it was lack of regulation and research material actually, naturally some americans want to blame the youth they failed to teach in the first place instead

>>12072341
>was Americas youth to blame for their downfall
It was more like Atari's executives had no idea how to run a game company (granted, there really wasn't anything like Atari at the time of the Warner buyout but still) and was wholeheartedly convinced that they could coast off a game system from 1977 for the rest of time. People always love to talk about Sega's downfall, but Atari's downfall was a mix of funny, frustrating, and a little bit tragic.

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>>12072341
They started the home gaming revolution but they never really tapped the potential in original games that weren't arcade ports. Even with the 7800 they were mostly just cranking out downgraded versions of arcade games which were no better than the NES ports but the NES also had Zelda and Metroid and Dragon Quest, etc.

Atari's idea of what video games could be never really expanded beyond the arcades. Even the games that were more expansive were all 3rd party and a lot of them bailed for Nintendo. And Nintendo also figured out how to limit shovelware. They just got left behind as the world moved on. Happens to all of us at some point

>>12072484
>and was wholeheartedly convinced that they could coast off a game system from 1977 for the rest of time.
I always hear people say this, but they released a proper successor, the 5200, at a reasonable hour, shortly after the Colecovision and only 5 years after the 2600. And when the 5200 failed, they had the 7800 locked, loaded and set for release in 1984, but got delayed due to Tramiel shenanigans.

They made s fantastic game in the early 2000s for DS, N+. But I'm not aware of any games they made between Jaguar and that. Or any since N+, for that matter

>>12072520
>made
They published those, and atari of the 2000s is barely related to the atari of the 80s, it's more or less just infogrames wearing their skin

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>>12072341
Atari arcade cabs were kino. Even "meh" games(pic unrelated Millipede is tits) were pieces of art.

>>12072503
This guy's got it. Atari is neat for its time but it really relegated itself to be just the arcade port machine, which I think the Sega Genesis was better at.

Agreed as they didn't try to make unique experiences but cash in on what kids think games should always be. Just high score fests.

I am thankful that other companies at least tried though but if there was only Atari, it would have been pretty grim.

>>12072514
While this is true, the 5200 was supposed to come out around the late '70s, but was morphed into the 8-bit computers. Had the 7800 released in '84 they probably would've rebounded (at least in the 80s) but they still were supporting the 2600 too. I love the 2600 but it should've been discontinued in 1982 realistically speaking. Keeping the 2600 alive may not have been the only thing that lead to their fall, but those development resources could've been allocated to the 5200 instead of trying to build brainwave controllers (not baiting) for the predecessor. What also didn't help in the late 80s was Atari having like 4 systems (2600, 7800, XEGS, Lynx, with the Mirai/Panther or whatever it was starting development too) all concurrently being supported. Basically it wasn't just one thing, but a series of blunders that lead to Atari dying.
Sorry for the wall of text, I get autistically passionate about Atari

>>12072625
Based to see an anon passionate about shit like this.

Do you think Jack Tramiel is the ultimate cause of their failure or the tipping point?

>>12072503
Mostly right, except for
>And Nintendo also figured out how to limit shovelware
Not if the NES library is anything to go by
>>12072625
>Had the 7800 released in '84 they probably would've rebounded
What makes you figure? It's an interesting thing to consider. Christmas 1984 being post-crash. Were games half-dead at that point in the west or is that just Nintendo-centric revisionism?

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Can he pull off the impossible comeback?

>>12072692
>atari logo is 3 dicks touching
>rainbow background
>most well known 2600 game is about holes and snakes
mt. fujibros...

>>12072703

We finally found Mr. Gay

>>12072729
Move over Mario Galaxy...

>>12072668
I think he made an already bad situation worse. The going theme with Atari seems to have been that the executives had no clue on how to actually operate a game company. Tramiel's time with Commodore was mainly supported by Irving Gould it seems so without that guy who could bail him out he was fucked from the get go. So when you have this guy without his bailout buddy trying to run a video game company that was previously hemorrhaging money and who is also known to be hard to work with and would have to personally sign off on everything and you have essentially just thrown gasoline on a raging blaze in an attempt to put it out.

>>12072686
>Were games half-dead at that point in the west or is that just Nintendo-centric revisionism?
I wasn't there so I can't say definitively, but people didn't just stop playing video games. I imagine it was more like nowadays where people are playing games, just not buying them (pricing is the main reason today, but back then it was probably quality control). I think the 7800 would've pulled Atari out of the hell they dug themselves in and if they had some foresight on platformers (and based off the unreleased Garfield game on the 2600 some of the devs did) and made something to compete with Mario when the time came, they easily could've been a threat to Nintendo instead of a very small dent. Again, this is all mainly speculation on my end. It's easier to say how they could make it go right with hindsight on your side.

