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The final boss in Ramparts is scheduled for a beat-down.. On Warcraft Episode “Ramparts. Vazruden and Nazan” Mark: Welcome back to On Warcraft on On Networks. I am Mark Major. Arwyn: I am Arwyn Wheats. Mark: And we are going to take you through the last part of the ramparts, part three with Vazruden the dragon rider and Nazou, naza… Arwyn: Nazan. Mark: Nazan. Arwyn: His little friend. Mark: His little ridden friend who he rides on, because he is a rider on the storm. Alright let’s kill some dragons. Arwyn: Alrighty. Mark: Alrighty. Arwyn: I’m ready. Mark: I’m ready, to get through this rampart. Arwyn: Cool, awesome. Well if you are ready then you have probably brought your fire resist gear. And this is the one for it. That’s right because the dragon itself spits fire. Mark: Shocker. Arwyn: Right, so there is a lot of fire damage in this fight. The first thing you need to know heading to him, is and mind you, you already killed the other bosses and trash, if not everything. You have two guys to kill at the beginning of the bridge. And then the next two guys at the bottom of the bridge directly below the dragon and its rider, they start the event. So make sure you know this going in, because otherwise when you start the event it is really a kind of shocker. Mark: That’s right don’t alert the little guys until you are ready to rock. Arwyn: That’s right, it’s the second guys. You can keep them sheathed, spirit regen or do anything else to get your mana and your health back up. And once their dead you have about 1.5 seconds to drink if you haven’t, if you have got someone who maybe killed a sheep to fast or something like that. You have got a really, really short window to drink. Mark: Yeah that’s not a lot of time. Arwyn: Not a lot of time but if your really on the ball you can do it. Mark: I know a guy who can put a pint down in a second so. Arwyn: 1.5 seconds flat? One second flat? Mark: One second flat, just open u the throat and bam down it goes. Arwyn: He could do another half then. Mark: He could. Arwyn: So uh once you are up to full health and mana and everything. This is where you are going to want to engage and the dragon. Now originally you have the dragon and the rider swooping around. He guy who comes down first is the rider. I guess he paratroops off or something. Mark: He jumps off. Arwyn: He just kind of comes down to kill you. I wish it were that combatic. It would really make the instance a lot more interesting. As it I he just kind of comes down and runs to you. Yeah it is not very showy at all, he is not very limber. So you want the tank to taunt him immediately. Because having killed the first two guys, no one is agro the boss yet. He is going to the healer, always. Everyone loves the healer. Who doesn’t? So you want to make sure he taunts off. You want to make sure that while the dragonling is circling around. Mark: Is this a real dragon or just a dragonling? Arwyn: He is a real dragon, he is bonafide, fire spitting, floating in the air, the whole nine yards. But while he is circling around he is spitting fire down on you. While your killing his rider. I guess he likes being ridden. So he is really attached to this guy, he is going to try to protect him. At about 20 percent the dragon will land and he will come try to beat you up himself. Mark: He is done calling in air strikes he is going to make it personal. Arwyn: Right. Now the thing about him, you still need to be killing, what is he, Vazruden? Mark: Vazruden. Arwyn: Vazruden the herald. You need to still kill the guy even while your tank immediately taunts the dragon, because he will go after the healer. Mark: He will rock your world. Arwyn: He likes bar b qued healer and he takes it raw or whatever. So make sure to taught him off your healer or whatever. And kill the guy. Start on the dragon, the dragon breaths fire. Mark: The guy should be pretty much dead. Arwyn: The guy should be that’s the point, if you have done anything in your job right. But if you re coming at a level 56, you might have a tougher time bringing them both down. But still just, you get the job done, so he breaths the fire of cone. The dragon does. Mark: Cone of fire? Arwyn: Fire of cone. Mark: Fire of cone. Wow that’s a new one. Arwyn: It’s kind of funky actually. Yeah he throws cones at you, they are pointy. Cone of fire, are you happy? Cone of fire, which means if you face the dragon stay from you party members, they don’t get hit with your fire. So you have got to have a tank that is kind of on the ball, knows how to position the bosses and things like that. If the tank does get in the fire, he can strafe. You know side to side running, strafing means side to side and shoot. Mark: I know I know that. Arwyn: So he can run out of the way of the fire cone, and he can also run in between the dragons legs to get out of fire. That is the same with other melee. Now if your melee DPS, you should not be in front of the dragon. Mark: No you want to be behind the dragon, away from the action end. Arwyn: Aim for the tail. Aim, well on your point of view I don’t know, but aim for the tail. Mark: That’s a different game. Arwyn: If you are melee