Tag Archives: Documentary
Jobs v. Gates: Go!
As a (virtual) card-carrying member of the Computer History Museum, I love anything that involves the history of technology or computing. Imagine my glee when I discovered the National geographic Channel has created a mini-series called “American Genius,” which focuses on famous rivalries throughout history. It also has a fantastic webpage you should really click over.
There are more than you might think: The series includes such rivalries as firearms manufacturers Colt and Wesson and publishers Hearst and Pulitzer. But the one I am most interested in is the one between computer luminaries Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Buried Atari cartridges up for sale on Ebay
Back in 1983, Atari paid Steven Spielberg around $25 million for the rights to make a game based on his film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. They gave programmer Howard Scott Warshaw six weeks in which to finish the game in order to meet the holiday season, even though most games took about six months to develop. So confident were they in the demand for the game, they actually manufactured more game cartridges than there were consoles to play it on.
The demand was indeed strong. Unfortunately, the game itself wasn’t so strong, in fact some say it’s the worst game ever made (I disagree), and it’s especially strange considering his other titles – Yar’s Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark – are considered some of the best. Either way, the returns started coming fast and furious. Before they knew it, Atari had a massive amount of unsold cartridges and the urban legend was born that in the middle of the night, they trucked all those E.T. cartridges off to a landfill in the New Mexico desert, and didn’t just bury them but buried them under concrete. That couldn’t stop the game from heralding the great video-game industry crash of 1983.
Recently, a documentary produced by Xbox studios was filmed that followed investigators as they set out to dig up that landfill and determine once and for all whether or not the cartridges were actually there. It turns out they were, which I think we all knew, along with copies of Phoenix, Swordquest, Defender, Star Raiders, Centipede, and Warlords. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the documentary hosted by Howard Scott Warshaw at the recent Classic Gaming Expo here in Las Vegas, and it was fascinating. Here’s the preview for the documentary, and maybe it’s just me but I found the preview itself as interesting as the whole movie.
Some of the cartridges that were unearthed have already gone up on eBay, which surprises absolutely no one, but the prices might. Many of the games have some good bids, but the E.T. boxes that came out of the landfill are going for over $500! That’s a picture of one below.
Atari 2600 E.T. game from Almagordo landfill
I’m a collector of this stuff myself as you know, but I just don’t feel motivated to bid on these. We already saw the post on eBay lunacy, and while I understand these are a part of history – and they are – these prices are high, in my humble yet nonetheless correct opinion. I’m tempted, but not at those prices.
Trumph of the Nerds
You may remember my mentioning in class that I was considering having movie screenings for tech-related movies that also happened to be good movies. That would include titles such as TRON (the original, not that G-d-awful remake), WarGames, Hackers, Her, Minority Report, and a couple of Simpsons and Futurama episodes for starters. If you’re wondering, I’m working with the legal standing that it all falls under the ill-defined idea of fair use since it’s being shown, ostensibly, for educational purposes.
I was going to do all that using a site called cytu.be, however I am still wrestling with it. Therefore, I thought in the meantime, and since we have a couple of weeks before we will be gathering again in class, I would present to you a documentary about the history of the personal computer and the industry that grew up around it, called Triumph of the Nerds.
It’s not the greatest name, I know. It’s even derogatory in parts, although some of the characters live up to the title. And Robert Cringely who wrote and narrates the whole thing certainly means no harm. In fact, Bob Cringely is the well known (and fake) name of long-time technology writer Mark Stephens, but the Bob Cringely name has actually been owned by many people and in fact two people are using it as pseudonyms right now!
