Lynxpro

You forgot #4: 4. Triggered a massive retail purge of video game equipment and software, thus lighting the fuse of the Great Video Game Crash. Question is, without the Tramiel Commodore price war, would the Great Video Game Crash have happened simply from the glut of bad 2600 games or was it a combination of both factors? Perhaps Atari Inc. could've withstood the video game console collapse had it still had healthy sales of the A8 computers [and healthy profits] had it not been for Tramiel's insane rule of Commodore biting at the heals of their other market...

There's a note in one of the annual reports that they gave them shares in lieu of payment (which was overdue). Time Warner actually negotiated the stock deal settlement between Atari Corp and Atari Games Corp. From 1991 through 1994, Time Warner was increasing their holdings in Atari Corp. and courted the Tramiels to sell.

I think Atari would've flattened both Nintendo and Sega had Warner retained James Morgan at the head of NATCO. If Warner wanted to get rid of the company, they should've spun it off to the shareholders instead of selling it piecemeal on-the-cheap to Tramiel. Having seen what the Tramiels did with Atari Corp., I think we can honestly speculate that NATCO would've been a greater success in terms of video games [at the very least] and computers. A TTL only company that never acquired Atari's assets probably would've cratered on its own. It wouldn't have had any of the existing inventory to sell off to make cash in that regard. Jack would've had to pour more of his own money into the enterprise or competed against Amiga in trying to find a larger company to buy the "ST"...

I thought GEM was easier than Intuition back in the day although I didn't care for GEM's default green color [blue was better]. My pro-ST'ness was keen to focus on the limitations of the AmigaOS at the time: virus prone [were Atari ST fans writing them?], too dependent upon Kickstart discs, instituting multitasking on computers that shipped with less RAM than the STs and more crash prone. and the fact that Commodore was manufacturing it. I should've respected it for the abilities it could do with such limitations at the time. I think AmigaOS/Intuition would have been better had GEM [or GEMlike] been the GUI. The "workbench" metaphor was rather strange compared to the "desktop" and AmigaOS past 3.x seems to have moved to the "desktop" metaphor from what I've seen. And for some reason, the GUI kinda looked as ugly as GEOS. Surprising that the text font for the GUI looked so cartoonish and 8-Bit. For all the talk of the limitations of the ST's standard fonts, they didn't look as cartoonish in my eyes and a wee bit more professional looking...

Didn't Commodore also push trade-in rebates for trading in not only other Commodore computers [VIC-20] but also competing computers? It's been a long time since I read The Home Computer Wars, but I do know practically all of the home computer companies - except Apple - were pushing rebates in order to compete with Commodore's insane price slashing... And it was insane*. Jack gained massive market share but it cut Commodore's profits so much he was shown the exit door from his own company. *Basically a personal vendetta to destroy TI in revenge for what they allegedly did to him and Commodore "personally" during the calculator "wars" with no respect to the interest of Commodore's shareholders...

I'm kinda on limited time at the moment so I can't respond to some of the postings above but I wanted to ask if GCC ever considered marketing the 7800 on their own... And what was Warner Communications thinking with not just handing the 7800 over to Atari Corp? Did they have some idea of wrestling the home video game rights to the "Atari" name and assigning it to Atari Games Inc/Corp along with the 7800? It just doesn't make much sense what they did if they were trying to get Atari off their books...

When I talked to Leonard about it, he said Amy never completely worked right. That's why they gave it to the outside firm (Light and Sound) to try and get things going with it. Interesting. Any idea why Atari Corp. later sued them?

