Once Upon Atari
In 1999, former Atari programmer Howard Scott Warshaw (E.T., Yars’ Revenge, Raiders Of The Lost Ark) gathered some of his erstwhile game-making cohorts to embark on a home-made documentary about the pre-crash years at Atari. Warshaw, now an independent filmmaker, still stands by his claim that being an Atari programmer was the most amazing job he’s ever had - and by the end of the first half-hour installment on this disc, it’s hard to not believe him.
The four half-hour episodes on the DVD (paradoxically produced in the order 4, 1, 2, 3 - Mr. Lucas would be proud) detail the working environment at Atari, the perils of dealing with management and huge wads of cash, the difficulty in particular of programming the Atari 2600, and the simple joys of creating games the way Atari
used to (and the way that few companies or programmers do now). Throughout the shows, most everyone backs Warshaw up on his fundamental premise, that Atari was an incredible place to work. Sometimes the dark side of this shows up in the person of the manic Tod Frye (the legendary 2600 Pac-Man programmer), whose uninhibited antics saw him cutting his head open while trying to defy gravity at the office, and jumping off the second story of a building, only to climb back up after being reprimanded by management (!). Frye winds up being the centerpiece of the second episode, which deals primarily with the issue of how much money was made, due to his legendary $1 million payout for completing the Pac-Man cartridge on time.
And is that particular game’s legendarily bad status dealt with at all? Oh yes. And here something is revealed for the first time, and not just by Frye himself: Atari demanded that the game’s code be brought in at 2K, when Frye had hoped do something more sophisticated with a bankswitched 8K+ cartridge. I’ve always felt sorry for the guy just for the sheer amount of misery heaped on him for a game he had to code in six weeks, but now I think he’s really off the hook. Chances are, Frye may have had something like Rob Kudla’s superior Pac-hack in mind all along.
From a technical standpoint, Once Upon Atari is a superb piece of work. Each episode is timed out to 30 minutes, and with the exception of just two or three instances of choice language on the interviewees’ part and the occasional mention of drug and alcohol use on the job, it’s ready for prime time. Why G4 hasn’t bought the rights to Once Upon Atari and aired it is baffling. It’s a compelling story, though it doesn’t go into the timeline of the industry or the factors that led to the crash - it’s more of a valentine to the halcyon days at Atari. Programmers Rob Fulop, Larry Kaplan, Carla Meninsky, Rob Zdybel and many others are interviewed at length, and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell also chimes in occasionally. If I have one complaint, it’s that we don’t hear many of Warshaw’s own exceptional stories - meeting Steven Spielberg during the fateful planning sessions for the E.T. game, for example. If Warshaw was a bit gun-shy about “interviewing himself” in the main body of the show, then perhaps some of that material could have become a DVD bonus segment.
There are a few oddities production-wise - the sound on the fourth episode (but also the first produced) is uneven, and there are a couple of oddly-framed shots in the third episode, but this isn’t a major studio production here. It’s one guy. That’s something I can readily sympathize with in my line of work.
At first I wasn’t that crazy about the Tarot card motif that Warshaw throws at us in his introductory segments, but that grew on me very quickly by the end of episode two - it fits better than you might think. And the menu structure for the episodes itself is quite humorous - chances are, you’ll get a glimpse of a game you used to spend a lot of time with somewhere in there. Included as bonuses on the DVD edition (introduced at Classic Gaming Expo 2003, mere months after the completion of the long-awaited episode three) are some unused interview clips with Nolan Bushnell and a brief interview with Electronic Arts founder (and later 3DO chief) Trip Hawkins - which makes one wonder what that was shot for. Is Warshaw working on a video game documentary with a wider scope than what went on at Atari? We can only hope. Because Once Upon Atari is immensely enjoyable, immensely informative, and at the same time immensely funny.
