How a Failed Atari Addon Led to EA Sports

In 1981, two former Atari employees – Craig Nelson and Bob Brown – met to form a new company to produce Atari Video Computer System games. The two were inspired by other, similar groups which had left the company to form independent software publishers, most notably Activision and Imagic. Brown was intimately involved in the creation of the VCS, but had been let go in 1979 while researching future new products for the company. Nelson along with his brother Stephen had been part of the consumer programming group at Atari, leaving around 1980 due to the working conditions. Brown and Nelson knew intimately – both from their own perspectives and that of the programmers they still corresponded with – that the VCS was running up against its own limitations, yet the market was still growing precipitously. If only they could attach themselves to that potential and rise above it, they could make something out of the results.

Bob Brown with one of Arcadia’s first products.

The company Arcadia Corporation was formed on June 11th, 1981. The team – with Brown’s hardware expertise and Nelson’s programming strength – set about creating an extension of the VCS’ capabilities in the form of an addon. In all ways, Arcadia was determined to set itself apart from the competition. They would operate for nearly a year in secrecy until they had enough titles to utterly overwhelm emerging competitors. They would offer their games more cheaply than a cartridge by making their addon run off of audio cassettes, a common storage platform on home computers. The games themselves would also be far more influenced by computer games and elaborate console games like Adventure, providing the player with expansive gameplay rather than purely with fast action.

An illustration of how the Super Charger fits into the VCS.

The addon was known as the Super Charger, a custom cartridge which hooked into the VCS and housed 6K of memory, 49 times that of the VCS natively. Hooked into the addon cartridge was an audio cassette loader from which players would load their games into memory to be played through the Atari console. It wasn’t an entirely new piece of hardware all on its own, but the ability to offload the functions in RAM opened up a new world of possibilities for the aged platform. It was a potential second wind for the most popular home gaming system in the United States amid the coming saturation of its market.

Arcadia debuted the Super Charger at the June 1982 Summer CES at the same time that Atari was readying its 5200 Supersystem and Coleco was ready to ship Colecovision. All three of these potential futures launched more or less simultaneously, and with Arcadia as the new company in the mix it was hard for them to cut through the market noise which was becoming deafening. The Super Charger cost $70 on release, about half the price of a VCS itself, but the additional games only cost $14 compared to a standard cartridge hovering around $30. They would position this as a greater value in terms of investment than the new consoles, a concept that had been a difficult sell in the 1970s.

When Atari first sold the VCS – and indeed when Fairchild first hawked the Channel F – getting consumers on board buying multiple games for a system was difficult when nothing had previously worked that way. A system in itself was seen as the item, a tradition that Atari broke by not including an in-built game with the VCS. Over time, consumers came to realize the value in constant new releases keeping their platform relevant. Gaming reviews and magazines often emphasized a number of games a console had above anything else. As things were moving into the first major hardware battle in the US console market, it seemed perfectly logical that consumers might prefer upgrading their older system and benefitting more firmly from the technological advances that had been made in the past few years.

However, the history of console addons that have followed the Super Charger shows a clear lack of interest for anything that does not directly enhance the gameplay experience. While the extra fidelity of increased RAM was welcome, the games by Arcadia still very much looked like Atari games. They were expertly crafted, including Frogger, The Official which matched the Colecovision and 5200 versions in every way that mattered, but the increased graphical depth made for a new look and style. Game players were always looking for something truly new and not simply incremental.

It also didn’t help that the North American Home Video Game Market Crash was taking effect just as they were getting going. Even the more traditional companies like Activision and Imagic were hurting, so the room for something untested like Arcadia’s offering was shrinking. Super Charger provided a potential solution to the market woes with its cheaper games on a cheaper format for the buyer, but it again was stuck on an expensive peripheral which wasn’t going to penetrate a large percentage of the VCS market. Even with this, they continued to fight that uphill battle and push their technology to as-yet-unseen limits.

French advertisement for the Super Charger.

The company – renamed Starpath after a trademark dispute – soldiered on with attempts at solving its deeper issues. They tried several different strategies. They dropped the price of the Super Charger to get a greater install base. They introduced the product into several different European countries, beyond just the UK. They courted outside developers to put games on the Super Charger (one accepted but never actually managed to release a game for it). Over time they began to realize that they needed to stop playing at the platform market and focus on software. They would move to develop cartridge games for the Colecovision and Atari 8-bit computer line using their abundant new expertise, but they continued to support the Super Charger while experimenting with its technology. Through this, Starpath developed a focus in their development, primarily on art and animation.

Just as Activision had brought a new level of visual fidelity to the VCS in the middle of its lifespan, Starpath was doing the same with each of its games. Whether it was a semi-scrolling 3D maze in Escape from the Mind Master, the leaping bunny in Rabbit Transit, or the articulated swimmer of Survival Island, the Super Charger games put a lot more effort into the flow of motion than most of their contemporaries. At the programmer’s chair were people including Scott Nelson, Brian McGhie, and Stephen Landrum, all of whom would play a role in the company’s next stage.

Michael Katz, video game industry executive extraordinaire.

Starpath had to eventually abandon its proprietary Super Charger and sell its last few games purely by mail order. They seemed to be headed towards the fate of the majority of Atari third-party companies as a casualty of the Crash. However, their efforts caught the attention of Michael Katz, the president of the computer game company Epyx. Epyx was reinventing itself from a publisher of methodical RPGs into a company focused on the fast action capabilities now possible on platforms like the Commodore 64. Katz saw Starpath’s talent and potential as the type of development he needed in-house at the company, particularly after a defection by original founder Jon Connelly. On December 7th, 1983, Epyx bought Starpath and commenced with moving their ten person design staff to their offices in Santa Clara, California.

