It's January of nineteen eighty four, and a Detroit local named Stephen Bell has become something of a rock star, one with a joystick in his hand instead of a guitar. He's the first ever winner of Atari's sword Quest contest, which promises one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in jewel encrusted treasures to players who can successfully navigate four adventure games.
You might think word doesn't travel very far about a video game contest, but Atari is one of the most well known brands in the world, and Stephen is an Atari champion, the Tom Brady of video games. His picture appears in Atari Age, the magazine devoted to all things Atari. Each issue is poured over by tens of thousands of Atari fans. This means he was at least a little recognizable.
So when Stephen arrives for the second sword Quest competition in Sunnyvale, California, a little kid spots him and kind of freaks out.
They all knew because of a magazine. I actually had one younger kid come up and want my autograph. So one time in my life someb be wondered my autograph.
The kid is starstruck. Stephen is one of gaming's first celebrity players. In fact, all the sword Quest finalists are, and that attention can sometimes get well a little creepy.
And so they were calling the seven of us or eight of us to see if we could tell them what we did to solve the puzzle, and they wanted to give them clues as to what to do for the Fireworld was starting, and so as we turned in one, the next one was going, and everybody was calling to find out how we got to where we found the answer.
That's Jackie Custer, another finalist in the first game Earth World.
I actually had one guy who came to my house. Showed up at my house. I don't know. He found my address from somewhere.
Like Stephen, Jackie is becoming a bit of a celebrity and maybe something else too. Maybe they're targets. Both are looking to the second leg of the contest, fire World. The two have qualified for the in person final and a chance to win the second prize, a gem studded chalice worth another twenty five thousand dollars. They have the experience like a prize fighter who's already made the walk to the ring. There were eight finalists in the first game,
which was almost impossible to solve. Seven made it. One missed his flight. This time, seventy three people qualified for the contest in California. Stephen and Jackie will have far more competition than ever before. There are some familiar faces and some not so familiar, including the man who would
become Stephen's earcist rival. When the smoke clears, another winner will be crowned, and someone will get one step closer to the grand prize, the fifty thousand dollars swored of Ultimate Sorcery, but behind the scenes, Atari is playing a different game entirely. It's a contest of survival in a brand new world of next level video games, one threatening to leave the company in the dust. To keep going, they'll try anything, including breeding players' minds for iHeartRadio. This
is the Legend of sword Quest. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus, and this is Episode three. The Chalice. Fireworld, the second in the sword Quest series, hit stores in February of nineteen eighty three. Like Earthworld, it came packaged with a DC Comics story that helped flesh out the narrative while providing game hints. Twins Tor and Tara were still in pursuit of the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery, which they need to defeat the evil king Tyrannus, the tyrant who murdered
their parents. To do that, they'd have.
To navigate a fire drenched hellscape. It was a fable, mythology, part Conan parked Star Wars, and all melodrama.
Fireworld, and never was a place more aptly named. Volcanoes, blazing geysers, rivers of lava as far as that I.
Can see, As you might expect, all the stress of exacting vengeance and suffering and hostile environments takes a toll on the relationship between the siblings.
We'll pass out from this terrible heat unless we find a cooler spot and quickly. We'd better talk this over, figure out which direction we should be going. I don't know which one's best. No time for that. This way lies as open as any. Come on, Wait, that path.
Looks even worse to go down.
I mean, look at it. Will you quit arguing and follow me.
There wasn't as much drama in Fireworld the game as there was in the comic. That's because A TOI was always in a hurry to get games out to the market, even if they weren't necessarily entire shape. Here's Stephen Bell that.
Was actually harder the actual game. Well, like I say, you know, the games were in the comic books, but the games themselves were they were okay. Once again, you could tell that they had this grand vision. They didn't have enough time to do what they really wanted to do because you know, somebody, wait at the top. You could get the next game out work, you said, selling like hotcakes. So as far as the gameplay goes, it was just okay.
The comic held clues, but this time players had another source of information each other. When the Earth World Contest was held, a network began forming among gamers, not only in person, but in the pages of video gaming magazines and through the mail. Jackie Custer, another Earth World contestant, explains.
