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Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

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Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#11

Post by scherlock »

LocalH wrote: post #8
battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

I don't think so. Perhaps AI-upscaled? The footage looks legit and would track with the tube cameras that would have likely been used at that time. Although it sucks that it's deinterlaced to 30fps. Video like this really needs to be preserved without immediately throwing out half of the motion

Yeah, this doesn't look like AI generated. It was probably filmed on super 8 film stock. The clothing, hair cuts, manufacturing process all scream early 80s.

I could see a cheap restoration introduction artifacts as a more likely reason for the look.

Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#12

Post by iwanttocomment »

battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

It totally would have been normal to have a custom shirt like that back in the day. I had a few.

In the late 70s and early 80s, there were custom "iron on" T-Shirt shops in most malls. They would have a wall of larger iron-on decals, primarily logos of sports teams and rock bands, but they also had custom letters, usually in the Cooper typeface. You'd tell them what you wanted, the size and color of your shirt and lettering, and they'd go in the back room and iron what you wanted on your new shirt for a few dollars. This was especially popular with youth sports teams in lieu of professional uniforms, families who wanted to match for a big trip (often with custom names like this), and, as you can see here, jokey custom workplace team shirts.

If you watch a late-70s or early-80s episode of The Price is Right, you'll almost certainly see contestants or audience members in these custom iron-on shirts - same font, same slightly disjointed look.

The left-hand text on Dave Compton's shirt is slightly blurry and unreadable given the resolution, not garbled. But it's not some AI nonsense.

DAVE

COMPTON

(King?) OF PACKERS

(He'll?) PUT IT IN ANY BOX

This isn't just a rah-rah team spirit shirt or something obscure, it's a peculiarly '70s innuendo combining thoughts about his job... and his sexual prowess. Sure, that kind of shirt would cause a modern workplace to, uh, send him packing. As they say, it was a different time.

Here's a thread on Reddit about one of those mall custom iron-on t-shirt shops: https://www.reddit.com/r/70sdesign/comments/hf6f0q/tshirt_ir...

Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#14

Post by FrontierProject »

battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

This site has become completly insufferable with the incessant AI accusations IN EVERY SINGLE THREAD, often over the most benign posts.

Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#15

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

iwanttocomment wrote: post #12
battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

It totally would have been normal to have a custom shirt like that back in the day. I had a few. In the late 70s and early 80s, there were custom "iron on" T-Shirt shops in most malls. They would have a wall of larger iron-on decals, primarily logos of sports teams and rock bands, but they also had custom letters, usually in the Cooper typeface. You'd tell them what you wanted, the size and color of your shirt and le…

It seems like the kind of thing you’d get at a company party then, say for meeting a milestone.

Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#16

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

sam345 wrote: post #7
battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

I agree with the normalcy comment re screen printing. But the video does seem too high resolution from what I would expect. And why doesn't author discoose the source or a reason video was taken. Odd that there's very little chatter between employees but they were in front of a camera. Otherwise very interesting video. We loved battlezone.Way cooler than any other game at the time.

It seems exactly like what you’d get from a decent “prosumer” video camera then.

Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#19

Post by pimlottc »

battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

People have a lot of misconceptions about the pre-internet era. The past was plenty sophisticated, it just wasn't /digital/. We certainly had things like high resolution video (on analog film) and novelty tee shirts with fun fonts (laid out manually in fixed sizes). There was just more manual work involved in creating, duplicating and distributing these things.

Re: Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

#20

Post by UncleSlacky »

battlezoen26 wrote: post #4

I believe these are AI-generated photos, and perhaps content. Look at the back of Dave Compton’s shirt carefully, and you’ll notice that the left side starts to have garbled text. It’s very impressive, though. If I’m wrong, and these are real, then I’m very interested why Dave was wearing that shirt. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have been normal to have a custom shirt like that with different font sizes with your own…

The author has updated the site to address this:

"Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated. Which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose. I just wanted to clarify that it is not. It would be pretty daft of me to be knowingly posting AI generated footage on a blog that I’ve worked hard to keep on the up and up. The footage was captured by a CBS news team, and they followed up with an interview of Atari employee (I’ll share that at a later date). Same goes for the images – they’ve been around for a while but clearly were taken at around the same time. The footage was upscaled a little on export from the editing software I used to clip irrelevant parts from. Hope this clarifies – enjoy!"

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