Tag: atari

New Horror 2023 – Day 3

“Someone screamed – it was me, it was me – as her flesh blackened and greened and sank in around her bones like fallen cake.”

“The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror” by Carmen Maria Machado (2020)

Horror-ish? Certainly in the spirit of the time. But it’s also just one of those meditative pieces about how one gets here through all the muck of youth and existence, where you are who you are and sometimes you have to wonder how you got to be this way.

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“I’ll tell them what we did and you won’t be able to stand it!”

“Do You Know… the Beast-Man?” by Richard Howell, Colleen Doran, Kevin Cunningham (1992)

Wow. This one’s pretty raw in terms of a character being abused and treated horribly. But the thing is, Machado’s story has the exact same scenes, only between a man (abuser) and a woman (victim) instead of a man (abuser) and a man (victim), like in this story. So why does a man abusing another man stand out to me when the other, more heteronormative abuse does not? And that’s the most fucked up thing here, realizing it’s just because it’s between two men and that’s not normalized in my brain the way it is when it’s a man abusing a woman. This one absolutely got to me.

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“Might be your dream, but it’s my rules!”

Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare dir. Rachel Talalay (1991)

Oh, so is this how Freddy Kreuger became a cartoon? Because pop culture definitely took this character and made him into a spooky family-friendly spokesman. And the movie isn’t being coy about it, but somehow the comedy and campiness doesn’t quite gel. The ending montage showing scenes from the previous movies definitely make me think I should go watch those instead.

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“Remember to carry matches; the HAUNTED HOUSE is very dark.”

Haunted House dev. Atari (1982)

It’s obviously of its time and technology, but I can see how this sort of thing is a progenitor to a lot of what we now know as survival horror. It has limited supplies, a house full of spooky creatures, and most importantly it’s explicitly dark with the need to light one’s surroundings. I also appreciate the many modes available so players can customize their difficulty level.

So I live in silicon valley and it’s sort of like living wedged in between various kingdoms, what with Google and Facebook to the north-west and Apple to the south and various other big companies with huge sprawling campuses all around here. Knowing those places shuffle around billions of dollars is kind of nuts (especially in relation to the poverty all around them).

But I’m also aware that I live in the city where Atari got started. I’m not a big Atari person but I know the history and prominence of that company, and since moving to Sunnyvale (just one letter shy of the hell mouth) I’ve kind of poked around to see what vestiges remain of those game companies from the pre-00s. You can look up addresses of the old HQs and warehouses but much of the time you’ll just find some condos and apartment buildings.

But today, prompted by that recent visit to the Computer History Museum, I decided to look up Andy Capp’s tavern, the spot where the first Pong prototype was installed and Atari realized they had a hit. Turns out the tavern is long closed, of course, but the building still stands as a comedy club. I went there once many years ago, before I knew what used to be there and it was literally right up the street from my house.

And before it was this Rooster T. Feathers place, it was a comedy and dance club called Country Store, fitting in with this area’s former status as orchards for miles.

Now I think I’ll go watch a random comedian and see if I can get any sense of the dive bar it used to be. Turns out these old silicon valley people loved to hash things out at the bar.

ourladyofomega:

November 29, 1972: Atari introduces the Pong video arcade. Al Alcorn created it as a programming exercise, but Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney were so impressed with it that they helped manufacture and distribute the finished product to all points across the U.S.A.

Pong would eventually enter the home market during the 1975 holiday season, and so would their competitors who created various Pong clones to take a bite out of Atari’s profits.


📷: Rob Boudon

(WK)

Hey I was just at the museum where they keep the prototype.