3 ms·

The Benefit of Doubt: Nobody knew how to market video games yet. Their failures taught Nintendo and Sega how to. Seriously though: I KNOW RIGHT?! You can't sel

The Benefit of Doubt: Nobody knew how to market video games yet. Their failures taught Nintendo and Sega how to. Seriously though: I KNOW RIGHT?! You can't sell more items than your market has consumers. That is unless you're expecting them to break your item out of frustration and then replace it.

kabdib 13y ago
Well, there's "benefit of doubt," and then there's "anybody who played this game for more than five minutes would realize that it's unshippable garbage". Except that marketing guys wanted their bonuses, and didn't know shit about games, and furthermore they didn't care (because Atari's hiring practices were incomprehensibly bad and, in some cases, just downright corrupt). So you deny a programmer -- a domain expert -- 2K of ROM and you get FlickerMan instead of Pac-Man, but hey what does that coder know, anyway? He's just typing bullshit into a computer and anybody can do that. And you give another programmer maybe six weeks to write something that should take four months minimum, because that guy is always complaining and how hard could it really be? And the company crashes, and you skate off to Burger King and sell plastic toys to screaming kids and you think it's the same thing. "What? None of that stuff back there at Atari was my fault, it was all the self-important geeks who just didn't listen." I remember being chastised for writing a game in 5 months. They wanted it in six weeks, and I told them it couldn't be done. They wanted to add three or four more programmers to make the work go faster (sorry, I've already taught two of my co-workers to program this machine, I don't have time to do that again). I gave them a day-by-day schedule and they actually accepted it (which later surprised me). Atari marketing was full of this: - The marketing genius who wanted to print out and copyright all possible 8x8 four-color (maybe five-color) bitmaps, as some kind of pre-emption against the competition. I am not kidding about this. Had to do some math in front of him to show how much paper it actually was (it doesn't outweigh the Earth, but only a few orders of magnitude). [edit: my bad, I did the math for a monochrome bitmap. If we'd printed it out it would have weighed significantly more than the solar system. Let's go put all the marketing people on their own Dyson Sphere, okay? :-) ] - The marketroid who decided that the Home Computer Division would no longer make any more games with shooting (result: a bunch of shitty games that never shipped, and some that did ship and made me sad). - The team that added a "Help" button to the Atari computers, and expected help to magically just happen on already shipped software. For a long time, that button did absolutely nothing at all. I wanted to work on games and computers, but these people made it awfully hard.

kabdib 13y ago

Well, there's "benefit of doubt," and then there's "anybody who played this game for more than five minutes would realize that it's unshippable garbage". Except that marketing guys wanted their bonuses, and didn't know shit about games, and furthermore they didn't care (because Atari's hiring practices were incomprehensibly bad and, in some cases, just downright corrupt). So you deny a programmer -- a domain expert -- 2K of ROM and you get FlickerMan instead of Pac-Man, but hey what does that coder know, anyway? He's just typing bullshit into a computer and anybody can do that. And you give another programmer maybe six weeks to write something that should take four months minimum, because that guy is always complaining and how hard could it really be? And the company crashes, and you skate off to Burger King and sell plastic toys to screaming kids and you think it's the same thing. "What? None of that stuff back there at Atari was my fault, it was all the self-important geeks who just didn't listen." I remember being chastised for writing a game in 5 months. They wanted it in six weeks, and I told them it couldn't be done. They wanted to add three or four more programmers to make the work go faster (sorry, I've already taught two of my co-workers to program this machine, I don't have time to do that again). I gave them a day-by-day schedule and they actually accepted it (which later surprised me). Atari marketing was full of this: - The marketing genius who wanted to print out and copyright all possible 8x8 four-color (maybe five-color) bitmaps, as some kind of pre-emption against the competition. I am not kidding about this. Had to do some math in front of him to show how much paper it actually was (it doesn't outweigh the Earth, but only a few orders of magnitude). [edit: my bad, I did the math for a monochrome bitmap. If we'd printed it out it would have weighed significantly more than the solar system. Let's go put all the marketing people on their own Dyson Sphere, okay? :-) ] - The marketroid who decided that the Home Computer Division would no longer make any more games with shooting (result: a bunch of shitty games that never shipped, and some that did ship and made me sad). - The team that added a "Help" button to the Atari computers, and expected help to magically just happen on already shipped software. For a long time, that button did absolutely nothing at all. I wanted to work on games and computers, but these people made it awfully hard.