In August nineteen eighty six, Stephen Bell decides to check his mailbox. He walks over, opens it and begins sorting through pizzaflyers, bills and letters, junk, junk, and more junk. One envelope, though, catches his eye. It has a return address from Atari Holdings Incorporated, out of New York. Stephen thinks this is a little strange for one. Atari's headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California. That's where he'd become the first
ever winner in their sword Quest contest. The prize for racing through the first game in record time was a talisman worth twenty five thousand dollars. He hadn't won the second game, but had kept busy trying to solve the third water World. The second strange thing was that he hadn't heard anything about the contest in the past two years. Nothing official anyway. Stephen opens the envelope, think, King, he's going to get word on whether he qualified for the
water World contest, which has been delayed over and over again. Instead, the letter informs him of something else. It's not an invitation, but an offer. Here's Stephen, they.
Just wanted to end it, and here's some money. They offered Mike and I fifteen thousand.
It's a kind of settlement offer. Atari is canceling the contest, all of it, and they're offering Stephen and fellow winner Michael rideout fifteen thousand dollars to not compete, to give up any legal claim to having been denied a chance at winning the sword Quest contest and the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery, which is worth fifty thousand dollars. The talisman was already gone, having been sold by Stephen to buy a defective Pontiac Fieriro, a model that had the annoying
habit of catching fire. Now he could take a guaranteed fifty thousand dollars or take a one in four chance of getting the fifty thousand dollars sword, and maybe even one or both of the other prizes, which are valued at twenty five thousand dollars each. This was like one of the puzzles in the game, objects constantly being shifted and sorted from room to room. Stephen stands outside his apartment on the outskirts of Detroit, a dwindling hub of
jobs lost to a sagging American automotive market. The money was more than he'd make in a year, but the sword and its bejeweled handle is calling to him. Stephen isn't sure what to do, and then the letter mentions something else.
The letter stated it had to be unanimous or they would actually continue the contest.
Two sword Quest games had been played and there were two winners, Stephen and Michael, the winner of Firewars World. Both would have to agree in order to get the money. The problem. This was nineteen eighty six, and neither one had the other's phone number for iHeartRadio. This is the Legend of sword Quest. I'm your host, Jamie Loftus and this is episode four, Descent into Darkness. Water World, the third game in the sword Quest saga, was released in
October nineteen eighty three. The winner was due the Crown of Life, a headpiece made of solid gold and adorned with diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. It came with a cash value of twenty five thousand dollars, assuming the victor would ever want to part with it. The in person contest for the crown was planned for nineteen eighty four, but early on there were signs that something was well off about the promotion. Unlike the other games in the sword
Quest series. Water World War wasn't sold in stores. You couldn't just go into a J. C. Penny or Toys r Us and grab the game from a cashier with your hot little hands. You had to be a member of the Atari Age Fan Club and send away for the game. It was weird.
I think at the time it never even occurred to me. We saw it in the newsletter and ended up again being able to get our hands on it, but we didn't really stop to think that it wasn't in the stores. At the time. We were living in a small town that I don't think there were any video game sales, like any stores that sold them, so at the time it meant going into the bigger town, which wasn't far away,
mind you. But we didn't do it a lot, so I think we weren't keeping track of what was on the store shelves as well, especially once we realized we could mail order some of these things. So yeah, for water World, we ended up getting it through the game club.
That's Russ Perry Junior. Back in nineteen eighty two, US was about fourteen years old, living in Illinois and a devout sword Quest player, A quester a sword head, whatever you want to call it. He was obsessed with winning actual prizes.
Oh yeah, definitely. I mean there's always things like just you know, solving the game and having bragging rights, but like, yeah, actually winning something like that, Oh yeah, that would have been awesome.
When the first sword Quest game, Earth World came out, Russ and his brother grabbed it.
We loved that game when these sort of seemed on the surface like they were going to be sort of a continuation of that. So yeah, we got the game as soon as we could, and then immediately started pressing on it.
