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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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