I have to admit it: I am a sucker for old commercials. While other people would watch reruns of "Cheers" or whatever Charlie Brown special that they recorded on their VCR back in the day, I typically fast forward to commercials. Not only is it a nostalgia trip to me but it's also an entertaining way to see a part of past culture.
Imagine my excitement when it was announced that Oldergames.Com/Knurdz Entertainment was releasing a DVD containing classic video game ads would be released at CGE. So I stopped at their booth and picked up a copy of "Video Game Media Archives Volume #1: Atari".
The case is a clear plastic standard DVD case with the sleeve printed on a type of perforated card stock using what could be a pretty decent ink printer or a color laser. Fairly attractive to the eye with the description on the back that helps spur the memories of gaming ads past. The disc itself is your standard DVD-R, which gets no qualms from me (it's a small operation-who can afford to have professionally pressed discs?). The disc label is colorful and well centered. Also included inside is a card that thanks you for your support and also mentions about piracy and how it affects Oldergames, the developers, you, etc. Sounds good so far, right? So without further ado, let's pop the disc in.
When my Philips DVD player started playing the disc on my Samsung HDTV, the screen was squished about half-way up the screen. What the hell? I took the disc out and played it in a player upstairs on my standard TV. Came out fine. Hmm. Went downstairs and plopped one of my home movie DVDs in. Played fine. A light bulb appeared over my head as I fiddled with my DVD player's Video controls and turned the Progressive Scan OFF. The picture came out normal. Why this is I have no idea but it kinda irks me as I have to change the settings on my DVD player to view the disc. I could watch it upstairs but it gets pretty dang hot up there. It played fine on my PC using Cyberlink Power DVD, which is where the screen shots I have came from.
The disc starts and you are greeted with a menu that looks something like this:
After seeing the fairly professional looking packaging I was hoping to see a decent menu system. What this looks like to me is a generic template with the general title "Atari" with each chapter titled as the individual file names. The interface, while functional, is amateurish and cheap. It gives the impression, at least to me anyway, that the content was quickly slapped together. The clips are in file name alphabetical order, so you'll get some Lynx commercials mixed in with your Atari VCS ones.
So I press "Play" on my remote and get the content going. Really, that's the REAL point of such a disc is the content. Yeah the whole progressive scan thing is a downer and the interface is pretty basic, but what about the stuff that's inside? The first clip is about Activision. The clip looked a bit blurry but that could be from the age of the tape it might have been taken from. Watching it a bit longer, I get to an image of Pitfall creator David Crane
There's a bit of blockiness in the colors, like the video was compressed. According to my PC, there's only a little over a gigabyte used up. There's 83 commercials and info bits of varying size and the disc isn't even filled-if it was compressed for space I wouldn't know why. So I watched some more. Oh hey, an Alan Alda video and a surprise. Can you guess what it is?
Yep, it's a video pulled right from the web: from atari-history.com. The video originally was pretty compressed and stretched to fill my TV screen it looks worse. In fact you'll find a few entries from various commercial repositories: commercial-archive.com (the "Reinvent the Video Game" Atari 7800 commercial shown on the DVD was given to Commercial Archive by Sean Kelly), X-Entertainment and others. All the videos are of varying quality in image and audio.
I checked the DVD to see if there was some sort of acknowledgment at the end, to give props to the people who originally made these videos available and other than the watermarks at the corners or the splash screens before or after a clip, there was no such thing done. Granted some of the sites I checked didn't say you *couldn't* download and sell the clips I just don't think it was right, especially since a couple of those sites were asking for donations or offered to sell you their videos on CD for a minimal fee.
I WILL admit I might be a bit wet in the assumption that Knurdz just scoured the web and snagged a bunch of videos to sell without asking permission or offering compensation. Thing is, there is no indication on the packaging as to whether or not the clips were from original sources (as in straight from TV to tape to the computer) or just downloaded. If I'm wrong by this assumption, please let me know.
By making the disc available for purchase one kinda gets the impression that you're going to get some sort of consistent quality. To watch one good looking clip to seeing some blocky mess to another where it's blocky AND hard to hear isn't really acceptable in a sales package. There are some neat clips buried in here: a few from Europe, a Japanese commercial, some ads for games I've heard of but never seen on TV.
As it is, I don't think it's a very good product. You kinda get the "sort-of" truth in advertising: yes there's a lot of ads on this disc, yes it's handy to have it in one place and watch them on your TV BUT you've probably seen a lot of them online for free (and you probably already have downloaded some already). Granted I could have asked where the clips came from but I shouldn't have to. Anyone who would buy the disc is probably already web savvy so if Knurdz was upfront ("ads gathered from around the world, from personal video collections to repositories from on the Web"), the buyer might get a clearer understanding of the quality they are getting. At the price of $15 it's just too much for what you get.