Venetian Blinds

“A Fully Operational Venetian Blind.”

“Conceived and designed by Activision.”
Mock-up box art re-created by me.

Hey folks, have you heard the good news? No more video games! Eyup, it’s been a long time coming, but they’re all gone now and they’re never coming back. So, go ahead and pack it up; nothing to see here, end of an era, so on and so forth.

Sike! April Fools! Boy howdy did I have you tricked there for a minute or what, huh? That’s why they call me “Cass the Master Prankster,” folks: You hang around me long enough, you’re gonna end up getting bamboozled, boy I tell ya’…

Okay, so I don’t actually have any sort of jokes or stunts planned for April Fool’s day. Truth be told, I actually kind of find the whole “mess around on your website on April 1st” gimmick a little played out. So, I’m gonna take it in a different direction on the Bad Game Hall of Fame: Instead of writing joke articles about regular games or something like that, I’m going to write regular articles about “joke games” — titles which themselves were intended as pranks, novelties, or outright hoaxes. That being said, today’s subject was perhaps designed with a more unique intention: Pettiness.

Today we look at the most realistic windowsill simulator ever committed to an Atari 2600 cartridge. It’s honestly something of a stretch to even call it a “game,” as there’s no real objective to reach or entertainment to be had with it. In fact, I can pretty much sum up its whole functionality in a single sentence: You can open and close a set of blinds in front of a window. Needless to say, this was never intended as an actual retail product to be bought and sold… until someone had the gall to do exactly that. This is the story of the making [and eventual monetization] of Venetian Blinds.

“Is This What You Guys Are Referring To?”

Atari Inc. were on top of the world moving into the early 80s: They had nearly single-handedly popularized the medium of video games, to the point where they were almost entirely synonymous with the term. More tangibly speaking, their arcade division had generated $52 million in sales come fiscal 1979, with their consumer division managing a whopping $200 million on its own.^[1] Now, this doesn’t account for an admittedly floundering pinball division, but the point of fact here is that Atari were very profitable in this period, and that it seemed to all the world that they would only become more valuable over time. This period of profitability served not only to establish the brand as “The Name” in video games, but also certainly afforded employees at the company some level of job security. A general rule of business goes that the higher profits are, the higher spirits are.

However, despite existing in what is sometimes reported to have been a perpetual state of partying, not all staff at Atari were happy. In addition to an environment that was allegedly very often uncomfortable for female staff,** there was a problem across the board where programmers and designers went largely uncredited for their work on games. Not only did software of this era tend to lack any sorts of credit rolls or acknowledgements in-game, but the manuals didn’t credit creators either. Of course, this trend would exist for some years in the industry outside of just Atari, with the often-cited justification being that publishers feared their employees being scouted by the competition and stolen away from them — a flimsy excuse, but one which at least passes for justifiable. Only one problem for Atari trying to pass this off: They didn’t have any real competition.***

The real reason developers went uncredited was so that none of them could become “rock stars”; where consumers might come to know them by name and develop sort of programmer-specific loyalties. Of course, the reason Atari would want to avoid this is because they didn’t want to renegotiate contracts with employees who had name recognition behind them — increasing their value and having a better bargaining position when it came to talks of wages. God forbid a billion dollar corporation allocate even a fraction of a percent of their profits towards properly compensating their staff. Naturally, employees at Atari were acutely aware of the situation and their company’s intentions, fueling frustrations internally. It is out of this frustration that perhaps the most famous video game “easter egg” was born — debatably the first of its kind altogether. Warren Robinett – developer of Adventure on the 2600 – details the motivation behind sneaking his name into the game:

“Atari would not give public credit to game designers. This was right after Atari had been acquired by Warner Communications. It was a power play to keep the game designers from getting recognition and therefore more bargaining power. So I created a secret room that was really hard to find, and hid my signature in it. I didn’t tell anybody (this was a hard secret to keep to myself) and let Atari manufacture a few hundred thousand cartridges and ship them around the world. […] They couldn’t punish me. Well, they could garnish my royalties… oops, no royalties. Well, they could remove my name from the box… well, no, it was never on the box.” ~ Warren Robinett^[2]

Creative as this gag may have been, it didn’t really do much to further the cause for developer recognition. On that front, a faction of programmers within the company would have to take more assertive action. In May of 1979, four employees walked into the office of CEO Ray Kassar, and demanded royalties for programmers across the company. These four employees were David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead; the quartet responsible for the bulk of Atari’s software sales. As David Crane recounts after having gotten a look at an interoffice memo: “There were 35 people in the department, but the four of us were responsible for 60 percent of the sales.”^[3]

