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Musician (metal guitarist) and aspiring furry writer!

I love Rain World, soulslikes, Monster Hunter, and cool weird games with immaculate vibes!

Music obsessed and guitar obsessed!


Lizstar
@Lizstar

This is a very weird piece of video game history, but honestly really funny. Okay, to start, we gotta go WAY back.

The Venetian Blinds technique was a way to display sprites on the Atari 2600. Basically, the 2600 could only display 6 sprites simultaneously. To get around this, earlier games had sprites flicker, appearing every other frame so that they could basically get 12 on screen. This, of course, looks kinda bad, and can irritate players. So Bob Whitehead, a developer at Atari, came up with a technique where every alternate horizontal line of a sprite is displayed instead. It's a little more pleasing on the eyes, and still allows more sprites. A good compromise!

Anyways, let's change gears a bit. Did you know working at Atari was absolutely fucking horrible? Atari barely paid its developers, treated them like dog shit, and refused to let them be credited in any way. Pretty bad. So a bunch of the best devs at Atari split in 1979 to form a little company that could called Activision, which was formed to counter these values, and be a GOOD company to its developers! God I want to sob but can't even muster up the energy.

Anyways, Atari didn't like this, because they were greedy and awful. After Activision made some good games for the 2600, Atari sued them, claiming that they had broken non-disclosure agreements and had stolen trade secrets. The trade secret directly mentioned was the Venetian Blinds technique, which for the record, NO Activision game had even USED at that point. It was a blatantly frivolous lawsuit by a big company trying to scare a new one.

So, to improve morale around Activision, two of the devs, one of which being Bob Whitehead himself, made a cute little demo, and claimed that "while we are using the Venetian Blinds technique here, it's a unique innovation, cause of the pretty sunset."

What IS the demo? It's uh, a venetian blind. You can draw the blinds and see the sunset, or let them go down. That's about it. It's not a game. It's a shitpost joke made by anxious developers afraid that the biggest company would destroy them just because they could. That lawsuit eventually got settled out of court btw, and no one's publicly stated how it turned out, though apparently Activision had to pay some royalties, which blows.

Anyways this demo was never intended for public release or eyes, obviously. It was shown off at a 1982 consumer electronics show, but was otherwise not really known about, though the sunset in it was later used in Barnstorming. It was officially released though in 2003 in Activision Anthology, which went into the details and history of it. And its a very interesting part of gaming history! Thank God big companies no longer treat their employees like shit and then punish them with a smiting hand when they actually try to fight back. Thank God THAT'S over.

The set itself is a joke set where you lift and lower blinds 100 times and it took me 5 minutes.

If you're curious about more, here's a fun review by Bad Game Hall of Fame: https://www.badgamehalloffame.com/venetian-blinds/


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in reply to @Lizstar's post:

I don't know if you've ever watched the mini docu series that Howard Scott Warshaw made years back called Once Upon Atari, but I highly recommend it if you haven't. It's a fascinating look into stuff that happened at the company and interviews with a lot of the programmers who were there at the time.