How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?

[totallyterrificpants]

I'm 25 so obviously I didn't grow up with Atari. I remember I was 12 when I started researching old Atari games, old NES games etc. I got my hands on a 2600 when I was 20 and I love it. I can play Atari for hours. However, I've only met one retro gamer my age who likes Atari. For most, they stop at NES. A lot dismiss what came before it.

 

I've heard from other retro gamers

"Atari is bad"

"Atari is boring"

"Gaming didn't get good until Nintendo"

"Only hipsters like Atari"

 

Most retro gamers I know also dismiss Sega and love anything Nintendo released in the past. Why is this? I would say personal preference but I'd say a good 85% of retro gamers my age adore Nintendo and dismiss Sega and especially dismiss Atari.

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

I think it's due to the fact that many people quote unquote. "Consider it the main console that caused the video game crash". They blame E.T. and Pac-Man for it even though they never played it and know the truth about these games. And that they consider the NES to be "the system that ended the video game crash and saved the gaming industry." A lot of people born around 1990 or later seem to dislike anything about the Atari. These people don't like it cause they never experienced it.

[Matthew]

 

 

Most retro gamers I know also dismiss Sega and love anything Nintendo released in the past. Why is this? I would say personal preference but I'd say a good 85% of retro gamers my age adore Nintendo and dismiss Sega and especially dismiss Atari.

 

Only in North America.

[Andromeda Stardust]

As someone who retrogamed for ten years before getting an Atari, it is because everyone else thinks it "sucks". If everyone you talk to claims it sucks, then you'll assume it sucks and dismiss it without trying.

 

That said, the primitive VCS graphics have a "rawness" about them I would consider to be an aquired taste. NES was the first system to achieve cartoon like level of realism. The fact that the tiles really come together to create a living, breathing character instead of a bunch of blocky rectagles went a long way to change the perception of gaming.

 

Some people have an equally hard time accepting the rough polygon models of the 5th generation N64 and PS1 and I understand that as well. There are a number of parallels between 2nd gen 2D and 5th gen 3D since sprite tech and nearly 20 years later polygon tech were in their respective infancies.

 

But I also say, don't knock something until you've tried it. I really loved some of the early NES and Famicom games with their arcadey feel, and the 2600 really shines in this arena. Once you get over the graphics and sound, there is a lot to love here.

 

Best advice? Don't knock something before you've tried it.

[totallyterrificpants]

I love the arcade feel of old Atari games. The charm, the stories in the manuals, the artwork on the boxes and seeing what they achieved with the limitations of the console. Plus I just these days mostly don't have time to invest in a long game. But I love playing a 10 minute Atari game, writing down my scores and trying to beat them.

[high voltage]

I never hear anything like that except from the Nintendo fan boys of course.

You never hear anything stupid like that from Sega users, but there you go, and dismissing Sega? I never hear anything that super stupid.

 

Anyway, Atari is everywhere modern, eg Activision Classics and Atari VCS is on iPhone, Android, PC, MAC and others. No worries there.

Edited November 15, 2015 by high voltage

[totallyterrificpants]

I'm in Australia where Sega was pretty big, especially Master System and Mega Drive. My first console was a model 1 Master System. But even here where you run into old Sega games all the time, a lot of retro gamers I know dismiss Sega. I often hear how Nintendo was better and Sega only had Sonic etc. Sega had so many good games and franchises, on all their consoles. Toejam and Earl, Panzer Dragoon, Jet Set Radio, Wonderboy etc.

 

A lot are fanboys when it comes to Nintendo. I was a huge fanboy during the GameCube days but I know good games when I see them by other companies. I have a Master System and Mega Drive with games but my main focus is 2600 but I have played hours of Intellivision and love that console! I've even found some fun games on the CD-i. Good games are good games. I just wish they gave these games a chance. I admit before I took an interest in Atari I was weary but once I tried it I got hooked.

[+save2600]

Wasn't aware there are retro gamers not into Atari. Posers!

[Lentzquest]

I'm glad that most don't pay a lot of attention to pre-NES. I think that's one of the things that keeps the community here enjoyable. Well, just as long as you stay out of the Jaguar section of the site. That's kind of the mosh pit.

