Trammeil

[atari70s]

Ok im gonna kick myself for asking this . But why does everyone blame Tramel for teh demise of atari. granted there was some mistakes but wasnt atari loosing money since like 1982. was that before tramels take over?

[liquid_sky]

I think one major reason is his views that video game consoles were things of the past and that computers were the next wave ( he formed commadore i beleive) and he pretty much left the 7800 in a warehouse for 2 years and by the time it was out nintendo took over the market and atari slowly crumbled from then.. that and they didnt advertise for crap.. and they all had bad hair afro thingies.. umm yeah

[Ze_ro]

Yes, Atari was a sinking ship even before the Tramiels came into the picture, but in my opinion, they sped up the descent. There were MANY bad choices made, and MANY things that should have been done differently that could have saved Atari. The Jaguar and Lynx were unlikely to make it to the head of the industry no matter who managed Atari, but they should have died the way they did.

 

I still find it kind of funny (funny strange, not funny ha-ha) that Commodore gradually died too after the Tramiels left. Strange that two of the biggest and most influential companies from the beginning of both the console and computer industry both took such a down-turn after the Tramiel move...

 

--Zero

[atari70s]

if thats true then i see trammel as looking down teh road cause computers were the next wave. and well the 7800 later release was an error. that cost atari but it was right after the crash noone knew what was going to happen. think if htey sold the XEGS as a computer( waht trammel most likely wanted to do) maybe atari woudl be here today as a computer leader .

[liquid_sky]

you never know.... id take GEM OS over WIN9x anyday

[atari70s]

the best feture about the 8 bits were that you can run them on a TV you cant do that wihta TV cause the line signals are different

you need a 14,000 $ item to fix it (yea 14,000) in that respect atari and commodore were ahead of there timeeven to today)

[liquid_sky]

but arnt ntsc and pal resolutions dramitacally lower? not that it mattered too bad for those systems but i think of the moniter as a more revolutionary device. atari did display the first cd-rom drive at the 1984 ces show i beleive.

[atari70s]

id pay to see that CD drive hell id pay to own it ( slow as hell but still)

[liquid_sky]

I saw it somewhere online

 

quote

 id pay to see that CD drive

 

People, I think you better find a picture of it and make some money!

[Nateo]

You're probably gonna hate me for saying this, but... who's this Tramiel guy that you keep talking about? I keep hearing that he's the reason why Atari isn't at the top anymore.

[liquid_sky]

Jack Tramiel bought Atari from Time Warner i forget the year.. i think 1983 or 1884. I am sure there are people who know alot more about him and know more of his actions than me

[Ze_ro]

quote:

---

Originally posted by atari70s:

the best feture about the 8 bits were that you can run them on a TV

---

 

Uh, actually, TV output is *dramatically* lower quality than VGA! I guarantee you aren't going to manage 1024x768 on any TV (Hell, even the new HDTV's max out at 800x600 I believe). That being said, there actually are a number of video cards that have a TV output on the back of them. Of course, there's still a huge quality hit (anyone ever seen a WebTV? They're nasty)

 

Interestingly enough... the Dreamcast is capable of displaying on a VGA monitor

 

--Zero

[Mindfield]

 I read all about that CD-ROM drive. It was an excellent idea at the time. The company that was developing it had it running a full encyclopedia on CD, with fulltext searching capabilities. Very avant garde, particularily since CD-ROMs for computers didn't even become commonplace until the late 80s.

 

 Atari _did_ eventially release that drive, by the way. It was the CDAR-540, a 1x speed CD-ROM drive for the ST line that connected directly to the ACSI bus. IIRC, not many were made, so it's a bit of a rare property. A friend of mine (one of the directors of the Toronto Atari Federation user group) actually had one, though I never got a chance to see it at the time. :-/

 

 As for who Jack is, he was the former CEO of Commodore who, in 1984 left the company and bought Atari from Warner Communications. Why he is blamed for the downfall of Atari I think is simply a matter of chronology: Jack, and later his sons Gary, Leonard and Sam, were the last owners of Atari, and it was under their reign that everything crumbled. However, the foundations were already cracked and eroded from the poor, totalitarian leadership of Ray Kassar under Warner's rule. His iron-fisted command of the company left many of Atari's employees disgruntled. Ironically, this autocratic leadership caused Ray to be indirectly responsible for the formation of one of the biggest and oldest software companies on the planet: Activision. Activision were formed by a group of former Atari employees who, unsatisfied with the working conditions and the restrictions upon developers not getting credit for their work, left Atari to form Activision, which went on to become the first third party developer for the VCS and, ultimately, a giant in the software industry even today.

 

 Still, Ray Kassar started the ball rolling for the death of Atari. The Tramiels merely hastened its demise. The difference is that Ray's problem was that he was a bit power mad, and at the same time ignorant of the necessities of developer licensing. The Tramiels were simply bad businessmen who made bad decisions frequently, the biggest of which I think is the lack of advertising.

