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> The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games Every history a

by livrem 3y ago

> The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. Home computers in the 1980's did well without trying to lock out bad games. The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?

grumast 3y ago
I think a large part of the problem was the cost of discoverability. On modern PC and mobile, with the availability of free games, it costs nothing but time to wade through piles of bad games. Even on the C64, piracy was prevalent enough that it was easy to obtain and try a large number of games. Atari 2600 games required purchasing cartridges and therefore an outlay of money. Without the internet, it was difficult to get reviews or feedback on the quality of a game without knowing someone that actually purchased it. Added to this, most of the games sold at full price, regardless of the quality. It doesn't take the purchase of too many full price games that were really bad before one gets very hesitant to lay out cash for a new game.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  But review magazines, and word of mouth, would have helped identify the good games?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    review magazines were not universally available. a proper bookstore with a large enough selection of magazines was at least 45 minutes away from me during this time when i was too young to drive. word of mouth has a broadcast radius that is pretty limited as well. hell, i remember the first time i went to a mall with a computer store that actually had magazines dedicated to games. it's also something different from now where you might be into the games/computers, but your parents very well might have held the idea that you were rotting your brain with that stuff. it's probably pretty hard to imagine compared to what is available today. the 80s and early 90s were pretty much the dark ages if not stone age compared to today.
    - Aardwolf 3y ago
      Atari is before my time, but regarding SNES and gameboy, here the popular games went very much through word of mouth (and seeing) on the school playground. I'd imagine this also be the case for Atari if multiple kids had Atari 2600's. Of course if it was rare, then that wouldn't work.
  - Tiktaalik 3y ago
    Review magazines barely existed. Nintendo coming along later and creating it's Nintendo Power official magazine (based heavily on Famitsu) to help direct consumers to the good games was yet another piece of the puzzle that Nintendo laid in creating a vibrant games industry.
- philistine 3y ago
  I’ll say it simply: consumers had nothing to do with the demise of the Atari. It’s retailers, who bought cartridges without ever thinking the gravy train would stop. Atari and everyone else told them consumers had an insatiable appetite for full price cartridges. But when the sales cratered, due to an oversupply, retailers were stuck with the cartridges without the ability to return them. So they turned to the measure that killed the Atari: clearance bins. When all the games you could hope to ever play are in a bin for a buck each, no one is buying anything at 30$ anymore. Nintendo’s never going to say it, but their practices with the NES were not quality control; they were doing price control.
  - belugacat 3y ago
    Exactly this. Even to this day, Nintendo is very smart about almost never discounting their flagship games - and when they do, it’s by a small percent, sometimes with strings attached, not the crazy “90% off” tactics many other developers/publishers follow.
    - doubled112 3y ago
      Playstation games being in the $15 bin while desirable N64 games never seemed to go on sale was a big reason kid me had a ton of games compared to my friends with N64s. I still see this with my kids and their Switch. PS2 and GameCube seemed to follow the same pattern.
    - babuskov 3y ago
      Yes. And it teaches the consumers that there's no point in waiting. When you want their game, you just buy it at full price on launch date, because you know that waiting for discount would take years and even then it would be 20-30% off at best.
      - born2meme 3y ago
        Or in my case it taught me to not want to play the fucking thing at all. Simple as.
- chefandy 3y ago
  > I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms Firstly, unlike a PC or phone, an Atari 2600 isn't useful without games. Secondly, without ubiquitous reviews freely available on the net, players essentially had to choose new games based on the name, box design, and copy. Beyond that, the games weren't necessarily low-quality in the QA sense, i.e. sloppily manufactured or buggy-- most of them just sucked, were ugly, and weren't fun for your average player. Keep in mind, these weren't targeted at video game enthusiasts: they were competing with home video as an entertainment device. You have to compare their appeal with movies, rather than then-current computer games or maybe even board games. I worked in back-end web dev roles for over a decade, but more recently got an art school education in design (concentrating in a few disciplines,) and work in games in both design and technical capacities. Many old Atari games suck because they're either fundamentally bad ideas as games or disastrously implemented. Video game design wasn't really a thing back then, so all of the design work ended up being done by the developer that made the game. Though many developers get annoyed by my saying that design is a learned skill that you don't automatically gain by being a developer, I assure you that not having any designers involved ensures that these games will be more miss than hit. To make matters worse, Atari's success essentially created a gold rush condition. Everyone who was technically capable of making a game was trying to-- probably not even realizing that's exactly what everyone else was doing. It was like 2000 people on a beach saw 3 talented people surfing a wave, so they all grabbed the nearest flat object and jumped in to disastrous effect. Poor retail strategy was obviously a problem, as others have pointed out, but if people buying games could be reasonably assured they were good, I doubt it would have had any more effect than any other big retail miscalculation.
TheBigSalad 3y ago