[+swlovinist]

I think alot has to do with nostalgia. If you did not grow up with a system, then you do not have a personal connection to it. Sure, you can like something that you did not grow up with, but it is different. I think that it is harder to like Atari style games when growing up with Nes. I guess the same can be said if you grew up with Atari, and did not prefer the "newer game types". They ware totally different types of game style, graphics, etc. Personally I am a huge fan of Atari, Nes, and Sega, but I think that SOME people here are kind of funny on their perspective of the Nes. I compare it to "rooting for the other team" or being a Democrat and trying to like something Republican. I always can tune in somewhere for a good laugh when it comes to all the terrible shortcomings of one of the more successful classic systems.

[Wickeycolumbus]

For me Atari stuff is a lot harder to find in the wild than NES and other more popular systems. I think that must have a pretty good impact on it as well.

[BurritoBeans]

Being still in High School (The oldest system that's been in production during my life is probably the N64), hearing from the other six people who collect older games, it seems that a big factor in it is what people read and hear from videos. Just about 3/4 of the people who are into gaming around school has some sort of NES or SNES or Genesis laying around their house, and those who collect for the older systems just focus on those because they've available and they have the big name Mario or Sonic or whatever behind them. It seems that all the Atari people hear (apart from me occasionally) around school is from videos on youtube saying how "terrible E.T. and Pac-Man are and how they ruined the gaming market" so if I bring up Atari they instantly think of it being some system that ruined gaming.

Oh well, I can't complain that they don't collect - it keeps the local prices on Atari carts down low, so it's easy for me to beef up my collection while everyone else is shelling out tons of money for Nintendo games.

Edited November 15, 2015 by BurritoBeans

[spawnshop]

As a child born in the late '70s, I grew up with both. My first system was 2600, then NES, Sega, etc. I love NES and it's games, and wasted TONS of hours playing, but I did the same with 2600. 2600 was my first real connection to home gaming and will always have a special place in my heart.

But I also think that NES came at a time when gaming was "more popular". It seemed that EVERYONE on my block had a NES but not Atari for some reason. And remember when you could rent games at your local video store?? I don't remember ever being able to rent Atari games. So unless you or your friend had the game, you were never exposed to variety of titles like you could on NES. I remember renting a different game every week. It seemed the library was endless.

And yes, with all of the hype, NES titles are a lot more costly over 2600. For collecting, I do CIB for 2600, but loose carts for NES due to prices. I just make my own custom cases for those.

[bretthorror]

My start in Atari was funny, I was about 6 and I'd played NES and SMS up to that point and my uncle was dating this chick who had a son older than me and he actually had an Atari. I wanted to try it (I've always wanted to try every console, its controllers, etc) and wow did I think it was the drizzling shits. I think he put Stampede in and I just couldn't relate. Years later I saw a plug n' play game in the Sears catalog and asked my mom to get me it, I was like 17 at the time maybe, thinking it was NES games, which I always loved the most. It turned out to be an Activision plug n' play of 2600 games. I tried all the games and thought they were ok. I fucking got a huge kick out of Ice Hockey being a Canadian and you just beat the shit out of your opponents, so I think I kinda started playing that mostly and eventually played the other 9 games quite a bit. So I now knew Atari was good shit. I was out of gaming for about 10 years and finally bought a PS2 in like 2005 and I found out Intellivision Lives existed. Never played Intellivision, loved a lot of the games on the collection. Then I found out about Activision Anthology and Atari Anthology and that's when I realized how lucky I was to have been re-introduced to Atari through Activision because their games had decent graphics and good, simple gameplay. The games on Atari Anthology were just not very good in general and look bad. So, I totally get it. If you're gonna turn someone on to Atari, you have to pick the right games to start.

 

NES has the benefit of structurally being similar to modern games, there's an ending. You can easily make out what everything on screen is supposed to be. Plus, Nintendo is still around today, so younger people can relate to that. If you're into the bare essentials of Nintendo first party games, you're set with all their systems without even having to branch out, they're all worth it and they were all popular. The success of the DS doesn't hurt either, considering if you have a modern 15 year old who played New Super Mario Bros. on DS and liked it, then they can go back to a plethora of games just like it.

 

I personally never even knew about the video game crash until I got the internet and it's just something that people don't seem to want to shut up about. I don't know why it's even mentioned as much as it is, especially since it happened in an era where a lot of them haven't even played games from and it lasted for such a brief period. I guess it'd be fair to say retro gamers are nerds and it's no surprise that they are into RPG games and hate sports games. It's kind of funny though because me and a lot of the people I know were and are so different from the vocal retro gamers out there today. All my friends loved sports games and violent games, I knew one kid who had an RPG and that was Mario on SNES. So a lot of people dis the Genesis for no reason aside from the SNES had newer technology and more RPGs, but if you were like me, the Genesis was definitely awesome. I don't get how Sega gets lost in the collector scene, if Sega can't get its props, it's easy to see how the 2600 is overlooked. Collectors seem to have really closed minds, as is evident when people pay big money for nearly unplayable NES games when they could buy decent SMS games instead.

