Atari: Legends of the Fall

Today’s audiocast will be a little different. For those of you who don’t know, I used to work at the Atari Corporation. You know, the guys who helped your parents raise many of you by creating the Atari VCS, which brought the joys of Combat, Adventure, and PacMan into your home. Unfortunately, I began working for Atari in their Final Days, when the Jaguar 64 was still considered a console to watch out for.

That viewpoint was quickly rendered ridiculous by their release of pretty much every game worked on in-house. I was hired to work on the game called Black ICE\White Noise, a ‘cyberpunk adventure’ – as you can see, the sordid little tale that follows dates back to a time when ‘cyber’ anything had not yet lost its cachet. I’ll be reading from an essay written by Chris Hudak, a friend and fellow employee of Atari Corp. Every word is true.

A Day In The Life at Atari Corp.

Here's something I thought you might find interesting: A typical day in the life of that great videogame institution, Atari, which as you may have heard has recently undergone a rather radical program of what is euphemistically referred to as Corporate Restructuring.

A little background, just to give you the flavor: I was brought on board Atari a year and a half ago as a writer and co-designer of a sophisticated, reasonably daring, decidedly adult and ultimately doomed cyberpunk CD-ROM game -- full of full-motion video, subtle humor, and cheerfully needless violence and death -- which was to be called Black ICE\White Noise.

(We spent months arguing about that name, by the way, so start liking it or stop reading my column).

Anyway, two buddies of mine named Akela and B.J. had just finished laying the barest-bone groundwork as I entered the fray, and my first duty was to expand upon the bios and adventures of the three main characters they'd provided drawings of: a slick, stylin' Arsenio Hall-esque black hacker dude; a beautiful, ass-kicking Japanese female street samurai; and a long-haired, mirrorshaded, leather-jacketed Caucasian borderline alcoholic burnout. Much to my surprise, one of these characters was very obviously and admittedly based on me, and I leave it to my more astute readers to guess which one. So, my buddies and I -- along with a cadre of some of the most colorful and self-abusing gang of testers this side of the United States Army Neurochemical Warfare Division -- formed the cancerous core of the Atari that the suits never wanted you out there in Consumerville to even suspect existed, much less know about in the kind of lurid and raucous detail which I am now about to put forth because you're all just so completely swell. The account offered herein is not actually a direct conveyance of the events of a single day, but rather a reasonably conservative and reliably representative montage of what went on when the upper echelons had their heads lodged firmly way up their butts, er, I mean, their attentions directed elsewhere:

8:00 AM: Yeah -- right.

11:34 AM: I sit on the southbound Caltrain, half-dozing with my PowerBook in my lap, idly wondering if I can justifiably get away with having one of the full-motion-video actors call the player a "lying sack of shit." Love finds a way just before the Sunnyvale station.

12:17 PM: I pile into my cubicle and fire up the editing software in which I'm creating the city map for the game. The Playboy centerfold on my cube wall has survived yet another day of Atari's recently-instigated anti-sexual-harassment program.

12:18 PM: BJ, acting as project leader, announces that the Black ICE\White Noise team really needs to have a staff meeting, and furthermore that team morale would be greatly enhanced if the meeting were held in the Brass Rail, a nearby strip joint. We all nod gravely and agree.

12:42 PM: Dave, the DJ at the Brass Rail -- who is witness to rather a lot of these 'staff meetings' -- announces our arrival over the P.A. and celebrates the moment by immediately playing three Nine Inch Nails songs in a row. The girl removing her clothing onstage wanted Prince, and that's just tough.

12:59 PM: BJ, watching the girl onstage with his jaw hanging ajar, pours us each a glass of beer from the pitcher -- Coke for Akela -- and comments for the second time how much this beats the hell out of being at Atari, where pretty girls are pretty much against company policy. We all agree, and thus concludes the team meeting for the day.

1:47 PM: BJ comments that it's probably time we were getting back to the office. "Naw," I advise, and he politely drops the subject for the next fifteen minutes.

2:15 PM: Back at the office, a large argument has ensued between the Black Ice team and the producer, Faran: Faran vehemently disagrees that players should be allowed to attack and kill San Francisco Police officers (the game takes place in San Francisco, 2056, until four months later when we realize the Jaguar engine will not support hilly terrain and we grudgingly rename the whole goddamn city which is now entirely flat). The team -- in a bizarre moment of complete solidarity -- insists that choices must be up to the player. Even the normally passive Akela has developed a jutting, stubborn jaw and growls "No, Faran!" to everything the producer says until he goes away.

