| An Interview with Curt Vendel |
| Written by Arthur Annis |
| Friday, 28 November 2008 08:39 |
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Last month, I presented you with a review of a new product by Legacy Engineering Group - The Classic USB Joystick Controller. Although Curt and his team have been busy over-seeing the production of this excitingly new product, I was able to get him to take a few minutes to answer a few questions that fellow retro-gamers wanted to know about him, the company and the new product, that quite simply I haven't been able to put down.
RetroBlast! Review: Legacy Consumer Electronics Classic Controller Pt. 2 Arthur Annis December 2008
Can you tell us a little about L.E.G. and your role in it? Curt: Legacy was originally formed in early 2001 for doing Mainframe archival recoveries and was called Legacy Media Conversions. The group of engineers whom I had on tap were also avid video gamers and during lengthy tape conversions, talk would always turn to video games. So I decided that the company should focus on consumer electronics design and engineering and Legacy Media became Legacy Engineering. What is your own personal history with gaming? Curt: Well, lemme pull my teeth out of the glass here and tell ya all about my history with video gaming. Back in the 70’s I got my first taste of video games in the roller rinks that I used to go to on the weekends… back in the good old days were a 9-10 year old could walk out of his house, hop on a city bus and go to the other side of town, hang out for the day and come home in time for dinner all by himself without worrying about winding up on the back of a milk carton. I got to play arcades like Space War, Outlaw, Sprint, and many other games; they were big, and mysterious and fun. Then in Jr. High I was invited to a friend of a friend’s house and he plugged Atari Adventure into his console and I played it for the first time. That was it, I was hooked beyond belief! The game seemed alive and thinking, I couldn’t believe it. Not only was I fully hooked on video games, I was fully hooked on Atari. My 2600 arrived in 1981 and by 1983 I had an Atari 800 computer and it just kept on going from there. Now I own what is probably the largest collection of Atari equipment in the world. Do you have you own personal game room? If so what’s in it? Curt: I have a modest sized arcade down in the rec. room. I had grand dreams for a 30-40 arcade machine rec. room, but you know how it goes – the wife stepped in… I donated a lot of my rare arcades to the Funspot Classic Arcade Museum in Weirs Beach, NH. Gary Vincent is its caretaker and he’s really put a tremendous effort into its upkeep and continued expansion. Where did the idea for the USB joysticks come about? Curt: I was amazed at how great the arcade and console emulators have come along over the years and that the games themselves are great – but the sacrifice of being stuck using a keyboard, mouse or {yikes!} analog thumbstick to play those games just ruins the experience almost instantly. Even modern games – many of them just don’t play well with analog thumbsticks… so I wanted to bring back things to the way they used to be – a good old fashion joystick and fire button, pure, and simple. The patents for this classic design of the joystick had long since expired, so with the path clear, I thought it was time to bring the classic back to life and put it into gamers hands as a modern USB controller. What was Atari's initial reaction to your request of using a copy of their joystick? Curt: With long expired patents, it is not “their” joystick, just as so many other controllers have never been patented or the patents have expired, they have also been remade as well. Atari is now focused on its primary interest which is software, but the offer still stands for the joysticks to be fully branded in the future if they ever want to. I have a long standing professional relationship with Atari and I respect their decisions. Do you think these controllers will have a positive or negative impact on the 2600 collecting community if any? Curt: I am hoping, that giving players a chance to play classic games the way they were played and should be played may spark up more interest in old and new players and attract even more attention to the Atari 2600, its games and most importantly the massive homebrew community that to this day is still finding ways to make unbelievably fun games from that wonderful 128 bytes of memory, just look at atariage.com and you can see the fevered devotion of Atari enthusiasts. You have said that the USB sticks offer 10 additional inputs for the "Build Your Own" community, what ideas had you thought they'd be used for? Curt: I’ve built many desktop and full arcade cabinets, so anyone who’s done it, knows the heart of such a device is a good controller. Nobody likes to hack up a keyboard or a game controller to wedge it into their design. So I made a point to put on 10 pairs of solder points for people to easily add buttons onto the plastic case, or to use the board and wire it to a desktop or arcade cabinet for emulation and game control. Many asked – why didn’t I put a few extra buttons directly onto the joystick itself. I’m a purist – I want to keep things as close to the original as possible – the joystick is a stock original in its design. If someone needs to add more buttons – I went to Radio Shack, bought 2 small momentary push buttons – the tiny red topped ones, looked to where to would be best placed and drilled holes and wired them up. Now I have a start button and a B button for games that need them. I’m leaving it up to gamers to add on things as a matter of their own preference. I’m a big advocate of putting together products for general users – but catering to the hacker community that always wants to do more with products, so I like to add in extra’s like this.
