Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production
arcadeblogger.com129 points by videotopia 5 days ago
129 points by videotopia 5 days ago
I worked in a restaurant in 81 while in HS. Next door was a convenience store that had Defender and Battlezone. I think I spent half of what I made on those two games for a few weeks. I would sneak out for a game. An addiction. I can still hear those Battlezone sounds in my head 45 years later.
Just to get your nostalgia juices flowing again, someone recreated the Defender sound engine in the browser.
I was a huge fan of the Activision remake, and the Battlezone 2 sequel. The mixture of FPS and RTS was really appealing to me.
I had to beg my parents for an ATI Rage LT Pro AGP 8MB card to play the sequel.
The periscope style vector CRTs use in the arcade Battlezone were a claustrophobia and panic-inducing experience. Glowy unpixellated 3d, narrow field of vision. Unforgettably cool.
Fun fact - Atari threatened to sue me for my “clone” of Battlezone.
15 years ago... They had just released a remake in 2008 for the Xbox, so the IP was certainly fresh in their minds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(2008_video_game)
Did they eventually drop the threat or did something else happen?
That's hilarious. God bless the old Atari who wanted to sue the world. The irony now of course is that Atari no longer own Battlezone's IP. Rebellion managed to grab it when Atari went bankrupt in 2013.
Similar footage from the era, taken at Bally/Midway during production of Ms Pac-Man.
> Atari’s primary coin-op manufacturing and headquarters facility was located at 1265 Borregas Ave, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 during the key 1976–1984 period. Another critical site in the immediate area was 1196 Borregas Avenue, used during the subsequent Tramiel era
I don't think these buildings exist anymore.
What a nice time capsule. All praise to the cameraman for doing long steady shots and not replacing the audio with music or commentary.
Are there any articles on how vector graphics were developed for arcade games?
I vaguely remember there was also one home game console that attempted vector graphics but cannot remember the name
Was fascinated with it at the time but with only access to a TRS-80 such things were impossible to learn back then
A really good start is Jed Margolin's website. He was a key engineer in Atari's vector hardware and software through the classic era.
I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content.
Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text.
It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt.
Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own name on the back stating what you’re doing in an obscure way.
The author has updated the site to address this:
"Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated. Which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose. I just wanted to clarify that it is not. It would be pretty daft of me to be knowingly posting AI generated footage on a blog that I’ve worked hard to keep on the up and up. The footage was captured by a CBS news team, and they followed up with an interview of Atari employee (I’ll share that at a later date). Same goes for the images – they’ve been around for a while but clearly were taken at around the same time. The footage was upscaled a little on export from the editing software I used to clip irrelevant parts from. Hope this clarifies – enjoy!"
I'd find it easier to believe this comment is AI generated, given that the account is only 53 minutes old. The text on the t-shirt looks totally normal to me.
The fact that this blogger, whose blog I'm reading for the first time today, has been posting archive footage and imagery, using a pretty similar format, from the same factory since at least 2019 (https://arcadeblogger.com/2019/12/26/atari-coin-op-archive-f...), and also the fact that the new post is his first blog post in 18th months, makes me think it's highly unlikely that this the post AI generated in any way.
People have a lot of misconceptions about the pre-internet era. The past was plenty sophisticated, it just wasn't /digital/. We certainly had things like high resolution video (on analog film) and novelty tee shirts with fun fonts (laid out manually in fixed sizes). There was just more manual work involved in creating, duplicating and distributing these things.
I don't think so. Perhaps AI-upscaled? The footage looks legit and would track with the tube cameras that would have likely been used at that time. Although it sucks that it's deinterlaced to 30fps. Video like this really needs to be preserved without immediately throwing out half of the motion
Yeah, this doesn't look like AI generated. It was probably filmed on super 8 film stock. The clothing, hair cuts, manufacturing process all scream early 80s.
I could see a cheap restoration introduction artifacts as a more likely reason for the look.
It looks more like video to me, honestly. It appears to be a smooth 30fps rather than the 18fps I'd expect from Super 8. There are also telltale stair-stepped sloped lines that demonstrate the effect of the deinterlacing. There did exist luggable 3/4" U-Matic recorders which I'd have to imagine CBS would have been using in 1980.
YouTube/Google doesn't give a shit anymore. They will mangle your video and audio and serve users "enhanced" "improved" "upscaled" encodes without telling you.
