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And that's how Nintendo pulled their coup in the US games market. They still had all those mediocre (as in long in the tooth) arcade games but also original ga

And that's how Nintendo pulled their coup in the US games market. They still had all those mediocre (as in long in the tooth) arcade games but also original games (full RPG and complex strategy) more like computer ports. The dark horse contenders were the actual "general purpose" computers. That worked out well but took quite a bit longer to play out than the consoles in gaming popularity. Less accessible I suppose.

jhbadger 4y ago
It depends on what you mean by "general purpose computers", 8-bit computers like the Apple ][, Commodore 64 (and in Britain/Europe things like the ZX Spectrum) were actually quite popular before the NES. In fact many NES games were actually ports of earlier computer games.
VyseofArcadia 4y ago
It's always been interesting to me that the 7800 and NES were designed at roughly the same time, because the 7800 seems so much more primitive. (Using the TIA for sound didn't help!) On paper the graphics hardware is superior, but I feel like no 7800 games of the era really new how to take advantage of it. What really killed the 7800 I think is that it was cancelled and only later released after the NES revived the market. And it was released at a budget price point with a bunch of mediocre arcade ports. And this was after Super Mario Bros. had rocked the world! And the NES had better ports of most of the 7800 launch lineup! I wonder what would have happened if the 7800 had not been cancelled originally. I think the NES would have still beaten it in sales, but maybe the NES would have looked primitive in '85 if 7800 devs had a year of learning how to get more out of the hardware.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  The 7800's technical advantages are subtle in that relative to the rest of its generation, it can do lots of sprites smoothly and with varied color, but the output quality is relatively low res. It doesn't screenshot as well in a tiny magazine thumbnail, which is going to bias expectations towards "worse graphics". I do think that had it not had a terrible launch, used better controllers, and invested more in software dev and on-cart tech(there were scrapped plans for better audio chips) it could have gotten a serious market share. But the whole story of Atari is that it succeeded marvelously as a startup and then subsequently floundered as a large enterprise, and this is just one more example.

jhbadger 4y ago

It depends on what you mean by "general purpose computers", 8-bit computers like the Apple ][, Commodore 64 (and in Britain/Europe things like the ZX Spectrum) were actually quite popular before the NES. In fact many NES games were actually ports of earlier computer games.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago

It's always been interesting to me that the 7800 and NES were designed at roughly the same time, because the 7800 seems so much more primitive. (Using the TIA for sound didn't help!) On paper the graphics hardware is superior, but I feel like no 7800 games of the era really new how to take advantage of it. What really killed the 7800 I think is that it was cancelled and only later released after the NES revived the market. And it was released at a budget price point with a bunch of mediocre arcade ports. And this was after Super Mario Bros. had rocked the world! And the NES had better ports of most of the 7800 launch lineup! I wonder what would have happened if the 7800 had not been cancelled originally. I think the NES would have still beaten it in sales, but maybe the NES would have looked primitive in '85 if 7800 devs had a year of learning how to get more out of the hardware.

syntheweave 4y ago
The 7800's technical advantages are subtle in that relative to the rest of its generation, it can do lots of sprites smoothly and with varied color, but the output quality is relatively low res. It doesn't screenshot as well in a tiny magazine thumbnail, which is going to bias expectations towards "worse graphics". I do think that had it not had a terrible launch, used better controllers, and invested more in software dev and on-cart tech(there were scrapped plans for better audio chips) it could have gotten a serious market share. But the whole story of Atari is that it succeeded marvelously as a startup and then subsequently floundered as a large enterprise, and this is just one more example.