It also shows how much Warner botched the transition . . . all those issues should have been dealt with before the sale went though and (ideally) much of Morgan's plans for NATCO and Atari consumer in general should have continued under TTL/Atari Corp. (they wouldn't have conflicted with Tramiel's plans either, and in fact would mean downsizing in a much more orderly manner than Tramiel was more or less forced to do -it was so much of a mess with the entire staff laid off by Warner, total chaos in the company, noone knowing what the hell was going on, lots of blame and animosity, frustration, lawsuits, etc, etc) Tramiel may have shifted Morgan's plans a little (Morgan wasn't pushing the 16-bit computers very hard), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. (especially since MICKY was dead -honestly I'm not sure how marketable such a high end game system would have been in 1984, maybe they'd use it in the arcade more so early on -there's no way to set up the amiga graphics chipset -let alone sound- with much less than 128k and still have it useful, 64k would be pushing it and you'd have to deal with single buffered graphics and 32k or less of work RAM). Honestly, I don't see the Amiga (or rainbow) chipsets being attractive consoles in any configuration until 1987 at the very earliest. (and even then more dependent on consolidation and features cut out to customize for a console only chipset -you'd really want at least 128k DRAM -plus ROM, of course) I think you may be giving too much credit to Jack Tramiel about his intentions being compatible with James Morgan's NATCO plans. The lawsuit specifically calls out Tramiel over unnecessary firings just to make him look aggressive to the media for maximum publicity... Had Warner left NATCO alone, that would've probably been enough to prevail legally against Commodore's actions with Amiga since NATCO essentially was Atari Inc. Commodore would've been twiddling their thumbs at that point because they would've lost the Amiga and they would've still been involved with the lawsuit against TTL. Wgungfu, I believe Koolkitty89 is asking you this question.... I don't know if the proposed Atari Inc. purchase of MOS is widely known; I didn't hear about it until Al Alcorn mentioned at the Commodore 64's anniversary panel that he himself had tried to persuade the Warner brass about it [i'm assuming he meant he lobbied Manny Gerard with the idea]... I don't recall if Motorola was suing MOS in 1976 over the 6502 being an alleged copy of Motorola's chip but perhaps that might've made the Warner brass a bit risk averse over such a potential acquisition. I also have no idea how much impact the case would've had on the "second source" suppliers had MOS eventually lost the case too, but Atari Inc. never switched over to Motorola's 8-bit chip line nor to the Z80 or 8080 to mitigate such a negative outcome... *EDIT* I should've read Wgungfu's article first since it covered that lawsuit... The amusing [and alt.history] idea of the whole potential Atari acquisition of MOS would be to c-block Tramiel from making Commodore vertically integrated and thus preventing him from launching his price war with the C64. Of course, I guess one could say that he could've responded by purchasing Synertek. He wouldn't have had the cash to buy Rockwell Semi, but I guess he could've made a run for Zilog and then the VIC-20 and C64 would've been Z80 powered... And an Atari acquisition of MOS in 1976 would not have prevented them from acquiring Synertek later on in the game [especially when Atari Inc. was flush with cash]. Had they acquired both, MOS's East Coast operations and manufacturing probably would've been moved and consolidated to the Bay Area though...or somewhere else on the West Coast...

The NES had 2k of RAM and it got Paperboy courtesy of Atari Games/Tengen. Granted, it wasn't that good, but I digress. SMB was an arcade port. Am I the only person that actually played it in the arcade? Atari Games had the rights to Namco's RBI Baseball, both in the arcades and on consoles via Tengen. Atari Games/Tengen had Cyberball which was huge in the arcades and did well on the other consoles. The rule was simple: If someone wanted to release a game on the NES, they couldn't release it on a competing console for two years, period. Computers versions of that same game were exempt. Example: Say Epyx created IMPOSSIBLE MISSION II on C64. If they wanted to make a console version of Impossible Mission II and went to NES first (since it was biggest), they couldn't release Impossible Mission II for SMS, 7800 etc. for 2 years. They *COULD* release IMPOSSIBLE MISSION for Atari ST, Amiga, Apple IIGS etc during those two years though. The loophole that occasionally popped up was in situations where the company making the NES game licensed the title from someone else. For example, American Technos did DOUBLE DRAGON in the arcades. American Technos licensed DOUBLE DRAGON to Tradewest for the NES. Tradewest couldn't make the game for another console. However, American Technos could license the game to Sega and Activision for the SMS, 7800 and 2600. Atari could and did find games that fell into that loophole. Xenophobe, Ikari Warriors and Commando fell into that zone. Ditto for Kung Fu Master, Rampage and Double Dragon. But most of the hot titles on the NES couldn't be made on the 7800 because of the exclusitivity clause. Everyone was writing for NES first and then staying there. This is different from today when most games come out on 2 or more consoles. Those licensed titles that eventually did make it to the 7800 made them later on in the console's life and not coincidentally during the time the Atari Corp v Nintendo of America antitrust lawsuit was getting heavy in the courts. Even though Nintendo ultimately won the case, they did relax the harsher parts of their "exclusive" contracts. Although the damage had already been done greatly during 1986-1988 which was the reason for the success of the NES.