>>12072484
>Atari's executives [were] wholeheartedly convinced that they could coast off a game system from 1977 for the rest of time
Nolan Bushnell warned them when they bought it, but it took years and the appearance of Intellivision and Coleco (which were directly due to Bushnell's ousting) before they finally started to believe it.

>>12072686
>Were games half-dead at that point in the west or is that just Nintendo-centric revisionism?

Some of it's Nintendo lore, but there's plenty of truth in it too. Sure, many companies moved over to computers, but many more failed to make it. I'd compare it to the dot-com crash. A lot of shitty shell-game companies bit the dust, but a lot of good companies died in the wake of it, and investors treated the whole market as radioactive for years to come.
The companies that survive were in many cases reluctant to go back to consoles until the later NES years, too

>>12072750
>Tramiel's time with Commodore was mainly supported by Irving Gould
Gould was the guy who destroyed Commodore. He may have been a difficult guy to like on a personal level, but Tramiel built Commodore himself.
The problem with Tramiel's Atari was almost entirely due to the botched sale, where he only got parts of Atari, and had to fight a long legal battle over who owned what, which was the #1 (though not the only) reason the 7800 was delayed for so long.

An alternate timeline where Nolan Bushnell sold Atari to Tramiel instead of WB would be an interesting what-if. Tramiel was a hard-nosed boss, but he treated engineers with respect (as long as it was mutual) unlike the WB guys who treated engineers and game designers as replaceable greasemonkeys.

The having-to-sign-off-personally thing was Tramiel's particular genius, he was good at keeping all the plates spinning, and used it to his advantage. He'd ask an engineer "when will X be ready?" and then plan seven other things to coincide with that date, and if you delivered the X on time, the whole thing ran like a well-oiled machine. Heaven help you if you were blowing smoke up his ass with your estimate though, if you took too long and didn't notify him about delays, it could cause all kinds of problems for the company and he'd have your ass for it.

>>12072341
high-strung prima donnas

>>12073251
I have no idea where you would get this notion

>>12073236
>The problem with Tramiel's Atari was almost entirely due to the botched sale, where he only got parts of Atari, and had to fight a long legal battle over who owned what, which was the #1 (though not the only) reason the 7800 was delayed for so long.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Epyx develop the 7800 (or a company with the same name)? If so, I wonder what that contract looked like because I can definitely see them trying to shop the hardware around after the split which would be a headache for a new owner to handle. Did Tramiel or the 7800 engineers ever discuss what happened with the system IP immediately after the split?

>>12073350
You are thinking of the Lynx on which iirc Epyx got shafted pretty hard. The 7800 was designed by the General Computer Corporation (GCC) which also got shafted and had to pivot to computer hardware to make end meets until they just started selling printers for a few decades and died.

>>12073350
As I recall the 7800 was developed by a separate team that Warner Bros higher ups hired, without telling anybody below about it. When they sold Atari the "separate team" thing meant it wasn't clear who owned their work, and since it was one of the most valuable bits, both sides of the post-sale split wanted it.

>>12072615
>Atari is neat for its time but it really relegated itself to be just the arcade port machine
This is a weird narrative that I hear from time to time, I can only assume it's some kind of Nintendo fan thing.

The 2600 had a huge library of original games that weren't arcade ports. Atari's first party stuff was usually (but not always) arcade ports, but that's because they were an arcade company first and foremost, and so their designers mostly preferred to work on arcade hardware, then when something was good they'd create a console version of the game.

I'm surprised the E.T. landfill still hasn't been raided by some youtuber

>>12072341
>was Americas youth to blame for their downfall?
no. as per usual with americans it's always incompetence and greed. jack tramiel drove it into the ground.

>>12072484
>It was more like Atari's executives had no idea how to run a game company
they knew. what happened was when atari was sold to jack tramiel he quickly realized this console business their in wasn't profitable for them, cancelled them all and poured the money into making a computer to compete against the amiga, purely out of spite. they got lucky with the ST. was all down hill from there. warner made the wise choice of holding onto atari games early on, along with namco owning a percentage, and kept pumping out classics.

