[HN Gopher] "Atari Was Very, Very Hard" - Nolan Bushnell on Atar...
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"Atari Was Very, Very Hard" - Nolan Bushnell on Atari, 50 Years
Later
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-06-27 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.howtogeek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.howtogeek.com)
| psim1 wrote:
| > HTG: So let's go the opposite way now. What did you do "wrong"
| at Atari that people could learn from today?
|
| > Bushnell: I think that I--how do I put this without sounding
| like an asshole? I put up with incompetence more than I should
| have. I should have been quicker to fire.
|
| I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to grow
| into a role and time to get really good at it. But you also need
| to watch closely and make sure that growth and expertise are
| occurring, and if not, get better people in. This is delicate. I
| think most orgs err on the side of grace. And the ones that err
| on the side of "asshole" and just do a lot of firing are also
| doing it wrong.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Having a fire fast culture creates a stressful atmosphere.
|
| It's better to have high standards to begin with to avoid
| needing to fire people. If you're firing a double digit percent
| of your hires, there's something wrong with your hiring
| process.
|
| Most companies use metrics that are weakly correlated with
| success on the job. When you've hired dozens of people, who
| will be successful or not becomes quite obvious.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _It 's better to have high standards to begin with to avoid
| needing to fire people._
|
| Which leads to the job interview system that doesn't satisfy
| anybody either.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| The tech interview system employed by FAANG is an example
| of a weak correlation style interview. Actually the
| structure of the interview is mostly fine, but the criteria
| being judged is usually off.
|
| 1) Questions should be structured such that they're modeled
| in a real world context, and somewhat close to the nature
| of the type of problems your company/division solves.
|
| 2) For most companies, coding ability and quality is more
| important than CS theory strength. Success on a coding
| problem for these companies should be judged by pace of
| coding and quality of solution, rather than time complexity
| of the result. Run time complexity of an algorithm is
| almost 100% orthogonal to ability to write high quality
| code quickly, yet this is where 99% of the interview focus
| is for most companies.
|
| That being said, if you're hiring somebody to design a
| database storage system, sure, theory is more important in
| that context. But 99% of jobs are not that.
|
| Can't tell you how many people I've seen join FAANG that
| I've worked with who are actually quite poor performers in
| a real world context. It's very easy to grind leetcode and
| game the system as its structured.
|
| Its true too that at scale the correlation is probably good
| enough to end up with a decent workforce though. But also
| very easy to tweak judging criteria to be more highly
| correlated to real world success. I've hired close to 100
| engineers, and its immediately obvious to me who will
| perform well by how they carry themselves in the interview.
| I pretty much don't even take into consideration whether
| they reach an optimal runtime solution. One of the best
| guys I hired couldn't even implement a tree
| traversal/DFS/BFS in the interview
| arinlen wrote:
| > _I feel two ways about this. You need to give people time to
| grow into a role and time to get really good at it. But you
| also need to watch closely and make sure that growth and
| expertise are occurring, and if not, get better people in._
|
| I found the way you chose to frame this to be a bit disturbing.
| You framed the employer as a passive watcher of a process where
| they invest zero and provides zero input, except for the part
| where they feel entitled to terminate staff for the sole sin of
| not blossoming greatness in the vast desert of growth that was
| your creation.
|
| How about this: if what you seek is growth and expertise, why
| not explicitly nurture that in the environment you create?
| manmal wrote:
| I agree about culture & environment. There are people though
| who barely manage to write fizz buzz, and I believe you
| wouldn't want to pay them for programming work.
| devmunchies wrote:
| This was a good podcast with Bushnell where he talked about the
| his personal backstory and founding of Atari.
| https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/atari-with-nolan-bushnell
| lostgame wrote:
| Weird take; I wonder what an alternate universe where the Jaguar
| didn't rival the Saturn in terms of difficulty to develop for
| would look like.