Russ tried to solve the first two games, but they were both difficult.
So well, we didn't win the first one, Let's go see if we can do the second one. And the second one seemed like it was a little bit easier, but it was still as eech and we still couldn't find an obvious pattern. And I think we ended up finding like maybe six of the clues legitimately, but again it was mostly coming down to the comic book that we found the words in the comic books and were able to enter, and I think again we only got three or four or maybe we got all five, but
the order was wrong or something. But so once again, yeah, we were just that close and didn't quite make it.
But like a lot of gamers, Russ wasn't discouraged. Gaming is a hobby of getting your reps in, and so Russ dutifully sent in his thirty one dollars and ninety five cents for a copy of water World. Four to six weeks later, he got the game, and this time there was something of a surprise. The game was accompanied by a hint book, which guided players on strategies to find clues in the game. Water World was based on the chakra, the ancient spiritual theory of energy points in
the body. Knowing how that was laid out would help you navigate the different rooms. Russ, however, was not versed in Hinduism or Buddhism, so he just kept his eyes glued to the screen and hoped for the best.
It was definitely easier, and I don't remember if we ended up finding all the clues or just the majority of them, but it was clearly easier. We found more clues and it didn't take us as long. If I remember, the map was a little bit smaller too. I'm trying to remember that was based on was it And it was like eight rooms total, I guess, and I don't remember exactly how they were connected, if it was a
ring or a grid. But it didn't seem as hard even I think some of the challenges that you have to go through in certain rooms, I don't think they were necessarily as hard.
The comic was also of some help. Included in the package. It told the continuing story of Tor and Tara, the twins opposing King Tyrannus and searching for the objects that will help lead them to the sword that can bring Tyrannus down. In the third issue, they're forced to brave the open seas.
He didn't come up. That means, even though it's cold enough up here to make icicles out of a dragon's breadth, I've got to go back after him. Wait, something ascending from below. No, oh god, he's dead dead.
Actually, Tour's fine, he's fine. He found a mask that allows him to breathe underwater, and the twins are successful in capturing the crown, which brings them one step closer to the sword, just like the people playing the game. Finally, Russ thought he had the solution. He wrote it down, sent it in and waited. In May nineteen eighty four, he got a response, and it was good news. The solution he provided had been correct, but just as before,
there were too many winners, way too many. For the last game, Atari had seventy three people with the right answer, but only wanted to have fifty playing in the finals. This time, the company needed to narrow it down even further, from forty five contestants to just ten, so they asked Russ to write an essay about why he liked the game. Russ did. He wrote it down, sent it in, and waited.
Yeah, it's always that combination of excited, but oh god, there's more. You know, we might not make this, even though we did all the work and I got it right this time. I think in our heads we knew that it was it was a little bit easier than the other ones, so I think we kind of assumed there'd be more entrants that got it right. And again, I don't think we had figured out yet that it was only available to a smaller group of people.
Russ kept waiting. He turned fifth, and then sixteen. He had gotten his learner's permit, and the time Atari was taking to address the contest his voice was getting deeper in the time Atari was taking to address the contest. Maybe Russ would get married and have children before Atari wrote him back about this contest.
And it did seem like with water World, things got really quiet, and it was Earth's World and Fireworld. We knew we hadn't won, we weren't going to make the final playoff, but then when the playoffs occurred, there'd be coverage in Atari page and other things, so at least we got closure on those water World it did kind of feel like, well, there's no closure here.
What happened?
And then finally he got a response. It came in nineteen eighty five. It was from Atari's marketing firm, Amern Marketing Associates, and it began, dear mister Perry, Atari was sold to new owners last summer. Russ must have gotten a kick out of that, mister Perry. It went on to say, a very conscientious and industrious attorney for Atari has the matter in hand now, and I wish there was more we could tell you. For us, it amounted to the same thing. The chances of a water World
contest were looking grim when sword Quest began. Atari had been on top of the entertainment world. But in nineteen eighty four things had changed considerably. Sales had slowed, the stock of parent company Warner had dropped like a rock, and the company had gone from a Silicon Valley sensation too well something else.
