two mediums should make them happy. And for those that aren't comic book collectors, these comics still make a great addition to your own collection of video game memorabilia.

Postscript (12 June 2013)

I don't have much to say about this. Cav announced the theme of the issue would be video game cartoons, so I assumed comic books were fair game as well. I was a comic book collector before I became a video game collector, so this was right up my alley. I initially volunteered to write a special article strictly about Atari Force, but decided to just include them in my broader article for my regular column instead.

Interview with Jerry Greiner (originally for Classic Gamer Magazine)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. This article originally appeared in CGM #4 (spring 2000), but the below is from my copy as it was submitted and may not reflect any changes the editors made.]

In November of 1999, Jerry Greiner, better known as classic video game dealer JerryG, announced he was going out of business after many years. In February 2000, shortly before the official announcement that he had sold his business, I caught up with Mr. Greiner to get the details of why he’d both gotten into and then gotten out of the classic video game sales business.

Greiner, 58, began collecting classic video games around 1989, although he'd "always been a collector of something." He and his wife enjoyed going to garage sales. Mr. Greiner said, "I kept seeing the Atari stuff and I remember back when my kids were younger having the Atari and playing the games. Kept thinking, 'well one of these days I ought to pick one of these up so I can show the grandkids what their parents played with.' We stopped at a garage sale and a guy had a box full of games and game system. Probably had 50 games, a bunch of controllers, and stuff. Sold it to me for 15 bucks. Then unfortunately at the next garage sale, a guy had a box full of games about the same size. He offered it to me for 5 bucks. I said, 'Geez, I've got to average my cost here,' so I bought that one."

Greiner continued, "Then I got to thinking, 'well, I wonder how many different games are out there?' So I just started buying them by the titles."

I’m sure that part sounds very familiar to most collectors. He remembered setting a limit on what he would pay: 10 cents a game. However, if it had "some weird, neat label on it," he’d go up to 25 cents. "It was easy to go out on a Saturday and, if I’d wanted to, I could have picked up a thousand games, but I’d usually find 20 or 30 or 50 or something I didn’t have." Then he decided he should have a system for each grandchild, but not knowing how many he’d have, he just started picking up extras.

Like many other collectors, Greiner started collecting a single system: the Atari 2600. He recalled, "I remember stopping one day and the guy had these ugly looking yellow carts." The man claimed to have every cartridge ever made for this system. "By the time I left he got down to $5 if I took everything. I said, 'no, I don’t want it,'" Greiner continued. "I figured it was some weird junk that wasn’t worth anything. Then [later] I realized it was a Fairchild [Channel F] and then all of the sudden I wanted a Fairchild. I haunted the flea markets and thrift stores and garage sales until I finally found a Fairchild."

Although his collection has branched out to include other systems, the Atari 2600 remains his favorite. "It'll probably be the last thing I give up. They'll probably have to bury it with me," he said.

When asked what his wife and children thought of his new hobby back when he started, Greiner at first said he wasn't sure. He literally filled up their house in Oregon with his collection, he said. When they prepared to move to Arizona in 1996, she said, "I want a house we can live in. So let's find one with a three car garage so you can put the games in the garage and I can have the house." However, Greiner said, "she's been very supportive and understanding of all the stuff that I drag in." Both of them enjoyed going to thrift stores and garage sales. It showed when they moved because they had a six week garage sale, made almost $12,000, but didn't even get rid of half of their stuff.

Around 1991, Greiner stumbled upon an early issue of The 2600 Connection newsletter and saw an ad for Games and More, who had Atari games still in the box. He called, and the owner started ranting how he was tired of collectors calling up and then complaining about his prices on the old games. Nobody complained when he charged $30–40 for an NES game, but people got upset if he even asked for what he paid for the older systems' titles. Greiner asked how much the owner was selling old games for? The man replied $5–10, but he was going to just throw them out because they were taking up shelf space. Greiner told the man he was really interested and asked what the man had. The owner responded he didn't have a count, but he had a list of the titles he had and read some off. Greiner asked, "if I took more than one, what would you want for them?"

"Five bucks a piece. If you took a bunch it would be even cheaper," the man replied.

Greiner asked, "how big a bunch and how much cheaper?"

The owner told him, "if you take everything I have I'll sell it to you for 50 cents a piece, whether it's a piece of hardware or a game and I won't charge you for the common stuff."

