4 ms·
I believe it was mainly the technical limitations of the Atari 2600 console, which couldn't even run a decent version of Pac-Man. Instead they produced this blo
by leereeves 3y ago
I believe it was mainly the technical limitations of the Atari 2600 console, which couldn't even run a decent version of Pac-Man. Instead they produced this blocky, flickering monstrosity:
https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/pac-man https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/pac-man
As arcade games improved, Atari console games began to look like garbage by comparison, even the high-profile games produced by Atari, like Pac-Man.
- bzzzt 3y agoThe flicker was not that bad on CRT TV's of the time (which had very long phosphor decay times). I still own a few 2600s and a lot of games including Pac Mac which is of course not the same as the arcade version but more of a simplified version requiring a bit of imagination. Which isn't surprising coming from a machine with 128 bytes of memory and no framebuffer ;) Those arcade games didn't improve by themselves though, you needed better hardware for better games. While Atari didn't do themselves a favour by trying to squeeze every penny from the 2600 they did build successors. But by then the economy tanked and the competition from Nintendo started.