|
| I'm aware this wouldn't have solved the other issues - such as
| the desperate need for a 'Killer App', and - of course - the big
| Sonic/Mario problem of the time, which was a major draw into SEGA
| or Nintendo's camp.
|
| The system - as is - is probably way more capable than what we
| were able to see from the software we got.
|
| I read that a ton of Jaguar games actually abused the sound chip
| (I think this was it?) - which was a Z80, or something similarly
| simple to develop for, and thusly some of the software was
| literally using maybe 20% of its potential.
|
| The previously-mentioned SEGA Saturn would often be similarly
| abused (though not _nearly_ quite as bad as running most of your
| program code off the _sound chip_ ) where programmers would use
| only one of the core graphics chips or only of the SH2's (or
| both...) which resulted, of course, in much; much poorer
| performance than the serious powerhouse the Saturn was during its
| lifetime.
|
| Many PlayStation/Saturn ports of the same side by side make this
| difference brutally obvious. (The Saturn DOOM port is, sadly; a
| notorious example. It was Carmack's decision not to run it on the
| 2 VDP's - to which he later acknowledged was a mistake.)
|
| The Saturn and Jaguar debacles _really_ woke up the industry a
| lot to caring about developer needs - with documentation and
| follow through with developer support so poor that even at-the-
| time behemoth EA refused to support SEGA's next console, the
| Dreamcast; in what would've been an unthinkable move 5 years
| before.
|
| EDIT: after making some corrections, I realized on editing I
| pulled all this info from memory; which honestly makes me one
| hell of a geek, lol...
| russfink wrote:
| Some of the games appeared to not have randomness (eg PacMan
| ghost patterns). Was this an intentional gameplay feature, or did
| the hardware lack a suitable source of entropy?
| Miraste wrote:
| The ghost patterns in most Pac-Man gameplay are designed on
| purpose, but the directions they turn when running from Pac-Man
| once he's eaten a pellet are intended to be random. From a
| broadly interesting look at the game's internals
| (https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-pac-man-dossier):
|
| "The PRNG generates an pseudo-random memory address to read the
| last few bits from. These bits are translated into the
| direction a frightened ghost must first try. If a wall blocks
| the chosen direction, the ghost then attempts the remaining
| directions in this order: up, left, down, and right, until a
| passable direction is found. The PRNG gets reset with an
| identical seed value every new level and every new life,
| causing predictable results."
|
| I don't know how the initial RNG works (the source is available
| online, but my Atari ASM skills seem to be lacking), but more
| modern takes sometimes use a linear-feedback shift register, as
| seen here: https://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-lets-make-
| a-game-sp...
| simias wrote:
| I can't answer for Atari but I know that games from that time
| would usually derive randomness from user input timings. There
| simply wouldn't be a readily available source of (good) entropy
| available otherwise and using a complicated algorithm to
| harvest it and "mix" it would be prohibitively expensive. And
| who cares for crypto-grade entropy in a game anyway?
|
| It's actually still common with much more recent games where
| there are viable strategies that involve putting the RNG in a
| known-state (for instance at init) and then performing very
| precise actions to trigger a normally random event with 100%
| certainty. Here's an example for Final Fantasy XII:
| http://www.fftogether.com/forum/index.php?topic=2778
|
| Basically the strategy is that by using a "cure" spell several
| times in a row and looking at how much health it regenerates in
| the game you can guess the position within the RNG output
| sequence (that is fixed and resets when you power down the
| console). Then when you know where you are you can plan your
| actions knowing ahead of time what the RNG will output and
| whether it'll be favourable or not.
|
| I believe that what you observed in Pacman was however due to a
| primitive AI: each ghost would have a simple strategy and stick
| to it, making them predictable and non-random by design.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Yes the movements in original Pac-Man were deterministic.
| There were books published back in the day that detailed the
| pattern you should take to beat each level. They were hard
| codes paths. There were a few variations and the only thing
| stopping you was your execution at higher and higher speeds.
| I got to the point on a Nintendo DS port of it where I could
| pretty much play forever (255 levels I think).