I kept up with the video game magazines as much as possible, and it was clear between some of the articles we were seeing and just the times you do get to the store, there's a lot more cartridges unclearance. You realized there's definitely something going on.
Russ didn't know what that something was, but he was about to find out. In the summer of twenty twenty two, the parent company of Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers Discovery, made headlines when they wound up shelving an entire movie, Batgirl, which was already done filming. They figured it saved them more to keep it tucked away than to distribute it.
It's not often major movies with Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser are just locked up, but Warner did it, and then they did it again in twenty twenty three, and it wasn't the first time they had made a drastic move to please shareholders. In nineteen eighty four, it's safe to say Atari was no longer the star of Warner Communications. Instead of posting record profits, the company was losing tens
of millions of dollars a quarter. Atari went from expecting to see revenue rise by fifty percent to seeing it expected to increase only ten to fifty teen percent. One of the bigger problems is that there were more systems available, like Kaliko Vision, which had gotten off to a slow start but exploded once Nintendo's arcade hit Donkey Kong arrived on the system. It was the killer app before there
was such a term as killer app. Everyone loved Donkey Kong from playing it in the arcades, but if they wanted to play it at home, they had to buy a Kaliko Vision, which had an exclusive on the game. Early on.
Kaliko Vision, I'll never forget I was sitting at a meeting at Atari when the first colcos hit the street. So they went out and bought one, and they walked into the conference room and they took it out of the box, and they opened it up and they looked at it, and the engineers looked at it and said, it hit clearing a piece of shit.
That's many Gerard Manny was a top executive at Warner who led the charge to buy Atari in nineteen seventy six. Manny is ninety now and he sees Atari's downfall as one built partially from arrogance. Atari had the opportunity to get Donkey Kong all to themselves, but they didn't.
It was there.
Having another competitor is not good, but it never had me reallyver. What it had was Donkey kar And when I went into Kazar, who ran the company, I said, we knew how good Donkey car. We had the most arrogant programmers in the world in the coin oup division, and they were telling us this is one of the great games of all time. Why did you let the game go? And he spaid to me, well, they wanted two dollars a cartridge for a royalty. We aren't going
to pay that. He couldn't. May what do you say, stupid, He said to growth margins or eighty eight percent on the cartridges, And that was going to be one of the best games anybody ever saw. And forgetting that, Calico.
Got Donkey Kong was lost to some bad math at Atari. The other problem the Atari system simply had too many games and not all of them were coming from Atari. A growing number of third parties were able to produce games for the system without Atari's permission.
We could not legally prevent it, and it had I forget the technicalities of it, but it had a lot to do with what they had done well done at the very beginning, and the way the twenties eacheter was designed and nobody thought it was a great prominent business.
This is how Atari's out in trouble. The flood of software. Now, remember that every subsequent successful piece of video game hardware, having learned from our experience, you couldn't play out of cartridges unless you got a license from the parents.
That's true. Video game companies got way more strict about these games after Atari messuck. So how could that happen? How can a company literally just crumble financially overnight. That's a twisty knot. But here's someone else that can give you a picture.
ET had just come out and Atari made this, you know Howard Warshaws gave ET. So they had a press conference, they showed the game, and I was the only person from Atari there. Nobody else wanted to go.
That's Larry Kaplan Larry was a programmer with Atari who left the company and then came back in time to see it well implode. Part of that was poor quality control. One of the most enduring stories of the Atari age is the debacle that was Et, a game based on the hit movie of the same name. Atari wanted, No needed it in time for the Christmas nineteen eighty two holiday season. That meant game designer Howard Scott Warsaw had just six weeks to program it. Spoiler, it's really hard
to make a good game in six weeks. And to add insult to injury, reporters at the press conference thought Larry was Steven Spielberg. Both men wore glasses and had beards.
