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Who Likes Atari?

Gonad

Gonad

DON'T FUCK WITH MY TITLE BITCH
My husband and I are delving into an Atari hobby, since Star Wars action figure collecting is running out of steam. I have a link to a funny thread where one of the original Atari programmers (Demon Attack, Missile Command, Night Driver, etc) reveals he is a whiney bitch when Atari fans don't want to pay him enough money for releasing games now.

Rob Fulop Disappointed In Atari Community.
 
My understanding is that Atari-brand games are quite sturdy. You can boil them and after they dry they are still playable. Activision games, while nifty, are not so sturdy.
 
He starts off the thread with two polls: one asking if current Atari game-makers should be paid, and another asking "What is a reasonable monthly salary for a 2600 designer to earn?" which is rather humorous since clearly an Atari 2600 game designer has an unbelievably niche audience.

Rob Fulop said:
I'm about to release a new 2600 cart - Actionauts. I have no idea how much such a thing is 'worth' in the Atari 2600 collector's marketplace. What I know are the following two facts.

1) I've released a game into this community before. The name of the game was Cubicolor, and I released it almost 20 years ago. At the time, I had no idea what to charge for the game, so I picked $50 pretty much out of the blue sky. The fifty available copies sold out pretty fast. Today the sale price for one of these games hovers around $1,000. OK, personally I think this is sort of a high price for a game unworthy of release at the time it was made, but who am I to know how these things work. For whatever reason, the 2600 collector community has decided a Cubicolor is worth $1,000. Regardless, I think it's a fair statement that I certainly didn't get the better end of THAT particular transaction !

Suffice it to say the $50 is probably below the price of what an Actionauts cart is 'worth'.
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Rob Fulop said:
Since nobody knows the real "value" of the game, all I can go by is the cost of making the game. Which comes down to what is a fair "wage" for me to earn here? How much is five months of my time worth? I'd like this community to help answer this question, before I put a price tag on the game.
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LOL what a loaded question. Not too bad so far.
The poll results show a majority of votes in the 2k/month range.

Rob Fulop said:
You do realize, that you are suggesting that a 2600 programmer, one with reasonable credentials, should expect this community to pay them no more for their time then they could earn as an assistant manager at Jack in the Box, right? Maybe you are right, and such is how this community truly values people like myself ... I guess we will see based on the result of the poll !
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He seems a little sensitive . . .

Rob Fulop said:
I'm actually not 'unhappy' about 'getting short changed' by Cubicolor at all.

I brought it up to make the point that nobody knows what these things are worth.

Thus, the only way to figure out what they should sell for is by looking at how much it costs to make them available.

Personally, five months of my time is worth quite a bit more than $50K ... but I know that such is way out of the park here.

But I should earn SOMETHING for those five months, right? I mean, I have no income from 'another job' here .. unlike a lot of homebrew authors .. making games is what I do .. and what I've done for over 25 years.

To be told by people in this community that the think my time is worth $2k per month .. is sort of weird, actually.

I mean, in the same breath, the person who says this can't seriously tell me how much of a "fan" they are of my work, right?

Anyway, I'm very curious as to the results of the survey. I'm actually coming to realize already that the $2k crowd, is looking at this purely from their own somewhat selfish worldview .. they would have picked $1k if it were an available choice, and they don't wish to pick $0, since it's sort of absurd.

thanks for your thoughts. RF
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There are a few pages of back-and-forth, and comes to an end with the following posts:

Rob Furlop said:
What I'm doing, is offering the last game I ever worked on, incomplete, after having dragged it up out of the basement where it has sat for 25 years, and put a shiny box and label around it ... and offered it to those in the community who have historical interest in such a relic. I am not doing this out of a desire to 'make a living' ... 'make a killing' .. or 'make a schilling'. I'm doing it because people bugged me to do it long enough so I finally did it. I'm putting a price tag on it that feels right to me ... on which pays me for the time/effort involved. Should anybody feel 'ripped off' the last time they purchased a game from me directly ... when I charged them $50 (25 years ago!) ... I will happily buy it back from them at ten times the price they paid for it. Not many people are rushing to my inbox to sell back the last game of mine they purchased. So sorry if I really can't take a lot of the weeping here seriously, okay?
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Rob Furlop said:
The truth is, the Atari 2600 is very much a part of my past .. my distant past. I do not play the games ... and I rarely come on to forums like this. My only connection to the community is through infrequent discussions such as this one. I wish I left with a better feeling about it, suffice it to say that I do feel 'chased off the board' here ... and I hope that if another one of my colleagues from the past venture into a place such as this .. they receive a warmer welcome. If such happens, it certainly will not be from my recommendation
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Wah waaahhhh! Anyways, I seriously recommend reading this thread. It is kind of sad considering this is one of the greats of the classic gaming era. The posters in that thread were extremely polite; after several pages some of them finally started being blunt about the poor business model of designing Atari 2600 games in 2008.

He came back later and started a new thread to let them know his new/old Atari reject game was available to purchase on his site. I think there's some reviews on YouTube if anyone is interested.
 
The best part is when Dickweed McNobody compared his overpriced shit games to a Rolling stones concert.

I paid my $200 to see the Stones a few years ago. I thought it sort of ridiculous, frankly. These guys can barely lift their guitars any more. But it was The Rolling Stones, after all ... so I paid my $200 along with tens of thousands of other people. And I'm glad I did. Did any of the fans in the crowd begrudge Mick and the boys anything? Of course not.
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You got me there, "rob furlop".
 
Or when he compares his reject Atari work to unreleased Beatles tracks:

Well, I've made little secret about Actionauts. It was not a game worth of release at the time (1984). So it's not like the game can be compared to a commercial release of any game. [ . . . ] I just the other day was reading a review of some unreleased Beatles stuff that was found on some of their Abby Road sessions. Some people are saying "it's not up there with the bands typical music". Well, uh .. I mean there IS a reason the material was unreleased in the first place, right?
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So from what I can gather; he is very upset with the Atari community for only wanting to pay him 2k per each month of his time that he spent working on this game 25 years ago that wasn't good enough to release. Not to mention that he was already getting paid a salary back when he created the game.
 
Wait...they're still releasing games for the Atari 2600? Shit, I don't think I even have a TV that will support the 2600!
 
Actually, it is easy to hook a 2600 up to a modern TV. Get an adapter for your Atari cord to hook into the "ant. in" on your vcr. Oops, I mean dvd player. We picked one up at RadioShack. wHICH still has lousy customer service, by the way. We were looking for the connection and a guy comes over and we tell him what we need and he asks us why we need it. "We're hooking up our Atari 2600." Then he says "Are you sure this is what you're looking for? Is this an older Atari?" WTF? Is the Atari old? What a dumb-fuck question, is the Atari old.
 
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