just hit him in the butt basically. Everyone else should be ranged and vanishing themselves because especially on a lower level group like 56 going on forward. You are going to make sure that your healers are just healing your tank. It is a tough fight, if you are at that level. Mark: There is lots of hurting going around. Arwyn: Lots of hurting, so again, fire resist gear is going to be helpful. The other thing that is going on while the cone of fire is being spat upon and the guys are moving around. He is still going to be throwing out rings of fire that stick to individuals and it is like napalm. So if you get hit by one of those. It smells like defeat if you stay in it. Mark: Depends on your point of view I guess. Arwyn: Well for the dragon yeah, so run out of those fires and you should be fine. They do a lot of damage tick for tick; just run away have your DPS bandage yourself. If you are the healer obviously heal yourself. But keep your focus mainly on the tank, because they are going to be in a world of pain. Mark: Yes they are a world of pain. Arwyn: Get through the fight, a fiery world of pain. It kind of has a warm burn. It’s nice, it a good hurt. If something happens and you wipe on this fight, you can reset it. There is a big curly horn on the side of the ring. Mark: Ricolla. Arwyn: Right the problem is if you actually succeed, the box drops with the fat loot in it, and someone blows the horn, loot first. Because if that horn gets blown dragon is back in the sky and his box is gone. Mark: And your like what, what, oh oww it burns. Arwyn: So you got to do it again. Aw the pain, aw the atmosphere. So you have to do it again if you do blow the horn. So it’s a failsafe, but if you got four morons in your party, the same guys that forgot to loot the other two bosses. Mark: No well I didn’t, they are running around naked and they are blowing horns and pulling switches. Arwyn: You know the ones. G kick. So once you have got the guy down obviously loot, don’t blow the horn unless you mean it. Right and from there you are golden. This is the last guy. He drops the last quest item that you need, the other two that you have collected. And he also drops a new quest item. Mark: Right to start you off on a new path to glory. Arwyn: That’s right, hats going to lead you straight over to the blood furnace, which is the next instance in this hellfire citadel complex that you have been fighting in. So that is a pretty cool thing. Mark: That is very cool, so to wrap it up. Arwyn: Right o’ what we are going to do is head in there, fire resist gear. Mark: Fire resist that. Arwyn: The dragon is a fire spitter. He is a spitter. Mark: He is a fire starter. So make sure you are resisting that fire, you are staying out of the fire when he doe spit on you. Run away from it. And if you are the tank face him away from your party so you are the only one facing that fire. Let everyone else hit the butt. And then loot the box; it has got your fat loot in it. Don’t blow the horn until you need to. The horn resets. Mark: That is a good life principle I think. Arwyn: Don’t group with morons too. Mark: Alright so you have gone through the ramparts, hit the Omor, hit Gargamel, and hit the dragon rider dude, what comes next? Arwyn: Well with all those quest done you’re going to return back into your little town, which ever which on you are. And this quest is going to send you to the blood furnace. Mark: Awesome! Arwyn: Hellfire part 2. Mark: Hellfire. Arwyn: So another part of the citadel, more loot more xp, more reputation. It’s not easy to get too though. Mark: Yeah it is kind of a pain, you got to go around and over the. Arwyn: Over the river and through the woods, but grandma does not live here. So in the next episode we will tell you how to get to it because it is a little bit convoluted. Mark: So stay tuned for the next episode.
Get through BF in record time and move on to instances that you actually want to run.. On Warcraft Episode “Blood furnace Overview” Mark: Welcome back to On Warcraft on On Networks, I am Mark Majcher. Arwin: I am Arwin Lietz. Mark: And we are going to be taking you through the Blood Furnace forge, furnace. Arwin: Burn that blood. Mark: Burning blood. Arwin: Burn it. Mark: This is another kind of medium sized, three boss instance with a bunch of stuff in it. Arwin: It is longer than the Ramparts, and it is a little bit more of a pain in the ass to get through, but it is all about the warlocks, wet dream! They love it here. And all the warlocks in there for mobs, they love you; they want to be with you so it is a good time. Mark: They love you until it hurts. Arwin: It hurts bad. Mark: Alright, we’re ready to go. Arwin: Let’s go, you have to get their first. Mark: We’ve got to get there, how do we get there? Arwin: Well they could not have made it anymore further away for the horde particularly but also for the alliance is a pretty big pain. You have got to go, if you’re starting at the Ramparts, because you know I get there now. Start at the summoning stone and you’ve got the head across to this tiny little bridge that is heading over to the, kind of like the alliance stronghold. You go across the little dirt path and then