[Ze_ro]

I still don't really understand why the Tramiels managed to keep Commodore going (Back then, Commodore was huge, and dominated the computer market), but their style of management pretty much killed Atari... anyone got any ideas?

 

--Zero

[Mindfield]

Yeah. Jack got his three stooges--er, sons to run things. Jack was at the helm of Commodore and ran it quite well. Once over at Atari however, and after a brief period of leadership, he handed the reigns ... er ... reins, over to his sons, who then proceeded to display their business acumen by spending the next ten years putting the company on a steady diet of worferen and arsenic. Which is to say sinking the majority of Atari's remaining funds into all sorts of losing R&D propositions while all but ignoring the power of the press, not to mention alienating dealers in their spare time.

 

Don't get me wrong, they never ceased to bring innovation to the forefront of the creations that did make it to the fore, but their conspicuous lack of advertising all but doomed them from the start. Sure, they simply didn't have the funds to launch an effective campaign -- but again we come back to all the money they sunk into R&D projects that didn't and would never see the light of day. I mean, it's important to continually develop and test new ideas, but of considerably more importance, especially when you have a limited budget, is the ability to decide beforehand which projects will be most likely to succeed, and which will fail, and then trash those that will fail so you can direct more funds to those that likely won't. In that, the Tramiels were alarmingly inept. Of course, Warner weren't all that much better -- need I mention AtariTel? -- but the Tramiels took it to the extreme. After all, the Tramiels were practically pioneers of the term vaporware, and that shook a lot of what remained of people's confidence in Atari every time a new product was announced but never appeared.

 

It's not too hard to see why the Tramiels are relentlessly blamed for the death of Atari. They presided over its funeral -- a double plot, with JTS Corporation right next to it. In the end though, they simply finished what Warner's Kassar started.

[jsoper]

A lot of the failures came down to software also. What if the 7800 and Jag had launched with games that used the full console potential but also had the addictiveness and gameplay of Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy and so on.

 

I read the last couple FF games had teams of 200 or so people working on them. Game creation was becoming a business requiring huge investments with the chance of huge rewards. Atari should have invested more in software then marketed the hell out of it.

 

Just MHO, John

[mos6507]

I love these threads, I've read so many "what they did wrong" threads and every time it's a lot of the same conclusions, with a twist here and there.

 

As someone who has spoken with all pre-Tramiel parties involved, including Nolan Bushnell, I'd have to say that the seeds of Atari's downfall were intermingled with the seeds of its success, namely the sale to Warners in 1976.

 

Atari started out as a free-wheeling post-hippie startup. It attracted people because of the creative freedom it gave its employees. It really was a lot like the Dot Com startup era a couple years back, but with a more solid business model. Atari's most productive era occured when this positive attitude meshed with Warner money--in order to provide a comfort zone where people could work without worrying about the company's future. Between 1976 and 1979 Atari was basically subsidized by Warner Communications like a charity case which didn't really pay off until Space Invaders came out for the 2600 (and Coinop I guess did quite well from Asteroids onward).

 

It was in 1979 that the suits at Warners couldn't leave things well enough alone and had slowly destroyed much of the original freewheeling spirit at Atari, and had marginalized most people's creative ideas in favor of a more top-down beaurocracy.

 

They wasted money in the wrong areas and didn't spend money where they needed to.

 

To me, Atari's greatest assets were its braintrust. This included the original hardware engineers who had created the 2600 and the 400/800, and the original programmers who were just then hitting their stride with the VCS. And then there was Nolan who was reduced to a figurehead.

 

Atari never really recovered after they lost Jay Miner and his crew, and David Crane and the rest of the star programmers.

 

The 5200 was symbolic of the failure of Atari vision and engineering at that time.

 

Atari 2600 Pac Man symbolized the failure of Atari's software development at that time. They overcompensated and spoiled the VCS team with bonuses to the point where they lost their own objectivity.

 

It's really hard for lightning to strike twice and recruit replacements that are every bit as good as the originals.

 

By the time the Tramiels came in the company was such a shell of its former self, and without the coinop division, it was hard to imagine any sort of restoration...

 

It's really got to start with the PEOPLE. Money alone is not enough. Vision isn't enough enough. You need the right people to execute that vision.

 

What bothers me the most about the Tramiels, though, is the way they turned their back on their core userbase.

 

Their core userbase was still the 2600 and the 8-bit home computer users. They couldn't afford to alienate them. But shelving the 7800/Jr. and pushing the Atari ST which was simply not the right upgrade for 8-bit users, did just that.

 

It's like the Tramiels wanted to start over again by building up a totally new and different userbase. This was a STUPID approach.

 

What I expected Atari Corp. to do was what Apple did with the IIGS and make a meaningful upgrade to the 8-bit to keep it contemporary, even if they chose to still do the ST. The 130XE was compromised by its poor workmanship and the lack of any truly new chipset. Even though they lost their brain trust, they still had a lot of leftover Warner R&D projects they could have utilized better, like the 1090XL expansion box and the Amy chip.

