Atari's Military Simulator

[@WrestlingWithGaming]

Absolutely killed it with this one. Great research, visuals, VO, everything. Kudos man!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks man! Appreciate it :)

[@jdenoe69]

Thank you for sharing the history of this unique arcade cabinet.

[@HistoricNerd]

Its one of those stories I was surprised there wasnt a video already honestly. Thought this one was just to interesting not to share.

[@chrilz1498]

Thank you for sharing this story, it’s fascinating and so much was brand new for me. Your production value and presentation are always top notch, cheers on another excellent video!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thank you I appreciate it. I had way too much fun learning more about blender this time

[@tangreen7267]

A long awaited video, thanks, HistoricNerd !

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks for watching!

[@AFFL1CTED1]

Nice work Ian. Really enjoyed this one!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks man! Glad you did :)

[@tonystark6306]

Outstanding writing and research. Was completely unaware of this story despite considering myself to be a retro gaming enthusiast. Loved to learn something new. Thank you for all the hard work sir.

[@HistoricNerd]

It's a little more obscure at this point. I was honestly surprised other content creators handnt tackled this one before.

[@RewindArcade]

This was a very fascinating story, thoroughly enjoyed the video. Great production value too! Thanks for putting this together and I look forward to watching more!

[@HistoricNerd]

If you liked this one you might like my N64 video as well :)

[@Lou.B]

WOW! GREAT film about my favorite arcade game, which I grew up playing! Thank You for the terrific research and storytelling! NEW SUBSCRIBER!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm very happy with how this video turned out.

[@ScruffyLookinRGB]

Great deep dive into this lesser known topic. I thought thoese controls looked familiar. I suddenly want to go out and buy the old star wars game cabinet now. Seriously though really great documentary this episode should definitely be on the history Channel👍👍👍

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks man. I had always had an interest in this cabinet and thankfully a bunch of stuff came out in the last couple of years

[@Vanessaira-Retro]

What a wonderful job you did on this video Ian, Hooah!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks! This one was pretty fun. I'm glad that I was able to collect pretty much all the sources available for it and put it into one source

[@oldretrogamer78]

Another terrific documentary!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks buddy!

[@aaronwelsh33]

Great Video Ian. Battlezone is one of my favorite golden age arcade games. I think the Marine Corps tried something similar but decided that it was just cheaper to feed the Jarheads real crayons than introduce an arcade machine that just simulates the experience

[@HistoricNerd]

There apparently was a marine ordered simulator not from Atari but it had a large projector for displaying on walls, that came out in the late 80s. But I couldn't find much about that one as people have claimed that was the "Atari" one. Which it wasn't.

[@Gorilla_Jones]

@@HistoricNerd wasn’t that a Martin Marietta simulator?

[@MrPolicekarim]

Also Doom as well.

[@alexander_mejia]

I find the subject very interesting even if you couldn't find the real answer. The amount of civvies in the game industry opposed to helping out the us government in training sims is a real deal still to this day. I'm pretty sure in this situation someone was advising Atari to diversify with a defence contract. It's likely that Atari decided not to pursue this since their business was growing so rapidly, or there was opposition from employees internally or both. Imagine if one of your employees got wind of this and said "shut it down or I quit?" If this is some important programmer, or group of programmers at the company you would think twice before following through on delivering the prototypes for military training.

[@Gorilla_Jones]

Get to work you tree huggin hippies!

[@JayRCela]

Years ago a good friend of mine who had done some contract government work with NASA and the military told me about this, I thought he was nut's. He also told me about a revolutionary audio compression algorithm codec called MP3, and I thought he was joshing me then too.

[@HistoricNerd]

That's pretty great! When I first heard about this I'm 2011 there was like a single paragraph on the internet about it. Thankfully recently there was a large dump of info about it :)

[@DrewberTravels]

Otherwise known as the plot for the movie Toys.

[@HistoricNerd]

I was wondering why LL Cool J showed up in my research disguised as a couch.......

[@mbe102]

One of my favourite go-to's. I still remember playing it, on like a Java Applet on the iMacs in school through a web browser. EDIT: Obviously not the Bradley training version lmfao.

[@HistoricNerd]

Played the hell out of battlezone growing up. A few pizza places in California has operational cabinets for a long time. The rom for Bradley trainer has been dumped and works if you wanted to try it.

[@reagandow850]

What a well researched and amazing video. Phenomenal job sir.

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks I appreciate it :)

[@Gorilla_Jones]

A. I have fond memories of playing all the vector based games including BattleZone at Milford Rec. What a great time HN. B. You missed an opportunity to use Conan's "In the year 2000" song. Great work Historical Nerd.

[@HistoricNerd]

Oh man....I dropped the ball on that one.

[@Gorilla_Jones]

@@HistoricNerd it’s ok, you provide free entertainment to the masses.