head around to the right crossing along the chasm edge. You’ll see a long flight of stairs which suck, because if you fall off of the stairs you have to go back and around and go back up the stairs and then you’ll actually walk along Ramparts, why you do not walk on the Ramparts to get to Ramparts I do not know. It is retarded, but you walk along the Ramparts and it will lead you right into the instance, which is at the top of Hellfire Citadel. You head in there and the same thing with the ramparts, you can go in there really early. It is not worth it though, because this instance is about an hour and ½ to 2 hours, much longer than the 45 minutes of Ramparts. Mark: You really only have to do it wants if you want to. Arwin: Just go in for the quest; just really go in for the quest. And that is a quest that you can pick up that 58. You have to start and do the Ramparts first and then go in and continue Hellfire. It is just a collection quest is pretty easy, just kill a couple of orcs and get; actually I think you get the blood. Mark: Awesome, in the furnace? Arwin: In the furnace that’s right, the crucible as it were. The other thing that you can do is this kind of a exploration quest when you go into the Blood Furnace, you have to go to certain points like the final boss and you’ll find that and no problem there. So… Mark: Let’s get in it. Arwin: We are in. We have figured it out and we have found where it was, the trash in here, there’s going to be some rogues stuffed in here. They’ll just kinda chill out and wait for you, they also respawn so even after you’ve found them and killed them if you inevitably wipe and come back in… Mark: Yep, they will be there waiting for you. Arwin: So don’t run in alone, it is silly. Mark: Keep a buddy. Arwin: Keep a buddy always at least a buddy, a buddy or four. Mark: Maybe five, or four. Arwin: The whole party in their but as I mentioned before it is a lot of warlocks, warlock paradise. This is where they go on spring break I think so when you’re in there killing you want to make sure to line of sight pull them so that they have to run forward and kill you, or try to. Hopefully they don’t. Mark: You do not want them to kill you. Arwin: You do not want them to kill you. Mark: Don’t do that. Arwin: But they fear because they are warlocks, so pull them away from any other mobs that you are fighting, and if they cast Hellfire or anything else like that on you move out of it. Just walk away. You do have some, some summoners; you want to make sure that you kill those guys first because they’ll come after you. So the trash is not too big, not too big of a deal nothing out of the ordinary. If you have a warlock in your party then it is super handy because they… Mark: They grabbed those monsters with their mind and throw them away. Arwin: They can enslave and you can have a monster tank for you to kill other things or whatever else happens. There are lot of fell guards in here and those are the big nasty tin men of the warlock world they’re pretty tough so again it is helpful to have a warlock insight. It is also really handy to have a crowd control in this instance. All three bosses somehow can benefit from, very benefit from the crowd control. So we will talk a little bit more about the bosses in other episodes. Beyond that, aside from nice to have a warlock, nice to have or really nice to have crowd control your typical fine and party is going to get through your just fine. Mark: Yeah, walk on through. Arwin: You just get on through and get your quest done, it is pretty standard and it has got good reputation, better loot than ramparts actually. Mark: But none as efficient time vs. the looting. Arwin: No, not as efficient, but when your grinding up from 61 to 62 this is another place to come. Mark: You’re going to hit it. Arwin: Hit it good. OK one thing to note if you do find yourself in the blood furnace and you want to jack up your experience in your reputation gain. Mark: You can do that. Arwin: You can do that, as you are in the Hellfire Peninsula there are PVP options, this is even on non PVP servers it is kind of cool. You can capture towers and you’ll go back to your town and get tokens or something like that, you will turn them in and they’ll give you different marks that add buff to you. The buff will give you 25% more honor, reputation game, and 5% more experience. Mark: That is good. Arwin: So if you find yourself in instance that frankly is not as efficient as ramparts in the Hellfire area. Mark: Say Blood Furnace? Arwin: I don’t know Blood Furnace? Mark: Blood Furnace right, yeah. Arwin: Use that buff and it will increase your reputation and experience game. Mark: Make it a little smoother for you. Arwin: Always a good thing, grind it on up from 56 to 62. Mark: Cool so let’s stop killing trash and start killing bosses. Arwin: That is right the next thing we are going to talk about is the first boss in the instance which is The Maker. Mark: The Maker. Arwin: He has quite a bit of trash to him, not as much as the Ramparts but we will take you all through that. Mark: But space it all out.