I was very young, but I don't recall anyone referring to it as a crash until 20 years later. At the time it just seemed like Atari came out, ran it's course, and then the NES came out and blew it away.
- philistine 3y ago
  Because the crash was a business issue. Players never saw anything bad happen; quite the contrary. The price of games went to the floor. Literally, most Atari games ended up in clearance bins for pennies on the dollar.
- sparky_z 3y ago
  The business side was absolutely destroyed. Atari was broken up and sold off by its parent company. Every other 3rd party developer went out of business (or took enormous losses and closed their game division) except for Activision, which survived by the skin of its teeth by pivoting to computer games and spent years digging itself back up to profitability. Retailers lost so much money that the whole concept of "video games" became anathema, which is why Nintendo had to pitch it as a general "entertainment system" and sell it with the light gun and ROB the Robot (basically as decoys for the retail buyers) just to get a tiny foothold back on retail shelves in their NYC test market and prove out the market again.
jccalhoun 3y ago
The difference is that computers and phones do things other than play games. The 2600 didn't. Now, there is the fact that there may be two sides to the story: Is it that people stopped buying games or that the market was so crowded that it was difficult for companies to make a profit? I don't know if that is plausible or not.
babuskov 3y ago
> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. It's because platforms (Steam, stores, etc.) hide them from users. > But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down? More likely lack of good games. So when all you could find was trash...
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Personally, I believe the 2600 was just a victim of age. There were a glut of shit games for it, don't get me wrong, but it's not like we were buying dozens of carts a week. We usually had 5-20 carts, with about half of them played regularly. There was also the push to CDs, later, that doomed a lot of cart consoles. Not only was the media better, and cheaper, it was also "the new thing". It was my last console. After that, PCMASTERRACE...ok..Vic-20/C64/Amiga/8088MASTERRACE. lol Anecdotal, sure, but I was there. :)
- tenebrisalietum 3y ago
  The Atari was released in September 1977, so by 1983 it definitely was a bit long in the tooth. Arcade hardware continued to progress - then Nintendo hit the sweet spot in late 1985 with its resolution, colors, sprites, and cost (and licensing agreements because the Sega Master System was slightly better hardware wise but didn't do as well in the U.S.) Six good years is a long time for any console in the US.
  - sumtechguy 3y ago
    If you watch the documentaries with the original developers and CEO they expected the life of the system to be ~2 years. At that point they would refresh with maybe 100-200 games total for the system. But they realized they could play a different game and lock competitors out by buying up key components or tying up component makers and keep it going for longer. By the time 83/84 rolled around the mid 70s system was looking and sounding really dated next to a ti99 or c64 (with similar price points). It did not help that former atari devs were starting their own shops and cranking out games too. That 4-8 week cadence and they were blasting games out. Nintendo with its seal of approval was to keep the number of games down and the quality up. But most importantly get in a percentage of every single sale.
I_Am_Nous 3y ago
ET is blamed and it might have just shined the spotlight on the quality issues, since it was a huge blockbuster movie and nearly everyone knew about it. So if you see an ET game in stores, loved the movie, but then got "falling in hole simulator" as a game it's even more egregious because the movie was so good in your opinion. Maybe it helped people take the rose colored glasses off and realize that games are supposed to be fun, not just functional.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  E.T.'s a funny one. It's one of the top-selling Atari games of all time, but they made 5M copies for (at the time) an install base of around 10M. Assuming half of your customers will buy the game is a bit bonkers to me. As far as E.T.'s quality goes: yes, it's extremely flawed, but it's honestly nowhere near the worst game ever made. I think it definitely contributed to Atari's woes, but it probably wasn't solely responsible.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Wikipedia says they produced 4M copies, sold 2.6M by the end of the year, but ultimately 3.5 M were returned as unsold or customer returns. Wikipedia says, "Atari sold 1.25 million Space Invaders cartridges and over 1 million VCS systems in 1980, nearly doubling the install base to over 2 million, and then an estimated 3.1 million VCS systems in 1981", so if they thought E.T. was going to be as big of a hit as Space Invaders, 4M copies is actually low production. Pac-Man released in 1982, sold 7.2 M copies in 1982 and about 3M more in subsequent years.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    I don't think people are understanding the problems with E.T. You cannot even finish it. The game does not fully function. Like honestly, what game is worse? Custer's Revenge?
    - sparky_z 3y ago
      You absolutely can finish it. I've done it. It's a confusing mess of a game, but it's not broken.
duxup 3y ago
I grew up during the Atari age. Anecdotally it was really a problem. Folks who owned one would play it, enjoy it, but then you'd start picking up games that were purely "twitchy" and had nothing else going for them... and then another and ... it just wasn't enough to want to keep playing. Eventually your system collected dust. The NES came along and the gameplay on the games, while superficially similar, felt more dynamic and had more going for it. As a kid I probably wouldn't have said "low quality cartilages" but it certainly colored your view of the system and how you spent your time. Atari had a lot of garbage and was woefully arcade style play. Nintendo came along with something more / great games.
gaazoh 3y ago
