from Hacker News

Atari Coin-op Archive Footage

by videotopia on 12/26/19, 10:52 PM with 12 comments

• by doomlaser on 12/27/19, 12:11 PM

  Choice quote from Atari's early 1980s market research:

  > Players want detail, movement, three dimensional effects, color & color changes, unexpected events, faster games with more realistic & dynamic sound

  Good basic principles for any game developer, from the 1980s to the 2020s

• by madengr on 12/27/19, 2:32 PM

  Interesting that they did 100% incoming part inspection on their ICs going into the arcade machines. I’m not sure if ICs were less reliable then, or they just built a higher quality product.

  That semi-automatic pick and place was neat.

• by NotSammyHagar on 12/28/19, 8:01 AM

  Dig dug made $2 million a console in 1982 dollars. $2 million! That would be fantastic today. $5.25 million in 2018 dollars. That was a staggering amount of money. Assuming a console today might cost a couple thousand to manufacture, imagine if you made $1 million after designing and programming a game per console sold. That was a golden age in many ways.

• by psim1 on 12/27/19, 2:57 PM

  I did not know that Silicon Valley had that nickname even back in 1980. (About 9:30 in first video)

• by mcenedella on 12/27/19, 1:42 PM

  The Chubby Checker recorded Dig Dug song is a terrific find.