Back in the day, people left their homes to play video games. Play Value Episode “The Death of Arcades” Libi: When we talk about arcade games you have such awesome memories of like either going with your friends or just like that’s what kept your attention for hours and hours and hours when you were a kid. Jeff: Arcades were great because when you were a kid they were a fad for awhile, but looking back now it’s almost, what it’s almost like looking at a mulch shop in the fifties. It’s just not a thing we have anymore. Dan: You know in the early seventies Pong actually was a hit in bars right, but it wasn’t until the end of the seventies that games like Space Invaders came out, these huge money makers actually established a reason to have dedicated arcades. TJ: And here you have dedicated gaming centers for people to say lets put a center for kids to play games, and the games will come. And sure enough hot on the heels. Pac Man was on the hype. Josh: So Pac Man is in a lot of ways the first video game character. Before that there are a lot of spaceships, a lot of boxes ad triangle bleeping and blooping. But Pac Man is kind of like a person and you know you can put him on a Saturday morning cartoon. You can put him on the cover of Time, you can put him on kid’s lunch boxes, and he has a wife! Dan: That time period between 1978, and maybe 82, 83 was sort of the golden age of arcades. Every year you had new games that were pushing technology, making a heck of a lot more money. Josh: You got Donkey Kong, you got your Pole Position, and you got your Frogger. Dan: You know you had the Star Wars arcade game which was huge, centipede. They all used different control mechanism some were joysticks some were paddles. Others used the trackball. Josh: Video games eventually became so mainstream that there was a movie based on video games, Tron. And then in turn of course there is a video game Tron, of course based on the movie. TJ: So by the early eighties you have one and a half million arcade machines in the country together. People are playing about 2 million hours on these machines. That is a lot of time for them to stand going, up pa pup, pup, pup, like that. Josh: And we all just pulled together. Someone had to stop the centipede invasion, had to be us. Dan: The video game industry in that period from the late seventies to the eighties it was out of control. It was pulling in twenty billion dollars a year which was more than major league baseball basketball and football were pulling in combined. This is ridiculous. Christ I think that’s why Americans are pretty fat. TJ: Now this was a peak, but we new it couldn’t last forever. Dan: Every year the video game industry was just growing and it was growing in terms of the money it was bringing in. In terms of the people who were actually visiting the arcades. People who were involved in the industry didn’t really think there as any way for it to go but up. And it actually ended up peaking and not growing any further because the investment started to exceed how much you are actually going to play the games. Josh: When arcades started to fall the first places to feel it where places that should never had games in the first place. Places like grocery markets, restaurants, senior citizen homes, synagogues. Those all disappeared. After that the huge theme parks that were built around the idea that video games were just a never ending gross business. Those started to fall. By the end the only places that are left are in the middle. The medium sized arcades, little, dark, not as glamorous, but just reasonable enough to turn a profit. TJ: And then right around 86, 87 Nintendo. The Nintendo came out and became really popular and that revitalized the entire game industry but it moved the focus back into the living room. Josh: Arcade games because it was such a business made up of a hundred companies. They wouldn’t advertize on TV, where as Nintendo they are like, mom buy your son this! And then for the son they are like tell mom to buy me this. Birthdays, Christmas you can’t give an arcade game realistically, but you can give a Nintendo. Shandra: So actually the Nintendo systems and arcades could kind of peacefully coexist. The nail in the coffin for Nintendo games is when the Sega Genesis came out, in like 89, 90. Because it was arcade games that you could play at home. It was direct competition. TJ: Now Sega was making arcade games, but they decided to make the same version of games for their new console. Now why did they do that? It is not because they didn’t want to make money in arcades anymore, but they said we can do better if we start to sell these games directly to the consumer. You don’t have to go to Joe bob pizza shack anymore. We can just say hey, Mr. Consumer, watch this commercial on TV and go out and buy this game yourself. So Sega was cannibalizing their own arcade audience but they had seen the writing on the wall. They knew that home gaming was the way of the future. Dan: They were able to replicate the arcade experience pretty well. First and foremost, the fact that you could get Strider, Altered Beast, and Afterburner on your home systems when you bought your Genesis eliminated the need to go to the arcade. But then the other thing that started happening was playing these games at