Purely speculative/anecdotal, but: Atari 2600 games are just not that fun. Of course, for a while it was the best gameplay experience one could have, but when the next generation of consoles came, it was flat out outcompeted. I (and quite a few people) still play NES-era games, and not just because of nostalgic value. A lot of them are still a lot of fun. I have tried some Atari games, and with hindsight and the internet, I can target the best ones, or even recent homebrews that were made with current knowledge about gameplay mechanics, but at best they can get a few minutes of my attention mainly due to curiosity. Gameplay is severely limited by the single-button controller and processing power, very tight memory constraints mean very limited content (at best a handful of different screens played in a loop), and graphics are horrible. My brain can "fill in the blank" with NES-generation or later pixel art, but not with Atari 2600-style big blobs of color.
- snakeyjake 3y ago
  >Purely speculative/anecdotal, but: Atari 2600 games are just not that fun. I had a 2600 brand new and the games weren't fun. I feel like I have gone insane or entered a parallel universe whenever someone fondly remembers that era of video games. I was there. Everyone was like "wow this is so cool" before coming to their senses and going "wow, this is shit". That's what caused the video game crash: the novelty of moving a square around on your TV wore off and people stopped buying all of the boring, samey, shit games.
subsubzero 3y ago
As someone who lived through that era and had an atari 2600 it was really a combo of two things. #1. The games on the atari were not games that you spent hours playing, they were very simple, space invader, pacman etc, and were not entirely that fun. #2. Nintendo. Once the NES(1985) came out with mario bros. and duck hunt it was a like a tsunami of incredible game play that gamers had never experienced before besides maybe at the arcade. The games for the NES just kept getting better and better, Zelda, Mario Bros. 3 while the atari was languishing with its older technology and stable of boring games. Atari fought back in terms of technology with the Jaguar(1993) but once again even with better technology you still need great games, and the jaguar did not have mario, zelda, and a host of other fun games that nintendo(snes had been out for two years now), and also genesis had. By that time the writing was on the wall and Atari was in its death throes. So the trope of atari having a ton of unlicensed games being the demise of the 2600 platform is not true at all. I would have to say it really boils down to just the stable of quality games that nintendo and later genesis possessed and atari just didn't have access to.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  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?
  - jcpham2 3y ago
    Technically correct but Atari attempted to compete later and failed with the Atari Jaguar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
    - mattl 3y ago
      The Atari that made the Jaguar isn't the same Atari that made the Atari VCS.
Tiktaalik 3y ago
The significant difference here is that back in the 1980s and 1990s there was the real valuable commodity of shelf space being taken up by garbage games. Something that would result in unhappy customers buying some random product on the shelf, and bad implications for the company that stocked said product. In contrast with PC and Mobile it's all virtual. There's reams of trash out there and it can be ignored and there's less downside to it existing. However, it is still a problem, one that remains somewhat poorly unsolved, with huge effort being put into storefronts to serve as gate keepers to help direct people to good product and not the mass of trash out there. TBH I think the millions of very bad games did kill the mobile market. Traditional game developers have near completely abandoned it. There's some alt universe version of that mobile market out there that is more healthy than it is now if different choices were made. Similarly the PC market didn't used to be anywhere near as healthy as it is now. When I was younger developers had abandoned the PC market as well and the console market was thriving. Storefront curation is something that has brought more health into the PC space.
- mock-possum 3y ago
  If the Apple Store had the same return policy as Steam, I would buy *a lot* more mobile games on iOS. Unfortunately paying for mobile games is a gamble that I’m not willing to take most of the time. It takes heavy personal recommendations from friends or an exceptionally compelling gameplay video to convince me.
  - Tomte 3y ago
    I never had a problem returning apps or games. But that's with Germany's "Widerrufsrecht" (right to revocation), admittedly.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The problem with the mobile market is that microtransaction laden dopamine traps dominate the stores. People who are looking for a game that isn't a glorified gambling-free real-money casino go elsewhere, so the people making these games just assume the only thing that will sell are games designed to extract money out of ADHD cases and children. Apple seems to be trying to push against this, what with Resident Evil getting an iOS port and them shipping phone hardware with decent GPUs in them. Then again, we've seen this happen before. Every few years someone releases a mobile game that's really high quality, it gets ignored, and then it disappears off the App Store[0]. The mobile app stores are really hostile to anything that doesn't get frequent updates, which means the developer needs recurring revenue, and the only way to do that with a game is to shove your game full of microtransactions to spend on and release it as "free" to "play". Steam has about the same amount of garbage that iOS and Android's app stores get, but people still sell older games there. I can drop $70 on a pay-once game and be somewhat[1] confident that it isn't going to disappear. Same thing with the console stores. Hell, on console you can still buy physical media and enjoy first-sale rights, which is the last bastion of consumer protection in this awful industry. There's also the elephant in the room that mobile phones are just... not very good for certain genres. The Atari 2600 was the same way - it was designed to do Pong and not much else. Most of the games on the system were absolutely heroic efforts to bend H-Blank graphics to their absolute limit. In the case of phones, a lot of action games just need physical