3:27 PM: It is determined that the art department needs DeBabelizer to finish the project, and it needs it right now. Each purchase -- even something as minor as a printer cartridge -- must be personally authorized by CEO Sam Tramiel himself, and if he's out sick that day with mono, you, sir or madam, are out of luck. Days later, the Atari Economic Engine rears is belching, rusty head, and some unseen suit way up high decides it's time to see if there's a cheaper alternative to buying the $100 piece of software. Three months later, with no DeBabelizer in sight, I call the company and beg and piss and moan until they agree to send me a 'promotional copy,' on the understanding that we plug the product in our game, which is fair enough. I thank the immensely kind and understanding lady at Equilibrium, and the product arrives in two days. The entire process of contact, proposition, and acquisition has taken me just under forty-five seconds. I proudly point this out to the Vice President, and he tells me to take the Playboy centerfold off my wall.

3:29 PM: "It's okay, I got DeBabelizer. God, I'm good," I announce to everybody and nobody as I poke my head over the cubicle divider separating me, Akela, and BJ. Immediately, a suction-cup dart hits me square in the face -- launched from the cube of Ford, our new art dude -- and a forty-five minute melee ensues, involving the use of rubber bands, water balloons, paper airplanes, day-old muffins, floppy disks hurled like shuriken, and a number of increasingly-sophisticated plastic dart guns from the local Toys 'R' Us, which by this time has more of our combined incomes than the phone company. The free-for-all ends abruptly when a randomly-flung object hits Todd -- one of our artists -- smack in the cashews. He remains curled, pale, and very quiet at his desk for a solemn nineteen-and-a-half minutes, and we all feel really shitty for him.

4:10 PM: The loudest profanity I have ever heard within the confines of a work environment issues forth from the cube next to mine. The 3D software package we are using -- a mere year and a half behind the state of the art -- cannot generate an object based on the number of facets desired, and B.J. must now break out a scientific calculator, cardboard templates, and a mass of increasingly crumpled and stained paper napkins filled with the proper scrawled formulae. Since this will occupy him for some time, I take a stroll over to Ford's cube to ask him what happened to my EtherNet connector, without which I cannot back-up the city map I've been scowling at for four weeks, and which could, theoretically, vanish from my hard drive at any time. He says he honest to God hasn't seen it -- 'it' because we only have one extra such device to share among three or four computers currently linked only by our highly advanced SneakerNet -- and that I should ask Akela. Akela is not at his desk. Unable to understand why he may have left the office, I go back to my desk and prepare for the after-work Marathon networked game.

4:12 PM: For the third day running, a tester named Hank has gotten flack from his supervisor for a small, discreetly-placed, and very modest picture of a pretty girl on his cube wall. He is reminded of Atari's sexual harassment policies, and the supervisor makes a point of poking his head rudely over Hank's cube wall to check up on things. Hank -- who's been diligently hunting down software bugs since 7:00 AM despite the apocalyptic party he summoned from the depths of Hell the night before -- resolutely ignores the supervisor until he goes away, and then performs a suggestive, disturbing pantomime which conveys, instantly and viscerally, his exact feelings about Atari's company policies, supervisors in general, and this supervisor in particular.

4:49 PM: Akela, groggy and puffy-eyed, pokes his head over the wall and asks if I needed something. He has been sleeping under his desk the whole time, and there are still dust-bunnies in his long hair.

4:50 PM: Ford learns that Sam Tramiel is on a business trip and has, uh, forgotten to sign the contractors' paychecks. Sam will return, according to the human resources people, "in about a week." Ford utters the second-loudest (but by far and away the foulest) profanity I've ever heard within a work environment, and indignantly spends the majority of the next two workdays on the phone with his ex-girlfriend and some skate shop or other.

5:34 PM: The Black Ice team arrives at a convenient and, if we do say so ourselves, brilliant method of raking in lots and lots of effort-free revenue; we will offer advertising 'billboard space' to major corporations on the virtual real estate presented within the game city. The art time will be negligible, the actual creative energy we must divert from our demanding project will be zero, and the money will be absolutely scandalous. A marketing rep downstairs agrees this has potential and vows to get right on it. We team members spend a mournful couple of seconds blinking at each other, knowing for certain now that the proposal will never, ever see the light of day.

The point I'm getting at with all this is: If and when you accept a job at a computer game company, take your first paycheck to Toys 'R' Us and arm yourself to the teeth.

‘Cause I fell on Black Days
I fell on Black Days
How would I know
That this could be my fate
-- “Fell On Black Days”, Soundgarden