Clearly mean way. I looked at reporters interviewing me, you know, for TV and local stations and newspaper, and they all kept figuring out I said no, and of course then nobody wanted to talk to me. It was fine, Yeah, I didn't know what to say. Anyway, I was there because nobody else wanted to be And yeah, I thought was somebody could be there double gay, So it was probably a bad idea.
Anyway.
To be clear, e T didn't kill Atari no one game can do that. Not really, it's a tidy way to summarize the story. But there was more going on.
So a lot of it was that they done been successful, made a lot of money, and so they went out and sent it and they had people doing all kinds of crazy things, paying money for all kinds of stuff, and especially on the computer side, and you know, just wasting money. The huge buildings.
So we had all these buildings, huge rents, and all these defences in these grouping all kinds of crazy wild you know, weird stuff, you know, titles that never sell by the day, hardware, they were working on a video phone.
All kinds of stuff, and you know, they spent a lot of money. But pac Man did not sell well and they got returned and EP did not sell well, and so Christmas came and retailers didn't have a good Christmas because things weren't going well. So here it is December and the retailers are trying to return the games already for Christmas didn't even come because they have inventory, you know, all over the place, and you know, famously they buried some one of them buried with the landfill.
They couldn't sell them at a Tariet didn't want to take them back.
Thanks to a glut of games and a lot of bad games, revenues began falling. This wasn't an abrupt thing. The so called video game crash took time to unravel, but eventually Warner Communications wanted out, and that part happened.
Fast Ober night. Retail January said hey, we're not interested. We'll not buy any more titles. We will return everything we have, all the units and everything else, and that was it. It's clear the company is going down to.
The company entered into a complex deal to hand it off to another party, with options for the new owner to buy Warner stock and Warner able to acquire a minority interest in the new Atari if they chose. Some business experts characterized it as Warner practically giving Atari away. Warner didn't sell all of Atari. They kept the arcade division and Atari Tell the telecommunications arm of the company, but home consumer products were no longer under their banner.
Gaming was also undergoing a radical transformation culturally, like Rock and Roll before it, Parents and child advocates were worried about gaming's effect on kids, and while sword Quest was offering real prizes, other games were offering real life consequences of a different sort. In nineteen eighty two, a man named Glenn Matta was playing pac Man at a bar in Riverhead, New York, when a woman began insisting it was her turn at the machine. Matta began fighting with
the bar's bouncer before getting kicked out. He went home, retrieved a rifle, and headed back to the bar, opening fire, striking and killing a patron. Naturally, every story detailing the killing made sure to mention the dispute had been over a pac Man game. That same year, an eighteen year old Indiana man named Peter Bukowski was playing an arcade game called Brazil in pursuit of a high score. When
he finally achieved it, he stumbled and fell over. People rushed to his aid and an ambulance was summoned, but it was too late. Peter was dead. The deputy coroner later determined he had died of a heart attack. There was some inflammation of his heart, but investigators couldn't determine whether the excitement of playing the game was or wasn't
a contributing factor. The deputy coroner did add that Plukowski could have died from any kind of exertion, but he was playing a video game, so people jumped to that conclusion. Some towns even took the extraordinary step of banning miners from playing games. In Marlborough, Massachusetts, kids under eighteen were banned from arcades before three thirty in the afternoon on
school days and after ten at night. Marlborough even mandated that arcades couldn't be opened within fifteen hundred feet of schools. The town of Bradley, Illinois, introduced similar policies, banning kids under sixteen from all arcids. It was turning into footloose for video games.
Jerry.
Video games are the latest craze to sweep the country. In most of the world, too, millions of people are addicted to hours of gazing at electronic images on game screens, in arcades and in their own homes. What makes video games so popular? We search for an answer as we begin a special series on video fever Games people play.