As you might expect, this meeting didn’t go smoothly. Not only did Mr. Kassar deny their request, but he also took the opportunity to diminish their self-supposed value to the company, and demonstrated his own lack of understanding of the very industry itself in the process. As Larry Kaplan tells it: “Kassar called us towel designers. He said, ‘I’ve dealt with your kind before. You’re a dime a dozen. You’re not unique. Anybody can do ­a ­cartridge.’”^[3b] With those words of encouragement, the four programmers were sent back to their workstations and expected to get back to business as usual: Slaving away for $22,000 a year as they brought in literal tens of millions to their place of work. They would not stand for this.

Within a year’s time, the crew had left Atari, but still determined to make games for their former employer’s hardware. This was literally unprecedented at the time: They were, perhaps unknowingly, setting the example for all future companies who would come to be known as “third-party” developers. Their Activision company would be the first of its kind — not to mention becoming one of the longest-running institutions in all of games development. Of course, Activision these days is known as something of a behemoth. But back in the 80s, they were the scrappy underdogs. Nowadays, they hold control over some of the most major licenses in the industry, and are capable of crushing smaller companies beneath their foot. In 1980, they still had to double-check with lawyers to make sure what they were doing was actually legal.

Activision would find almost immediate success in their field, with a launch lineup poised to net them quick millions: Boxing, Checkers, Dragster, and Fishing Derby. Now, it may be hard to look back on these releases through a modern lens, and fully understand what differentiates the likes of these titles from Atari’s standard fare. What they managed to excel at was executing relatively simple ideas with a more refined degree of presentation; using all manner of programming trickery in order to perform visual feats folks might not have known the 2600 was even capable of. These programmers knew the hardware better than anyone else at the time, understood what consumers were looking for in games, and leveraged that knowledge in order to produce some million-selling cartridges for the console.

Again, as you might expect, Atari was not thrilled by this. Before Activision’s launch lineup had even hit store shelves, Atari were already in the process of trying to sabotage the upstart: Running full page attack ads in trade show prints, threatening retailers who might dare to stock Activision titles, and – perhaps most seriously – threatening a full-on lawsuit against the company. On what charges? “Stealing proprietary information.” Their argument was that during the time spent by the Activision staff working for Atari, they had come to acquire valuable technical knowledge and programming techniques that they may not have otherwise been able to discern — knowledge and techniques that Atari alleged belonged to them and them alone. Chief among this classified information was something known as “the ‘venetian blind’ technique”; a programming trick Bob Whitehead himself had pioneered in developing 1979’s Video Chess.

Which begs the question: What in tarnation is this so-called “venetian blind” technique, and what’s the big deal about it? Well, before we can answer that, we first need to learn a little about the 2600’s hardware limitations. Needless to say, there were loads of things that you simply couldn’t do on the console given cartridge restrictions and system processing limitations. Perhaps one of the more stifling limitations was the inability to render more than six unique sprites simultaneously on a horizontal line of resolution; a task which itself already required its own degree of programming trickery in order to pull even that off. Bear in mind that this was hardware which Atari itself had initially envisioned as having “a life of two or three years” after its initial 1977 release,^[4] and that they didn’t necessarily plan on having to overcome these sorts of hurdles.

Commonly, the workaround for this sprite limit would be to intentionally utilize “flicker” — flashing sprites on-and-off-screen so they would only appear on something like every other frame. Famously, 1982’s conversion of Pac-Man to the 2600 would have its four on-screen ghosts constantly flicker in order to accomodate them all moving individually of one another. On an older CRT television, the ghosting and color bleeding factors of these displays meant that the trick could possibly create the illusion of all sprites being on-screen at the same time. But it certainly wasn’t a perfect solution, and could often be downright unpleasant for some players to look at. It’s also an effect which doesn’t always capture well in 30 FPS internet videos, leading to a long-standing misconception among some folk that the 2600 Pac-Man only had two ghosts.

This is where venetian blinds come in. By only drawing every other vertical line of a sprite – leaving pixel-wide gaps in-between – you could offset sprites occupying the same row by just one pixel, to where their visible vertical lines fall on the same empty spaces as their adjacent sprites, thus ignoring the limitation. To picture it another way; imagine a set of venetian blinds, where the panels that comprise it can be angled so that they leave gaps between each layer. And so, while this effect in games may have left you with sprites that looked like they had stripes, the color bleed on CRTs may have well filled these gaps. In either case, it was still a more effective and visually-appealing technique than constant flickering. In the case of Video Chess, it allowed for the seemingly impossible feat of displaying a full range of eight different player pieces on the same row of chessboard squares.

