Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who lived through that era and had an atari 2600 it was really a combo of two things.

#1. The games on the atari were not games that you spent hours playing, they were very simple, space invader, pacman etc, and were not entirely that fun.

#2. Nintendo. Once the NES(1985) came out with mario bros. and duck hunt it was a like a tsunami of incredible game play that gamers had never experienced before besides maybe at the arcade. The games for the NES just kept getting better and better, Zelda, Mario Bros. 3 while the atari was languishing with its older technology and stable of boring games.

Atari fought back in terms of technology with the Jaguar(1993) but once again even with better technology you still need great games, and the jaguar did not have mario, zelda, and a host of other fun games that nintendo(snes had been out for two years now), and also genesis had. By that time the writing was on the wall and Atari was in its death throes.

So the trope of atari having a ton of unlicensed games being the demise of the 2600 platform is not true at all. I would have to say it really boils down to just the stable of quality games that nintendo and later genesis possessed and atari just didn't have access to.

I didn't live through the era but I did watch that "Icons" documentary detailing the crash. They had people from Activision stating that the issue was really that they initially ignored the avalanche of companies coming in and releasing garbage and just brushed it off. What caught them off guard was that all those companies going out of business and dumping their unsold product into the clearance channel for dollars per cartridge meanwhile good developers are still coming out with premium games and trying to sell them at top prices. It was very hard to survive this.

[1]:https://youtu.be/RuHbRPoOEEA?t=783

Rewatching this documentary they also talked about how it took them time to realize that you need to update the hardware and they dragged their feet on this before finally relenting. Looking at what ended up coming out (Atari 5200, 7800, Jaguar) its clear that they suffered the same nonsense that many American companies tend to end up as: A bunch of idiots parachute in from elite business schools who know nothing of the business and know better than the people on the ground. They manage to eventually destroy whatever advantage/good will they had. Why does this happen so much in the US?

I am left wondering if the execs at Atari even played video games?

Hiroshi yamauchi never played videos games, and Nintendo did well under his leadership.

He had the good sense to hire someone who understood fun. Did Atari have someone like Shigeru Miyamoto?

I didn't live in that era but I thought the video game crash which more-or-less killed Atari was before the NES was introduced?

Technically correct but Atari attempted to compete later and failed with the Atari Jaguar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

I say attempted because as a teenager you could either afford the SNES or the Genesis but rarely both. The Jaguar came out after both the SNES and Genesis and IIRC had superior hardware, but no game support due to things like licensing agreements. It was never a real contender - not from my teenage 12 year old perspective.

The Atari that made the Jaguar isn't the same Atari that made the Atari VCS.

The "video game crash" was a drop in capital, not revenue. Sales of Atari games continued to grow up until the introduction of the NES in 1984. But investors lost faith in the industry because sales didn't meet the wildly overstated forecasts made in 1982.

Atari saw a lot of unsold inventory returned to them and orders cancelled at the end of 1982 because of overproduction. This is what Nintendo was trying to avoid with their licensing requirement. Retailers were promised that they wouldn't have to overbuy game stock. Nintendo introduced artificial scarcity into the gaming business, something they probably already knew from their card game history. If you limit the supply it creates increased demand which keeps prices high.

NES didn't come out until the tail end of 1985 in NYC and 1986 in the rest of the country. Since no new Atari games we're even released by anyone in 1985 (with 2 minor Activision games as the only exception) your claim seems dubious to me. There may have not been a drop in sales numbers from the retailers (who were still burning through the glut of old stock by selling at a loss) but at that point I can't imagine that anybody was still making money up until the NES came out.

I thought the NES was known for revitalizing the home console industry in America, not for killing Atari?

The events that lead to the "death" of Atari as they were at the time is commonly known as "the video game crash of 1983," meanwhile the NES didn't come out in American test markets until late 1985.

Also, if you spent $20-$50 of 1970s money ($100-$250, adjusted for inflation) on a game and was bored of it in 15 minutes, that might make you wary of purchasing another 1970s game.

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