Right after the contest, I was flooded with calls. I mean it was constant, and a lot of those kids were like teenagers and young adults that were into Atari and was in the contest but didn't win. You know, it didn't get to be a finalist.
The newer sword Quest players wanted help. Some of the veteran players were fairly open minded about sharing tips and tricks, but Jackie was hesitant. It felt like giving the enemy strategies on war.
I had all these people calling me saying, well, how'd you get the answer? How'd you get the answer? And I could have very easily told everybody, but we still had another contest, we had Fireworld, and I didn't want everybody to win. I mean, if the more people we had going, the less chance you had of doing well.
And so I sort of tried to keep it to myself, you know, but some of these people would get on the phone and they would beg you and push you and push you and try to get you to break it down, you know, to where you would tell them the answer how you came up with it. So many people won the second one, and I think that some of the other guys that were finalists for Earth World, I think some of them gave out secrets, you know, kind of let their friends in on it.
With Fireworld, Jackie was at a slight disadvantage for Earth World. She had done a lot of the puzzle solving while her husband Dana controlled the game using the joystick. This time, he wasn't as involved in helping her navigate the game. But she was still determined to make it through. The treasures in the game revolved around the Tree of Life, a concept found in the Kabbalah, a study of life from the perspective of the Jewish faith. There was depth in these games if you chose to look for it,
but this was the eighties. Gamers liked Frogger. Most people skipped the subtext.
I practiced until it was crazy, I mean constantly, and we even thought of, like Dana just churning in the second one, but he didn't have as much time to work on it. He was very, very busy with work, and when he came home he wanted to play with the sun, and so he didn't really get into it as much as I did. And so it kind of just was the belief that I would just churn it in and hopefully enjoy another trip to San Francisco. But yeah,
I practiced and practiced, and I got better. I got quite a bit further on the fireworld.
This time, more people qualified for the finals. Seventy three of them in fact, including Jackie and returning champion Stephen Bell, all had the correct answer. Leads to chalice. Power abounds. Like the first game, contestants had to know that the correct words were identified by a clue in the poem included in the comic.
In Earth World Gred, these twins have twelve beasts of Zodiac birth and mastered thieving as they sought for sword of Ultimate worth through Fireworld's flames. They now do rage well. Time it's told is ad to seven days a year, an age who knows in a world gone mad.
In the comic, the phrase ad to seven is printed in a different typeface. The pages of the comic containing the right clues needed to add up to seven. But did that? Many more people figure that out on their own. Were a lot of twelve year olds really into typography. Jackie isn't sure.
About that, Like this is how you do it, you know. I just don't think that all of a sudden to go from seven of us to fifty of well, I think it was seventy five of us that got it for the second one. I just think that some of the finalists on the first one. I think let lous on how it was done, you.
Know, however it happened. Seventy three was way too many contestants for Atari. The company was committed to flying out all the finalists and putting them up in a hotel for three days in the Bay Area of California. This contest was already an expensive proposition, so when the number of winning entries grew to be too much, Atari went full grade school teacher.
They couldn't afford to have that many people. It was just too big of an unmovie group, you know. So they cut it down and you had to write an essay about why you want it to go.
Yes, an essay a homework assignment. Atari wrote back to the players and told them to submit a manifesto on why they loved Fireworld. So everyone wrote something, including Stephen Bell, but as he dropped it in the mail, he wasn't sure being a returning champion was necessarily an advantage.
He had a little thing on what do you like about the game? Like I said, I was still in contact with a middle group of friends, and once again I was talking to Jackie on the phone. I said, you know, I don't think they're gonna pick me to be one of them because I already won one. And she says, no, they're going to pick you to see if you can win them all. Well, I guess we'll see, sure, enough, you know, I get my little acceptance letter. There you go coming back.
Keep in mind, Fireworld was an often infuriating game, so many of these essays expressing their love for it were probably not entirely sincere. But a golden chalice was at stake, so a little creative license was to be expected. Atari got these seventy three essays and picked the fifty they liked best. Pretty soon, Stephen Bell, Jackie Custer, and forty eight other people got a letter in the mail inviting them to the finals, which would be held in January
nineteen eighty four. Stephen and Jackie had an advantage of swords. They knew what it was like to play a game under pressure, with a time limit and rows of television set up. They were the two veterans, but now there was just a one in fifty chance either one of them would come out on top. And that wasn't the only different thing this time around. As soon as Jackie and Stephen got dropped off, they found themselves in an entirely new environment.