So, here’s the issue: Bob Whitehead developed this particular trick during his time at Atari. Therefore, Atari believed they owned the right to the use of that programming technique, and that Whitehead taking it with him to Activision amounted to theft of a trade secret. This was alleged despite the fact that Whitehead had innovated the technique himself, and that none of Activision’s launch lineup titles actually even demonstrated the technique in question. Needless to say, the basis for this particular allegation was shaky at best.

To be honest, I don’t think Atari were actually deluded enough to believe their own argument here: It seems more plausible that Atari had simply hoped that the very threat of them filing suit would be enough to dissuade the Activision from pursuing their business endeavors. It was just one prong of their multifront offensive — one of several simultaneous scare tactics they had schemed up. And if and when they failed to intimidate Activision, their Plan B seemed to be to discredit them publicly; aiming instead to scare off other companies from establishing business relations with the team. Crane speaks of a full-page ad that ran in the 1979 Consumer Electronics Show’s dailies:

“It said, ‘Atari believes that anyone who would steal trade secrets from another company and try to profit on them are evil, terrible people.’ They didn’t mention Activision by name, but it was pretty clear they were talking about us. It was funny, because they made that statement, but we all agreed with it because we weren’t stealing anything. They tried to paint us as being ­really ­bad.” ~ David Crane^[3c]

With Activision undeterred by these threats and still successfully managing to negotiate funding through venture capital, Atari decided to go forward with their frankly frivolous lawsuit, probably hoping to at least tie Activision up in some legal red tape and waste their time and money. By this point, staff at the small upstart had to be sick of Atari trying to smear them and meddling in their affairs. And so, David Crane decided to make the most of a shitty situation, by at least trying to have some fun at their corporate bully’s expense.

The story behind the actual motivation and circumstances of what would come to be known as the “Venetian Blinds Demo” has always varied from source to source and from site to site. This is largely thanks to what I gather to be the site first responsible for revealing the existence of the demo to the public at large – AtariProtos – who complemented their findings with their take on when [and to whom] the program was first shown. By their account, David Crane cooked up the cartridge with the intent to play a joke on Atari’s lawyers, showing them the game while quipping “Is this what you guys are referring to?” As funny a story as that may sound, the reality is that Activision weren’t actually quite that brash.

As it turns out, Crane himself has given an actual first-hand account of the cartridge’s historical context, which has largely gone ignored / unreported in favor of the AtariProtos version of events. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that rather than going directly to the press with it, it was instead most largely distributed in the form of a bonus feature on a Game Boy Advance cartridge. Yes, the official story is seemingly exclusive to 2003’s Activision Anthology compilation — specifically the versions available on computers and Nintendo’s then-current portable console offering. By my account, I think I might be the first person to ever bother transcribing this elusive block of text, and so I’ll go ahead and present it here in full:

“The Venetian Blind cart is a working 2600 demo that shows a landscape at sunset outside a window, covered by a fully operational Venetian Blind — one that moves up and down under joystick control. Here is how it came about:

When Atari sued Activision they laid claim to certain ‘proprietary’ techniques. One technique for which they claimed ownership was first used by Bob Whitehead in the display code of the Atari Chess cartridge. This method moved the display objects back and forth every scan line to allow the game to display more objects. On the chess pieces, for example, Bob showed the odd pixel row of the odd numbered columns of pieces and the even pixel row of the even numbered columns. We called this the Venetian Blind technique since it made the pieces look like they were being viewed through a venetian blind.

One day in the lab at Activision while the lawsuit was in full swing, Bob and I collaborated on a practical joke. We made a display showing an architecturally accurate window with a view of a grassy hill at sunset. We covered it with a venetian blind effect that animated up and down (complete with the stacking up of the slats as they were gathered up by the blind mechanism). We took it to CES and showed it to a few people who were privy to the lawsuit, asking ‘Is this what Atari means by the Venetian Blind Technique?’

