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I don't want to insult Atari or anything, but...


King Atari

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They must have had some real idiots on the staff in 1988. They actually re-released "Home Run"!!! Really, why would you want to re-release "Home Run" at all?! In 1988, decent stuff like "Dark Chambers" was out, how could they think something as bad and ancient looking as HR would suceed?! That game was bad when it was first released 10 years earlier in '78!!! They probably would have done anything for a few dollars. Still, I'd like to find me a copy...

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I love the 2600 as much as anybody, but Atari released stuff like that 'cause, especially at the end, they were pretty useless and, really, deserved to die.

Its a shame, yeah - but any company who expected their fans to buy rubbish like that could only expect a good kicking.

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It's amazing to think that in 1988 (11 years after the system debuted), they really thought they'd be able to compete against the likes of Nintendo. A system that was being shown up in 1984 couldn't possibly have a fighting chance against such an advanced system. And, although I love it, the 7800 was, I must admit, not as good graphically as the NES (compare "Ikari Warriors"). Still, I'm amazed to think that they wanted people buy a 10 year old piece like "Home Run". It was pretty much an obvious last ditch effort.

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I've been reading 'Game Over Press Start To Continue'.The chapter about Nintendo of America having the meetings with Atari to see if Atari would sell the Nintendo game system in the U.S. sums up how messed up Atari was under WB ownership.The attorney for Nintendo could not believe how many useless vice executives Atari had at these meetings.With that many 'important' employees it is no wonder that old obsolete games were released-all these people had to do something to justify thier job titles!--even if that something was stupid.

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My understanding of the dealings with Nintendo and Atari was the fact that Ray Kassar was heavily involved in the talks but there was a problem with Coleco and the game Donkey Kong which was popular at the time.

 

Atari had obtained the computer rights to the game but Coleco had the home rights and were putting the game on Colecovision and they were going to have it work with the Adam Computer.

 

By the time that this issue was resolved, Ray Kassar was gone from Atari and the final deal was never signed. Who knows what would have happened if Atari had obtained the exclusive rights to market the NES all over the world?

 

Maybe Atari as we knew it would still be around instead of just their properties being sold from company to company.

 

Another example of mismanagement ruining a once great company.

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quote
I can't blame them. Who would want a crappy port of Pac-Man, even at the price of 2 bucks?  

 

Me. Just to show how bad Atari needed the money at the time. However, if Atari did market Nintendo, I don't think they were trusted enough anymore, even if they did market it, I bet it wouldn't have been as popular as it turned out.

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I think it's really silly to think that the success of the NES was exclusively due to some sort of huge hardware advantage over Atari. The NES was also a 6502-based machine, and with mostly off-the shelf components that were not particularly groundbreaking.

 

The 7800 was indeed a contender with the NES, especially had Atari standardized on sticking a POKEY in it or create some pass-through-cart.

 

It's that with the changing of the guard from Warner Atari to Tramiel Atari, there was a final loss of vision in the game development department. Maybe Warner Atari was too busy re-porting its coinop titles to the 7800, but at least they were doing something. The Tramiels de-emphasized their gaming division entirely and only re-entered it after Nintendo claimed the marketplace for itself.

 

The NES deal would have been beneficial to Tramiel Atari insofar as allowing Nintendo to revitalize the market through Atari instead of competing against Atari. But if Warner Atari looked at the NES purely on the merits of its hardware rather than the Nintendo game designers, I would definitely understand why they wouldn't see it as a worthwhile venture in lieu of the 7800.

 

The worst that can be said for the 7800s video is its lack of video RAM. It only has 4K of video RAM. I believe this limits how well you can utilize its 320x200 graphics mode), and when you were in 320x200 you couldn't get many colors on a line. Most games only use the 160x200 mode, which looks chunky compared to the NES' default 256x200 mode or even the C=64s 16-color 320x200 mode.

 

That's why the system shines so well doing Williams-style games like Robotron with few colors, solid backgrounds, and a lot of fast movement. But doing colorful platformers isn't as easy.

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