Our ghostly mentors challenged us to enter the second world that lies below to claim both the sword and our own destinies. Well, we've come this far, and by the gods, we won't stop now.
The first thing Jackie Custer noticed upon returning to San Francisco was that things seemed a little more let's say, economical with Atari.
Instead of having a catered dinner, they took us all and we walked a few blocks to Chinatown and we went to a Chinese restaurant and they served us kind of like not pot luck, but buffet style, you know, a Chinese dinner.
Where the first event had players in a lavish hotel with the contest and Atari's headquarters, this one was being held at a holiday inn.
It's like a roaring furnace, the greatest inferno we've encountered yet.
The hotel we stayed in. It was in San Francisco, it was, but it just wasn't at the same caliber as the hotel we had for the first game.
Jackie also felt like the number of finalists may have been too.
Much the second one. I felt like I was being pushed here and there, and that there was too many of us, and it was it was kind of like more like a herd mentality, and you know, everybody hurrying getting here and eat your dinner and hurry back to this and you know, take the tour and then get back to the hotel and da da da da da.
But not everyone agreed things were all that bad. Here's Steven.
We just went to San Francisco, a hotel in San Francisco. But I was pretty cool because they took us to Alcatraz. I was pretty cool. I don't know if anyone's ever seen the movie Escape from Alcatraz, but we saw the cell Clint Eastwood was in and all that.
There also seemed to be more camaraderie this time around, both between returning players and new ones.
It was interesting in the hotel. I'm sure the other guests didn't know what was going on, but it got pretty rowdy and a lot of fun. A big party, kind of like in the halls where our rooms were, you know, a couple different floors, they had a whole bunch of rooms. They had our rooms kind of together.
We go out in the hallway and everybody bring out their drinks or whatever they had and the food, and we sit around in the I remember sitting on the floor of my feet up on the wall, just talking and talking and talking till hours of the morning and getting to know each other and yeah, It was a big party.
But not everyone wanted to party. Stephen was in the zone, and so were plenty of others. Owing to the number of players, Atari took over the holiday inns ballroom. Tables were set up with fifty televisions and fifty Atari systems. Heavy curtains covered the floorid to ceiling windows to block out the sunlight and reduce glare on the screens. Conference chairs were set up in front of each monitor. The whole scene looked a little bit like an old school
computer class. One by one, the players began taking their seats under the drop ceiling a giant Atari sign set up to one side of the room. Off to another side was a glass case. Inside was the object of everyone's desire, the chalice, a cup from which to sip and save your victory.
The chalice was really gorgeous and if you're Catholic and go to church, the chalice the priest has it was kind of like the same size as a large chalice in the church, and it was all yellow gold and just around the cup part just you know, so many stones inlaid and just so beautiful, really really neat prizes.
An Atari employee described the rules like Earth World. Playing through Fireworld would be a timed competition. Players would have to gather objects and place them in their correct electronic rooms and in the right order to win. Atari made a special contest version of the game cartridge so players wouldn't merely be able to repeat what they had done with the home version. The televisions were turned on and
the Atari systems engaged. Each player held a joystick, also provided by Atari to prevent someone from gaining an advantage. No one was allowed to bring and use their own controllers. With fifty players ready to go and Atari employee stepped forward, some players stole one last look at the chalice, which seemed to gleam even in the dark and dungeon like room, illuminated only by the glare of the tube televisions and some harsh fluorescent lighting. In this holiday Inn ballroom, the
sight of wedding receptions, business conferences, and speed dating. Atari's second sword Quest competition was on. The clacking of the joysticks was symphonic. Each player consumed by navigating each room and grabbing objects an oil lamp and amulet, a grappling hook, and trying to figure out where each belonged. Some needed to be placed after you put the right object in another room. There was a lot of trial and error.