|
| Ms. Pac-Man didn't have this as the ghosts were not
| deterministic any longer.
| mikestew wrote:
| Original, arcade cabinet Pac-Man got an update after a
| while that eliminated the deterministic patterns. I'm sure
| the owners of 7-11 stores across the U. S. rejoiced, as I
| was one of those taking up space for quite a while for the
| price of a quarter (of a U. S. dollar).
| Lammy wrote:
| "This is the heart of the game. I wanted each ghostly enemy to
| have a specific character and its own particular movements, so
| they weren't all just chasing after Pac Man in single file,
| which would have been tiresome and flat." -- Toru Iwatani, Pac-
| Man creator
|
| https://gameinternals.com/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavi...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The ghost behavior is the real genius behind the game. Even
| if you don't realize it, your subconscious learns how each
| ghost operates and longer you play the more you learn how to
| exploit it.
| [deleted]
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "HTG: What is your favorite Atari game ever published by Atari?
| Bushnell: Tempest."
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| > Benj Edwards, How-To Geek: Do you think the video game industry
| has lost sight of any innovations from the early days of Atari?
|
| > Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded
| as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a
| newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading
| instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of
| people right now.
|
| > HTG: If you play a modern game, you have to sit and wait for
| loading, go through a tutorial, watch all the cutscenes, and it's
| an hour into the game before you can finally play something.
|
| I don't agree there. Some games are still like this. "Arcade"
| games are not the ones I like. I didn't like them when I had an
| Atari 800 XL but back then there wasn't really much else to play,
| due to limited system resources.
|
| But even back then I loved "Adventure", the idea of a whole world
| inside that computer. Shooting endless waves of aliens had much
| less impact on me.
|
| We have more types of games now, and some are approaching the
| complexity of the real world. Some are still not. This is a good
| thing IMO.
| criddell wrote:
| I mostly like shooters (like Far Cry) and skip every cut scene
| I can. I wish games had an _auto-skip all cutscenes_ option. It
| drives me nuts to have to skip more than one cutscene in a row.
| Do they really think I'm going to want to skip three cutscenes
| and then watch the fourth?
| mattnewton wrote:
| How do you feel about games like the original half life,
| which mostly don't have cutscenes separate from the game,
| just scripted events on rails you can observe?
| supernovae wrote:
| Regarding games "feeling hard" - I don't think video games would
| have survived and flourished so well if they were all so easy
| that you could plop a quarter in and just start playing.
|
| And even then, easy was in the eye of the beholder. As a kid, i
| lost a lot of quarters wondering wth was going on in game and
| Atari had more bad games than good games. To think i paid $60 USD
| for Pole Position back in the day. I'd take Forza anyday over
| that old road wiggle experience.
| joezydeco wrote:
| (nitpick: Pole Position was created by Namco. Atari was the
| distributor in the USA)
| keithnz wrote:
| I remember having pole position as a cartridge for my Atari
| 800XL, plug it in, turn it on, and instantly into the game! I
| played that game a LOT.
| supernovae wrote:
| Pole position started that crappy trend of pay per time vs
| pay per lives, but otherwise i did play that cart a lot too
| :)
| snorkel wrote:
| Mobile games today seem to have Atari's "easy to learn,
| difficult to master" design philosophy.
| snorkel wrote:
| (Which is also the title of a great documentary on Atari on
| Amazon Prime video)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Bushnell suggests the opposite near the top of this interview,
| that part of a coin-op game was exactly that you _did_ need to
| let people plop a quarter in and just start playing!
|
| > Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded
| as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a
| newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without
| reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost
| by a lot of people right now.
|
| Which makes sense to me, of COURSE you have to be able to "just
| start playing" if you wanted to get someone to put a quarter
| into a machine they hadn't played before!
| Natsu wrote:
| The older arcade cabinets had instructions printed on the
| cabinet itself and the game would generally show a sort of
| demo screen giving you an idea of what you were doing with a
| little bit of tutorial on them.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea, but in general that's 3 or 4 lines of simple text.