[@screwthenet]

I used to play battlezone on some apple 2 or similarly og computer as a small child. LOVED IT!

[@st1ka]

I can't help but feel that even if this was produced, it was kind of pointless? I can't imagine arcades of the era could properly replicate the physics of the tanks. Especially considering likely no one at atari had experience with driving tanks

[@HistoricNerd]

So yes and no, so the unit was for a gunner. They wouldn't drive, so it would give a gunner more hands on with a station and actions on targets which is half of gunnery practice. So advantages for being able to just sit and shoot. But doesn't offer a realistic value just basic practice which in theory could save a lot of money for military training.

[@sogero2]

I had no idea! Very cool. Thanks for this.

[@HistoricNerd]

Glad you enjoyed it :D

[@Egaslem]

One of the Bradley Trainer prototypes somehow found its way into an arcade on the seafront here in England, so perhaps more than two were made. Would have been around the end of the 1990's I think, they had a large number of rather old machines filling up one barely lit corner of the arcade, so perhaps they imported a container load of cheap unwanted arcade machines from a supplier in the US. I was initially quite excited when I saw what looked a bit like a Battlezone amongst the junk machines, one of my all time favourite arcade games, which I'd not played for years. I remember looking at the machine and being quite puzzled by it, it had a very strange set of controls, most notably the dial, and also all the extra buttons and a clearly well used, battered yoke that held together with Allen bolts, and had different shaped tanks to battlezone plus a helicopter, but had what appeared to be the original battlezone background mountains and volcano, and the text that appeared on the screen still called it Battlezone, despite the completely different name on the cabinet. I had no idea it wasn't a regular arcade game, and I doubt the arcade knew either, it was probably the most disappointing arcade machine I've ever played, the gameplay made no sense to me and I had no idea what the dial and some of the buttons did, you couldn't move the tank, just turn the turret, firing a missile brought up crosshairs which was interesting, but you only got two or three shots, nothing seemed to shot at you and my first game ended abruptly and I had no idea why. On my second try I ran out of ammo, rockets etc and there seemed to be no way to end it, and I assumed the game had crashed.

[@HistoricNerd]

That's a pretty amazing story. I hadn't heard of it making it out of the United States. Did you happen to remember the arcade it was at? It would be amazing if that cabinet is still out there.

[@Egaslem]

​@@HistoricNerd I'm pretty certain it was the arcade at Clacton Pavilion, but I would say there is no chance of it still being there, I think there's now a restaurant in the building where part of the arcade was and a "fun park" on the rest of the site. I usually avoided the place, but went in one day to have a look to see if they had anything decent and came across this machine and a good pinball machine, that I got into playing. It may have been Medieval Madness pinball which would have made it around 1998. I do recall looking for the machine at a later date and not finding it, so it was either moved or more likely sold/got rid of, I can't imagine it taking much money. I believe the site was owned by the local council, hence little or no money was spent on it. The lower level of the building had been converted to an arcade and all the windows were boarded up, so it was a sorry state, despite being a prime location right next to Clacton pier. I think since then, the site has been leased to a private company who have probably spent a few million on it.

[@HistoricNerd]

@@Egaslem that's really cool to know honestly. It's fascinating as how the history of this cabinet is still being discovered. I'm honestly glad to have found the content I have about it. It's a really neat story.

[@Boojakascha]

This reminds me a whole lot of the M.A.C.S. (Multi-purpose Arcade Combat Simulator) :D

[@HistoricNerd]

Oh man I loved MACS. That was a fun one

[@creativecatproductions]

I loved playing this game in high school on our computers

[@creativecatproductions]

Great video dude

[@HistoricNerd]

Thanks man, I appreciate the social media share :)

[@creativecatproductions]

@@HistoricNerd people need the education!

[@ViewpointProd]

i remember finding out about this thing on the atari compilation on the DS. pretty shocking that they'd let you play the thing too

[@HistoricNerd]

I actually didn't realize it was mentioned there.

[@ViewpointProd]

@@HistoricNerd At least, from memory it was? i think they also let you play it? its been years so, idk

[@HistoricNerd]

@@ViewpointProd I'll have to look into that. Thank you for the comment.

[@gordon2402]

Atari collection on nintendo ds part 2

[@st1ka]

Also, a laserdisc project failing? Gee, whould could've guessed 😏

[@HistoricNerd]

$10,000 easy price for the Laseractive fan

[@adventuretaco7140]

Awesome vid! That’s a sub and ring o de bell fo sho!

[@HistoricNerd]

Thank you appreciate it!

[@FrogTony]

Interesting subject...

[@HistoricNerd]

I very much agree :)

[@DhinCardoso]

Man! Where are you??? KZbin killed yet another special channel

[@HistoricNerd]

Hey there! So I was deployed for the last year to a place with bad Internet so I could really work on videos. But I'm back and expect some more content here in the next couple of weeks :D