The layout of the rooms was more apparent if you knew the design of the Tree of Life from the Kabbala ten circles inside of three triangles. It acted as a kind of navigator. Stephen Bell got off to a good start, but pretty soon that optimism gave way to despair.
I just wasn't getting these wouldn't get these clues as good, and I could tell like pretty quickly. I just remember, after about ten minutes, I'm like, yeah, I ain't went a nice one. You plu pulling away and I'm not gidneys.
The same was true of Jackie Custer, who had a sense she was only plotting along. Using the joystick had not been her strong suit, but she had gotten better with it. That was thanks in part to Stephen, who had shared.
Some of his Stephen Bell, who won the first one. He was a nice guy, and they were moving their joysticks. Later they were showing me how they could move through. And after it was over, we all kind of went around one of the screens and was looking and Stephen was showing us how he got through some of the mini games, and they were just so fast. It woggled my mind because I couldn't do.
That, you know. Eventually Jackie still fell behind.
I want to say that it was like the fourth or fifth level. Like I said, it was not fabulous.
Instead, two other contestants new to the sword quest scene began to pull ahead curiously. Both were from South Carolina. One was Rick Davidson from Kershaw, the other was Michael Rideout from Aiken. Both were making great time. Michael knew about the Tree of Life and was able to speed through rooms more quickly than most of the others. Rick didn't know much about the Tree of Life, but still managed to find what he needed. After forty minutes of play,
some players had tossed aside their joysticks in exasperation. The objects had been too hard to come by and their locations too difficult to discover. Others plowed ahead, but Michael and Rick were close, very close. As Rick plunked down his last object, he felt a surge of excitement. There was nothing left to do. He looked around and didn't see anyone else with their arms raised. He had done it. He had beaten Fireworld and obtained the Chalice. Except well,
except Rick's judge didn't agree with him. As with the first contest, each player was assigned a judge. This time one judge supervised two players to watch out for any suspicious activity and make certain the players completed the tasks. What suspicious activity would have looked like in nineteen eighty four is a mystery.
But still.
Noticed that the judge wasn't giving him me all clear. Rick had gotten all the clues and their corresponding numbers, but one, just one, was out of order. The official told him he'd have to do it over again, so Rick did just that. He raced through, repeating his own steps. He had just minutes to go, but then there was a commotion on the other side of the room. Another contestant was standing up. Rick looked over and the contestant was getting his arm raised. Applause was breaking out. Michael
not Rick had one fireworld. A dejected Rick put his joystick down. The rules were the rules. A little while later, the judge came up to him and handed him something. It was one of the game cartridges made especially for the contest. Attari always took them back and never allowed players to keep them, but the judge gave one to Rick. It was kind of a consolation prize and years later something that could fetch a pretty good price on eBay,
but it was no substitute for the chalice. Michael Rideout had earned Atari's holy grail, and he was close to passing out. With forty nine slightly envious people looking on, twenty four year old Michael Rideout was ushered over to the glass case containing the chalice with a flourish and Atari Marketing employee lifted up the case and handed it over. Both men froze for a moment to allow for a
photo to be taken. There's Michael, bearded to make him look a little older than his years, shaking hands with a smiling Atari Marketing rep male model Handsome. Michael would later say he was so excited that he felt woozy and feared he might collapse.
He was really excited now, he Yeah, it was kind of like, Wow, I thought Steven would react, you know at the first one. I really Michael just you know, he was so happy and jubilant and just really partying that night and having a lot of fun, and he was enjoying the attention. Everybody wanted to talk to him. Everyone wanted to a picture with him.
Michael had done a number of things right. He had wisely sucked up to a taar rate during the essay portion of the contest, writing that he had preferred Fireworld to the first game, Earth World. But there were things going against Michael too. He hadn't been in the loop on trading strategies with other contestants. Winning was a surprise, a big one. Afterward, he and Stephen Bell struck up a conversation.
I don't remember what was said, gratulations. I did remember because of what Jackie doing the last time. I think I said, yeah, well we both get to come back now.
