Jack Tramiel

We say that a cat has nine life and I had already use up 10.

So the Tramiel people came in from Commodore.

We were the old guard.

The first time they come in and they say, you guys screw up, we're gonna fix that.

And we put that in and it all worked.

So at that point, we went over to Commodore and showed it to Jack Tramiel and other people in the office.

And one of the things in the contract was it had to be able to beat the Fidelity Chess Challenger, which had come out in the meantime, another chess game.

It had to win.

I remember going to my lawyer and he said, what does it mean it has to beat? Well, I said, they have to play games against each other and it has to win.

It was like dumbfounded because you can't imagine what people had no idea about computer games in those days.

So anyway, we played these games of chess against a chess challenger and Jack Tramiel played some games and everybody agreed the product was good.

And then I put the ROMs in my pocket and went back to my motel room.

You want to announce what it is? Jack Attack.

What happened when Jack Tramiel took over Atari? Oh, my God.

Well, there you go.

How appropriate.

Anyway, that's the only place you could get this game.

But that section of the magazine was a godsend for beleaguered 8-bit owners after Tramiel basically, without knowing it, basically pummeled all Atari 8-bit software because as soon as the ST came out, and even if you tried to push the Atari 8-bit a little bit, no one made games for the 8-bit.

They just made it for the ST. And...

On the other side, a lot of American companies only made games for the Commodore 64.

But back then, they didn't.

But yeah, it was probably a test to see if they were going to put out the XCGS2 or whatever.

I don't want to give the Tramiel's any credit, but this is something.

It might have been like Mike Katz or one of those other guys.

Oh.

Um, yeah, Jack Tramiel said, um, famously he wanted to create a computer for the masses, not the classes.

Mm.

I think that's supposed to rhyme, the classes.

During one of the interviews in that documentary, there is, just as a graphic, there is in the background a blowup of a document, an internal Atari Corporation document.

So we're talking about Jack Tramiel Atari, an Atari Corporation document that belonged to former Atari artist and good friend of Howard Scott Warshaw, Jerome Domurat, if that's how he pronounces his name, D-O-M-U-R-A-T, or pronounced because he has sadly passed on.

This document, which is only partially visible, it's not entirely visible, is a sales ranking of all Atari VCS games from 1980 through probably about 1990, with yearly sales figures and aggregate sales figures for all of these games.

This is just up on the screen as a background.

Typical for the time, an external drive to store and read software on floppy disks cost extra.

Commodore, declared CEO Jack Tramiel, made computers for the masses, not the classes.

The C64's low price was made possible by an unusual selection of chips.

The CPU was a cheap, efficient, stripped-down industrial controller.

And

so this all comes into play for the Lynx because Atari started doing this thing where they withheld money from Epix, which is the Jack Tramiel special, as we call it on the podcast.

Now, remember Jack Tramiel?

Oh, I remember this guy.

This guy

And I guess they wanted them because they began to systematically deny Epic the payments they were owed until Epic's was in a very bad spot and had to make a bad deal selling the rest of the links rights over to Atari.

That's sort of the TLDR here.

And as I said before, this was all sort of the doing of Jack Tramiel, according to the Digital Antiquarian.