Critics believed kids spending six or seven hours a day playing games, or in what one dubbed an airtile electronic womb, growing numb to reality. If the games didn't do it, maybe the recreational drugs frequently bought and sold in the CD or arcades. Did some even believed kids sold drugs just to have the money to play video games. Between video game hysteria and market saturation, every penny of Atari going in and out was examined in detail under its
new ownership. One thing that stood out was sword Quest. When the company was sold in the summer of nineteen eighty four, two of the five contests had been held. There was still water World and Airworld, along with the grand finale where all four winners would vie for the sword. That was one hundred thousand dollars just in prizes, not to mention airfare for dozens of people, plus hotel, and
you need to feed them. A safe assumption is that it would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred fifty thousand dollars to finish sword Quest in the way Atari well the old Atari had promised. It had seemed like a great idea just two years prior, But then again, everything seemed like a great idea when you were making hundreds of millions of dollars. If Atari was compiling a list of unnecessary expenses, then acting as a travel agent for a couple dozen gamers had to be near the
top of the list. But here's the thing about contests, you kind of have to finish them. There are legal protections in place for contest entrants so they don't get financially harmed or cheated by contest promoters. Hundreds of thousands of people had purchased the games on the premise they could if they solved the puzzles and got the right phrase, be eligible for prizes. If Atari simply terminated the contest, they might be subjecting themselves to legal action, maybe a
Federal Trade Commission investigation, maybe a state law violation. Here's Stephen Bell.
For the second game. There was another friend that we met up with, a guy who had was really into this. We became good friends, and he lived out there in Fresnel, and so he was following everything that was happening real close, and he was kind of keeping me informed that a Tari was sold in the sky Bottom and we'll see what's going to happen to contest. And I guess say it took a year before funny, somebody convinced him that
you've got to do something here. You bought the company, you bought this contest.
So Atari handed it off to an attorney to figure it out. That process was protracted, lasting about two years. The deadline to enter water World was April nineteen eighty four. Stephen got his letter in August nineteen eighty six. After all that time, What that attorney came up with was this, only Stephen Bell and Michael Rideout had guaranteed slots in the finals to compete for the sword. Everybody else who had participated in Earth World and Fireworld had their chance
to compete, but only Stephen and Michael won. That left the two of them, plus the winning entries for water World, as the players who had the potential to win the remaining prizes. But in order to end the contest, there needed to be a unanimous decision between the two players. If one didn't agree, then it would have to go forward. That created a kind of union. Maybe Stephen and Michael could join forces and demand Atari offer a more lucrative settlement.
Not that Atari's solution was cheap. Because Stephen and Michael had already won their respective games. They were each offered fifteen thousand dollars. Neither one had submitted a correct water World entry, but that didn't really matter. The chance to win. The sword was already promised to both of them. They
didn't need to win the remaining two games. Michael Rideout would later tell gaming journalist and historian John Hardy that he tried to call Stephen to see what Stephen wanted to do, but he couldn't get in touch.
I was apartment hopping, So that's probably, unfortunately not of surprise, because you know, back in the day to have the Internet and everything else to track somebody down with, you know, if a phone numbering in service no more. Yeah, so as I didn't hear that, But I should have told them. I should have came back with a counter offer, saying, well, what the contest is done, then I win.
Both men struggled with the decision. The sword was valuable, holding it aloft would be the pinnacle of the most spectacular contest in video games up to that point. Did they want to cash in their chips or let it ride?
We should have known this would happen.
Now that we've gained a third talisman on this third.
World, the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery appears in the air, mocking us with its nearness for all that we cannot touch it.
Finally, Stephen came to a decision. It was one he had to arrive at in a kind of bubble, not knowing which way Michael was leaning.
And at the time, I'm like, well, we're in through the first money I won buying a car and stuff, and fifteen grandy come in handy. So my thought processor as well, I can't give up fifteen grand and ended up losing. Of course, I went, okay, I'll take the money.