 

Plus, hindsight is 20/20. Sure, you can rattle off amazing games for all these systems, but let's be real. At least as a kid, how good were our collections? For every Sonic 2 or Super Mario World we all had a Shaq Fu or Skate or Die.

[Lynxpro]

I'm 25 so obviously I didn't grow up with Atari. I remember I was 12 when I started researching old Atari games, old NES games etc. I got my hands on a 2600 when I was 20 and I love it. I can play Atari for hours. However, I've only met one retro gamer my age who likes Atari. For most, they stop at NES. A lot dismiss what came before it.

 

I've heard from other retro gamers

"Atari is bad"

"Atari is boring"

"Gaming didn't get good until Nintendo"

"Only hipsters like Atari"

 

Most retro gamers I know also dismiss Sega and love anything Nintendo released in the past. Why is this? I would say personal preference but I'd say a good 85% of retro gamers my age adore Nintendo and dismiss Sega and especially dismiss Atari.

 

There's a lot of uneducated morons out there whom also happen to be Nintendo fanbois. They dismiss all things Atari because of videos on YouTube. They blame Atari for the crash instead of giving the company the respect it deserves in creating the video game industry in the first place. They also don't factor into how many "firsts" Atari pioneered, both in gaming and computing. They falsely attribute everything to Nintendo when the truth is, Nintendo pioneered almost nothing other than monopoly tactics in the industry

 

Also, too many people think "Atari" only consists of the 2600. They've never tried the 8-bit computers, the 5200, the 7800, the ST computers, the Lynx, or the Jaguar. There seems to be amnesia over how dominant Atari - and later Atari Games - was in the arcades too.

Edited November 15, 2015 by Lynxpro

[mikey.shake]

Plus, hindsight is 20/20. Sure, you can rattle off amazing games for all these systems, but let's be real. At least as a kid, how good were our collections? For every Sonic 2 or Super Mario World we all had a Shaq Fu or Skate or Die.

Whoa whoa whoa... this is a complicated thread, to be sure...

 

But are you talkin' smack about Skate Or Die?

[bretthorror]

Whoa whoa whoa... this is a complicated thread, to be sure...

 

But are you talkin' smack about Skate Or Die?

 

Yes. Yes I am.

 

But not Skate or DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE 2.

[totallyterrificpants]

I prefer the Genesis over SNES because I as a whole hate RPG's. And I had the SNES growing up, I didn't have the Genesis. With RPG's I loved The World Ends With You on DS, Persona 4 Golden on Vita and Pokemon on GB but very rarely do I enjoy the genre. But I see a lot of Nintendo fanboy videos where they instantly dismiss other systems are quick to say "NES/SNES is better. End of discussion."

 

I saw a vid with a lot of RetroLiberty personalities discuss the 16 bit war and almost all of them were quick to instantly say Sega was bad and SNES killed it.

 

Same people bash Atari Jaguar without playing it. Honestly when I owned a Jaguar I only had one bad game which was Bubsy. Flip Out and Zoop were awesome puzzle games, Alien vs Predator was a lot of fun, too.

 

Lynx was also great. Only complaint for me is the screen but a lot of the games look VERY interesting.

[bretthorror]

I prefer the Genesis over SNES because I as a whole hate RPG's. And I had the SNES growing up, I didn't have the Genesis. With RPG's I loved The World Ends With You on DS, Persona 4 Golden on Vita and Pokemon on GB but very rarely do I enjoy the genre. But I see a lot of Nintendo fanboy videos where they instantly dismiss other systems are quick to say "NES/SNES is better. End of discussion."

 

I saw a vid with a lot of RetroLiberty personalities discuss the 16 bit war and almost all of them were quick to instantly say Sega was bad and SNES killed it.

 

Same people bash Atari Jaguar without playing it. Honestly when I owned a Jaguar I only had one bad game which was Bubsy. Flip Out and Zoop were awesome puzzle games, Alien vs Predator was a lot of fun, too.

 

Lynx was also great. Only complaint for me is the screen but a lot of the games look VERY interesting.