controls. Dropping the player into a 3D environment means they need at least two analog controls for camera and movement, which already means a good chunk of your screen is going to be covered in touch control overlays. Any finger-friendly alternate scheme you can think of (e.g. tap to walk, swipe to turn camera) is going to impose upon your game design because players now have their hands tied behind their back. Meanwhile, the one thing mobile does do well? Menu driven games, where you pick from a list and tap things. That's basically RPGs and card games. Those all involve mechanics that measure "character skill" rather than "player skill", and character skill is something that the game retains complete control over. So you can sell power quite easily. The one thing that mobile does well is also the one thing that's absurdly easy to monetize. This post was brought to you by RAID: Shadow Legends. [0] Or worse, Apple breaks iOS compatibility and even redownloading the app you bought no longer works. The most egregious example being them changing their signature algorithm in a point update and forgetting to resign delisted software. [1] Yes, I know, you don't actually own anything unless you pirate it. And game developers can still horrifically disrespect their own work by tying it to an online server that they can just shut down to turn that $70 to $70/year ala Madden.
zlg_codes 3y ago
The Crash of '83 was precipitated mostly by the flopped release of E.T for the 2600. It's a game that was in such shoddy condition that you literally cannot finish it. It spent less than 8 weeks in development. People were so disappointed that it killed the market until quality software came back with the NES. It's still in landfills today.
- jlarcombe 3y ago
  They dug (some of) them up: https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/landfill-smithsonian-collections-et-extra-terrestrial-atari-2600-game https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/landfill-smit...
jandrese 3y ago
I totally agree with you that Atari was far more culpable for its demise than third party developers. It was a classic case of a company working so hard to avoid killing their cash cow that they end up killing the company instead. The 5200 was far more of a problem than the third party carts.
summerlight 3y ago
We now have many good ways to curate and discover good-quality games. Atari didn't have that at the moment.
- sgarman 3y ago
  I think you could even argue that a primary reason Steam is so successful and powerful today is because of all the work and energy they put into browsing, reviewing and curating.
Narishma 3y ago
It makes sense to me. Computers and phones are used for many things, so if they're filled with bad games, you can just ignore that one use-case. A console's main, or even only up until recently, use case is games.
Andrex 3y ago
> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. The costs to produce cartridges are orders of magnitude higher than digital distribution. Retail storefronts are also limited in ways digital stores are not. > The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. The C64 was a home computer that encouraged user programming and development. The Atari 2600 was marketed as an entertainment device for consuming content. If the content is no good, the C64 can still get by but the 2600 loses its purpose. > But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down? The NES locking out unapproved developers was really more about having the PR to say "Nintendo blessed this game" than trying to avoid another crash (which I don't think Nintendo at home cared about when developing the Famicom, as Japan never had a corresponding gaming crash). And of course profit. Nintendo does care about that. Gaming was new enough in the 70s that in the minds of many it could have just been another fad, and the Atari crash helped "prove" that theory out. So there wasn't a big movement or anything to "save gaming" - as far as normal Americans were concerned, video games were just another pet rock and kids were going to glom onto something else soon enough. Psychologically, it made the medium "easy to abandon." Then Nintendo came and saved American gaming from itself, and the rest is history.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  Nintendo did not save American gaming from itself. US game makers created games for a lot of successful platforms including the PC/MSDOS, C64, the Mac, the Atari home computers, and the Amiga. What Nintendo did do was create the first good home console which had good games. Note that it was not until the Xbox/PS2/GC generation that PC and console gaming merged (i.e. there were relative few titles which were not multiplatform).
gxqoz 3y ago
This podcast goes into a lot more detail than most of the replies here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-40th-anniversary-part-1-atari/id1442690446?i=1000589745098 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-4... It's not just a glut of "bad games." There are a number of specific things big companies such as Atari did that made them more vulnerable to this crash than they otherwise would have been.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I had both and it's true that games on the 2600 were of low-quality. I mean: it was a very limited machine. The very best games were probably River Raid and Pitfall and maybe Combat. Stuff like that. There really weren't a lot of playable games on the 2600. https://youtu.be/gombHp5wMrk https://youtu.be/gombHp5wMrk The Commodore 64 came five years later. Five years back then was like decades today. On the C64 you could draw (it was limited but doable), create music, program... And games were on another level. The C64 had bad games for sure but also many incredible gems. And there were some games on the C64 you could play for months or even years, like the Ultima series. The 2600 came out in 1977. I think it did well for its time but when progress moved that fast, there wasn't much they could do to save a platform that was that limited.
babypuncher 3y ago
It's important to remember that in the early '80s, it was unknown whether home video games were just a fad or a new long-lasting market. With the 1983 crash caused by the glut of low quality products, it was very easy for retailers and investors to decide it must have been the former and stop taking video games seriously.