[atari70s]

AMY chip?? is that the Atari 1064 chip for the 8bits???i have a whole list of projects atari did but never finished i think the 1064 is the AMY chip do you know if it is?

[Tempest]

The Amy chip was the sound/music chip for the 65XEM computer which was never released for legal reasons. Curt has a page about this odd little computer:

http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bi...bits/65xem.html

 

Tempest

[Ze_ro]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Glenn Saunders:

The 5200 was symbolic of the failure of Atari vision and engineering at that time.

---

 

I always thought that the 5200 took a lot of slack that it didn't really deserve... yes, the controllers were a bad design... but the rest of the system was done pretty well. It was at least as powerful (If not moreso) as the systems it was competing against, not to mention the Pokey sound chip (Why they didn't use this in the 7800 is beyond me). I also think it's strange that Atari took heat because the system wasn't backwards compatible... Considering the time frame, I certainly wouldn't have expected backwards compatibility!

 

quote

Originally posted by Glen Saunders:

Their core userbase was still the 2600 and the 8-bit home computer users.  They couldn't afford to alienate them.  But shelving the 7800/Jr. and pushing the Atari ST which was simply not the right upgrade for 8-bit users, did just that.

 

I've always seen this as Jack trying to turn Atari into Commodore. After all, the ST and the Amiga are pretty damn similar...

 

quote:

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http://www.atari-history.com/computers/8bi...bits/65xem.html

:

The AMY chip and technology were sold to a Millwaukee based audio design house called Sight & Sound. The company was able to not only decypher the workings of the AMY, but created a newer and more powerful version which they intended to market. However Atari suddenly reappeared on the scene and initiated a law-suit that apparently was so frightening that many of the former S&S employees that have been interviewed for the research on the AMY chip would only talk under anonymity.

---

 

Damn... such a good idea gone completely to waste. It's terrible that they wouldn't even allow the company they sold it to to use it. Project "GAZA" (AMY + Rainbow + 68000) sounds like it could have been quite an amazing computer!

 

--Zero

[Inky]

I guess the question now becomes what's next for Atari. Does anybody see Atari regaining its one-time golden age prominence, or is it going to be forever relegated to a footnote in technology history?

[liquid_sky]

quote

I guess the question now becomes what's next for Atari. Does anybody see Atari regaining its one-time golden age prominence, or is it going to be forever relegated to a footnote in technology history?  

 

Truthfully i think the good times are long past.. the new atari will probally be a 3rd party developer and nothing more. I dont see any new consoles or anything else like that on the horizon

[Parcel]

I dont want a whole new console, only a handheld version of 2600. I also only want new games that are original or creative and built within the limitations of 2600. All that said, I dont see myself buying anything they release except classic games on GBA.

[mos6507]

<<

I always thought that the 5200 took a lot of slack that it didn't really deserve... yes, the controllers were a bad design... but the rest of the system was done pretty well. It was at least as powerful (If not moreso) as the systems it was competing against, not to mention the Pokey sound chip (Why they didn't use this in the 7800 is beyond me). I also think it's strange that Atari took heat because the system wasn't backwards compatible... Considering the time frame, I certainly wouldn't have expected backwards compatibility!

>>

 

The Atari 8-bit design was completed only a couple years after the 2600 was completed and was an order of magnitude more powerful in almost all respects.

 

But by 1982 when the 5200 came out the underlying architecture was already 3 years old. Atari was asleep at the wheel and had no true heir apparent for the 2600. The 5200 wasn't much of an R&D project. It was a stopgap. The 8-bit was ahead of its time when it came out in 1979, which mean that it was only a match and not really that much better than other machines then coming onto the market in 82 like the Colecovision. And the 5200 was kinda like an XBox in the sense that it was a home computer turned into a console. The same fears that Xbox fans have that all the games are just going to be PC ports came true with the 5200. Most of the titles were earlier 8-bit releases that were already old news by then.

 

Had the original designers stayed at Atari, a much more powerful system would have been available to them to use for a console, probably the original Amiga Lorraine design which featured less memory, a lower max resolution (320x240) vs. the Amiga 1000.

 

This machine would have been roughly as powerful as a Sega Genesis long before the NES and SMS came to market, let alone the SNES and Genesis.

 

As for the 5200 controllers, I have internal memos on loan that clearly document the engineers PLEADING with Atari management not to go with the sticks. Nobody was listening to the people who had the most common sense over there.

 

Even if history remained the same up until Jay Miner and company leaving, if Atari had, let's say, started the 7800 project at that time and released the unit in 1982 then they might have still been able to beat the impending crash since the userbase would likely have migrated to 7800 games which had the much-needed encryption system to control the 3rd parties.

[StanJr]

Its ridiculous to hope for a straight re-release of the old 2600 console and games (although that would be a great scenario). But wouldn't it be cool to see a new case design on the old console and a slew of new 2600 games? (i.e. Snider-man et al.) Just not a big enough market for it I guess. So Atari will live on with us, in the form of old consoles and games and the occasional emulator. (Unless of course we rise up.....)