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S1:E4: Escape To The Asteroids Zone :Part 1
Into The Vertical Blank: Generation Atari Season 1, Episode 4: Escape To The Asteroids Zone : Part 1 Into The Vertical Blank: Generation Atari Season 1, Episode 4: Escape To The Asteroids Zone Part 1. In Part One of our two-part extravaganza, we delve into the that game forms the…
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S1:E3: Atari Nerd
Into The Vertical Blank: Generation Atari Season 1, Episode 3: Atari Nerd In this episode we dig up one of our first podcasts from December 2008, which is one of the first Atari dedicated podcasts ever recorded. This low-fi descent into the aughties, complete with bad mics, driving noise, and…
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S1: E2: “A Hole Burned In my Pocket: Toys R Us And The Atari 7800″.
Into the Vertical Blank: Growing Up Atari. Season 1 Episode 2: “A hole burned In my Pocket: Toys R Us And The Atari 7800″. What was the “game cage”? What does it mean to “disconnect” while being “connected”? “Can a hole really be burned in your pocket?” In this episode,…
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S1:E1: All The Scan Lines Have Been Written
Into The Vertical Blank: Growing Up Atari Season 1 Episode 1 – All The Scan Lines Have Been Written In this, the real premiere episode, the boys pull out all the production stops to bring some much needed levity and interludes to a game playing session and discussion on modern…
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Toys R Us at (up to) 40% Liquidation – treasure hunt
Steve and I took on a field trip to record part of the Into the Vertical Blank: Growing Up Atari podcast, so say goof bye to Toys R Us, and explain what role it played in being an Atari fan in the last 80’st It was a pretty disappointing sale,…
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S1:E0: Into The Vertical Blank Podcast: Newbie
8bitrocket’s Into The Vertical Blank, Growing Up Atari Ep: 0 This is the test episode of the Into The Vertical Blank, Growing Up Atari. In it, 8bit Jeff (Jeff Fulton from 8bitrocket.com) tries out and reviews 5 Atari XL/XE Cartridges (probably won’t work on a 400 or 800) that he…
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Book Review: The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
When the marketing team at Simon and Schuster were calculating the target demographic for Jason Rekulak’s first novel, The Impossible Fortress, I’m sure they didn’t segment it directly to “romantic-at-heart mid-to-late 40’s computer nerds who are impossibly stuck in 70’s and 80’s nostalgia”, but maybe they should have. …
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The Christmas Train (An Atari Nerd Memoirs Story)
The Christmas Train (An Atari Nerd Memoirs Story) By Steve Fulton Part 1: H.O. Scale Christmas Train tracks feel like the stuff of life to me. They stretch long into an unseen distance, appear never ending, yet always travel to a known and inevitable destination. I’ve always had a fascination…
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Fultonbot’s Atari VCS Quest: “I Never Got Into Atari, but…”
“I never got into Atari” I’ve heard this phrase so many times from the owners of used and retro video game stores, and fellow retrogamers, that I’ve now come to expect it. When I enter a game store, or make a friendly connection at work, I brace myself to hear…
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Fultonbot Atari VCS Quest: Memories Of The Proper Vintage
Not too long ago I had a sudden realization. I don’t just need the games I had with my Atari VCS from 1981-1984. I need the console too. I’ve written about my brother and my quest for VCS before (1981 Atari VCS Christmas). The story is long and involved,…
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Father’s Day Story – A Moment Near Aspen Grove
Note: This story was recorded for “Never Let The fires Die: The Alarm Podcast”, and is available Listen in iTunes or Google Play The full story in written form is below: A Moment Near Aspen Grove We were on our way to Aspen Grove, a small campground in the Sierra Nevada…
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Chris Crawford’s Famous Dragon Speech and Interview From 2008
Chris Crawford recently highlighted a “cleaned-up” version of his famous, game industry-defining “Dragon Speech” from GDC 1992. In this speech, Chris Crawford explained his dream of of true “interactivity” and how the game industry and he had parted-ways. While he was almost universally rejected at the time, in an…
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Classic Games And CGE at E3 2004 (R.I.P. Keith Robinson)
Note: This is a lost story from before 8bitrocket.com existed. It was published June 1st, 2004 on Andrew Bub’s Gamerdad.com as E3 Embraces The Classics. This was the first time I met Keith Robinson, one of the original Blue Sky Rangers from Mattel Electronics, and the owner of…