by livrem 3y ago

grumast 3y ago

I think a large part of the problem was the cost of discoverability. On modern PC and mobile, with the availability of free games, it costs nothing but time to wade through piles of bad games. Even on the C64, piracy was prevalent enough that it was easy to obtain and try a large number of games. Atari 2600 games required purchasing cartridges and therefore an outlay of money. Without the internet, it was difficult to get reviews or feedback on the quality of a game without knowing someone that actually purchased it. Added to this, most of the games sold at full price, regardless of the quality. It doesn't take the purchase of too many full price games that were really bad before one gets very hesitant to lay out cash for a new game.

Aardwolf 3y ago
But review magazines, and word of mouth, would have helped identify the good games?
- dylan604 3y ago
  review magazines were not universally available. a proper bookstore with a large enough selection of magazines was at least 45 minutes away from me during this time when i was too young to drive. word of mouth has a broadcast radius that is pretty limited as well. hell, i remember the first time i went to a mall with a computer store that actually had magazines dedicated to games. it's also something different from now where you might be into the games/computers, but your parents very well might have held the idea that you were rotting your brain with that stuff. it's probably pretty hard to imagine compared to what is available today. the 80s and early 90s were pretty much the dark ages if not stone age compared to today.
  - Aardwolf 3y ago
    Atari is before my time, but regarding SNES and gameboy, here the popular games went very much through word of mouth (and seeing) on the school playground. I'd imagine this also be the case for Atari if multiple kids had Atari 2600's. Of course if it was rare, then that wouldn't work.
- Tiktaalik 3y ago
  Review magazines barely existed. Nintendo coming along later and creating it's Nintendo Power official magazine (based heavily on Famitsu) to help direct consumers to the good games was yet another piece of the puzzle that Nintendo laid in creating a vibrant games industry.
philistine 3y ago
I’ll say it simply: consumers had nothing to do with the demise of the Atari. It’s retailers, who bought cartridges without ever thinking the gravy train would stop. Atari and everyone else told them consumers had an insatiable appetite for full price cartridges. But when the sales cratered, due to an oversupply, retailers were stuck with the cartridges without the ability to return them. So they turned to the measure that killed the Atari: clearance bins. When all the games you could hope to ever play are in a bin for a buck each, no one is buying anything at 30$ anymore. Nintendo’s never going to say it, but their practices with the NES were not quality control; they were doing price control.
- belugacat 3y ago
  Exactly this. Even to this day, Nintendo is very smart about almost never discounting their flagship games - and when they do, it’s by a small percent, sometimes with strings attached, not the crazy “90% off” tactics many other developers/publishers follow.
  - doubled112 3y ago
    Playstation games being in the $15 bin while desirable N64 games never seemed to go on sale was a big reason kid me had a ton of games compared to my friends with N64s. I still see this with my kids and their Switch. PS2 and GameCube seemed to follow the same pattern.
  - babuskov 3y ago
    Yes. And it teaches the consumers that there's no point in waiting. When you want their game, you just buy it at full price on launch date, because you know that waiting for discount would take years and even then it would be 20-30% off at best.
    - born2meme 3y ago
      Or in my case it taught me to not want to play the fucking thing at all. Simple as.
chefandy 3y ago
> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms Firstly, unlike a PC or phone, an Atari 2600 isn't useful without games. Secondly, without ubiquitous reviews freely available on the net, players essentially had to choose new games based on the name, box design, and copy. Beyond that, the games weren't necessarily low-quality in the QA sense, i.e. sloppily manufactured or buggy-- most of them just sucked, were ugly, and weren't fun for your average player. Keep in mind, these weren't targeted at video game enthusiasts: they were competing with home video as an entertainment device. You have to compare their appeal with movies, rather than then-current computer games or maybe even board games. I worked in back-end web dev roles for over a decade, but more recently got an art school education in design (concentrating in a few disciplines,) and work in games in both design and technical capacities. Many old Atari games suck because they're either fundamentally bad ideas as games or disastrously implemented. Video game design wasn't really a thing back then, so all of the design work ended up being done by the developer that made the game. Though many developers get annoyed by my saying that design is a learned skill that you don't automatically gain by being a developer, I assure you that not having any designers involved ensures that these games will be more miss than hit. To make matters worse, Atari's success essentially created a gold rush condition. Everyone who was technically capable of making a game was trying to-- probably not even realizing that's exactly what everyone else was doing. It was like 2000 people on a beach saw 3 talented people surfing a wave, so they all grabbed the nearest flat object and jumped in to disastrous effect. Poor retail strategy was obviously a problem, as others have pointed out, but if people buying games could be reasonably assured they were good, I doubt it would have had any more effect than any other big retail miscalculation.