 

I just wish all the types who dismiss Sega, Atari, or most any other console would consider themselves as they are, Nintendo fanboys, and not retro gamers. Anyone who is a hardcore NES and SNES fan and doesn't own a Sega Master System and Genesis makes zero sense to me. They're both dirt cheap and the games are in the same graphical styles. It doesn't make sense to collect the bottom of the barrel NES stuff when there's good SMS stuff out there. And if anyone says "but I had an NES as a kid and not a SMS" and they're collecting out of nostalgia, then they can take that shit up with the psychiatrist, because that carries no weight in a real discussion. They also wouldn't have had 400 NES games as a kid. I just can not fathom why people collect or purchase games of all things based on platform and not, oh you know, the game! It's just foreign to me that people will spend years seeking out mediocre or bad NES games after they obtain the essentials when they could research for an hour and buy 25 SMS games that are going to be way better than the remaining games on their NES list. I wouldn't go out of my way to tell a casual fan to seek out a SMS, but if you're a hardcore NES fan, there's no way you can hate what the SMS brings to the table because it is the same shit. Sure, it doesn't hold a candle to the NES essentials, but if you're buying shit like Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde instead of Zillion, you're nuts.

[totallyterrificpants]

The Disney games on sega for the most part are so much fun. Quackshot, the Illusion games, Lucky Dime Caper etc are all fantastic. But I agree. I tried to get every Genesis game but I found I had so many bad games just sitting there. There is no point. Another reason why I am mostly an Atari collector with my other systems on the side. I find most 2600 games to me are fun in their own way and I love how back then anything could be a video game. Very interesting part of history.

 

I always wanted to try Zillion.

[PhoenixMoonPatrol]

Its weird cause I have no desire to even buy or collect for anything 8 bit besides the sacred Atari/Coleco/Intellivision era.

 

The 8 bit Sega and Nintendo era mostly bored me to tears. Outside a few good games

(Conta,HangOn,RBI BaseBall,CastleVania,Super Mario) the rest (or their sequels) never really caught my attention for too long.

Use to rent and borrow games from rentals and neighbors all the time,nothing I'd ever want to buy though.

9 out of 10 games from that era were fucking junk to me.

[Nutsy Doodleheimer]

The Atari 2600 was like having your own arcade. By 1980-1981 you started seeing killer apps and arcade ports. Space Invaders, Missle Command, Asteroids, Defender, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr, Berserk, etc. Just like the game boxes and illustrated cartridges, it let you use your imagination. The sound capabilities are some of the best. For example. The screen flashing and exploding sound after all your cities are blown up in Missle Command, The humming sounds and the coatile destroyed. In Yars' Revenge, the Jaws sound in Asteroids, the firing sounds and getting killed in Berserk, and tons more. I also like the toggle metal switches and the fake wood grain veneer on the consoles. It is something that the NES can't even compare.

[HoshiChiri]

It's a big mix of things, I think. First you have the Disney Effect- Nintendo has brain-wormed its way into our collective consciousness as THE source of timeless, family friendly quality gaming. Much as parents take kids blindly to every Disney musical because 'Disney=good for kids', They immediately get a DS/Wii variant when their spawn is old enough to clamor for games because it's the safe option. When those kids get older and decide to dig into the past, they immediately go for that same safe, familiar option.

 

Second is the Marketing Effect- I mean, that was the whole idea behind the Nintendo Seal Of Quality, right? "Those old Atari games, you never knew if it was crap or not. But with Nintendo, we GUARANTEE all our games are good! Available now at your local retailer!" The idea clearly stuck... how many NES games are generally considered crap, even now? I can't think of more than I can count on one hand... and I KNOW there's more than that!

 

Lastly is the Game Design Shift- preNES games are usually arcade style affairs. One or two screens, no ending, the point is to get a high score. NES marked a clear shift towards games with specific goals and endings when that goal was achieved (even if it just told you 'good job! Now play again!') There's been a mental shift towards an expectation of that kind of gameplay... 'I do a thing, I get a reward'. The idea of 'I do a thing to see how good I am, and that's it' is utterly unappealing to those who put no value into a score total.

 

The end result is trying to take someone who's been trained since their earliest gaming days to believe that NES is good family fun & their competitors lack quality, give them a game that's a much lower graphical quality then they're used to, and expect them to instantly switch from 'playing for story' to 'playing for score'. Most people can't overcome their own mental blocks without actively wanting to and working through the 'this isn't gaming' reflex.

