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Atari Labs in particular brainstormed a lot of things, some more on-target than others, so there are quite a few wrong predictions as well. It's interesting tha
by mjn 15y ago
Atari Labs in particular brainstormed a lot of things, some more on-target than others, so there are quite a few wrong predictions as well. It's interesting that it even existed, though. The idea, today, that a videogame company could host a basic-research lab like Bell Labs, MSR, etc., headed by a prominent researcher (Alan Kay was near the top of his fame at the time) seems almost absurd. Google hired Peter Norvig to head up a corporate research lab, but it's hard to imagine Ubisoft or EA doing something like that.
My favorite not-implemented Atari Labs memo, fwiw, was Brenda Laurel's suggestion that they design games for dolphins and humans to play together: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/laurel82_dolphinvideogame.html http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/laurel82_dolphinvideogame.html
- cwe 15y agoSome video game companies still are: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-secret-hardware-project-wearable-computing http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/13/2947088/valve-reveals-secr...
- iamdave 15y agoBy-and-large though, VALVe as a corporation is an outlier in virtually every sense from the rest of the gaming industry. They own 100% of their distribution, they're a developer that distributes for other developers, they're immensely in-tune with their customers, their consistently open support of the modding community, user-vs-profit focused DRM... Despite the fact that VALVe makes games, they're unlike any other gaming company out there right now. The Minecraft team is a few iterations and portfolio additions away from that same tier.
- unwiredben 15y agoAtari was far more than a video game company then. They had personal computers out since 1979 and were looking at seriously entering the education and telecommunications space. I saw a talk from an Atari veteran a few years ago about how they were working on FM subcarrier systems to allow transmitting programs via the sidebands of commercial radio stations.