Remember the 3DO? Or the Power Glove? It's easy to forget that the lineage of today's Playstations and Xboxes is filled with so many odd mutants never fit for mass consumption. Here's a look into the awkward, gawky past.
In the future, customers will go to a clean, well-lit cafeteria where delicious food will be on display behind glass. See what you like? Drop a few coins in the slot and that liverwurst on rye is all yours. Of course, by "the future" we mean 80 years ago, not in a couple of months when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell brings another of his uWink outposts to the Valley. The gimmick? You order your food on a touch screen! You'd think with Bushnell's experience with animatronics at Chuck E. Cheese, there'd at least be frickin' robots. (Photo by Eater LA)
It's a shocker, we know: Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star in yet another biopic, this time as Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. The Hollywood Reporter notes that screenwriters Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman sold their script Atari to Paramount on Friday, with DiCaprio's Appian Way shingle producing the story of "the godfather of the video game industry," whom we'd probably like just fine were he not also the shithead who foisted the Chuck E. Cheese chain on an unsuspecting American public.
Every time I think I'm finally sick to death of Leonardo DiCaprio he goes and does something awesome. This time he's signed on to play Nolan Bushnell, who invented the hypnotic mindfuck of Pong before founding Atari in a biopic about the legendary geek.
Amidst all the hubbub about MediaDefender — the file-sharing policing agency whose private email files were recently spewed across the Internet, revealing unsavory antipiracy plans — one particularly interesting tidbit has bubbled to the surface. The Pirate Bay, a major file-sharing site, says it now has proof from those files that the music and movie industries have been paying hackers to attack the site. It is now taking this information to the police and charging the Swedish arms of Fox, EMI Music, Universal, Paramount, Atari, Activision, Ubisoft and Sony with technical sabotage, denial-of-service attacks, hacking, and spamming.