Curt: Yes – up to 4 sticks to a single host company, then it’s just a matter of spending a few minutes with a program and mapping the controller to a player input, once its set you are ready for fun -- I had some friends over for a round of Gauntlet 4 players and it was a blast. What were some of the barriers encountered while producing these sticks? Curt: Financing a product to go into production… the steel tooling is very expensive and the factory requires a minimum 10,000 pc order, so it is a very expensive proposition, even for a small priced item. These new sticks, in my opinion, have filled the hardware void in emulating Atari games, are plans for the infamous 2600 paddle to come out? Curt: I would like to see it become a reality, we’ll have to wait and see. What was your and LEG’s role in the Flashback 2.0? Curt: Atari approached me in June of 2004 after spending over a year and half trying to convince them to get back into the hardware business. They wanted a product to ship by Sept of 2004 – a nearly impossible task. Well, 10 weeks of no sleep and the first Flashback was done. It wasn’t what I wanted in a product, but with such a limited amount of time it still came out better than other products that had a 6-9 month window. So it sold over 550K pieces in 2004, so by Mid December of 2004 Atari called me in and wanted to get to work on a follow up. This time I laid out that I would need 6 months and that this product would be a real Atari 2600 product. So Atari was tasked with designing a box for the unit, my team and I designed the processor – Michele, the MMU/Menu system – Gizmo and created a mini Atari 2600 console. By early Feb, working samples were shown to Atari and for the 2005 E3 we had 5 production systems with a 10 game text demo menu ready. I flew out to E3 and setup things for Atari at their space at E3. I was surprised that the three most played games were Outlaw, Maze Craze and Slot Racers. Meanwhile other selections like Missile Command and (I think) Centipede were available – yet people really liked playing the head to head games more. I wanted to put the real heart and soul of Atari into the product and that meant easter egg’ing in some surprises like hidden games, and of course the ability to wire up a real cartridge connector to use original Atari 2600 cartridges. It is my understanding LEG also had a role in the Flashback 3 unit, can you tell us a little bit about it? Curt: FB3 was my original design. I wanted to break the mold so to speak. So first I started over and did a new 2600 compatible CPU – this time making it more compatible, adding in LCD driver and SD CARD capabilities to it and designing a hand held 2600 compatible game system that would work exactly like an iPod/iTunes™. Plug it into your PC, open the desktop app that would connect you to a website, buy a game pak (of 5 or 10 games) for a small fee and they become cartridges in your desktop. Now drag them over to the console image on the desktop and they would install into the portable 2600 compatible console. Unplug and it would reset, reload the menu selections and would be ready to play. Can you tell us why the Flashback 3 was shelved? Curt: I was working directly with Bruno Bonnell on this product; he personally loved it and backed it. Just as we were readying to fund and start production his departure from Infogrames/Atari put the product on ice. I have the working unit sitting on my electronics bench in my office, I play it often. Your online portfolio showcases an Atari 7800 remake ; can you tell us anything about it? Curt: Back in 2002 I was approached by Oshea Ltd, they own this massive limestone cavern and it was filled to the brim with Atari 2600 and 7800 video games all brand new in the box. Oshea wanted to build a perfect replica of the Atari 7800 to sell and bundle in his games to sell as well. Everything was done for the plastics and PCB design. When it came time to develop the chipset, he wanted a factory to pay the costs upfront and he would repay them later in sales. To this day, I don’t think he’s found a factory willing to engage into such a business proposition. Well, we were commissioned to do I think 8 or 10 units (it’s been a while) for Oshea. I had some additional units built personally in a peal white design and I have to tell, they are stunning. If these sticks prove to be a huge success, do you think this will provide Infogrames enough feedback that there still is a market for Atari retro-gaming? Curt: It’s something I am hoping will happen. Can you give us any hints on the next product you have for the Retro-Gaming community? Curt: I’m hoping to directly fund either the portable unit or another design I have in very early stages. I would like to look for some investors or partners to come in and help bring some new, fresh products with me out into the market. Is there anything further, you’d like to add about these new sticks or your company that wasn’t addressed? Curt: Well, I always appreciate feedback and comments, I don’t have an ego to bruise and I love to hear what people want, I’m a gamer and I try to tackle things from both the business side and the consumer side to try to create products that are business and financially sound, and that are what gamers want and need. However, I am only one set of eyes and ideas, so hearing from other people is always great. And we at Retroblast want to thank you Curt for taking the time to answer a few questions for us today. For those who have missed previous announcements about this great new product, visit L.E.G.'s website and check it out. Click here to see and order a USB Joystick Controller Click here to see our Retroblast Review of this Product
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For two player games such as Combat, can two sticks be used simultaneously? Has this been tested with any emulators? 
