A Shareholder's Memories of Atari

by Jeremy Wilburne

As a former shareholder, I attended the 1993, 1994, and 1995 Annual Shareholder's Meetings at Atari Corp., not to mention the last Atari "Media Day" event in 1995 under the direction of Ted Hoff (at that time, I was working with John Marcotte on the ill fated Jaguar's Edge magazine -- my reviews of Pitfall were never published...).

So here are some of the things that stand out in my mind:

1993

The Jaguar was first introduced to us shareholders. At that time, the case was gray, and IBM had just finished the final version of the plastic case mold the day before the meeting. I got to play the prototype version of Cybermorph. The Time Warner rep, wearing probably a $2000+ suit, had three lackeys attending with him. He complained that the female Skylar character (she had a different name) wasn't nude, so it wouldn't be selling well to the teenage market.

John Skrutch showed off the prototype version of Crescent Galaxy, and in that, Trevor McFurr was visible inside the ship. It was very cartoony, and his spacecraft was the Atari Jaguar machine itself, with his head and torso sticking out of the top of the ship. I believe they were doing that for the Lynx character in the game as well, but they didn't show that. And if I'm not confusing years, Atari also showed off a prototype of Tempest 2000, but the only level finished at the time was the flat surface level, not the regular circular levels.

I suggested to Sam Tramiel in front of everyone that Atari pull the old Coleco strategy from the early 80s in coming out with a 3DO licensed emulator for the Jag, thereby stealing users away from that system like Coleco did with their 2600 emulator for the Colecovision. He didn't know about that.

1994

I pestered Sam Tramiel to license the Jaguar to Japanese manufacturers in Japan for a pre-emptive strike in the home market of Sega, Nintendo and Sony before they could bring out their game systems. I mentioned NEC and Namco as viable candidates, but he sluffed off my recommendation to the rest of the shareholders, saying that they were relying on the Japanese trading company Itachu (who had a strategic alliance with Time-Warner) to pump up the Jaguar in Japan. I said that Sega was having problems with the design of the Saturn and they might enjoy the Jag, but it didn't register with him. I also mentioned JVC as a good candidate since they were making the Genesis/Sega CD compatible machine known as the X-Eye at the time, and plus they were a registered third party developer for the Jag. This didn't dawn on him.

When I mentioned that Atari should port all the classic Atari Games arcade games to the Jaguar like they had done with the Lynx, he followed with the statement that Atari Games had not had a decent arcade hit in a long time. The truth was that Atari Corp. flaked out on back royalties owed to Atari Games over the various conversions to the Lynx system, thus they couldn't port any more titles until payment was made. This was in the shareholder's annual report. Atari Corp. finally issued non-voting common stock which they valued at $8 a share (when it was less than about $4 on the open market at the time) to Atari Games Corp. as a settlement, and Time-Warner forced Atari Games to settle for this.

Do you get the feeling that Sam Tramiel was a complete idiot? :)

You might want to know that in this same year, after I pitched the idea to Sam Tramiel that Atari court Namco to use the Jag in arcade machines and become a home licensee, J. Patton was sent over to Japan to show Namco the machine firsthand and its capabilities. J. Patton even told me this personally at the Sacramento Atari Expo.

The other highlight of the shareholders meeting was the wrath that Sam Tramiel received by this old lady who was a shareholder and this hippie over the gore in Kasumi Ninja. They said Atari should make non-violent videogames. Sam, unabashed, said that was stupid. I agreed with him on that, though.

1995

More Sam Tramiel idiocy. He boasted that Atari was ready to release the Jaguar II, with better graphics, more RAM, and a quad-speed CD-ROM to counter the popularity of the Sony Playstation. Of course, it never happened. Sometime between this annual meeting and the last Atari Media Day in November 1995, Atari hung up the first prototype model of the "Midsummer" chipset Motorola manufactured for the Jag II. It was hung up in the lobby of the company where all the various awards Atari had earned from the Consumer Electronics Show over the years. I believe the plaque said the chips had been finished in June.

Second of all, Sam defended his position of lowering the price of the console Jaguar in the face of angry shareholders. He said it was the same gimmick he and his dad pulled at Commodore in the early 80s with the Commodore 64, which didn't come with a disk drive but relied on cartridges. The logic was lowering the Jaguar's price would entice people to buy the CD-ROM, just like lowering the price of the Commodore 64 enticed people to buy the 1541 disk drive. The thing that got me was that Sam never understood that the computer and video game markets were different and that the "lowest price" did not work in video games.

Oh, one other thing, regarding the Lynx. Back in 1990, Bob Brodie, who held the publicity job before Don Thomas at Atari, came to my computer users group to talk about Atari. Bob mentioned that he tried convincing the Atari programmers to convert the Atari ST game Midi Maze over the the Lynx, since it was so hot at the time as the pioneer of networked video games. The programmers thought it was a stupid idea.

Four years later, the game surfaced as Faceball 2000 on the NES, SNES, Gameboy, Game Gear, and Genesis. :)