There's no reason AmigaOS couldn't emulate the route Apple went with MacOS [X]. They need to cut the cord and transition it to being a layer sitting atop BSD. But the diehards would say "that's not Amiga like!" Atari Inc. spent a fortune on commercials for the XL line of computers. Alan Alda wasn't cheap and I can remember as a kid seeing Atari computer commercials all the time during prime time television [when I wasn't playing my 2600]. Even then, Alda seemed friendly and trustworthy, unlike George Plimpton and his Intellivision commercials which made him look like a douchebag. That wasn't Atari's or Warner's shortcomings; it was the American general publics fault to fail to recognize that Atari was more than just videogames. Atari Inc. advertised the computer line well, unlike Tramiel's Atari Corp that advertised at 3am in most cases.

We should all remember that IBM had all of those resources as well but the ongoing Federal antitrust case against them made IBM look to having their eventual PC made from off-the-shelf industry standard parts and outsourcing the whole OS as well. Are there any Snowcap GUI pics available or will they become available in a future update to Curt's website? Is it confirmed Atari bought 6502s and 6507s from Synertek? The way the press has told it is Atari bought those CPUs from Commodore's MOS. Maybe Honeywell wanted too much money for Synertek in 85 because Tramiel was talking about the need for vertical integration practically right after Atari Corp. was christened. Wow, I just read the filed NATCO claims from Curt's site. Had there been justice, the NATCO plaintiffs would've ended up owning a chunk of Atari Corp and Warner.... That was quite a read...

Since I didn't have an A8, I played it on my 2600. My ship was blown up all the time. When a friend and I played - one of us would have the joystick and the other would use the keypad controller - we'd run out of my bedroom if the ship exploded... It was our way of "ejecting" and surviving. I think we were both 8 at the time. In defense of the article, the article itself states the game was from the late 70s; it's the picture caption that misstates it as the early 70s. So I wonder which "original" version of Star Raiders will be included as an Easter Egg... the A8 version, the 2600 version [probably], the 5200 version, or the ST version? I should've bought the ST version back in the day.

And its been downhill ever since. The guy that owns [the name] Amiga Inc. makes Al Davis [Oakland Raiders] look like a competent businessman. Actually, Sam Tramiel is probably one thousand times smarter than that guy. You mean that lame "Commodore USA" company run out of a furniture store with the vaporware website threatening to rebadge a bunch of low-tier [junk] computer equipment from China with the Commodore and Amiga brands? Selling a rebadged "Amiga" computer would lack the AmigaOS to go along with it since Amiga Inc. is barred from selling it since Hyperion Entertainment owns all the AmigaOS IP past 3.x.

Buying and selling stock is different than saying that they used company funds for personal things. Also, how do we know they violated any stock trading laws? Lots of executives buy and sell company stock. I said my broker made that statement. Even if there was said proof, the SEC never did anything. Jack Tramiel was cheap though. At the shareholders meeting where the Jaguar was initially showed off at, there were ceramic coffee mugs with Atari's logo emblazoned on them. The Time Warner rep - and his entourage - was the first person to leave the meeting with the coffee cup(s). After they left, everyone else took their cup with them [including me]. I remember the look Jack Tramiel flashed when he saw people leaving with those cups. At the following year's shareholder's meeting, they had styrofoam cups. As for the stock, what always struck me as surprising was Lee Isuger (sic) would write these articles praising Atari's stock and how the company was set to grow and then the stock would drop like a rock. The guy was kryptonite to Atari stock. I'm glad I never bought his portfolio software for my ST. Since AMY was completed and Atari Corp apparently did figure out how to use the chip, why didn't it end up in the XEGS? After all, Tramiel had intended to put it in the 65XEM and the XEGS was a repackaged 65XE. Maybe since the chip hadn't been fabbed they didn't want to go to the extra expense of doing so compared to the surplus of other 8-bit A8 chips they had at their disposal...

