The Smiley Smile Message Board

Check out these pages from the manual from Basketbrawl:

http://atariage.com/manual_page.html?SystemID=7800&SoftwareLabelID=724&maxPages=10&currentPage=6

http://atariage.com/manual_page.html?SystemID=7800&SoftwareLabelID=724&maxPages=10&currentPage=7

Bruce "Bruiser" Johnston!  :lol :lol :lol

And distantly related...hmmm....a southern Californian (named "Torrance") who finds himself relocated in New York....hmmm??

Long story short, I know the guy who wrote the manual -- and chances are many of you do too...because he's a BB fan, and he's been active online for years. He used to work for Atari back in the day. He advised me to check out the Basketbrawl manual to see his "inspiration". :)

Bruce was gangsta before the fans ever knew it.

Pacific Palisades represent!

I use to work at Atari in the 1980's. Many of the arcade video games, the 2600, 5200, and 7200 game consoles, 400, 800, and 1200 series computers and disc drives; worked on all of them. Don't remember this game though. When was it released?

What do you think of the ET game? ;D

The one that had its own cemetery?

Yeah! ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au4rDoyiaQ8

We were very disappointed when the ET game came out. We thought it was going to be much better than it was, capitalizing on the recent popular movie and all. Like a few other duds, we knew before it was even released that it wouldn't sell worth a darn.

I met Michael Jackson at Atari, around 1982 or '83. He did a walk-thru because he wanted to invest in the company, who was just purchased by Warner Bros. He wore black pants and a white t-shirt with black penny loafers and was surrounded by guys with suits. Our group stood around and waved hello, and I just walked over and shook his hand. My co-workers and boss thought I had balls for doing that. He looked at me and said, "Nice to meet you" in a high girly voice and a big smile. He musta thought I had balls too.

I read the game only had six weeks of development right before Christmas because the license negotiations took too long.

Oh man, E.T.  What a joke that game was, and it's amazing that Atari was banking on that game to be huge.  But Colecovision was about to enter my world in 1983!

Mikie,
Did you work on the XE series? The XE GS was my first computer when I was about 9 and I still remember opening the box and playing Flight Simulator 2 and Bughunt. Who would have thought-64k RAM and about 2MHz CPU and still better than Vista!!

Cliff - no, the XE was a game console that came out in the late 80's after my tenure at Atari.  It's probably a collector's item now!

It sure is-I sold it a few years back on ebay, boxed with about 80 games and accessories for about £150.

I work on pinball and arcade games for a living.  Interestingly enough, a lot of the Atari game pcb's (for the arcade games) have funny sayings etched on them... kind of in tribute to the rock & roll nature of the company back in the day... so some of the boards, in between the chips and things will have etched on it things like "I wish you were a Beer" or "I'm not dead yet" etc

Some Commodore-manufactured Amiga motherboards had B-52s song titles etched into the boards. I think the Amiga 600 had "June Bug" etched, Amiga 1200 had "Channel Z," and Amiga 500 had "Rock Lobster."

As for when "Basketbrawl" came out, I'm pretty sure it was toward the end of the Atari 7800's run.