>>12072341
>was Americas youth to blame
You always are

>>12072341
It was mid-1970s hardware that got dated pretty quickly in the early-to-mid 80s. It reached market saturation to where every household that wanted one had one. Every last person saw the disparity between the arcade machine graphics and Atari graphics, and knew that better graphics were always possible because of it, which helped make the Atari dated.

Atari took a big risk by milking it for as long as they could, and that risk back-fired and made it easy for Nintendo to come in and take over the market in 1985.

>>12073310
Atari boss said that the developers were a bunch of high-strung prima donnas. They quit and formed their own company, Activision.

>>12072341
Atari was to blame for Atari's downfall. Have you ever looked into their business and logistics end? Comprehensively retarded.

>>12073783

Producing as many consoles as ET carts was a stroke of PURE GENIUS...

>>12073783
They're cursed to always be run by retards

if Americas youth embraced computers instead of consoles, then maybe. there'd be an American demoscene and bedroom game coders

>>12074137
There were American bedroom coders, they just cut their teeth on the apple ii and Commodore, eventually founding companies like Sierra, origin and id.
It was more about "look at this dnd simulation I can do on the computer" than "look at some whacky graffiti effects i can do on the computer"

Atari just have a certain coolness about them, even if they didnt make the best games, they had style.

Just pure arrogance mixed with getting lucky.

The 2600 didn't do well because it was good, it did well because it was first. The "Gen 1" of consoles weren't even consoles, they were barely a game machine, some of them were less than even a Pong machine. Gen 2 was really the start of game consoles, and the 2600 was the first.

This made it new and special, and everyone's at the time first experience with games at home like that. Compared to the later Colecovision and Intellivision it rather sucked, it was mostly costing on having an existing consumer base and brand popularity due to being first. Maybe the simpler controller had a part in it, but it was also massively limiting.

It became clear that Atari had no idea how to actually handle videogames or game systems, the system had numerous laughably horrific games, mostly due to them not giving the slightest shit about quality and thinking anything put on the system would sell no matter how rushed or crappy. This ultimately killed the system and crashed the console game market in the US despite the huge lead they had been handed on a silver platter. After that when Gen 3 started and other more competent consoler manufacturers appeared they never recovered, even up until their last system they confused to make boneheaded decisions like having a number pad in a controller in 1993.

So no, the "youth" was not to blame for their downfall, Atari was the only one to blame for their own downfall.

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>>12074302
>Gen 2 was really the start of game consoles, and the 2600 was the first.
It wasn’t, let’s make that clear. Atari was dumb, but you’re not giving them enough credit, they got licenses for the games people wanted to play, while Intellivision and Magnavox were mostly stuck with knockoffs. Colecovision comparisons? That was 5 years after the 2600, completely different generation essentially, and they released a new console at the same time (even if it was just a 400/800 in console form).

>>12072686
I smell a bit of seething in that post

>>12072341
They simply could not compete with Nintendo's superior graphics.

>>12074137
Imagine having your "mind" rekt so hard by youropoor youtubers

>>12073772
That's sour grapes bullshit from a dickhead who got proven wrong though. The "Atari boss" in question was an idiot hired by Warner Bros who treated game designers like interchangeable cogs. They left because they were tired of being treated like shit, so they made their own company and were hugely successful. It was a big loss for Atari, and never would have happened under Bushnell, or anyone who wasn't a stupid asshole.
>>12073832
Bushnell wasn't a retard, he built the company as a haven for engineers and attracted a group of the best in the world. He just didn't understand the business side, and brought in the wrong people to "help," who made his company a massive overnight success, but also promptly took his company away from him and proceeded to fuck it up and ignore all of his warnings and insights.

>>12072615
>they didn't try to make unique experiences but cash in on what kids think games should always be. Just high score fests.
They were right though. High score fests are what video games really are. Everything that came after that has been an attempt to attract people who don't care for video games.

Exploration, story and RPG elements were added to games to attract people who would rather be watching a movie.

>>12074679
You don't seem to care about games with that dumb elitist mindset. You are as dead as Atari is.

>>12072341
video games had reached a faddish level of popularity that was not sustainable, and the fact that there was nothing to stop third-parties making games meant the avalanche shit trying to cash in destroyed their mass-market viability, and became retail poison

>>12072503
>Atari's idea of what video games could be never really expanded beyond the arcades. Even the games that were more expansive were all 3rd party and a lot of them bailed for Nintendo. And Nintendo also figured out how to limit shovelware. They just got left behind as the world moved on. Happens to all of us at some point
this is a big part of it, the japs came in innovating in game design andt hardware, and nintendo was far far better managed

>>12072341
What killed Atari was the lack of quality Western game developers. Westeners are greedy, self-centered and lack a longterm vision. They have a very sociopathic mindset. They don't take pride in their work, they only care about money, which they then piss away on hookers and cocaine. Once the Japanese devs began supporting their own, Atari was finished.

