decline of Atari Corp

[toptenmaterial]

It seems to me that Atari Corp did quite well in the 80s following a messy acquisition from WB. Though they didn't garner a major market share, they returned to profitability and created what appeared to be a sustainable business model. So what happened? Who/what was responsible for Atari Corps' decline, and when did it happen?

[+wood_jl]

You'll have to wait for the 2nd volume of Marty/Curt's book.

 

Competition from Commodore/Amiga, and of course the PC juggernaut. When it came to videogames: Playstation, Nintendo, and Sega.

Poor marketing stateside, slowness to update product line, announcement of vaporware - those didn't help to keep the loyal actually loyal.

[Keatah]

Vaporware is the most efficient detractor of anything.

Edited November 17, 2012 by Keatah

[toptenmaterial]

Seems like going all in with the Jag may have done it. I gather that leadership was more measured under Jack T?

[Clint Thompson]

In short: I think it really comes down to the management of Atari and nothing else, although there are parts that do influence the degrading of the Atari brand name as a whole which will follow. The most important or key factor of it all I think had to do with Sam's heart issues and being hospitalized sometime in 95 which defeinitely threw the direction of Atari off. I'm not sure how many months he was away from it all but I'm guessing it was a good 2 or 3 months and even when he did get back to it, it probably wasn't the same.

 

Atari used to be not only a hardware company but also a great software company, prior to the crash of course. I would say even though Atari proved to be profitable later in the 80s, it was only a short run and it should have been seen as nearing an end, especially once you got into 91/92. The separation of Atari Games/Tengen and Atari Corp is one of the biggest culprits I see, especially once you consider moving into the Jaguar era. From then on, Atari was mostly only a hardware company and I'm not sure the Tramiels really understood gaming nearly as much as they understood business and computers. Also, by that time (someone correct me if I'm wrong) Atari was rather quite small in the grand scheme of things but I don't think Atari really balanced it out accordingly and always seemed to act bigger even though they were well past their glory years of being large and in charge. Here you had what? About 5 of 6 top-paid execs (as I'm sure they were, they were all mostly family in it together) with less than 500 employees just doesn't seem to balance out very well, especially when you consider all the higher paid project managers, R&D and so-on on top of all that.

 

Instead of dropping from the computer industry altogether, they should have shifted to PCs for a solid line of income as placing all your bets in or on one specific platform as it is definitely a do or die for any company, in which case this proved to kill Atari. If anything, all the crazy and vast peripherals announced for the Jaguar was the one thing that kept it all hopeful but by the time they really got around to anything decent PSX/Saturn already held the candle. Atari obviously were desperate for any game to expand their library for the Jaguar and it shows as most games coming across as unfinished and unpolished, they just didn't care. They needed software which is weird because from what I've read obtaining development kits were hard and expensive to obtain ($10,000 each IIRC). What they really needed was about 10 more Jeff Minters around the office and that would have made things better in itself. Seeing threat by PSX/Saturn with textures, they had to follow suit and texture everything to the point of barely running instead of focusing on the hardware strengths of gouraud shading. (and I don't mean just cybermorph, the tech demo game pack-in). Lack of quality, lack of sales, lack of focus, lack of management.

 

Then you have the media/magazines but that's a whole other issue. Even though personally I was excited by it, the last thing people want to hear a year after they paid for your $249 console and then picking up your $149 cd add-on is that you're gearing up to release a whole new platform that will blow the socks off everything. Sam should have kept his mouth shut and kept that to himself, not that I guess it would have really mattered at all I suppose. Atari had the one-up that was never realized, they just let it slide under their nose. They could have had the package that nobody else had at the time but they tossed it all away and burned their bridges.

 

Lynx was another lack of focus side of things and Sam can tout the LCD thing all day long but that has nothing to do with software development on it which wasn't there aside from a few new titles. Once you see stuff like Alien vs. Predator surface for the Lynx you just kind of stand back in awe, dreaming of the potential and possibilities and left questioning why it never made it.