home people started to ask for longer more involved video game experiences than they had previously had. Josh: Arcade games are designed to kill you. They are designed to be frustrating; if you just sit there and play it for ever it would not be a profitable business. Where as home games work with you a little more, they are a little more fun, you can do things like explore, you can tell a story. Libi: Like the levels unto which you were stimulated were just completely changed and they were like more involved, you know like you were actually becoming the character. And you had to like think of where to go and what to collect and what to do. And like where to find things. Josh: The real case in point is the Neo Geo. This is a system that was designed to be as good at home as it was on the arcade. The games were the same in both. And even though the price for one was abnormally high, the games were very boring. They weren’t the kind of games people wanted. TJ: Why do I want to spend, in this case $54 for a game that gives me three minute burst of fun. Nobody wants that, they want something deeper. Girl2: Gamers grew up and they wanted more variety, and the home console offered that. They wanted board games, adventure games, role playing games, sports games. I mean how do you play a sports game in the arcade, it’s like impossible. Josh: So when you go home you have this rich tapestry of genres you can play with, and that’s why arcades died. They have a very narrow set of fleeting experiences. And we just outgrew them. Dan: What was interesting is when you were in the arcade, your basically putting in quarters and trying to last as long as you can with a limited amount of money. And there is a real financial incentive, when you get Final Fight at home and you can just continue and you can play till you beat it. It totally sucks all the fun and you realize right away that those game suck. Josh: The dead, dead cat bounce of arcades, right when they bounce, and right before the final death cry is Street Fighter 2, and Mortal Kombat. TJ: These games are going to test your skill against complete strangers, people you don’t know. And you know complete bragging rights; people are always stepping up to the challenge trying to challenge them. Josh: That is something that is very important to the development of video games, it never went away. It is just now we do it online. And there is elaborate ranking systems so you know exactly how good the person you are playing is versus how good you are. TJ: So the last thing that the arcades had to hold onto was that social interaction and that competitiveness against strangers. Well you know what that even fizzled as soon as the internet came along. Shandra: I think there will always be arcade games around though just for like nostalgic purposes. Just like I don’t want to get rid of that Frogger game that’s been sitting in the back of the store because it has been part of history. You know it’s like its sad but it happened. TJ: So we grew up and the games grew up but the arcades they couldn’t grow up and change for us, so they died. But they died so we could have Oblivion and World of War Craft and really complex artistic games like that. Josh: Arcades had to die for the art to evolve. You know you can’t make an omelet without destroying a few businesses, that’s the bottom line.
You won't believe the drama behind one of the best loved games of all-time. Play Value Episode “Tetris: Splitting the iron curtain” Dan: It is the summer of 1985 which in Moscow is still actually kind of cold, Alexey Pajitnov, a low level programmer is sitting around, and he puts together Tetris. The most simple puzzle game you can think of, stacking blocks, but there is something magical about it. Libe: So you know you can’t sell the game. This is communist Russia after all. So instead he gives it away to his friends. And then you know it spread all through Moscow. Jeff: You copied it from your friend. You copied it for his friend. You copied it for his friend, and soon it had spread al the way to the outer states. That’s what communism is, it means free Tetris. Dan: Now the game finally ends up in Hungary, in Budapest, in Croatia. Some Hungarian guys have made an Apple version of it. And this guy Robert Stein comes in and he is almost like an opportunist who travels around trying to by up stuff cheap and sell it more expensively some where else. And he see’s the game. And he says this game is great. I am not even going to buy this game. I am just going to steal it. Jeff: In Steins defense. What do you do? How do you break down that red curtain? You don’t get the rights to this game. Russia is a society, and they don’t even have private property, much less an abstract concept like intellectual property. How do you deal with that, you know? And it was probably easier to just steal it. Dan: So this guy takes the game back to the west and starts selling the rights to all these other companies, because they don’t know any better. They think that he has actually, legitimately gotten the rights from the guy who created the game back in Russia. Now people don’t really remember Robert Maxell these days, but back in the eighties he