>>12074582
typical Bushnell stan apologist, if he hadn't have fucked up we would still be playing great shit like pitfall Harry to this day desu

>weebs have joined the thread with delusional versions of history

>>12074582
>never would have happened under Bushnell, or anyone who wasn't a stupid asshole.
it did happen. he was still around after he sold it. and it's like you forget that he ripped off maganavox's pong and made an arcade version, giving no fucking credit at all until magnavox sued atari and won. revisionist history such as this on this boarad is the most revolting kind, as most of us here know it's vomited up fucking idiots that form their opinions based on comments from youtubers, that get their info from casually reading a wikipedia page.

>>12074925
bushnell wanted cash and sold it as quickly as he could to anyone that wanted to buy it. people really don't know shit about this retard and try to make him look like some kind of genius, when his claim to fame - pong - was stolen from someone else.

Someone is really mad and obsessed at some random youtuber.

>>12074137
>Americans didn't have computers
>Americans were never bedroom coders
>Americans did not have a demoscene
Where the fuck is this retarded nonsense coming from? It's objectively false, just iD Software alone was a company formed mostly by bedroom coders, and the Apple II and its hacking community was massive, along with a very sizable Commodore computer community.

Who's the inbred faggot perpetuating this myth? I keep seeing it repeated.

>>12075215
>under, around, all prepositions are the same
Way to establish credibility champ
>it's like you forget things youtube told me
Here's hoping that by the time you're old enough for the 4chin you figure out how memory works.

>>12075332
>Where the fuck is this retarded nonsense coming from?
Underage youropoors. They're eternally buttrekt that they have no identity to appropriate other than oi me speccy. It really is hilarious to watch.

>>12075215
>he was still around after he sold it
With increasingly little power over anything, Everyone I've heard from said Bushnell was an engineer's engineer and treated his guys with total respect.

>>12075231
>bushnell wanted cash and sold it as quickly as he could to anyone that wanted to buy it.
Bushnell was watching his company go under and was looking for anybody to bail him out before Atari went bankrupt. It was just his bad luck that he got a call from Warner Bros instead of somebody else. And hell, WB weren't so bad all things considered, it was largely the guy they put in charge who was an idiot, but an idiot who initially looked like a genius when he turned Atari around.

>>12075079
I kind of hate that really detached dividing up of the world, particularly when there's actually a LOT to speak against it. Yeah, I'm a big weeb myself and I love a lot of Japanese games, but the Japs NEVER held a monopoly on choice vidya with soul.

Some of my favorite ever videogames have come out of these countries:
>Britain
>Canada
>America
>Australia
>France
>Poland
>Sweden

>>12075359
>nooo! not my sloptubers that read wikipedia pages!

>>12075397
>Everyone I've heard from said Bushnell was an engineer's engineer and treated his guys with total respect.
i'm sure. you can still be this nice guy, steal from your competitors and deny the people you stole from, or atari employees, any credit for anything they make. interestingly, atari games (warner & namco) did start to give full credits to their developers on attract mode screens, which was kinda unheard of at the time.

>>12075454
>i'm sure. you can still be this nice guy, steal from your competitors and deny the people you stole from, or atari employees, any credit for anything they make.
You're basically conflating Bushnell with the WB guy who ran Atari after the takeover. Bushnell did set the original policy that the games were "Atari" games rather than "this guy's" game or whatever, but to be fair to the guy, he ran a very small company whose employee base was almost entirely engineers, and he pretty clearly viewed it all as a team effort.
Meanwhile calling developers who wanted credit "prima donnas" was the post-Bushnell management trying to run down the guys who went off to form Activision and Imagic, because they were being treated so poorly at the new Atari.

>>12075437
based

>>12075454
>youtubeling further humiliates itself
lol

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>>12072341
Accounting fraud killed the company; a bunch of cokeheads produced tons of inventory and fraudulently counted every shipped unit as sold merchandise. Which eventually caught up to them. Same thing happened to brands like Tyco.

>>12077146
>$40 for teenaged console with one controller or $60 for relatively new console, two controllers, a game, and compatibility with all games the $40 console can play.