TheBigSalad 3y ago

I was very young, but I don't recall anyone referring to it as a crash until 20 years later. At the time it just seemed like Atari came out, ran it's course, and then the NES came out and blew it away.

philistine 3y ago
Because the crash was a business issue. Players never saw anything bad happen; quite the contrary. The price of games went to the floor. Literally, most Atari games ended up in clearance bins for pennies on the dollar.
sparky_z 3y ago
The business side was absolutely destroyed. Atari was broken up and sold off by its parent company. Every other 3rd party developer went out of business (or took enormous losses and closed their game division) except for Activision, which survived by the skin of its teeth by pivoting to computer games and spent years digging itself back up to profitability. Retailers lost so much money that the whole concept of "video games" became anathema, which is why Nintendo had to pitch it as a general "entertainment system" and sell it with the light gun and ROB the Robot (basically as decoys for the retail buyers) just to get a tiny foothold back on retail shelves in their NYC test market and prove out the market again.

jccalhoun 3y ago

The difference is that computers and phones do things other than play games. The 2600 didn't. Now, there is the fact that there may be two sides to the story: Is it that people stopped buying games or that the market was so crowded that it was difficult for companies to make a profit? I don't know if that is plausible or not.

babuskov 3y ago

> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. It's because platforms (Steam, stores, etc.) hide them from users. > But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down? More likely lack of good games. So when all you could find was trash...

sonicanatidae 3y ago

Personally, I believe the 2600 was just a victim of age. There were a glut of shit games for it, don't get me wrong, but it's not like we were buying dozens of carts a week. We usually had 5-20 carts, with about half of them played regularly. There was also the push to CDs, later, that doomed a lot of cart consoles. Not only was the media better, and cheaper, it was also "the new thing". It was my last console. After that, PCMASTERRACE...ok..Vic-20/C64/Amiga/8088MASTERRACE. lol Anecdotal, sure, but I was there. :)

tenebrisalietum 3y ago
The Atari was released in September 1977, so by 1983 it definitely was a bit long in the tooth. Arcade hardware continued to progress - then Nintendo hit the sweet spot in late 1985 with its resolution, colors, sprites, and cost (and licensing agreements because the Sega Master System was slightly better hardware wise but didn't do as well in the U.S.) Six good years is a long time for any console in the US.
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  If you watch the documentaries with the original developers and CEO they expected the life of the system to be ~2 years. At that point they would refresh with maybe 100-200 games total for the system. But they realized they could play a different game and lock competitors out by buying up key components or tying up component makers and keep it going for longer. By the time 83/84 rolled around the mid 70s system was looking and sounding really dated next to a ti99 or c64 (with similar price points). It did not help that former atari devs were starting their own shops and cranking out games too. That 4-8 week cadence and they were blasting games out. Nintendo with its seal of approval was to keep the number of games down and the quality up. But most importantly get in a percentage of every single sale.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago

ET is blamed and it might have just shined the spotlight on the quality issues, since it was a huge blockbuster movie and nearly everyone knew about it. So if you see an ET game in stores, loved the movie, but then got "falling in hole simulator" as a game it's even more egregious because the movie was so good in your opinion. Maybe it helped people take the rose colored glasses off and realize that games are supposed to be fun, not just functional.

tiltowait 3y ago
E.T.'s a funny one. It's one of the top-selling Atari games of all time, but they made 5M copies for (at the time) an install base of around 10M. Assuming half of your customers will buy the game is a bit bonkers to me. As far as E.T.'s quality goes: yes, it's extremely flawed, but it's honestly nowhere near the worst game ever made. I think it definitely contributed to Atari's woes, but it probably wasn't solely responsible.
- toast0 3y ago
  Wikipedia says they produced 4M copies, sold 2.6M by the end of the year, but ultimately 3.5 M were returned as unsold or customer returns. Wikipedia says, "Atari sold 1.25 million Space Invaders cartridges and over 1 million VCS systems in 1980, nearly doubling the install base to over 2 million, and then an estimated 3.1 million VCS systems in 1981", so if they thought E.T. was going to be as big of a hit as Space Invaders, 4M copies is actually low production. Pac-Man released in 1982, sold 7.2 M copies in 1982 and about 3M more in subsequent years.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  I don't think people are understanding the problems with E.T. You cannot even finish it. The game does not fully function. Like honestly, what game is worse? Custer's Revenge?
  - sparky_z 3y ago
    You absolutely can finish it. I've done it. It's a confusing mess of a game, but it's not broken.

duxup 3y ago

I grew up during the Atari age. Anecdotally it was really a problem. Folks who owned one would play it, enjoy it, but then you'd start picking up games that were purely "twitchy" and had nothing else going for them... and then another and ... it just wasn't enough to want to keep playing. Eventually your system collected dust. The NES came along and the gameplay on the games, while superficially similar, felt more dynamic and had more going for it. As a kid I probably wouldn't have said "low quality cartilages" but it certainly colored your view of the system and how you spent your time. Atari had a lot of garbage and was woefully arcade style play. Nintendo came along with something more / great games.

