Did you know?

There are some pieces of gaming trivia most people know. I have compiled a list of lesser known facts.

Night Trap

The Atari 2600 and the NES had pretty much the same processor.

The NES used a MOS Technology 6502 processor. The 2600 used an offshoot of the 6502 called the 6507, which had fewer pins and, as a result, could address only 8 KB of memory.

Night Trap & Sewer Shark were developed in the late ’80s.

In 1985 development began on the Nemo. Nemo began as a prototype that was essentially a modified ColecoVision, designed to combine graphic images with video. It stored data on VHS tapes that contained audio and video as well as the game itself. Development was started by Axlon and later funded by Hasbro.

The first game was Night Trap. In 1987, the second game called Sewer Shark was created. After filming Sewer Shark, Hasbro left the project and the games and footage were stored in a warehouse. It wasn’t until 1992 when the Sega CD came out that the technology to do the game as originally envisioned was on the market.

The NES was almost an Atari system instead of Nintendo.

In 1984, Nintendo wanted to break into the America video game market and approached Atari to release the Famicom in America under the Atari name. Both companies had a tentative agreement until Atari learned Coleco was demonstrating a prototype of Donkey Kong for the Coleco Adam home computer system. This angered Atari who thought they would have exclusive rights to any Nintendo properties. They pulled out of the deal. Nintendo decided to make the Nintendo Advanced Video System themselves. Later they renamed the AVS to Nintendo Entertainment System. The rest is history.

Steve Jobs basically cheated Steve Wozniak out of money when he worked at Atari.

Steve Jobs started working at Atari as a technician. In 1975 Atari created a game called Breakout. Jobs was assigned to create a circuit board for the game. It had too many chips. Al Alcorn, the project manager, offered Jobs $750 and $100 for each chip he could remove from the design. Jobs made a Deal with Steve Wozniak and they reduced the amount of chips to 50. The design that was too complicated for an assembly line. Jobs told Wozniak that they paid him only $700 instead of the $5000 that he received. Wozniak only received $350.

Posted December 17th, 2012

About the author

Scott Hough has been playing games since 1986. His parents bought him a used Atari 7800 for his 6th birthday. He was hooked. He loves RPGs, RTS, and Flight Sim games. He is a big fan of the Dragon Quest franchise.


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