was a huge media mogul. He was like Rupert Murdoch. So then Stein sells it to Robert Maxwell’s video game company called Mirrorsoft. Josh: They are basically just creating fake contracts, fake deals with all sorts of companies from Mirrorsoft to Atari in the states, to Spectrum Holobyte. Basically he just went around selling it, trying to make as much cash as he could. Before the Soviets figured out he was selling their property. Jeff: It was just this whole mess, because Robert Stein is selling rights. The people he is selling rights to are selling there rights. And they are not real, but there is just this whole web of deceit and just laziness that no ones checking up on it. And it is all just going to come crashing down on it. Josh: Before anyone figured out who owned the rights. Tetris had already become the best selling PC game in the UK and America. Jeff: Robert Stein never thought it was going to be a big deal, you know? He just thought he would sell a few hundred thousand copies at best, make a quick buck. No one in communist Russia is going to find out about this. But the thing is Tetris is really good. It is really good, and it just becomes almost this world wide phenomenon. TJ: So the game gets so big that the Russian government takes notice. Now mind you, Russia at this time is Communist, so there is no owner in particular, other than mother Russia. Jeff: The Russians are Communist, but there not stupid. They see what’s going on. And they create Elorg, this company to manage the rights for Tetris. Before there was never anybody to officially organize the rights. Now that this organization exists there is just rampant land grab. Dan: You have got Maxwell, you have got Stein, and you have got Nintendo who are about to launch there Game Boy, all coming into Moscow at the same time, trying to snap up as many of the rights as they can for different platforms for this game. Jeff: And there are a lot of sticky issues here. This is just a society that works in a completely different way so it wasn’t exactly clear how it was going to shake out. Dan: Now Nintendo, they took the red eye and they got there first. When they got there they met with Russian officials, ad they say hey, we would love to get the rights for this kind of hand held version we are going to do. And we will show you how good job we did; we made a Nintendo cartridge, here check it out. Josh: They pull out a cartridge and the Russians freaked. We haven’t been paid for this; we didn’t even know this existed. Dan: And the Russians go, where did that come from, we didn’t give you the rights to that? Oh we bought the rights. No you didn’t. So the Nintendo guy says, I will tell you what, I will just right you a check for these rights too. We sold a bunch of these cartridges, just take this. Josh: The Russians, who hadn’t been paid at all for any of the versions that were best seller in the west, took that check and said, finally someone is actually taking care of us, and immediately granted the rights to Nintendo. Dan: Now the Stein guy, he has been selling this game left and right, it is the number one best selling computer game out there, and of course he has not paid the Russians a cent. So the Russia government is furious. But instead of giving Stein the old poison tipped umbrella in the middle of Trafalgar square, they say hey lets at least get some of this money. So they sign a contract with him to sell the computer version of the game. Jeff: Now Stein thinks he is buying the rights for computers, and he is thinking bout the broad definition of computers. He thinks he is going to sell it on calculators, on Game Boy, on watches, on Nintendo’s, I mean things will come in the future, everything. Shandi: So he figures nobody can say what is and what isn’t a computer. So I pretty much have everything I need to make money off of this. And the Russians realize this, so in the 11th hour they snuck something in to the contract, where they defined a computer as something with a keyboard and a monitor. TJ: That one little sentence basically blocked Stein from making money on any other distribution of Tetris. Which means he collets nothing from the Game Boy, he collects nothing from any arcade rights. He collects nothing from any home console rights. He got the rights to anything has a monitor, which is basically at this point a PC, and you know what Tetris was already a he success on the PC, so its over. So now Stein is stuck with nothing. Dan: Now Maxwell shows up later in the day, by the time he gets there all the good stuff is already gone, its like he was on the Russian bread line, you get to the front, and there is no bread left. TJ: And so we all know what happens, Russia sells the rights to handhelds and consoles to none other than Nintendo, and we know how that story ends. Dan: After all the dust settles, Nintendo releases the Game Boy with Tetris. And Tetris helps the Game Boy to go on to become a best seller. And the game boy helps Tetris to become the best selling game of all time. I think like 30 million Game Boy versions of that alone out on the marketplace. Josh: If someone got screwed and maybe didn’t deserve it. Under there other banner Tengen, I think