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Fultonbot’s Atari VCS Quest: Transmissions From AtariSpot
Soon after I made my first post about my VCS Quest, I got a tweet from another Atari fan named AtariSpot. He noticed my list and wanted to know if I would like to see his list of available games. We communicated on Twitter a bit, and noticed that…
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The King Of Kong: The Sociological Inner-Workings Of The Nerdcore
There is a line near the end of the extraordinary documentary The King Of Kong that carries the weight of the entire film. It was spoken by a tween-age girl, but in the context of the film, that girl might be the most “adult” person to show-up on the screen…
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Never Let The Fires Die: The Alarm Podcast : Episode #4
Note: Jeff and I produce and host a podcast for the 80’s band The Alarm. The Alarm are still going in 21st century, making new music, and inspiring their fans. We’ve been spending much of our “online” time working on the podcast over the past couple months, which is…
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Review: Extra Life By David S. Bennahum
The experience of growing up at the dawn of the video and computer game age is one that I know all-to-well. Video games and computers exploded at the end of the 70’s and have became an increasingly larger part of daily life ever since. However, while video games and computers…
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Controlled Chaos and The Meaning in Software Development
I believe that I was born to be a computer programmer. Somewhere, deep in my soul, there is a need to organize my thoughts in ways that are both new and interesting, but also foundational and reusable at the same time. I’ve always felt that there is something atypical about…
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Review: Atari 2600 Dragonstomper.
In 1981 a small company named Arcadia was formed with the purpose of cashing in on the craze that was home video games. The company was quickly renamed Starpath when it was learned that at least one copyright was already registered with an association to video games (Emerson Arcadia) and…
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Book Review: The Art Of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford
(Note: How great is this book? I wrote this 10 years ago, and all I had to do was change about 20 words, and this review is as relevant now as it was in 2007) By all rights, Chris Crawford’s book The Art Of computer Game Design should be a…
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Never Let The Fire Die (podcast episode #2)
Jeff and I host the official podcast for the band The Alarm. They had a bunch of alternative hits in the 80’s (The Stand, 68 Guns, Strength, Spirit Of ’76. Rain The Summertime, Rescue Me, Sold Me Down The River). They new 21st century version of the band…
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Review: Why I Loved Raiders Of The Lost Ark for The 2600
Wired posted an article a while back about the worst movie tie-in games of all-time, and , Raiders Of The lost Ark for the Atari 2600 made the list. It feels like I’ve been trying to convince people since 1982 that this is simply not the case, and the quest…
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Pac-Man, Electronic Games Magazine, And The Exact Moment Atari Lost The Video Game War
Note: As I discover the 120 or so games on my list of “lost” VCS games from the 80’s, I will spend some time discussing the ones that, in one way or another, mean something significant to me. This is one of those stories. “It’s disappointingly difficult to…
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S-Town And The Age Of The Binge Podcast
A lot has been written online in the past week about the new podcast “S-Town” from the producers of Serial and This American Life. “S-Town” seemed to drop out of the blue last week as a bingable, 7-episode monster of humanistic insight and emotion. The story is about…
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8bitrocket Retro-Game And DIY Game Development News Update
New Book About Atari 8-Bit computers! A new book, Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation by veteran tech writer Jamie Lendino was released last week by Ziff Davis. The book looks mighty interesting, but so far there is no news about the actual contents. We here at…
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Fultonbot’s 1983 Atari VCS Quest: The Absent Minded Collector
The “pile of stuff” in the photo to the left is a collection of 36 years worth of “absent-minded” Atari 2600/7800 collecting. I say “Absent Minded” as I was never really serious about collecting games. My feelings for the VCS/2600 and 7800 were what I would call “uncomfortable nostalgia”.…