Two late term projects at Starpath were built around a common sprite called the running man. This fixture in game graphics displayed a somewhat proportional human moving with swinging legs and many distinguishable motions within a running stride. It had been the starting point for many games on the Intellivision as well as Activision’s Pitfall!, but it was very difficult to create for the VCS – even on the Super Charger. Starpath programmer Dennis Caswell took this demo, converted it to the C64 with relative ease, and began working on the game Impossible Mission.

Nearly released in the last line of Super Charger games was Sweat!: The Decathalon Game. Programmed by Scott Nelson, it was shown at the 1983 Summer CES with an anticipated release in the fall to pre-empt the excitement of the Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles. Many game publishers were looking to take advantage of this event, with athletic sports becoming a huge public interest. Sweat! had ten different events which players could compete in for a high score, all with their own version of a multi-colored running man. For whatever reason, it was not been shipped with the last few Super Charger games, despite being functionally complete.

The programming of Sweat! was an insane feat even with the boost provided by the Super Charger. At its core gameplay fit perfectly into Michael Katz’s vision for Epyx’s new product line on home computers. The Starpath team plus a few internal Epyx developers were immediately put to work on creating a game in the same style for the C64. They were working towards the January 1984 Winter CES, only a few weeks away from initial talks, and the game would be released later that year.

*Summer Games* premiered at the Winter CES.

The game they produced, Summer Games, had the hallmarks of simplicity from a console developer which was rarely seen on computer platforms. The events – now only seven – all utilized a single button and joystick, which were prevalent amongst home computer game players. Tapping a button to run, launching into a jump, adjusting angles and moves were all controlled in a precise manner which took a long time to master. Each event was its own distinct stage as a series of mini-games not directly tied together. This format provided a lot of value to particular game players, though made the whole experience lack a general flow. Regardless, Summer Games was immensely successful and its format would be the basis for even more sports video games.

Some of the art tools used in the later *Games* series.

Development of a line of Games games became the most important part of Epyx’s bottom line moving forwards. Summer Games had been a very early example of a computer game developed by a real team with different specialties, but each new entry was going to draw in new talent. One of the artists who joined with Summer Games II was Mike Kosaka, a highly accomplished pixel artist and designer who headed the creation of the Epyx submarine game Destroyer among others. Kosaka, along with Stephen Landrum and Kevin Bunch, were actively courted by rival computer game publisher Electronic Arts for their expertise. Whether it was a financial, creative, or other desire, the three of them joined EA conjointly to create a similar game to Summer Games.

The game the team created at Electronic Arts would be released in 1987 as Skate or Die, a skateboarding game which mimicked the Summer Games formula with a central hub to connect all the different minigames. The same stylish presentation and precision gameplay followed them over from Epyx and formed a new bar for the depiction of real world activities on 8-bit computer platforms. For Electronic Arts, Skate or Die was a renewed commitment to their on-and-off again interest in sports games for broader audiences.

The Earl Weaver Baseball cover, note the “Sports Legends” at the top.

Even from the company’s earliest days, they had pursued the sports genre with games like One on One: Dr. J vs Larry Bird. They hadn’t committed to it as a focus, but in addition to Skate or Die in 1987 they also received the title Earl Weaver Baseball. Affixed to this by marketing man Don Traegar was a potential brand for these games called Sports Legends. He had hoped that celebrity-led sports games would carry this title but only one other game was ever given the honorific, and it was a racing game. However, as sports games development at the company continued to escalate – due mostly to interests of the game designers – a marketing hole seemed ready to be filled.

Mike Kosaka was one of the most active developers pushing this trend, providing art not only for games like Lakers versus Celtics but also the original John Madden Football on the Apple II. He loved competitive sports as much as anyone and he one day decided to sketch a logo as a riff on the famous broadcaster the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN). His stylized letters spelled out EASN, Electronic Arts Sports Network. This simple doodle was seen by Don Traeger who picked up on the potential significance of this idea as a marketing tool.

Though EA’s sports games were not always in the same series as Epyx’s Summer Games successors were, they could potentially be connected through this idea of a “network”. This diegetic means of putting context to sports games had been used by the computer game company Cinemaware in a series they called TV Sports. The TV Sports games would have the amenities of a broadcasted football or basketball game with announcer commentary, a half-time show, text on screen, and shots of the crowd. To one degree these were just enhancements in the realism, but on another hand they were a deliberate choice which bound together these games as being from the same company.

The EASN logo in the NHLPA Hockey cover.

With the product to back it up, Traeger pushed through the new marketing effort and the began labelling games with EASN at the end of 1991 with new console game versions of their biggest sports games like John Madden Football II, NHLPA Hockey ‘93, and Bulls vs Lakers. While they would have to change the name due to ESPN getting on their back, the rebranded EA Sports continues to persist to this day as a well known unifying brand within video games.

The ambitions of extending life to console games eventually drove talented programmers towards the articulation of fully-realized human characters within computer games. This necessarily required artists to pull together, and as the games expanded into every conceivable sport there came the need to unify them into something larger. A perfect merging of design, art, and marketing created the brand we all recognize today. It would have been very different without that janky cassette tape attached to the Atari VCS.

Sources:

1982-06-25 The Indianapolis, page Star Magazine 5

1982-12 Mart, page 20

1983-01-22 Cash Box, page 14

1983-02 TV Gamer, page 56

1983-03 Electronic Games, page 10

1983-06 Radio Electronics, page 65-66

1983-06 Electronic Fun with Computer & Games, page 98

1983-06 The Logical Gamer, page 1 + 6

1983-07 Electronic Fun with Computer & Games, page 16

1983-07 Computer & Video Games, page 20

1983-07 The Logical Gamer, page 13