Atari got unfairly screwed in the whole Tetris debacle. Atari had bought the imaginary rights to the game and they thought they were buying something real, but they weren’t. And they produced and advertised there version of Tetris. Which a lot of people think is superior. Dan: I mean Atari had actually made so many of these cartridges they couldn’t just throw them away. They actually had to put them out in the marketplace first, just to try and roll the dice. And then when they lost the case they had to recall them all. And that ended up costing them even more in the long run. Jeff: And at this point there is a lot of bad blood between Atari and Nintendo. So Nintendo is only two happy to stop Atari from selling what they thought was going to be a hit game. Dan: And of course back in Russia the Russian government made millions off of this, but Alexey Pajitnov, the programmer didn’t make any money at all, because of course the communist party system, you can’t make a lot of money. Shandi: If Pajitnov would have been born in a different country the whole twisted crazy stories about all these companies fighting for all the rights. Yeah, it wouldn’t even exist. Josh: It is kind of interesting actually; Tetris has probably appeared on more operating systems, consoles, handheld videogames, graphing calculators than probably any other game in history. The reason why Tetris is the number one selling game of all time is because it is not technology dependent. TJ: You could put that game anywhere and it plays just as good as anywhere else. You can put that game on a cell phone and it is going to play just as good as it is going to play on the Xbox 360. Basically it is the solitaire of the next millennium. Shandi: That is why it got so popular. And why Tetris spread so fast. Wherever you play it it’s the same feeling. TJ: And a hundred years from now, Tetris will still be here. Just like solitaire just like chess, and all these new games they will be no where to be found. Shandi: Yeah, Tetris is going to be around forever. It is going to outlive us all.
The history of the bitter feud between Atari and Nintendo. Play Value Episode “Atari vs. Nintendo” Dan: Nintendo and Atari, you would think these two video game pioneers would be the best of friends. But you really should not invite them to the same dinner party. Jeff: Atari was synonymous with video games for a long time, the way that Nintendo is now, and uh they fell off there throne. They made some miscalculations, they made some bad decisions and they weren’t the number one guy anymore Josh: But Nintendo took on Atari’s role and Nintendo’s success just like fueled the fires again, and gave Atari this last glimmer of hope that they could be back on top of the industry. Libi: Atari released the 7800, in an attempt to compete with Nintendo. And when that didn’t work out, Atari decided to drop the whole console thing, and said hey; alright we are just going to make games for Nintendo instead. Jeff: One of the reasons Atari fell from grace in the first place is just so many games were coming out it was impossible to keep track of what were the good ones and what were the ad ones. And the bad ones were so overwhelming that people just started to think that’s what videogames are, they are garbage. Libi: Nintendo wanted to reassure its customers that they were going to get good games from them. So what they did was decided to put the Nintendo seal of quality on their games. And then limited other companies and told them hey you can only make five games a year for our console. TJ: So you have to pick the five best games, because we are not going to flood our console with crappy games. We saw what it did to Atari, we have seen the past and we don’t want that. We want to have some kind of quality control. Jeff: So Nintendo says no more than five games a year, and in order to ensure that happens they put a security system in Nintendo called the 10 NES code. And what it is, is kind of a lock and key system. Where there is a special chip in the Nintendo games that matches a special chip inside the Nintendo. And if both aren’t present a game doesn’t start. Josh: When a cartridge was put into the console they communicated, and it was like this is a real game, this isn’t a real game. If it was a real game you could play it, if it wasn’t a real game, meaning authored by Nintendo, it wouldn’t play. Libi: So by limiting companies to only creating five games a year for their system, they really did ensure that they got the best games from those companies. Jeff: The companies didn’t like being limited to five games a year. But because they were, you see some of the games that come out here are some of the best games ever. Capcom is releasing Mega Man, Bionic Commando, Ghost and Goblins. Konami is putting out stuff like Contra, stuff like Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Gradius. There are just so many great games that even today they still make sequels to. Because they were so good that even twenty years later people still want Castlevania's because of those first few. TJ: Ok when Atari gets this news that Nintendo’s only going to allow them five games Atari is like wow, wow, wait a minute. We