 

Instead of wasting away their money on countless projects (game titles) that clearly had little oversight and overpriced licensed titles that never even seen the light of day commercially, they should have buckled down and focused on where they needed to take their dying platform and how to do most of it in-house or willingly extend out everything they had to offer to other compentent development houses for a fraction of the cost, including focusing on their CD unit that got delayed far too long. For a company that did very little in '95 and '96 (released commercially, aside from the CD unit), I would love to see where the $90-million infused from the Sega-Atari lawsuit went , because it sure as hell didn't seem to do much other than fuel the company afloat for a few more years.

 

Regardless of the so-called PSX/Saturn dominance, 1995 could have been Atari's year to shine and could have very well pushed them into millenium and above. They should have:

 

-First and foremost, offerred their own affordable ABC-like series of IBM PCs to keep a solid line of revenue flowing in that could offset any burden the Jaguar would obviously prove to become.

 

-Continue with increased Lynx game development (though one could wonder how since they had a hard time doing the same for the Jaguar; it just seems mismanaged to me so I say this with the idea of different management, obviously)

 

-Immediately fix the bugs and issues of the Jaguar chipset for all future consoles, thus making it easier to develop for. (My guess it was already too late and all the chips for years to come were made as a whole at once, but I have no idea on the manufacturing process of this or why they didn't correct the error for future chips. Or maybe they did, though I don't remmeber that being the case.)

 

-Immediately take advtanage of the cross-licesing deal with Sega from the 1994 lawsuit moving forward, having at very least, Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racer variant ported to the Jaguar platform by the end of 1995 holiday season. (I want to say I vaguely remember it being a requirement for the other party having to wait 3 years before they can use it but I'm not sure if that is fact, if so, it's Sam's fault for agreeing to it and settling out of court.) Why this didn't happen over the other various and expensive projects is beyond me and will be one to baffle me to this day. I don't want to stir any drama but would love to hear why Sam did the things he did and what he would have changed, etc. etc.

 

-I wouldn't have bothered with half of the expensive licensed titled names to begin with but with what they DID spend on time and developement, there's no way it shouldn't have been released for the 95 holiday season compared to most of the other crap they had, especially when you take Kasumi Ninja and Cresecent Galaxy into account.

 

-There's no reason MK-III couldl've never been released for the Jaguar and Atari should have pushed for it just as well, dropping the ball on shit like Brett Hull Hockey or crap like Demolition Man and focusing on real obvious hitters such as MK-III. I think this just proves how blindsighted the Tramiels were in not being real gamers or knowing what their platform needs. Everyone wanted MK3, everyone and it could have probably been the best of its kind.

 

-Jaguar VR - I speak from experience from owning one of the prototypes, this is what Atari should have invested in and this is what would have really set them apart, not textures or copying Sony or Sega. The hardware was basically completed, it was the prefect timing for Virutal Reality as it matched all the sci-fi movies perfectly and honestly the tech was pretty awesome plus the Jaguar could pull off better results than even Virtuality's $100,000 arcade machines at the time. I'm telling you, you haven't seen a Jaguar move until you've played Missile Command VR on the headset. Had this unit been on display in at least one shopping outlet per state across the America, it would have definitely destracted from some of the PSX/Saturn stuff and made Nintendo look like a fool for calling their Virtual Boy, Virtual Reality. Not only that but the Jaguar's hardware perfectly matches that of what is needed for the VR games at the time. All the BS about lawsuits this and that of health hazards are merely an excuse as to why it didn't happen, nothng more. Using your cell phone is probably far more detrimental to your health than playing a VR headset a few hours here and there a week or starring off into your phone for hours on end on facebook like most people do.

 

-Black Ice/White Noise - this was the GTA of its time and would have easily been a system seller, and no one else had it. Atari had spent a ridiculous amount of money on this title but again, lack of focus and proper management and the game just didn't get anywhere. What other game do you know that you could walk down the street, shoot a cop and then follow it up with a hooker in a dark alley? I'm telling you, this was edge of the 90's and Atari had it... they just didn't capitalize.