The joke was on us in one respect, when we realized that we had made public our latest innovation (the background sunset) when we showed it to our competitors. (Several games in the lab were using this new idea, but they had not yet been published.) As it turned out, nobody picked up on our slip and nobody beat us to market with the sunset.” ~ David Crane^[5]

** I simply don’t have the energy [or the space] to get into all the details about this here; so I’ll just leave a couple links to David Kushner’s 2012 Playboy article detailing the “Sex, Drugs, and Video Games” environment that the Atari offices fostered, and to Rolling Stone’s Stefanie Fogel recounting of the recent “#notnolan” controversy. For a bit of balance, Kotaku’s Cecilia D’Anastasio also published an article recording comments from twelve female employees of Atari of the era, who are largely positive in their reminiscing on old times.

*** Yes, there were other games consoles on the market at the time. No, none of them had even a small fraction of the brand recognition that Atari enjoyed in this period. The stories of “market confusion” of the era where consumers were supposedly overwhelmed by the number of competing consoles on offer are greatly exaggerated: Atari were far and away the industry leaders of the era, and handily dominated retail space in their heyday.

“The Joke Was on Us in One Respect.”

So, that’s that as far as Venetian Blinds was concerned: It wasn’t made to annoy lawyers or amuse a courtroom, intended to make its way out to the public, or with any other sort of long-term goal in mind. It was just a goofy little program meant to be shared among friends and colleagues for a laugh. And I’ll bet it was pretty successful in that purpose! There’s certainly something amusing about the idea of a veteran programmer putting together a needlessly elaborate and impressive display piece, all for the purpose of a dumb throwaway joke. There’s also the fact that the Venetian Blinds program doesn’t even demonstrate the actual venetian blind technique in question, which is also pretty funny if you ask me.

Again, there are conflicting reports as to whether Atari’s lawsuit was ultimately lost in trial, settled out of court, or simply thrown out by a judge before it ever even materialized. I’m inclined to believe that Atari and Activision did choose to settle: Sources seem to point to an agreement being reached at some time in 1982, wherein Activision would pay Atari some percentage of royalties out of their sales profits.^[6] At this point, the gates were opened for other companies to enter into similar agreements with Atari, and begin to produce their own titles for the console. The era of the third-party developer had begun, and Atari would soon see interest in and profits of their consumer division skyrocket as a result.

For its part, Venetian Blinds wasn’t just completely buried and forgotten by Activision after the fact. The scenic sunset was repurposed for use in 1982’s Barnstorming, as programmed by Activision’s Steve Cartwright. Serving as an effective and quite visually-striking backdrop for the game, it helped the title in being considered among the classics for the console. Only a scant few folk within the industry would recognize the background as Crane and Whitehead’s handiwork from a couple years prior. Outside of this implementation though, that’s really where the relevance of Venetian Blinds ends: It didn’t anger anyone at Atari or prompt them to go ahead with their lawsuit, as it’s doubtful that the company was even aware of the program’s existence during this period. Venetian Blinds wasn’t referenced in any sort of public form or fashion, and seemed to remain an entirely inside joke for the better part of twenty years.

CORRECTION (4-2-18): Thanks to none other than AtariProtos’ own Matt Reichert reaching out to me on the AtariAge forums, I’m now able to provide an accurate account as to how the original “Atari lawyer” story came into being! I’ve rewritten part of the article here accordingly, so as to provide as accurate information as is possible.

It’s thanks to the dedicated Atari enthusiast community that the game was given a spotlight and new life in the 21st century, with AtariAge community member Matt Reichert publishing a page on the then-newly established AtariProtos.com on October 18th, 2002. Having corresponded with an Activision employee by the name of Ken (likely Ken Love; producer for the Activision Anthology titles), it was from this source that he received the supposed details behind the development of Venetian Blinds. However, as Ken wasn’t actually around to see the program developed by Crane and Whitehead, it’s likely that the story as he heard it had been slightly warped by some chain of gossip and rumors within Activision over the years. But with a lack of a first-hand account from Crane himself available at the time – his interview likely having been conducted some months later – this version of events was all they had to go off of.

Matt reported the story as it was told to him, creating a dedicated page for the game on his website. It was at this point that a number of folk were first made aware of the existence of the program, along with a small batch of other demos and prototypes he had also been made privy to at or around that time. With the GBA and PC versions of Activision Anthology containing the full story not releasing until the following year (and even then, only being accessible to a limited audience), the internet would continue to repeat the story as told on AtariProtos. Perhaps if Activision had made a bigger deal of having exclusive interviews with the original developers included in the compilations, word of the full story may have spread sooner?

