I'd like to announce to Stellalist that Stella at 20: Volume 1 is now complete.
In the end there is no intro to computers or 2600 architectural tutorial on
it. We'll have to do something along those lines later on, either as a
companion video, multimedia CDROM presentation, book, or something
online. I think it's well worth doing. On the other hand, it maintains
the purity of being a narrator-less piece, told purely in the words of the
participants. So while some of Joe Decuir's explanations are incomplete,
it's still in his own words within the roundtable setting. By never
cutting away to voiceovers with animated diagrams, I think it flows a
little bit better.
But on the practical side, it was just too much for me to handle on a
workload and an intellectual basis (not being really that familiar with the
2600 system at the actual assembly or gate level). I know the gist of how
it works, but I'm far from being qualified to draft a document on how to
write for it. I was winding up rewriting the Stella programmer's guide and
thinking, why bother if the resources are already available online?
Remember, these were very off the cuff, stream of consciousness
moments. For most of the Nolan sessions, for the most part, they happened
automatically like hitting the play button on the VCR. "Tell me how the
2600 came to be" was about as much as I needed to say, and they would start
spinning stories for a half hour straight. They were sharing stories not
so much for me or the camera, but between their peers, which is a very
unique feel to it that I haven't seen elsewhere, although I _tried_ to
duplicate it for Arcade Party Pak.
I think the parts of Stella at 20 that wind up being the most unique, and
compelling, are the human interest stories, the stuff that only these
people know, that nobody else knew, and I've been holding onto for the last
3 years. Aside from a handful of people who have seen the raw footage,
nobody's seen some of this stuff, and there are, in my opinion, quite a few
"revelations" here about who deserves credit for what in bringing out the
2600 and making it and Atari a success. I'm not going to spoil it for
anybody, but I think most of you will be surprised by what you learn in
this tape!
I'm really looking forward to hearing what people think of the tape. I
hope that people watch it knowing that it is primarily a no-nonsense
document of an event, the gathering at Nolan's predominantly, and therefore
I focused on the side of historical completeness rather than coherency or
technical flashiness.
In the three years since I shot it I expanded well beyond the IEEE article
and in the end I just wanted to have a series of set-pieces that jumped
around and covered a lot of different issues above and beyond just the
2600's longevity.
I think, while the lack of tutorials makes it hard for a novice to follow
some of it, that there is still something for everybody into the Atari to
enjoy here.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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