There were two finalists who would get to compete for the sword. Stephen had opted to take his initial prize, the Talisman, right away, but Michael didn't really have that option. After the first competition, Atari seemed to realize how dicey it was to just hand the prize, worth twenty five thousand dollars to the winner and hope it didn't get lost or stolen. This time, they allowed Michael to hold
it just long enough for some photos. Then they explained they'd have it sent to him, but not via the postal service. They did enlist a Brinks truck. Brinks, of course, is a national security transportation firm that moves around cash and other valuables, including apparently Atari prizes. Here's Stephen would Michael write out?
Won his channelis the second one. They didn't give it to him right away, And if that was me, I would have said, oh no, no, no, if that's my property, you hand it over right now. But when he won, they went, yeah, and the first guy we just handed a tool when they were looking at me and they said, we thought that wasn't such a good idea. But I heard it took him like three months to finally get it. Of course, because him and I we you know, we
exchanged photos when he finally got it. That's how I know what it took so long, because you know every color, Hey, you get it?
Who really hear you?
That's what I'm like, dude, you should have just said, no, it's mine, give it to me.
Well, Michael had to wait for the literal Brinks truck to show up. He and the rest of the players got in some sight seeing. But again Jackie felt like things were a little different this time around, that maybe Atari, which was the king of video games, had a crown that was beginning to slide off.
They put us on buses the next day after we had our competition, and they drove us all around the city, and pretty much the next day we left, so it was a much shorter trip and they didn't treat us quite as richly as they did on the first one. You know, the first one, it was like it was really really fancy and very very nicely done.
That left Jackie empty handed, well almost, she actually got her hands on the sword technically sorta.
So I brought a Fireworld T shirt and three cassettes that I have the games, one still sealed in the box because I bought a second and third one of some of them. And at the end of the contest, the first one, they had these big swords hanging down with the logo on it and everything. You've probably seen a poster, i'm sure, or online they have pictures of
these swords. Well, there was these cardboard swords hanging from the ceiling all over where we had the competition, and at the end we got to take those down and take them home with us. So it took home a big sword. It was like about, oh, maybe as long
as the yardstick. You know, three four feet something like that. Anyway, I had that all in one piece for a long long time and it broke into it's just like a corgated cardboard, you know, a thick and it broke a couple of years ago, and so I just saved part of it, and I had that and some other goodies that I brought home.
But for some players there was a reward beyond a material prize. It was something Jackie had noticed while talking with other contestants.
There were several Vietnam veterans that still were dealing with coming home from the war, and they had taken up this game. One of them I talked to quite a bit, and he said it gave him a sense of something to do, like something to keep him busy, because he had such bad thoughts from the war and it was very difficult for him to get settled back into everyday life.
And so he was going through a lot of medical problems and he was playing the game and happened to get the right answer and was at the second one.
This was a kind of video game therapy, a concept that was slowly gaining attention but still largely unheard of at the time time. But there was one inherent problem with sword Quest. It was virtually impossible to qualify for the finals and a shot at a real prize. Only the best of the best had a hope in hell or fireworld of doing it. There was another way to play video games for profit, and unlike Atari's promotion, players
could do it on national television. In the early nineteen eighties, producers James Caruso and Mavis Arthur produced a nationally syndicated television series called Starcade, and it was a chance for kids and adults to compete against one another in video games in front of a wide audience.
This is docade TV's first video arcade game show, starring your favorite video games and some brand new ones being introduced to the public for the first time.