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De-Motivational Engineering Problem Solving Worksheet from 1989 applies now more than ever
(warning, some adult language is in this post) By Jeff Fulton (8bitjeff) When my dad left his job at Hughes Aircraft in 1989, he gave my brother, Steve, and I a lot of advice and a whole bunch of de-motivational type stuff that had been hanging around his office. We…
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Ballad Of Atari: 1982-1984
Ballad Of Atari: 1982 E.T. And Pac-Man Not The Worst, Yet Not The Best The Gamers Notice Ballad Of Atari: 1983 800XL Flag Ship. Work Horse. All That Jazz. Cliches Of Awesome Ballad Of Atari: 1984 GCC designs The 7800 Last ditch hope for…
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Dead End Game Development: There Is No Such Thing As Free Beer
Note: “Game Development Dead end” is new blog series where we tell the stories behind games that were never finished or released (most of the time, for good reasons.) For every game a developer releases, usually there are 10 more sitting 1/2 finished on their hard drive. This…
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Ballad Of Atari: 1981
Ballad Of Atari: 1981 (part 1) Never Ending Walls Fall Down To My Bouncing Ball In Super Breakout Ballad Of Atari: 1981(part 2) Ugly Garden Gnome Hides Within The Mushroom Field Shoots Gross Insects Dead
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Atari In the Wild No. 2: 2600, 5200, 400/800/XL/XE Carts
This is the second installment of “In The Wild”. In this series, I do first impression reviews of games I have added to my collection of carts for old Atari Systems. In the Wild refers to me having found these while shopping at local retro gaming stores, and other non-ebay…
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Linkstorm!: 8bitrocket Retro Gaming News Update
IDW To Release Atari Themed Board Games IDW Games, designers and distributors of a multitude of games (including the magnificent The Game) have signed a deal to create board games based on Atari properties. The first will be Centipede in September 2017, followed Asteroids and Missile Command. The games…
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Ballad Of Atari: 1980
Ballad Of Atari: 1980 (part 1) VCS Breaks Through Sales Sky Rocket With Space Invaders Cartridge Ballad Of Atari: 1980 (part 2) Atari Is The Fastest Growing Company Ever Recorded
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Review: Lucky Wander Boy plus Interview With Author D.B. Weiss
(note: An edited version of this review originally appeared on http://www.gamerdad.com in 2003) About 15 years ago, I ventured past the realm of the “Classic Game Fan” to a destination that can only be described as the absurd. I had been a fan of Atari since around 1977. I’ve owned every…
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Fact Checkers Sharpen Your Pencils: Nolan Bushnell Interviewed For NPR’s “How I Built This” Podcast
Let me just get this out of the way, I LOVE Nolan Bushnell. He is the visionary without which we would not have all that is and was Atari. Sure, if he did not start Atari with Ted Dabney back in the early 1970s’s, someone else would have eventually created…
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Linkstorm!: 8bitrocket’s Retro Gaming News (Updated!)
Atari Box Art Finally Being Recognized Atari VCS box-art is very close to our hearts here at 8bitrocket.com. The recent book, Art Of Atari made it even more-so (see review on this site soon). Now The Onion AV club has a new column named Art Of the Game by…
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Ballad Of Atari: 1979
Ballad Of Atari: 1979 (part 1) Rocks Floating In Space Insert Coin To Shoot. Collects Quarters By The Ton Ballad Of Atari: 1979 (part 1) The Four Horseman Of David, Larry Bob, Alan Form Activision Competition Sows The Seeds Of Apocalypse For Atari Inc.
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Review: Phoenix IV : The History Of The Video Game Industry By Leonard Herman
Phoenix IV : The History Of The Video Game Industry by Leonard Herman is the most well researched, historically accurate chronicle of the video game industry that you will ever find. Almost completely devoid of conjecture, hyperbole, and opinion, the books attempts (and succeeds) to posit an impartial, fact-based account…
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Fultonbot’s 1983 Atari VCS Quest: The Checklist
Here is my quest. This has been bubbling under my skin for 34 years now, and this morning, while walking the dog, I finally understood what I must do. In the summer of 1983, my brother Jeff and I sold a bunch of our Atari 2600 stuff so we could…
