I talked about Atari Adventure, or Atari Video Adventure, here and here. According to Atari, the centers would be “the premiere showcase for the newest innovations in computer learning and video excitement.” There were less than ten locations across the U.S., at least one of them a straight up arcade at the Disneyland Hotel. It was a costly, ambitious enterprise that lost steam after Atari’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial debacle (Christmas, 1982) that partially launched the video game crash of 1983.
The footage includes quite a bit of concept art I haven’t seen, and I love the line: “Atari is dedicated to exploring the human frontiers of high technology.” Nolan Bushnell once referred to his business as “leisure applications of technology,” another nice phrase that’s become an overriding preoccupation of the first world.
Parts of the video were taken from another Atari promo from 1981 called “Inside Atari: The Next Decade” (below). I like the intro about the importance of games reflecting the “politics, the wars, the economic systems of the societies that create them”—narrated over some artsy footage of two white dudes in suits playing Go, an ancient Chinese strategy game.
2 Warps to Neptune 
Thanks for bombarding me this morning with an eff-ton of Atari goodness which, for reasons completely unknown, completely evaded my radar back in the day. Dood. Atari Adventure? And I thought I lived in arcades…AA would’ve been heaven.