Anyone Starcaid had an Atari connection. For the pilot episode, Atari co founder Nolan Bushnell helped producers source the game cabinets and find contestants. They played arcade games like Centipede or pac Man, and their scores were totaled up. The highest scoring player who also answered some trivia questions correctly, would get to play against a celebrity. In the first episode, it was Larry Wilcox, who co starred in the California
Highway Patrol drama Chips. Sometimes parents would team up with their kids to play. The winner might receive a full size Arcade cabinet, or even a vacation to Hawaii. But Starkaid had a couple of things going against it. For one, television stations believed no one would want to watch people playing games. For another, there was still a concern video games were making kids lazy and rotting their brains to try and perfect the format. Darcade shot a few pilots,
three of which were hosted by Alex Trebek. Yes, my childhood crush Alex Trebek. When Starcade was picked up by cable channel TBS, Trebec was long gone and would soon move on to another job, Jeopardy. Maybe you've heard of it. The format was also different, with producers ditching the celebrities and team format, but the show was further proof that competitive gaming could catch on. It may have even motivated some gamers to enter the sword Quest contest, or some
sword Quest players to audition First Arcade. Of course, Atari already knew competitive gaming could be the next big thing. All indications were that sword Quest was a massive success, Atari sold five hundred thousand copies of the first game, Earth World. Fireworld was another hit. This was also a time of real ambition for the company, where it was trying very hard to break out of its wood paneled
paradigm and into something new. Like mind Link, an accessory for the Atari that seemed to be able to read minds. Players would strap the device to their foreheads, then, using biofeedback, users could control characters on screen, to the dismay of impressionable kids everywhere. The mind Link couldn't actually read your thoughts. All it really did was detect minor muscle movements in
your forehead. Supposedly, when an Atari executive demonstrated it at the Consumer Electronics Show, it fell off his head and broke. When the company tested it with players, they complained it gave them headaches. The mind Link was never actually released. Another major project Atari planned was by passing physical media, years before downloadable gaming became the norm. Atari wanted to deliver titles through an FM radio station. The data would be sent through the station and then received by a
special Atari peripheral. It was exciting technology, but it also had the added benefit of helping Atari save money on inventory. After all, if you didn't need to store plastic cartridges, you need less warehouse space. Though it was tested in Los Angeles, it never rolled out nationwide. It would be several more years before modems and downloadable games took hold in American homes. They also re released their system so it came in all black, abandoning the wood grain finish
common to audio equipment and station wagons. This was, after all, the eighties, an era of increasingly slick esthetic choices. A version of the console even wound up in Japan, where it competed for gamers with a system called the Family Computer or Famicom, made by a company named Nintendo. Prior to the second sword Quest contest, Stephen hurt Atari might even move the tournament over to the mecca of video games, Japan.
I think we were all like, are we going to Japan? No, we just went to San Francisco, a hotel in San Francisco.
The Atari console cost twenty four thousand, eight hundred yen or about one hundred five dollars, while the Famicom was only fourteen thousand, eight hundred yen or sixty dollars. Despite taking their name from Japan, Atari means to hit a target. They didn't do well over there, but still all signs were pointing to both Atari and video games in general becoming a powerful force in entertainment. But that didn't gel
with Jackie's experience. She had been to two contests and there was a marked difference between the two, and it didn't match with something Michael Rideout heard when he was at the Fireworld tournament. When Michael later gave an interview about his experience to gaming journalist John Hardy, he mentioned something odd had happened at the contest. Someone had walked up to him and given him a warning. No matter what the person said, don't agree to let Atari cancel
the contest. Cancel the contest. Why would they cancel the contest? Was that even legal at the time. Michael had no idea what they meant. He was in it for the long haul. For one thing, he was keeping the jalice. Unlike Stephen, who sold his prize to buy a car, Michael wanted to savor his victory. There were two more games to be played and then a final event with a fifty thousand dollars sword on the line. Even with a mind link, it was impossible to read Atari's mind
and know what they were thinking. But a lot was happening in the video game industry and at Atari that would have far reaching consequences. The third contest was due to be held soon, at least that was the plan. Instead, it would be over two years before Stephen and Michael heard from Atari again. That's when they both got the letter.
That's when it hit the wall, and so they sent out a letter to the twelve people involved. They just wanted to end it and here's some money.
That's next time on sword Quest.
The Legend of sword Quest is a production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. This episode was written by Jake Rosson and hosted by Jamie Loftus producers are Miranda Hawkins and Josh Fisher. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elc Crowley, Brandon Barr, and Jason Ing English. Our show editor is Mary Doo. Audio engineering by Graham Gibson, Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson and Jake Rosson. Original score by Jesse Niswanger. This episode was sound designed by Josh Fisher,
mixing and mastering by Jake Cook. Show logo by Lucy Quintonia Voices in this episode are provided by Miranda Hawkins, Haley Ellman, and Graham Parker.