I think the best Fry's of all was the former Incredible Universe location, just south of Portland. I believe it was the only Fry's that didn't charge sales tax.
The Fry's by I8 in San Diego was an Incredible Universe too. (Not the Fry's in north county, the one further south.)
That Mission Valley San Diego Fry’s seemingly bought all of Incredible Universe’s old delivery trucks too, and never repainted them. Well into the 2000s, it was hilarious to still see Incredible Universe trucks driving around delivering appliances.
(Also I remember going to the North County/San Marcos one the weekend it opened, think I bought a 128 MB flash drive for $30. Now it’s a Costco Business Center)
> convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"
I had a traveling job for a while, I was away from home every single week.
When you first start doing a job like that, you imagine that you'll be doing all kinds of sightseeing. I thought I'd be traipsing through Central Park and eating Cubanos in Miami.
None of that happens IRL; you're so busy working, by the time you have a few hours to kill, all you want to do is space out. Doing tourist stuff gets to be WORK.
After a few months of this, I started to just obsessively spend time at Fry's.
I didn't even really need anything from Fry's. It was just this place I could reliably visit at any tech hub on the west coast. Doesn't matter if you're in Burbank or San Diego or Sacramento or Portland or Seattle: if it's 2010, there's a Fry's you can wander around in for a couple of hours.
I've never been to The Space Needle in Seattle, but I've been to Fry's Electronics numerous times.
> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development.
It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari.
It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around.
Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg.
That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure."
Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history.
Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.
The Atari 2600 had a certain type of "adventure game", which was basically walk-around until you found this blob of pixels (see manual). "Adventure" was famous, and "Superman" (also a Warner movie franchise) did well with this style.
Atari "Raiders of the Lost Ark" seemed to be a game that sold very well on name value, but it was hard dexerity, and required reading the manual, and so most people probably didn't make it more than about 5 screens in. That and Atari "Pac-Man" and a few other games, and HEY Atari is just ripping us off!!
"E.T." was pretty half-assed, but IMO a big part of it was the entire game design was not all that entertaining to begin with. It was "Superman" with pits.
They could have just made the game not suck. The original Star Wars arcade game that Atari did was received quite well. Video game franchises based on movies did tend to have this cash grab quality to them though for long afterwards (with some exceptions), even on the NES.
> Every story I hear about Atari is wild. Hard to believe they managed to have the success they did.
It was a different era.
I worked in a mall arcade in the early 90s, and because we purchased arcade games, I had access to the trade shows and various promotional events. For instance, E3 invited me to come out for their first event.
The size of the teams in the early 90s was TINY; I met the dudes who made Mortal Kombat at the AMOA convention, and the entire team was less than ten people. The main programmer had so little experience, he was largely known for doing the voice of "Rudy" in the pinball game "Funhouse."
Basically, the tech community was tiny and the gaming community was a tiny subdomain of the tech community.
Atari's big innovation may have simply been that it was founded in the right location (Silicon Valley.) If it wasn't for that, Steve Jobs wouldn't have worked at Atari. (And Wozniak wouldn't have moonlighted at Atari.)
Atari was the only major gaming company based out of Silicon Valley
A lot of the games of the time were basically just Japanese games that were licensed by US distributors. Pac Man came from Namco in Japan and was distributed in the US by Chicago's Midway, Space Invaders was made by Taito in Japan and licensed in the US. (Also by Midway, IIRC.) "Defender" was one of the first 'homegrown' games in the US that wasn't coming out of Atari in Silicon Valley. (Defender was made by Eugene Jarvis in Chicago for Williams, who later merged with Midway.)
Although Nintendo was NOT based in Silicon Valley, they had the dumb luck of locating just up the hill from Microsoft. If you've seen "King of Kong," the dude from the documentary basically lives halfway between Microsoft in Redmond and Nintendo in Snoqualmie: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_North_Bend
Sega WAS based in Silicon Valley, but their slow decline was arguably due to a political tug-of-war between Sega of America (based in Silicon Valley) and Sega (based in Japan.)
> A simple question to ask an employer during an interview is whether the company is profitable or not. If so, for how long?
This is great advice.
For instance, I was once in an interview where they were grilling me. I was reluctant to do the interview in the first place, because they'd gone bankrupt TWICE in the past five years.
At the end of the interview, it seemed fairly clear that my odds of getting the job were about 50/50. The interviewers were smart and they were asking hard questions.
But when I asked them to comment on their two recent bankruptcies, it changed the mood entirely. At that point, the entire "vibe" of the interview shifted. It became CLEAR that they'd been losing employees at a furious pace, because of their financial struggles.
Once we talked about "the elephant in the room," the entire interview tone changed, and they made me an offer in less than twelve hours.
My "hunch" is that they'd been grilling interviewees (because they were smart folks) but had been scaring interviewees off because they were in such terrible financial shape.
Basically, potential hires were ghosting them because of their financial problems, while they were simultaneously discussing technical issues when the real issue was financial.
I accepted the offer, and the company is still around. I had a similar interview experience at FTD in San Diego (the florist), and they are kaput:
> “Sorry, we spent $200k on consultants and conferences that accomplished nothing, so now we have to cut an employee making $40k” really erodes morale in ways that merely firing people doesn’t.
One time I was tasked with auditing what my team spent, at a tech startup. During my audit, I found that we'd spent a million dollars to make a single phone call.
Basically:
* We were spending money like it was going out of style
* We were getting the highest level of support contracts on EVERY piece of hardware and software that we bought. This mean that we would routinely purchase hardware, stick it in the corner of our data center, and it would have an expensive support contract, before it had even been installed in a rack and plugged in. In some cases, we bought stuff that never got installed.
* The software support contract from one of our vendors was a million dollars a year. The software was quite reliable. In a single year, we'd made a single support call.
This is why I recommend to everyone, both in and out of tech, that you need to try and get as much money out of your initial negotiation and down the line as possible from your prospective employer; if you don't get it, it'll be fucked away on like one single meal or evaporate some other way.
When I was doing AIX and Solaris system administration in Salem Oregon, they paid me $75 an hour.
A lot of people here are comparing Corvallis to Seattle, but they’re hundreds of miles apart.
Salem is the nearest big city.
TBH, making $75 an hour in Salem was like making $150 an hour in Seattle. You can live REALLY WELL on $75 an hour in Corvallis.