Then we started Battlestar Galactica, for which an early laserdisc was made but not much else, and a preliminary test for Knight Rider, but nothing that was shipped. Another one was Road Runner which was GREAT, and WAS tested in an arcade, and then redesigned to not have the laserdisc because it kept failing.
I actually did not make that game, I just did some work on it to help the team out. And I was right, but we started several games anyway. Bottom line, the technology would not survive the arcade environment, was slow and unreliable, and was very expensive for what you really got out of it. I spent two summer sessions at MIT in 77 and 78 (or maybe 78 and 79) in the Architecture Machine Group (later to become the Media Lab), and basically came back to Atari and suggested that we did NOT do any laserdisc games. I was sent to graduate classes at MIT by Atari to study laser disc technology. Ken Van Mersbergen has the source code for this test game, so should he ever decide to compile and release the ROMS for it, it might be possible to actually play it. Unknown: the name in the top-left corner ("MShoo"?), the name in the bottom-center ("Rubin"? for Owen Rubin?) and "The Master" (?). "Michon" is Ted Michon, another former Last Starfighter team member, "AJM" is likely graphics artist Alan J. Horseman, who was the project leader for the unreleased Atari arcade game, The Last Starfighter. Near the end of the video is a frame of signatures from everyone who worked on putting this test game together.
As far as I know, Atari dropped the project before any serious development started. The footage is basically test footage that used modified Firefox code. This would have been a conversion kit game for Atari's Firefox game. This is a direct copy of the laserdisc footage I archived several years ago, for Atari's unreleased Battlestar Galactica arcade game.
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