 

So, for those of you that are still with me :

 

The summer and holiday season of 1995 should have been a mild success for Atari at very least, leading them into the future and this is what we should have seen happen:

 

•The Jaguar CD with an added 2MB of system ram to increase game potential and size for all future CD games and giving the overall system a total of 4MB of RAM, which could have potentially allowed games like Area 51 and Max Force to find its way on the Jaguar in 1996, seeing maybe even Vicious Circle as well.

 

•Sega's ported Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racer, two of the biggest games during its time.

 

•Jaguar VR with 3 titles available to play on the unit (Missile Command VR, Dactyl Nightmares and the VR pack-in game Zone Hunter, all with voice over network communications)

-(I would have exptected the Jaguar Voice Modem to either be packaged with the hardware or a discount given for those buying the VR headset since the hardware was complete and working) How cool would it have been to dial up a friend in 95 96 or hell even today and play a virutal reality game of Zone Hunter with them while screaming at them into the headset and having a blast with it all?!

 

•Mortal Kombat 3 cart/cd release, Possible Mech Warrior variant, IS2 cart/cd Released, World Tour Racing CD released, American Hero CD released (edgey adult title, which is what they needed), Varuana's Forces CD just to name a few.

 

•Announce and actually develop upcoming titles for early 1996 such as AvP2, Black Ice/White Noise CD, an updated Virtuality's Boxing VR, Area 51 and Max Force are just a few things. It's hard telling where things could have gone had they just did what they set out for 95 originally.

 

All in all, there's just a ton of things that should have been handled differently and it's a shame it didn't happen as planned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[+wood_jl]

I agree, they should have moved aggressively into PCs. They already had a foothold in it, too.

 

 

The Atari PC4 was a pretty nicely-equipped VGA 286.

 

 

 

I think they should have come up with another name for their computers, like Toyota did with Lexus, to separate themselves from the game image. They never shook that, you know.

[jaybird3rd]

The Atari PC4 was a pretty nicely-equipped VGA 286.

It was indeed. I actually own one in near-mint condition (albeit somewhat incomplete inside) that I've been meaning to dig out of storage for photos for the longest time.

[toptenmaterial]

Thanks a lot for your analysis, Clint!

[+wood_jl]

•The Jaguar CD with an added 2MB of system ram to increase game potential and size for all future CD games and giving the overall system a total of 4MB of RAM, which could have potentially allowed games like Area 51 and Max Force to find its way on the Jaguar in 1996, seeing maybe even Vicious Circle as well.

 

Of course, the CD built-in would have been the best way to go. I suppose it's easy for us (armchair quarterbacking with 20 years hindsight) to forget how EXPENSIVE CD-ROM was, back then. So my armchair quarterbacking wishing for built-in CD is probably not feasible for the time. The 3DO launched around the same (????) time with CD, but was $700!!! I remember paying fairly handsomely for my first PC CD-ROM kid about that time, or maybe 1991-1992; this is back in the era when if you didn't have SCSI in your PC, you bought a sound card with CD-ROM interface on it. The Nintendo 64 should have had a CD-ROM built-in too, but by the time it launched, prices had plummeted on CD-ROM where it would have been feasible.

 

I can't remember if the Jag CD got as much support as the Sega CD, even, being an add-on. Anybody?

 

edit: In reference to the PC sound card/CD-ROM interface: I meant a KIT that came with the Sound card, CD-ROM, and some software. Creative Labs was a big player, and there were a couple others. These kids came with a Grolier encyclopedia (typically), Microsoft Bookshelf, etc. They were NOT cheap.

Edited November 18, 2012 by wood_jl

[high voltage]

True, my first single speed CD kit in 92 was $300, for my 386 PC, came with a ISA board, ribbon cable and it didn't even fit in my Vectra, had to feed the cable through the back of the PC:

[Classic Pac]

Believe me better games would of helped.

[Emehr]

I'm going to play armchair CEO and say they never should have re-entered the console market with the Jaguar and should have, instead, stuck with the portable market. The Lynx really could have been a contender if they had focused on improving battery life, attracting third party developers, and marketing the thing a lot better than they did.