A week later $1800 in shipping charges showed up on Greiner's doorstep. That was almost three times what he paid for the merchandise itself, which was all Atari 2600 items. His wife asked, in the way wives do, what he intended to do with it all. Thinking on his feet, he replied, "I'm going into business!" His first sale was to a man in New Orleans: Kaboom! for $4.

Over time, more people with large supplies of games came to him to sell cheap. Sometimes he told them to junk it because he didn't know what to do with more of it. One man in New Mexico tried to sell him a bunch of Intellivision games. After going down to a nickel a game, Greiner still refused because he didn't have room for it. Finally, the man said he’d send it to him for the cost of shipping, but Greiner still said no. He regrets it now, somewhat, but at the time it seemed the correct thing to do.

Over the years, business has been up and down, but enjoyable. Most of Greiner's profits were spent on his personal collection or expanding his inventory. "It's not like everybody thinks," he said. "It's not a way to make a million dollars. I don’t think anybody's going to get rich selling old video games. It's particularly tough if you're trying to do it as a dealer with taxes and those requirements." He believes eventually collectors who sell a lot but aren't officially in business will discover the pleasure of dealing with the IRS. "It costs me more to try to keep track of the paperwork than to pay the taxes," he quipped.

Greiner feels the hobby of collecting classic video games has grown since he went into business. "I think things like eBay have been very helpful to the hobby, but they're also very detrimental. I'm not sure, in the long run, if it's going to kill the hobby or increase the hobby. It's been good from the standpoint that it brings recognition among people that these things have value to somebody and it encourages more people to look for them. But I think the detrimental part has been that no matter who you talk to in the last couple of years, it's extremely difficult to find anything at all, the reason being every collector buys everything he can with the idea of selling the excess on eBay. And so there's not the stuff out there for somebody like myself or the collectors who started when I did to go along and say, 'oh, look at this, I think I’ll just buy one of these for the heck of it,' unless we're the first guy at the sale. The change that I've seen is that there's more customers who buy from me because they want to play a 2600 game than there are collectors who want a particular title or label or something."

When asked if the expansion of the Internet might play into this, he said yes. "When I first started, basically I did snail mail catalogs. Now I haven't printed a catalog in three years. Most of the same names are still doing business with me, except now they're using the Internet."

I asked Greiner if the decision to leave the video game business had been long in coming and if it was a difficult one. He said, "it was probably a matter of several years in coming. It was very difficult to make the decision because I didn't really want to get out of games."

He decided to keep the hobby, but quit the business. He will continue to maintain the video game museum portion of his former web site at www.atari2600.com.

"I guess the biggest problem for me and the biggest reason that I decided I had to quit was I was just unable to keep up [with shipments]," he said. Another big factor was that both Greiner and his wife have health problems. Greiner is fighting diabetes and recurring exhaustion. However, he will continue to help the new owners, a young couple, with the business for an undetermined amount of time. (Basically as long as he feels like it.)

He'll keep a personal stock of rarer items for trade. "When I first started accumulating things, I was accumulating them for trade. I picked up a number of contacts from The 2600 Connection and the Digital Press. Everybody had the good stuff that I wanted and they wouldn't sell it, they wanted to trade for it. So I started trying to collect the better stuff to use for trading. And then people would get mad at me because I wouldn't sell it. Finally I broke down and sold some stuff. This time I don't intend to break down and sell stuff."

Greiner did, however, sell large chunks of his collection as part of getting out of the business. Much of it brought a higher price than he had anticipated. He said it was difficult to part with some of it, particularly the obscure stuff he hadn't had time to play.

When asked what he would do with all the new space, he replied, "I'm not so sure there's going to be a whole lot of space left." His wife wants to actually put a car in one garage. Another is used for his office. The third he'll fill with shelves. There's also a storage building in back that he may store household items in or make a game room out of. He will free up a patio, which has some boxes on it that he never unpacked after receiving them. All of these areas were filled to the ceiling with boxes of games and consoles.

"I've met a lot of nice people and good friends through the hobby. I've had people stop by from all over the world," Greiner concluded. "It's been more fun than work, although it's gotten kind of stressful at times. Hoping I can get a little more rest, get my health built back up where I can do more things. I hope I can make the game show in Las Vegas this year. I missed the first two." I hope you can make it, too, Jerry. No doubt it'll be even more fun for you now that you're "retired."