|
| Some of the RTS/simulation stuff I play these days have an
| hour or two of tutorials to explain all the complicated
| underpinnings of things occurring.
| Natsu wrote:
| Agreed, I'm just pointing out that not only were they
| generally simple, they had controls & instructions on the
| cabinets.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| My guess is that this was an era where an engineer did
| everything and so game design (the act of worrying about
| making a game fair, fun, intuitive, challenging, all in the
| right balances) probably suffered (and perhaps didn't really
| exist as a discipline for interactive digital games.)
| phkahler wrote:
| Yeah, they really missed that with I,Robot which made you
| choose between the game and the ungame. If you just pressed a
| button and oops!
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| The people who designed Williams arcade games apparently had
| a different philosophy.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Whenever people complain about the difficulty of Fromsoft
| games, I just think back to the early days of Atari and the
| pre-battery-save NES. No continues, you just go as far as you
| can and if that's not good enough, you get to start from the
| beginning until you get past it.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| There have been so many clickbait articles about how Fromsoft
| games are "the hardest games in the world" or other nonsense
| like that. That's never even been Fromsoft's goal, and it's
| not even close to accurate. They're arguably not even the
| hardest games of their type, Nioh is a lot harder from my
| perspective, and its gameplay was largely inspired by
| Fromsoft's games.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| They're both hard for the same reason (to me anyway).
|
| The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for
| me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The
| feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how
| long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up
| again.
|
| Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and
| say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to
| that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to
| go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm
| stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11
| and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle
| continues.
|
| Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part
| before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know
| the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at
| some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't
| play games like I used to. I have the same issues with
| fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic
| games, because they usually have the kindness to put a
| checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely
| puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss.
|
| I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc
| Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm
| willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I
| don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it
| just means I'm probably not going to play them.
|
| Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive
| multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to
| get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it
| to getting good.
| munificent wrote:
| It's an interesting psychological design challenge. Games
| are trying to do two things simultaneously:
|
| 1. Give you a deep sense of gratification when you succeed.
|
| 2. Keep the stakes low and make the game feel safe to play.
|
| Humans experience things in terms of contrasts, so the
| easiest way to ramp up the gratification on winning is to
| punish the player if they lose.
|
| But what punishments are available to a game? You could
| imagine a game that demanded access to your bank account
| and withdrew cash every time you lost. Or maybe it deleted
| a random file off your hard disk. Playing would definitely
| work up a sweat and give you a profound sense of relief if
| you won. But it would completely undermine the sense of
| safety needed to make a game feel like a _game_ and not a
| job or task.
|
| Because of (2), most games can't really take much from you.
| The main punishments they are able to mete out are:
|
| 1. Waste your time. Give you timers or cut scenes that have
| to be replayed before you can jump back in.
|
| 2. Bore you by making you replay stuff you've already
| played.
|
| 3. Destroy virtual items. If the game randomly generates
| treasure, then losing it on player death can be
| particularly anguishing because you don't know when you'll
| get it back.
|
| But, really, that all boils down to wasting your time.
| Because you can always get back that lost item if you grind
| long enough.
|
| That means that the cost model for playing the game varies
| widely based on player free time. Like you, I simply no
| longer have a lot of free time that I'm willing to pour
| into games. So, while I still like them, they're
| effectively too expensive for me to afford.
| imapeopleperson wrote:
| Anyone interested in building hardware for modern pong?
| [deleted]
| mistrial9 wrote:
| personal experience dealing with this &#$ _& ^$#@_# -- overall
| rating, probably "proto-VC" is accurate, similar to other
| primitive life forms. Definitely a taste for publicity, cant deny
| that.
| lukasb wrote:
| _HTG: What did you do "right" in the early years of Atari that
| people could learn from today?
|
| Bushnell: We did really good branding._
|
| Yep, they were great at this, and that's why Atari is still
| famous, rather than just the individual games.
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