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This article ignores the fact that aside from being barred with manufacturing unlicensed NES games, Atari also failed to compete with any of its subsequent cons

This article ignores the fact that aside from being barred with manufacturing unlicensed NES games, Atari also failed to compete with any of its subsequent consoles after the VCS (although it did have some success with its PCs). The consoles were all flawed in some way. They were underpowered, didn't offer much over the previous iteration, or simply didn't have a strong enough library of games to compete. Atari was famously slow to realize that maybe people want more out of a game console than home ports of decade-old arcade games. On top of that, their original games that weren't home ports were mostly lackluster or were just outside of what gamers of the time were demanding. Hard to say that Nintendo putting the kibosh on one arm of Atari's business "bled them to death" when all their other arms were bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. EDIT: As pointed out below, I have mixed up Atari Corporation and Atari Games, so not all my criticism stands. Atari Games, publishing as Tengen, still largely put out ports of arcade games, but they were at least contemporary arcade games.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
As the article mentions, by that time Atari had split into Atari and Tengen. Atari was dying of self-inflicted wounds, but Tengen was going strong.
duxup 2y ago
I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise. Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.
- toast0 2y ago
  Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games. If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual quality. It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    It's not about visual quality so much as the complete inability of Atari to understand that people's taste in games had moved on. In 1986, Super Mario Bros was still hottest game in the world, over a million sold in the US alone. Platformers were in, big time. And the Atari 7800 launched with... Centipede.
ndiddy 2y ago
You seem to be confused (which is fair, this is a little confusing). In 1984, Warner Communications sold Atari's home and computer game division to Jack Tramiel, which became Atari Corporation. Atari Corporation was the company that made all the future Atari consoles (7800, Jaguar, etc) and computers (ST line). Atari Games, Atari's arcade game division, remained with Warner. This article is entirely about Atari Games, who had nothing to do with anything sold for the home market with the Atari name. They were entirely separate companies. The reason why they did business as Tengen was that as part of the split, Atari Games wasn't allowed to sell games to the home market using the Atari name. I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end. Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  Ahh, I always forget Atari Corporation and Atari games were different. Thanks for the correction.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  Prior to the Warner / Tramiel sale, though, Atari management showed a stunning lack of foresight re: the lifecycle of their console platforms. If I recall properly, I've heard Al Alcorn (and / or perhaps Joe Decuir) talk about how the technical people pitched VCS as a short-lived platform, but management kept the product going far beyond its intended lifetime. The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600 compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder row to hoe when they came to the US. Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute the NES in the US... (Some people write speculative fiction about world wars having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga went to Atari, etc.)
  - 2y ago
jerf 2y ago
Yeah, Atari really "imprinted" on a style of game in the 2600 era and could never move on from it. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is completely disconnected in personnel several times over from the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.) And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics. If you really, really like that, they've got you. Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time, but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also imprinted. Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but the genre-definer. And so forth. Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what came before only prettier". It shows effort. The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely unplayable unless you read the manual. “Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
MBCook 2y ago
Part of the problem is that the 7800 was a decent/good system when designed in ‘84 terms of tech, other than sound which I think was identical to the 2600. But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel? However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too. In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games. By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more. The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had. The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap. So it didn’t do well at all. Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.
- flomo 2y ago
  Warner Atari had left an enormous amount inventory behind. (Beyond what they infamously put into a landfill.) They also had screwed-over the major chain stores, who wouldn't touch anything Atari. Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets. (There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)
  - MBCook 2y ago
    That doesn’t surprise me. I know he was a “screw over anything if it will make the computers 0.05% more popular” guy. That was all that ever mattered in his mind.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

As the article mentions, by that time Atari had split into Atari and Tengen. Atari was dying of self-inflicted wounds, but Tengen was going strong.

duxup 2y ago

I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise. Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.

toast0 2y ago
Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games. If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual quality. It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  It's not about visual quality so much as the complete inability of Atari to understand that people's taste in games had moved on. In 1986, Super Mario Bros was still hottest game in the world, over a million sold in the US alone. Platformers were in, big time. And the Atari 7800 launched with... Centipede.

ndiddy 2y ago

You seem to be confused (which is fair, this is a little confusing). In 1984, Warner Communications sold Atari's home and computer game division to Jack Tramiel, which became Atari Corporation. Atari Corporation was the company that made all the future Atari consoles (7800, Jaguar, etc) and computers (ST line). Atari Games, Atari's arcade game division, remained with Warner. This article is entirely about Atari Games, who had nothing to do with anything sold for the home market with the Atari name. They were entirely separate companies. The reason why they did business as Tengen was that as part of the split, Atari Games wasn't allowed to sell games to the home market using the Atari name. I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end. Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago
Ahh, I always forget Atari Corporation and Atari games were different. Thanks for the correction.
EvanAnderson 2y ago
Prior to the Warner / Tramiel sale, though, Atari management showed a stunning lack of foresight re: the lifecycle of their console platforms. If I recall properly, I've heard Al Alcorn (and / or perhaps Joe Decuir) talk about how the technical people pitched VCS as a short-lived platform, but management kept the product going far beyond its intended lifetime. The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600 compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder row to hoe when they came to the US. Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute the NES in the US... (Some people write speculative fiction about world wars having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga went to Atari, etc.)
- 2y ago

jerf 2y ago

Yeah, Atari really "imprinted" on a style of game in the 2600 era and could never move on from it. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is completely disconnected in personnel several times over from the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.) And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics. If you really, really like that, they've got you. Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time, but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also imprinted. Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but the genre-definer. And so forth. Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what came before only prettier". It shows effort. The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.

KerrAvon 2y ago
A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely unplayable unless you read the manual. “Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

MBCook 2y ago

Part of the problem is that the 7800 was a decent/good system when designed in ‘84 terms of tech, other than sound which I think was identical to the 2600. But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel? However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too. In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games. By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more. The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had. The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap. So it didn’t do well at all. Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.

flomo 2y ago
Warner Atari had left an enormous amount inventory behind. (Beyond what they infamously put into a landfill.) They also had screwed-over the major chain stores, who wouldn't touch anything Atari. Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets. (There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)
- MBCook 2y ago
  That doesn’t surprise me. I know he was a “screw over anything if it will make the computers 0.05% more popular” guy. That was all that ever mattered in his mind.