invented video games, w invented the home console. You’re not going to limit us to five. Dan: Nintendo says listen, you guys were first, we respect that but you got to play by the same rules as everybody else. Atari was not happy with this at all. TJ: It’s all on ego. Atari couldn’t stop third party providers from making crapware for their system. So when Nintendo tries to do it they are like wow, we couldn’t do it, what makes you think you can do it. Oh you guys add a secret code, damnit why didn’t we come up with secret code? Jeff: Atari wants special rules they want to put out more games, Nintendo says no. This goes back and forth for months, finally Atari says fine. So Atari through there subdivision Tengen, puts out three games, RBI baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac Man. And that is going to be the end of it. We will just keep moving and see how it goes. Maybe we will put out more games, maybe we won’t, you know? No big deal. TJ: Now this is were the story gets good. Because secretly Atari as a plan. All the Atari execs sit around and say ok, we are going to play by the rules. We are going to give them their five games, but we are going to break this code, we are going to find out what this secret Nintendo code is. Josh: Atari at first tried to hack the system. Bought a bunch of NES’s cracked them open gave hem to their best programmers. Monitored how the software interacted with the software in hopes of finding that unique little trigger that they could then bypass when they made their own game. Jeff: You know they tried to look at it and see what information was being sent back and forth. They were like we will steal this the correct way. But when that failed they were like alright, ok we will just take it from the copy right office. TJ: Atari goes to the copyright office and they submit a request to see the Nintendo code. Well the copy right office, fine why do you need to see the code? Atari said we are sued by Nintendo and in order for our legal team to create a proper defense we have to see what this code is, so that we can then fight this legal battle. Copyright office doesn’t know, so what do they do, they release the code to them. Jeff: This isn’t like one rogue Atari employee who is trying to rung Nintendo. This is an entire corporation, committing a major crime, really a very elaborate scheme to try and break the rules and then try to change them retroactively. TJ: So now Atari is sitting on the secret Nintendo code, and then in turn they sue them for 100 million dollars. They sue them for 100 million dollars because they have been monopolizing the industry. Dan: Nintendo they weren’t going to take this lying down, they said we are going to take this to the street. This is a street fight. So they went to all the toy retailers and they said listen. We got this tiff going on with Atari we will tell you what’s going to happen. If you carry any of their stuff, then you’re not going to get anymore Nintendo stuff, so no matter who wins these lawsuits. Nintendo still wins, Nintendo for the win. The fact is that Nintendo just owned the market, they dominated toy stores, and they are accounting for half of a store like Toys R Us’s profits. The court case took awhile to drag on but the results are just meaningless. Because Nintendo just bullied Atari out of stores. They had that much clout. They kind of were operating like a monopoly. There are warehouses full of games that people would have bought, but no ones going to sell them because they didn’t want to upset Nintendo. Josh: I mean basically Atari now needed to win this lawsuit against Nintendo. Everything rode on this, because they weren’t making any money in the market place with these games. Jeff: What happens next, because they so clearly stole it in a, a sneaky and underhanded way. I mean kind of like a Boris and Natasha style plot. Because of the way they got this they don’t do very well in court. Josh: Atari brought a fair and valid antitrust argument to bear. But completely ruined there credibility by engaging in theft, in copyright theft. TJ: But it never even got to that. Case was dropped, they settled out of court. Atari ultimately paid Nintendo something for stealing from them, and then Atari disappears. Jeff: Eventually the code was cracked as all codes are, and one person was making games, Wisdom Tree who put out some classics like Sunday Fun Day. Libi: And basically they hacked a secret code and they made Bible games. And so Nintendo heard about it and they were like man, do we really want to sue these guys. You know we are trying to tell parents that games aren’t the devil, but then we are trying to sue a church, un uh, I don’t think so, Tj: Nintendo in the true fashion of the Bible decided that they were just going to turn the cheek on this one and let Wisdom Tree do there thing. Jeff: This whole story is the beginning of a lot of bad blood between Nintendo and Atari, and it would continue for many years. But it was never really a big deal, just because Atari was never any competition. Atari always wanted to be, what Sega would eventually become, which is a real second company, with a real strong chance at dethroning the king.