gaazoh 3y ago

Purely speculative/anecdotal, but: Atari 2600 games are just not that fun. Of course, for a while it was the best gameplay experience one could have, but when the next generation of consoles came, it was flat out outcompeted. I (and quite a few people) still play NES-era games, and not just because of nostalgic value. A lot of them are still a lot of fun. I have tried some Atari games, and with hindsight and the internet, I can target the best ones, or even recent homebrews that were made with current knowledge about gameplay mechanics, but at best they can get a few minutes of my attention mainly due to curiosity. Gameplay is severely limited by the single-button controller and processing power, very tight memory constraints mean very limited content (at best a handful of different screens played in a loop), and graphics are horrible. My brain can "fill in the blank" with NES-generation or later pixel art, but not with Atari 2600-style big blobs of color.

snakeyjake 3y ago
>Purely speculative/anecdotal, but: Atari 2600 games are just not that fun. I had a 2600 brand new and the games weren't fun. I feel like I have gone insane or entered a parallel universe whenever someone fondly remembers that era of video games. I was there. Everyone was like "wow this is so cool" before coming to their senses and going "wow, this is shit". That's what caused the video game crash: the novelty of moving a square around on your TV wore off and people stopped buying all of the boring, samey, shit games.

subsubzero 3y ago

As someone who lived through that era and had an atari 2600 it was really a combo of two things. #1. The games on the atari were not games that you spent hours playing, they were very simple, space invader, pacman etc, and were not entirely that fun. #2. Nintendo. Once the NES(1985) came out with mario bros. and duck hunt it was a like a tsunami of incredible game play that gamers had never experienced before besides maybe at the arcade. The games for the NES just kept getting better and better, Zelda, Mario Bros. 3 while the atari was languishing with its older technology and stable of boring games. Atari fought back in terms of technology with the Jaguar(1993) but once again even with better technology you still need great games, and the jaguar did not have mario, zelda, and a host of other fun games that nintendo(snes had been out for two years now), and also genesis had. By that time the writing was on the wall and Atari was in its death throes. So the trope of atari having a ton of unlicensed games being the demise of the 2600 platform is not true at all. I would have to say it really boils down to just the stable of quality games that nintendo and later genesis possessed and atari just didn't have access to.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
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?
- jcpham2 3y ago
  Technically correct but Atari attempted to compete later and failed with the Atari Jaguar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
  - mattl 3y ago
    The Atari that made the Jaguar isn't the same Atari that made the Atari VCS.

Tiktaalik 3y ago

The significant difference here is that back in the 1980s and 1990s there was the real valuable commodity of shelf space being taken up by garbage games. Something that would result in unhappy customers buying some random product on the shelf, and bad implications for the company that stocked said product. In contrast with PC and Mobile it's all virtual. There's reams of trash out there and it can be ignored and there's less downside to it existing. However, it is still a problem, one that remains somewhat poorly unsolved, with huge effort being put into storefronts to serve as gate keepers to help direct people to good product and not the mass of trash out there. TBH I think the millions of very bad games did kill the mobile market. Traditional game developers have near completely abandoned it. There's some alt universe version of that mobile market out there that is more healthy than it is now if different choices were made. Similarly the PC market didn't used to be anywhere near as healthy as it is now. When I was younger developers had abandoned the PC market as well and the console market was thriving. Storefront curation is something that has brought more health into the PC space.

mock-possum 3y ago
If the Apple Store had the same return policy as Steam, I would buy *a lot* more mobile games on iOS. Unfortunately paying for mobile games is a gamble that I’m not willing to take most of the time. It takes heavy personal recommendations from friends or an exceptionally compelling gameplay video to convince me.
- Tomte 3y ago
  I never had a problem returning apps or games. But that's with Germany's "Widerrufsrecht" (right to revocation), admittedly.
kmeisthax 3y ago
The problem with the mobile market is that microtransaction laden dopamine traps dominate the stores. People who are looking for a game that isn't a glorified gambling-free real-money casino go elsewhere, so the people making these games just assume the only thing that will sell are games designed to extract money out of ADHD cases and children. Apple seems to be trying to push against this, what with Resident Evil getting an iOS port and them shipping phone hardware with decent GPUs in them. Then again, we've seen this happen before. Every few years someone releases a mobile game that's really high quality, it gets ignored, and then it disappears off the App Store[0]. The mobile app stores are really hostile to anything that doesn't get frequent updates, which means the developer needs recurring revenue, and the only way to do that with a game is to shove your game full of microtransactions to spend on and release it as "free" to "play". Steam has about the same amount of garbage that iOS and Android's app stores get, but people still sell older games there. I can drop $70 on a pay-once game and be somewhat[1] confident that it isn't going to disappear. Same thing with the console stores. Hell, on console you can still buy physical media and enjoy first-sale rights, which is the last bastion of consumer protection in this awful industry. There's also the elephant in the room that mobile phones are just... not very good for certain genres. The Atari 2600 was the same way - it was designed to do Pong and not much else. Most of the games on the system were absolutely heroic efforts to bend H-Blank graphics to their absolute limit. In the case of phones, a lot of action games just need physical controls. Dropping the player into a 3D environment means they need at least two analog controls for camera and movement, which already means a good chunk of your screen is going to be covered in touch control overlays. Any finger-friendly alternate scheme you can think of (e.g. tap to walk, swipe to turn camera) is going to impose upon your game design because players now have their hands tied behind their back. Meanwhile, the one thing mobile does do well? Menu driven games, where you pick from a list and tap things. That's basically RPGs and card games. Those all involve mechanics that measure "character skill" rather than "player skill", and character skill is something that the game retains complete control over. So you can sell power quite easily. The one thing that mobile does well is also the one thing that's absurdly easy to monetize. This post was brought to you by RAID: Shadow Legends. [0] Or worse, Apple breaks iOS compatibility and even redownloading the app you bought no longer works. The most egregious example being them changing their signature algorithm in a point update and forgetting to resign delisted software. [1] Yes, I know, you don't actually own anything unless you pirate it. And game developers can still horrifically disrespect their own work by tying it to an online server that they can just shut down to turn that $70 to $70/year ala Madden.