Postscript (11 June 2013)

Jerry did indeed make it to Classic Gaming Expo 2000, the same year I was there.  He even came by the Classic Gamer Magazine booth (which allowed Cav to take a photo for the interview), but I never managed to meet him the whole weekend!

At the time this was written, any serious video game collector on the Internet knew who Jerry Greiner was. He was active on the rec.games.video.classic newsgroup, too. I'm sure I could write an entire blog post on Greiner, but for now I'll just concentrate on the interview itself.

I contacted Mr. Greiner about an interview the same day he announced everything was for sale, 11 November 1999. At the same time, I asked CGM publisher Cav if he wanted to run it. If he didn't, I'd put it on my Classic Video Games Nexus web site, which was moderately popular at the time. Greiner agreed to the interview, but didn't have time to compose a lengthy e-mail, so would only do it on the phone or in person. As cool as in person would have been, he lived in Arizona and I was in Alabama, so that wasn't going to happen. Cav did indeed think it was a good idea, so I was reimbursed for the phone call.

For reference, here is the first paragraph of his announcement about selling out.

Because of the failing health of both my wife and myself, and because my space and spare time is getting scarce, and because I need to spend all the time I can on my regular job commitments I have decided to sell off all or parts of my collection and game stock. There is probably not anything I won't sell if the offer is right, including individual items or complete collections from my "want to keep" list.

Due to various things on both our ends, the interview didn't take place until mid-February 2000. I had a microphone that attached to a phone with a suction cup, so with his permission, I recorded the call. I also took copious notes. Thank goodness I did, because it turned out the computer caused some sort of interference that made some of the audio unclear. Theoretically I still have that cassette tape somewhere.

Because of the interference and because we both tended to ramble a bit during the interview, I went with the above narrative rather than reproducing the interview verbatim. Writing is also more enjoyable than simple transcription. Cav and Sarah were both very pleased with how it came out. The deadline for CGM #3 had already passed by the time the interview took place, so I didn't write it up until #4.

Shortly after the interview was conducted, Greiner announced the business was sold.

Effective at midnight, Sunday, March 26th, 2000 the Atari2600.com website and videogame business will be operated by Joe and Lottie Cody.

The couple bought the entire business, except for what Greiner kept for his personal collection or sold before coming to terms. He wasn't done with the hobby, though, as in March 2001 he finally released the first edition of the JerryG Guide to the Classic VideoGames. (He had released at least one "beta" version before that.) He worked on a second edition, but as of now, it has never been released.

Greiner "retired from the hobby" in 2012 and began selling off his personal collection. Much of it was selling directly to individual buyers. But a year later, he was still working on selling it off, mostly on ebay by that point. As you can see, even though he sold the bulk of what he had when he sold the business, his collection's size was still most impressive.

CVG 101: When Is a Combat Not a Combat? (originally for Classic Gamer Magazine)

[Classic Gamer Magazine introduction. This article originally appeared in CGM #3 (spring 2000) and is a revision of one I wrote for Suite 101 using the same title.]


Once your classic cartridge collection reaches a certain size, you’ll discover you’re finding few new cartridges at thrift stores. In order to "get their fix," so to speak, many collectors start collecting label variations to keep their number of "finds" up. Label variations simply means different types of labels on the same game. For Colecovision cartridges, this might mean the difference between the labels saying the cart is "for Colecovision" and saying it’s "for Colecovision & ADAM." For Intellivision, it’s probably the difference between the colorful Mattel labels and the black and white Intellivision Inc. labels, which also featured slight name changes to avoid licensing fees (e.g. "Football" instead of "NFL Football"). For the Atari 2600 it’s more complicated.

Because the 2600 (or VCS) was sold for over a decade, Atari went through four major label styles. The original style was all text on a black background. Then they started replacing much of the text with a colorful picture like the one on the box. Next Atari went with a silver background. Finally, at the end of the console’s life, they used a rust background. (Most collectors call it red; some call it brown. I think "rust" is more accurate than either of those.) But in all but a handful of cases (see sidebar), the game names never changed. So when is a Combat cartridge not a Combat cartridge? When it’s a Sears Tele-Games Tank Plus cartridge.

When the Atari 2600 debuted, Sears was one of the strongest retail chains in the United States. If you wanted to sell your product at Sears, it had to have a Sears brand on it. Thus, when Atari signed an agreement with Sears to have them sell the 2600, it became the Sears Tele-Games Video Arcade. (Tele-Games was the "brand name" for video games at Sears. It has no relation, as far as I know, to the current Telegames company (www.telegames.com), which happens to sell video games.)

