Lost Media: Atari Imagic Commercials
Published:
My latest hobby is mindlessly browsing eBay for lost media on VHS that I could potentially digitize and restore. I’m particularly drawn to cartoons and video game media, but so far the hunt for certain cartoons has been pretty fruitless. However, I have managed to find several interesting video game tapes.
I recently acquired a VHS tape with two commercials on it from Imagic, a short-lived but iconic video game creator for the Atari 2600. The commercials feature the games “Demon Attack” (1892) and “Star Voyager” (1982).
Tape Contents
The two commercials were both recorded to the tape twice. The tape is too short to make sense as something that would be played on loop, so I’m not entirely sure why they would have been recorded twice, but it was helpful to us for the restoration process.
There’s a few things right on the label I am still not sure what could mean. The “QIBA 20XX” identifier is so far a mystery. It could possibly refer to some kind of internal code or organization system.
These commercials are currently available on YouTube, but the quality is pretty bad. Just due to the fact the only current source of the video was uploaded 12 years ago, it happens to be low resolution and low bandwidth. Now that we have our hands on a copy of the source, I want to see if we can’t produce a better restoration.
Demon Attack
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Identifier | QIBA 2013 |
| Title | Demon Attack |
| Created | April 21, 1982 |
| Source | Link | Archival Version |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube | View | v.1 (Youtube version) |
| Internet Archive | View | v.1 |
| Torrent | Magnet 🧲 | v.1 |
Star Voyager
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Identifier | QIBA 2023 |
| Title | Star Voyager |
| Created | April 21, 1982 |
| Source | Link | Archival Version |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube | View | v.1 (Youtube version) |
| Internet Archive | View | v.1 |
| Torrent | Magnet 🧲 | v.1 |
Restoration
Major thanks once again to our friend Garrett Gilchrist who took the raw captures and performed the restoration process. This video has been deinterlaced (QTGMC), stacked (averaging multiple captures), and noise (audio) reduced. The final product is very true to the original source without any major alterations. We hope you enjoy it!
Who is Keye/Donna/Pearlstein?
Just below the date on the label of the tape we see three names: Keye, Donna, and Pearlstein. After some searching, I was eventually able to find out that these three names made up the name of a famous advertising agency in the 80s.
Keye/Donna/Pearlstein was responsible for creating some of the most iconic commercials of the 80s, including the “This is your brain on drugs” anti-drug PSA featuring Rachael Leigh Cook that aired in the late 80s and early 90s.
Jesse Pinkman certainly remembers this commercial.