zlg_codes 3y ago

The Crash of '83 was precipitated mostly by the flopped release of E.T for the 2600. It's a game that was in such shoddy condition that you literally cannot finish it. It spent less than 8 weeks in development. People were so disappointed that it killed the market until quality software came back with the NES. It's still in landfills today.

jlarcombe 3y ago
They dug (some of) them up: https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/landfill-smithsonian-collections-et-extra-terrestrial-atari-2600-game https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/landfill-smit...

jandrese 3y ago

I totally agree with you that Atari was far more culpable for its demise than third party developers. It was a classic case of a company working so hard to avoid killing their cash cow that they end up killing the company instead. The 5200 was far more of a problem than the third party carts.

summerlight 3y ago

We now have many good ways to curate and discover good-quality games. Atari didn't have that at the moment.

sgarman 3y ago
I think you could even argue that a primary reason Steam is so successful and powerful today is because of all the work and energy they put into browsing, reviewing and curating.

Narishma 3y ago

It makes sense to me. Computers and phones are used for many things, so if they're filled with bad games, you can just ignore that one use-case. A console's main, or even only up until recently, use case is games.

Andrex 3y ago

> I don't see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. The costs to produce cartridges are orders of magnitude higher than digital distribution. Retail storefronts are also limited in ways digital stores are not. > The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. The C64 was a home computer that encouraged user programming and development. The Atari 2600 was marketed as an entertainment device for consuming content. If the content is no good, the C64 can still get by but the 2600 loses its purpose. > But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down? The NES locking out unapproved developers was really more about having the PR to say "Nintendo blessed this game" than trying to avoid another crash (which I don't think Nintendo at home cared about when developing the Famicom, as Japan never had a corresponding gaming crash). And of course profit. Nintendo does care about that. Gaming was new enough in the 70s that in the minds of many it could have just been another fad, and the Atari crash helped "prove" that theory out. So there wasn't a big movement or anything to "save gaming" - as far as normal Americans were concerned, video games were just another pet rock and kids were going to glom onto something else soon enough. Psychologically, it made the medium "easy to abandon." Then Nintendo came and saved American gaming from itself, and the rest is history.

StressedDev 3y ago
Nintendo did not save American gaming from itself. US game makers created games for a lot of successful platforms including the PC/MSDOS, C64, the Mac, the Atari home computers, and the Amiga. What Nintendo did do was create the first good home console which had good games. Note that it was not until the Xbox/PS2/GC generation that PC and console gaming merged (i.e. there were relative few titles which were not multiplatform).

gxqoz 3y ago

This podcast goes into a lot more detail than most of the replies here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-40th-anniversary-part-1-atari/id1442690446?i=1000589745098 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-video-game-crash-4... It's not just a glut of "bad games." There are a number of specific things big companies such as Atari did that made them more vulnerable to this crash than they otherwise would have been.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I had both and it's true that games on the 2600 were of low-quality. I mean: it was a very limited machine. The very best games were probably River Raid and Pitfall and maybe Combat. Stuff like that. There really weren't a lot of playable games on the 2600. https://youtu.be/gombHp5wMrk https://youtu.be/gombHp5wMrk The Commodore 64 came five years later. Five years back then was like decades today. On the C64 you could draw (it was limited but doable), create music, program... And games were on another level. The C64 had bad games for sure but also many incredible gems. And there were some games on the C64 you could play for months or even years, like the Ultima series. The 2600 came out in 1977. I think it did well for its time but when progress moved that fast, there wasn't much they could do to save a platform that was that limited.

babypuncher 3y ago

It's important to remember that in the early '80s, it was unknown whether home video games were just a fad or a new long-lasting market. With the 1983 crash caused by the glut of low quality products, it was very easy for retailers and investors to decide it must have been the former and stop taking video games seriously.