In any case, that’s how Venetian Blinds managed to somehow technically become a commercial product in 2003 — after two decades of nearly complete secrecy. Granted, it’s nothing like a prominently featured title in these retail compilations: It’s included and presented merely as a novelty, and fittingly so. And with fifty-plus other virtual cartridges available in the PC and GBA versions of the collection, they’re still a fair deal as far as value is concerned. Venetian Blinds is an entirely acceptable inclusion in this sort of format, as it’s not as if you’re paying money for the program on its own. Of course, the idea of putting something like a price tag on a standalone copy of the “game” would be downright ridiculous! Luckily, we can live happily knowing that Activision certainly wouldn’t stoop to that sort of low.

So, totally unrelated, but does anybody here remember Microsoft’s Game Room service? Don’t worry if you don’t: It was a really poorly-executed idea for selling “classic” titles for play in these sort of virtual arcades, adding online leaderboards and replays where applicable. While there was a decent selection of good-to-mediocre arcade games, the large bulk of the available library consisted of Atari 2600 and Intellivision titles; licensed directly from their original publishers (or at least whoever currently owned their names). And don’t get me wrong: There are some genuine classics among their ranks, and I’m always happy to see vintage games officially put back on the market in digital format! But, when it comes to some of their picks… Well, let’s just say that there are some “questionable” selections. And with an asking price of 240 Microsoft Points ($3) if you want to own a game on a permanent basis (as opposed to an alternative model of 40 points / 50¢ for a single play), it becomes very difficult to justify some of the titles available for sale.

The promise was initially made to release “Game Packs” on a weekly basis, with each making a number of assorted new games available for sale. But Game Room was plagued with technical issues and a general lack of interest from the very start, with a number of games decidedly not fitting the format or having controls that didn’t really translate to something like the Xbox 360 controller. Despite the original intention by Microsoft to make “over a thousand” titles available over the course of three years,^[7] they only made it as far as 188, before seeming to quietly give up on the endeavor. The thirteenth [and final] Game Pack released on December 22nd, 2010 would include perhaps the single most egregious title made available for purchase on the service: Good ol’ Venetian Blinds, now with an unjustifiable $3 price tag slapped on top.

As a program that some would argue doesn’t even qualify as a “game,” and as software which was made freely and legally available online by Activision just a few years prior, its inclusion on the service is honestly downright insulting. Of course you can make the argument that “nobody is forcing you to buy it, and anyone who does so deserves what they get.” And sure, that’s fair enough. But the fact that this was made available for sale in the stead of far more deserving titles — the fact that it is an entirely no-frills release with no additional features or functionality… the fact that the “Game History” description it provides is shamelessly copied and pasted from the AtariProtos page. The fact of the matter is, someone could have (and should have) said “No” at some point in the process of making Venetian Blinds available for sale in the year 2010. But no one did.

In the decades since Activision first rose up to stand against corporate greed, they became the very soulless husk they sought to spite so long ago. At some point, the company founded on the principle of recognizing its employees and being more transparent with consumers became a corporation populated by countless unnamed developers, shrouding its business in secrecy and paying little mind to the voices and concerns of their customers. Venetian Blinds is no longer a joke among a group of programmers and friends, nor is it simply a curious note in the history of our industry: It became a product to be paid for, as authorized by a company that has long since “moved on” from its past. I’m sorry if this all sounds particularly dour, but it’s honestly hard to write about this sort of turn of events without contemplating just how much lower the games industry can sink?

Have a happy April Fool’s day, everybody.

[1] Fulton, Steve. “Atari: The Golden Years — A History, 1978-1981.” Gamasutra. August 21, 2008. Web.
[2] Connelly, Joey. “Of Dragons and Easter Eggs: A Chat With Warren Robinett.” The Jaded Gamer. May 13, 2003. Web.
[3] ^{b c} Reeves, Ben. “Activisionaries: How Four Programmers Changed The Game Industry.” Game Informer. February 26, 2013. Web.
[4] Fulton, Steve. “The History of Atari: 1971-1977.” Gamasutra. November 6, 2007. Web.
[5] “Activision Anthology” for Game Boy Advance. Activision / Aspyr. December 8, 2003. Game.
[6] Katz, Arnie and Laurie Yates. “Inside Electronic Game Design.” Prima Lifestyles. October 25, 1995. Print.
[7] Plunkett, Luke. “Xbox Game Room To Feature ‘Over 1000’ Classic Arcade Games.” Kotaku. January 6, 2010. Web.