Word: atari
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...rule, don't get it. Which may be why the video-game craze has been seen by most adults -- including the captains of the entertainment industry -- as a dead end. For 20 years they have watched the advent of Pong and Pac-man, the rise and fall of Atari, the arrival of the Japanese, and have dismissed videogaming as a temporary detour far removed from the mainstream of modern American culture -- which is to say, movies and prime-time television...
...million Super NES sets. What's less clear is how long that enthusiasm will last. At best, say analysts, over the next five years Nintendo will sell about two-thirds as many of the new systems as it sold of the old. At worst, Nintendo could end up like Atari, which in the early 1980s tried to replace a wildly successful video-game player with one that was more powerful but incompatible. Atari ended up with a mountain of unsold game cartridges that got loaded onto dump trucks and used as landfill...
Part of the media's interest stems from the company the technology has been keeping. Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari in the mid-'70s, eagerly foresees games in which people would not just play but actually be Ms. Pac-Man. One of the most enthusiastic proponents is Timothy Leary, the former Harvard researcher who popularized LSD in the '60s and now has visions of a whole new generation "tripping" electronically. "Everyone will be equal in cyberspace," says Leary. "Inequalities of class and race will be eliminated...
...idea was a backlash of the Atari and Intellivision craze, which before dying a couple of years ago, engulfed now-college students to the point where talk of "Adventure" and "Breakout" was a more dominant subject of conversation than anything else...
...toughest finds was an original Pong machine, introduced by Atari in 1972 and considered the first successful video game. The search at one point led to a dealer in New York City reputed to have 21 games in his basement; unfortunately, the building had been torn down three months earlier, and all the games were buried under the rubble. The museum finally found a Pong machine in an arcade operator's collection in Great Neck, N.Y., a week and a half before the exhibit was to open. The museum also unearthed one of the last surviving copies of Death Race...