[MeneerJansen]

I don't know if people really bash the Atari because the NES is/was better. Like others said: 1. there's that game crash in 1983 and 2. the graphics are so bad they're funny.

I don't know how it's in the US, Japan, Canada and the rest of the world. But I come from Europe (Holland). And in my country in the 70's and 80's everything happened about 2 years later than in the US. I swear. I was a young teenager at the time of "the crash" in 1983 but was not aware of it. Game prices dropped but so do ALL prices for everything and anything after a few years.

The thing that did it for the first generation of game consoles here is one, and only one, thing: the Commodore 64. Why? Well, you could actually COPY games (on cheap tape) and trade them in the schoolyard by the dozens. I was convinced nobody, for the remainder of all time, would EVER buy a darned console. The principle behind it became completely insane within a few weeks after the first C64's were bought by some of my school mates. Who's gonna pay a tenth of the price of a C64 for a single Atari game?

After that I was very, very surprised when in the late eighties and early nineties Nintendo and Sega "re-invented" 'ye olde cartridge system. I just couldn't believe that people actually could be fooled twice. That whole PC/console "war" thingy went on up until a few years ago when the PC copy craze diminished. That was when the n-th gen. consoles like the PS3 and the XBox 360 came out. In my experience games since then are developed for a console and ported to the PC. And for each PC port you need a more expensive video card. Hence: bye bye PC gaming for me. I never thought I'd see the day. Its been 30 years of console based gaming hate for me. Thanks the the Atari, ha ha.

Now why do I still play an Atari game every time I get a new device like a phone or tablet (on an emulator)? That's because of a very unique, at least in my opinion, quality of the early console games, especially the Atari. Back then game developers were stoned creative people. Everybody into gaming, and especially classic gaming, should watch the documentaries called "Once upon Atari" (link youtube) about Atari made by the developer of E.T.: Howard Scott Warshaw. Apparently they were stoned all the time. Warshaw is also the maker of one of the best games ever made and arguably one of the best, if not THE best, Atari game: 'Yar's Revenge' (as well as 'Raiders of he Lost Ark' another favorite of mine). The other docu featuring Warshaw and the Atari craze (read: digging up the E.T. console bin) is "Atari - Game Over" (link youtube).

The Atari games were the only ones that had really different, creative and original game play per game. Yes, of the hundreds of games for the system a lot of them were made by cheap lame companies and were were bad rip offs. However, I'm often surprised by the originality of an Atari game. I cannot say that for any other system. The guys at Activision and Atari, for instance, tried their very best to invent new game play for every game. At the time game-types (like RPG, FPS, platformer, etc.) did not yet exist and they thought that each game should deliver something new. Really new, otherwise people wouldn't buy these ridiculously overpriced cartridges.

Take for instance 'Yar's Revenge'. It can almost not be ported to a cabinet for in an arcade game hall. The game is not really about scoring points but more about enjoying game play. In my opinion its one of the first games that's really meant for home play. Something that was greatly overlooked and underestimated at the time. The games that no one ever plays anymore are the uber cheesy ports of arcade games like Pac Man on the Atari (ms. Pac Man excluded of course). The first adventure game was for the Atari. You'd never see that in an arcade hall.

Atari paved the way that others abandoned in favor of graphics and banale copies of arcade games (i.e. the NES). When I saw the NES, SNES and Genesis games I was not impressed. All those bash 'm up games had exactly the same gameplay! Only thing that impressed me were the Disney games for the Sega, 'Earthworm Jim' (Sega if I'm not mistaken) and, of course, 'Donkey Kong Country'. But that last one has very repetitive game play too if you ask me.

So why do people hate the Atari? They don't. She's forgotten in favor of Nintendo. Which is strange because back in the day it got some serious beating from Sega. And why is the Sega forgotten? Probably because it doesn't exist anymore. Console systems that went away "must have done something wrong" so nobody thinks it cool to like their games. They do, however, think it's cool to bash them.

[edit] Apparently Sega still exists, ha ha. Thought they went bust. Edited my post.

Edited November 16, 2015 by MeneerJansen

[MeneerJansen]

P.S. In the documentary "Atari - Game Over" a whole lot of people came to watch the digging up of the dumped Atari E.T. cartridges. People were making photographs, some even shed a small tear. I don't see NES/Nintendo lovers queuing up to see anything related to eighties Nintendo (except the Donkey Kong arcade game). I think that says more about Atari love or hate than any internet debate.

Edited November 16, 2015 by MeneerJansen