Michael wasn't sure Steven was going to agree either, but he felt the same way. The guaranteed money was too much to ignore. Within months, Stephen and Michael got a check for fifteen thousand dollars each, as well as another prize.
I've had people over the years, and what do you think happened to it? Well, I think mister Jack Fremielle took him in dirt somewhere in his family. I don't know, you never know, but everything that's what happened to emerginally.
Yeah.
Actually I didn't hang with her until about ten years ago because of course, you know, you got this story to tell all your life. And one of my ex coworkers about ten years ago, so he's all up on Xbox and he asked me, Yeah, you got one, says no. He said to wait a minute, you wonder how much money are playing a video games that you aren't even playing him anymore. They also, out of the blue, they
sent I don't know if they sall to Michael. I'll sure they probably did their last video games system, the seventy eight hundred system. They sent to me as a little bonus prize that I didn't even know about. All Sun just showed up one day.
A new Atari seventy eight hundred gaming system which promised better graphics. They also got their choice of games for the system. Mis pac Man sent to Pete Joust, but not Airworld, the fourth and final game in the sword Quest series, was being shelved indefinitely. It was the bad Girl of the eighties, a piece of lost media tucked away into a vault, never to be seen by the public. So there were no winners for air World to settle with. That still left the ten people who submitted the correct
answer for water World and had a winning essay entry. Unfortunately, Russ Perry wasn't one of them.
They were sending out like little certificates with each contest, and I think we had gotten that certificate and the indication that hey, you got it right, but you got a tiebreaker.
Russ got a certificate crowning him something like a Supreme Sage of Sorcery or another made up title as consolation. That left one dangling thread. What was a Torri going to do with the ten water World finalists, whose essays they had already accepted and who had been promised a trip to California for the contest. According to one video
game historian, only one solution was possible. Atari would have to hold a water World tournament and award the winner the crown, and they'd have to do it in secret. There's a very nice coffee table book called The Art of Atari, written by Tim Lapatino and released in twenty sixteen. It features beautiful reproductions of all the amazing video game box art produced by Atari artists like Warren Chang, Terry Hoff, Steve Hendrix, Evelyn Cito, and several others. Seriously check out
some Atari box art online. It's terrific. The Art of Atari also served as a breezy history of the company on the subject of sword Quest. Lapatino writes, quote the contest legally needed to be completed so the Crown of Life was allegedly awarded to the winner of a semi public competition of several entrants unquote. While that's interesting, what does semi public mean? Do contestants have to wear masks? Where they all swornto secrecy? Dig a little more and
you'll find an Atari historian named Kurt Vendel. With another historian named Martin Goldberg, Vendell co wrote a twenty twelve book Atari Inc. Business Is Fun. He also amassed an incredible assortment of Atari games, consoles, papers, and other ephemera. He's long been considered one of the foremost authorities on a Tar's long storied, and sometimes pot and cocaine infused legacy. Kurt even went exploring in dumpsters belonging to the company to salvage the history it was too quick to discard.
He was once escorted from the property, a badge of honor for any cultural archaeologist. His Atari History Museum, which had an online presence and occasionally a physical one at gaming conventions, was a repository for all things Atari, store displays, prototypes, schematics. He even worked with Atari to release a retro gaming device,
the Atari Flashback. Drawing on his skills as an engineer, and in doing so, he found that he likely had more of the company's history on paper than the company itself. In nineteen ninety nine, The Village Voice Crown Kurt king Pong, so he had real credibility as a journalist Anatari archivist. This wasn't a random fan spinning a tail, but someone
who was constantly researching Atari's history. Kurt repeated the claim a few times on Internet message boards that Atari was legally obligated to hold a water World contest and that someone was awarded the crown. Here's Russ Perry.
