Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I understand, the "ET for Atari was so bad it killed the games industry" is kind of an exaggeration/misrepresentation. Which should probably be assumed from how simple the explanation is despite all the questions it brings - you can find plenty of people who had the game as a kid but not many that will recall it being so bad they never wanted to touch their Atari again.

Someone can find some real sources, but I read an article a while back explaining that - from what I recall - what really killed the industry was supply issue that got out of hand. When the Atari started to take off, they didn't have the production capacity to keep up with orders stores were putting in. Stores were being sent about x% of the size of order they requested, so the stores started putting in much bigger order requests to get the amount of stock to actually fulfill demand for their store. Because of this, Atari figured there was way more demand than there was in reality, so once they finally scaled up production they were suddenly able to fulfill the giant order requests stores were putting in, which was way more than they could actually sell. Suddenly stores were overloaded with Atari cartridges, and putting them into bargain bins just to get rid of stock. From there, it seemed like the home console thing was just a fad that came and went. ET just happened to be the big game Atari was pumping out units of because of their overestimation of demand.

The rumor had it they thought the movie tie-in would be such a hit that they produced more ET cartridges than there were 2600 consoles in existence.

Supply chain whiplash sounds credible too though.

My vague recollection is that coin-op was never quite the same after the crash, and you also stopped seeing as many coin-op machines in unlikely places. There was a fad element.

> they produced more ET cartridges than there were 2600 consoles in existence.

in this manner, you only have to manufacture the game one time instead of having to order a second manufacturing run later since it was assumed Atari was going to keep making more consoles. it was quite the "cunning plan". the rest of the world was just not on the same page of their play book. i'm guessing MBAs were involved

Supply and command Ricky Make billions of sheets of paper, eventually demand for pens will go up.. right?

There were a lot of bad games for the 2600. ET because it was pushed hard became the poster, but there were a lot of other bad games at the time. Many were another variation of the theme with nothing else going for them once you have played one pac man clone you have played them all.

ET did get a bad rap because of the bugs and it really wasn't fun. However the idea itself was sound and if they had spent another year in development (which would have been too late for many reasons, see above and other discussion) it probably would have been a fun game everyone remembers as a classic for how good it was - instead of one everyone remembers it for the bugs.

One problem was also that the 2600, hardware-wise, had run its course. Some of the other contemporary consoles were a bit better, but most of them were well below the arcade games of the day.

Yes, there are some impressive things being made with the continuing efforts of hobbyists today, but under the resources and commercial pressures of the time, the 2600 wasn't going to produce a stream of new and exciting hits.

There's a demake of Super Mario for the 2600, but it's clearly blockier and clunkier than the day-1 NES launch title, and it took decades of hobbyist effort to get even there.

I wonder if Atari didn't really know how to deal with the idea of an upgrade. Most home goods don't require a sudden upgrade to play popular new content (colour TV was intentionally compatible with black-and-white sets, and even hi-fi had a long transition period where you could get new albums in LP/tape/8-track/CD), so even if the 5200 had not been awkward, it would have been difficult to get the right mix of manufacturing, new game development, and backporting to smoothly transition.

The 7800 would probably have competed very well with the NES if they had launched at the same time-- backwards compatibility would have offered a placeholder as the 7800-native library was built out-- just give people a voucher for a stack of free bargain-bin games in the box.

> However the idea itself was sound and if they had spent another year in development (which would have been too late for many reasons, see above and other discussion)

I don't think any games were in development for a year at that point in time. Probably another month, maybe two, would be within the realm of possibility, but not a whole year. Unless maybe it got shelved and then reactivated later.

That is itself one of the problems of the day.

So many bad games that they (Atari) buried approximately 700,000 cartidges in the desert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

There's a recent homebrew for the 2600 called "Burying ET" about this very thing. Amusing. https://florentdeloison.itch.io/burying-et

> From there, it seemed like the home console thing was just a fad that came and went

lol. boy, is that an idea that didn't age well. I was too young to know about all of the business side of Atari, but I do know that me and everyone else like me never touched their 2600 after getting an NES. In my house, we went with the NES instead of the Atart 5200. We did get an Atari 7800 instead of the SNES, but I'm pretty sure that my dad decided on the 7800 because of the 2600 compatibility where the 5200 was not.

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