---
"YouTube secretly tested AI video enhancement without notifying creators" - Aug 25, 2025
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/08/youtube-secretly-test...
"YouTube will let you opt out of AI upscaling on low-res videos" - Oct 29, 2025
https://www.theverge.com/news/808717/youtube-automatic-ai-up...
---
Not only that, YouTube turned many old videos shot in portrait (from the 2010s and before!) into engagement-boosting "Shorts" crap which get horribly mangled in their own way.
"Notice a weird beauty filter on Shorts? YouTube says it's on purpose" - Aug 26, 2025
https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-shorts-upscaling-ex...
You're not "throwing out half the motion".
Given that PC monitors these days don't have an interlaced mode, how would you display it? Line doubling, so you're throwing out half the vertical resolution?
It totally would have been normal to have a custom shirt like that back in the day. I had a few.
In the late 70s and early 80s, there were custom "iron on" T-Shirt shops in most malls. They would have a wall of larger iron-on decals, primarily logos of sports teams and rock bands, but they also had custom letters, usually in the Cooper typeface. You'd tell them what you wanted, the size and color of your shirt and lettering, and they'd go in the back room and iron what you wanted on your new shirt for a few dollars. This was especially popular with youth sports teams in lieu of professional uniforms, families who wanted to match for a big trip (often with custom names like this), and, as you can see here, jokey custom workplace team shirts.
If you watch a late-70s or early-80s episode of The Price is Right, you'll almost certainly see contestants or audience members in these custom iron-on shirts - same font, same slightly disjointed look.
The left-hand text on Dave Compton's shirt is slightly blurry and unreadable given the resolution, not garbled. But it's not some AI nonsense.
DAVE
COMPTON
(King?) OF PACKERS
(He'll?) PUT IT IN ANY BOX
This isn't just a rah-rah team spirit shirt or something obscure, it's a peculiarly '70s innuendo combining thoughts about his job... and his sexual prowess. Sure, that kind of shirt would cause a modern workplace to, uh, send him packing. As they say, it was a different time.
Here's a thread on Reddit about one of those mall custom iron-on t-shirt shops: https://www.reddit.com/r/70sdesign/comments/hf6f0q/tshirt_ir...
As they say, it was a different time.
I'm friends with someone that worked at Atari around that era and he'll be the first to tell you it was a very loose atmosphere there.
It seems like the kind of thing you’d get at a company party then, say for meeting a milestone.
I agree with the normalcy comment re screen printing. But the video does seem too high resolution from what I would expect. And why doesn't author discoose the source or a reason video was taken. Odd that there's very little chatter between employees but they were in front of a camera. Otherwise very interesting video. We loved battlezone.Way cooler than any other game at the time.
It seems exactly like what you’d get from a decent “prosumer” video camera then.
> But the video does seem too high resolution from what I would expect.
Completely depends on what they were shooting on, the state of the media, the scanning methods used, any post-processing, etc. At first glance this does not look AI generated to me but hey, could be wrong
I don't think that's likely, claiming forged historical footage is real would be a very stupid way to torch one's reputation in a niche field. But it is a bit concerning that the author doesn't declare the source of the video. Especially since they're claiming it hasn't been put online before.
This site has become completly insufferable with the incessant AI accusations IN EVERY SINGLE THREAD, often over the most benign posts.
I think the fact that this happens on HN, where the users are generally more tech-savvy is signaling that trust in media in the online age is in severe decline.
As AI gets better (and there seems no reason to believe it won't for video production) believing what you see online (or on the TV, which already tends to source video for some events from phone footage) will no longer really be a thing.
We have been in a sort of post-truth world for some time but this is a whole new level. Maybe we will go back to newspapers? Physical print can't be switched on you 1984 (the book) style and is delayed enough for there to be some fact checking.
Definitely living in interesting times.
The fact that it was a brand new account just means HN is susceptible to bot accounts with these tech savvy people using AI to make those bots. When the AI accusations are from new accounts like this, I don't think it speaks too much about HN comments as the GP thinks. Not being able to understand that the account is new doesn't say much about the GP either
TBH, some of the text accompanying the photos has the stench of AI-generated text all over it - for instance, the phrase "wasn't just" shows up three times, each time as the exact same sort of negative parallelism. I can understand why someone might be suspicious about the images.
Having some shirts screen-printed for your employees strikes me as a totally normal workplace behavior.