So I don't recall the exact timing of all that. I think it might have been years later that I found that they allegedly did hold the contest. So there were a lot of people out there, and we were all kind of connecting as best we could, and you know, talking this stuff through, and you never knew how much was hearsay a rumor. You'd eventually, like, hear some stories over a few times and you'd realize there might be a grain of truth. Because I've heard this from guys
across the country now. But it leads me to wonder if he was speculating or had actually heard it from somebody.
Even if Atari wanted to terminate the contest and get out of the last game and the finals, water World had already been released and correct entries had already been accepted. How could Atari deny those contestants a chance? More specifically, how could Warner than the owners of Atari, deny them the chance? That the contest was held quietly, which for the gaming industry simply meant not publicizing the results in
gaming magazines was apparently important. It allowed Atari to put sword Quest to bed and avoid awarding the remaining two prizes, the Philosopher's Stone and the Sword. But where did Kurt get his information from? Almost certainly from speaking with former Warner and Atari employees, But Kurt never sourced this specific information, at least not publicly. What's more, no one has ever come out to say they were awarded the crown or even participated in a water World playoff. Did Atari make
them sign non disclosure agreements? If they did, would they still feel bound to them four decades later? It's not likely. While we'd like to ask Kurt, that's not possible either. Kurt Vendel passed away at the age of fifty three in twenty twenty from a heart ailment, which proved to
be a devastating blow to the Atari fan community. We'll have to go with what we know, and what we know is that when Michael Rideout discussed his win years later, he said that the ten water World contestants received a similar offer to what he and Stephen had received, just much less of it. The ten gamers got two thousand dollars or twenty five hundred dollars each to relinquish their stake in the water World finals. Stephen heard the same thing.
Remember that Stephen had a friend in Fresno who was in the Atari loop. In fact, Stephen is the first person to corroborate Michael's.
Story just it was a buyout, that it was. They had ten people waiting to go play for the third one. That's when it hit the wall. And so they sent out a letter to the twelve people involved if they just wanted to end it, and here's some money. So they offered Michael and I fifteen thousand, and they offered these other ten people twenty five hundred to give up their shot at a twenty five thousand dollars a crown.
Stephen has also heard the urban legend about the secret water World tournament, but remember that he and a number of contestants kept in touch with each other at least for a while, and there was a chance one of them would have been a water World finalist.
I read that supposedly somebody won the crown. I'm not buying it. I read that they had the ten people that they actually went through with that contest, but I'm not buying it because the legal ramifications of that. If that actually happened, yeah, I don't think so. But you know, unfortunately nobody in our little group was one of them, because no, of course we were talking, so we all had the same wrong answer.
Nor does Steven regret taking the money, though he's since come up with what he believed would have been a better counter offer.
It took me five years. About five years after that, I realized what I should have done. I should have asked him for the sword. I should have told him. I should have came back with a counter office saying, well, if the contest is done, then I win. Because I went to two of them and won one of them.
Michael wasn't that the first one, and I was even going to tell him, you can give Michael the crown and the other prize, and we each get our fifty thousand dollars prizes, and we're all happy because that wouldn't have cost him any money.
But that brings up another question. Keep in mind that in most all of the advertising material for Sort Quest, the prizes appeared as illustrations. There were no photos of the Crown, Philosopher's Stone, or Sword of Ultimate Sorcery. The game's creator, Todd Frye, never saw them. With Atari ending the contest, was there even a sword to hand out? Or had Atari been waiting until the last possible moment to commission a jewel encrusted blade from their company siblings
at the Franklin Mint. Here's Ross Perry Junior.
I remember back in the day, some people speculated that they weren't actually making the prizes until like right before the contest the championship.
Had hundreds of thousands of people been playing for a sword that never actually existed. The answer to that question would come some thirteen years later and nearly three thousand miles away, and of all places, inside a thrift store. 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, L. C. Crowley, Brandon Barr, and Jason 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 Hayley Ellman and Graham Parker.