Several of the games received new names as well. It’s uncertain exactly why Sears did this. Perhaps it was to confuse shoppers and have them buy what they thought was new game when it was actually one they already have. To make things more confusing, they named some cartridges after dedicated consoles they had previously released and just added a Roman numeral to the end to differentiate them. The most obvious example is Breakaway IV (a.k.a. Breakout).

Not all games were renamed, of course. Home versions of arcade games Atari had to secure licenses for were not (e.g. Space Invaders, Pac-Man), nor were those based on other licensed properties (e.g. Superman). There were also three games that Atari created, but only sold through Sears (see sidebar).

It is interesting to note that while Sears similarly renamed Mattel’s Intellivision as the Super Video Arcade, they didn’t rename any of Mattel’s games. The boxes and instructions were different, but the cartridges and overlays are generally indistinguishable from Mattel’s normal releases when found loose.

As a collector, you might ask whether the Sears version of games and consoles are rarer and therefore more desirable. In general, all Sears releases are slightly rarer than their Atari or Mattel counterparts. Whether they’re more desirable, however, depends on the collector you’re dealing with. Some collectors who don’t care about most cartridge label variations do collect Sears labels. Others don’t care at all, except for the "Sears exclusive" games.

If you do decide to start collecting label variations and start examining your duplicate games very closely, you might be amazed at just how many differences you’ll find. There are some definite sub-types within the main Atari label variations described earlier. And even within those sub-types, you can find some very minute changes on labels that appear identical at first glance. And that goes for third party companies, too.

John Earney began compiling a list of 2600 label variations, which can be found on his home page at http://www2.best.com/~jearney/. It hasn’t been updated in a few years, however. I guess even John got overwhelmed by all the small changes one can find. So, if you decide to collect label variations, set a limit on what you’ll keep. Otherwise you’ll probably quickly find your collection (rather than your extras) overflowing with Missile Commands, Space Invaders, and maybe even Combat, regardless of the name on the label.

Sidebar

Sears Name		Atari Name
Arcade Golf		Miniature Golf
Arcade Pinball		Video Pinball
Baseball		Home Run
Breakaway IV		Breakout
Cannon Man		Human Cannonball
Capture		Flag Capture
Chase		Surround
Checkers		Video Checkers
Circus		Circus Atari
Code Breaker		Codebreaker
Dare Diver		Sky Diver
Dodger Cars		Dodge 'Em
Gunslinger		Outlaw
Math		Fun With Numbers
Maze		Slot Racers
Maze Mania		Maze Craze
Memory Match		Hunt & Score
Outer Space		Star Ship
Poker Plus		Casino
Pong Sports		Video Olympics
Race		Indy 500
Slots		Slot Machine
Soccer		Championshp Soccer or Pele's Soccer
Space Combat		Space War
Speedway II		Street Racer
Spelling		Hangman
Steeplechase		[Sears exclusive]
Stellar Track		[Sears exclusive]
Submarine Commander		[Sears exclusive]
Tank Plus		Combat
Target Fun		Air-Sea Battle
Name		a.k.a.
Atari Video Cube		Rubik's Cube
Basic Math		Fun with Numbers
Championship Soccer		Pele's Soccer
(A Game of) Concentration		Hunt & Score
Fun with Numbers		Basic Math
Hunt & Score		(A Game of) Concentration
Pele's Soccer		Championship Soccer
Rubik's Cube		Atari Video Cube

Postscript (June 2013)

As it says at the top, a big chunk of this article is identical to one I wrote for Suite 101 a few years prior. The reason for this is quite simple; I blew my deadline. On February 23, I thought to check old e-mails and discovered the deadline had been February 10. Luckily for me, Cav was way behind, so I got about 10 days to write something. The old article was stuck in my head for some reason and my contract specifically left me free to use articles in print media.

I found several copies of John Earney's label variations list around, but the most recent (from 2001) is available at Atari Age.

This article is also available at Good Deal Games and has been for many years. Cav worked out some deal with site owner Michael Thomasson, and Michael specifically requested this article. The request came several months after I wrote it, so the potential conflict with Suite 101 didn't occur to me until now. But by then the article had been gone from Suite 101 for a long time, so I'd say no harm done.