Speak for yourself in that regard. Food Fight was well remembered by my circle. That was one of the first titles I bought for my 7800. Loved it in the arcade. GCC also did a good job on Crazy Otto/Ms. Pac-Man as well as the Missile Attack mod... As for some people in other threads doubting the power of Atari Games Corp. arcade titles and how they could've helped the 7800, I have to say that these people must not have been to many arcades back then. Atari Games titles were consistently amongst the most popular titles in the arcades, along with Sega's wares. They were also some of the most popular ports to the NES - official and unofficial - not to mention the Genesis/Mega Drive once Atari Games/Tengen moved on from the NES.

The AMY chip debacle being a prime example of that. Commodore basically did the same thing. It didn't take long for Jay Miner to exit and the whole "Commodore-Amiga, Inc." to be swallowed up into the rest of mediocre Commodore.

The joys of a capitalist society and freedom of choice and I'm presuming that when you say "sharing the platform" you mean both companies, sitting down, holding hands, sharing a smoke and deciding between them which one (the ST or the Amiga or a combination of bits from both) they were going to go with? That sort of thing doesn't seem to fly these days as governments think of it as anti-competitive. Are you kidding me? Did the Feds step in when Apple and IBM set up Taligent to hammer out a combined OS? What about all the companies that donate code to Linux and other shared open source software projects? Did the Feds bust the cooperation amongst the PC Cloners in developing IDE? Did the Feds ban the importation of the Compact Disc, DVD, DCC, and Blu-ray because all were developed amongst multiple companies? The answer is no to all of the above. The only area the Feds stepped in - and it was the Supreme Court - that blocked IBM's "US Memories" consortium plan. Atari and Commodore could've pooled their OS resources together and decided they both would build computers using a common OS and specs. One company could've marketed to the consumer market and the other to business. That is perfectly legal. But that never dawned upon Gould or Tramiel. That's my point. Maybe so but it was the least horrible of a bunch of horrible choices. I'd certainly rather GEM existed as a viable GUI instead of Windows. Windows Phone 7 is a dismal failure but it appears that won't stop Nokia from licensing it just so it can distinguish itself from all the other companies pushing Android based smart phones. The PCs of that era sucked. Microsoft CLI instead of a decent GUI, CGA graphics, sound so bad it made the ST's Yamaha chip sound good, the 640k limitation, slow hardware, etc. The ST was color and the Mac was B&W. The ST had a monochrome monitor with higher res than the Mac. The ST was faster than the Mac. The ST had better sound than the Mac. The ST had MIDI built in. The ST was also about half the price as the Mac. If you used a Mac emulator on the ST, it ran faster than a regular Mac. The STacy was the best "Mac" laptop on the market when it debuted. The only thing that the Mac excelled at over the ST - besides being far more expensive - was that it had system fonts built into the OS [unlike the ST and the often delayed GDOS]... So, what was your point? Have you ever used an ST before? Windows didn't eclipse TOS 1.0 in functionality and ease until Windows 95, 10 years after the ST debuted. IBM was a contractor who built the Jag for Atari. Atari and Flare designed the Jag. Your statement if applied to the current industry would mean that HP and most of the other PC companies only market their brand wares that are built by Chinese subcontractors. See my comments above. Several computer and consumer electronics companies "colluded" during that time period with no such legal action. No, what I was saying is that Atari and Commodore could've came to an agreement in 87 when they settled their lawsuits against each other. They could've opted to design a new platform that took the strengths of the ST and the Amiga and made it a common platform for both of them to ship products from. That isn't collusion any more than Philips and Sony "colluding" on Compact Disc and DVD. As for Sam's management, I'd say Irving Gould was correct in preventing Tramiel nepotism to be practiced at Commodore. Atari and Amiga both probably should've went with the 68010 from the start so both platforms would've been 32-bit from the start... The biggest blunder with the ST was shipping the SF354 drive. They should've only shipped the SF314 so all STs would've had 720k disk capacity. Splitting ownership between two different disk sizes meant the majority of the software shipped on the 360k disks. The Amiga platform didn't have that problem; they all did 880k with their "unique" disk format. The Mega ST and the STe line should've shipped with the 68020. And I do wonder how much games would've been better had Atari - or Amiga - had shipped with the 68881/2 math coprocessors standard. After all, PC platform gaming did leap once Intel harmonized their math coprocessors with the CPU directly with the 486DX. Did MOS ever create a math co-processor for the 6502? I felt the same way. I hated Macs until Mac OS X. And to think Mac OS X is Apple's goodness layered atop BSD just as Atari's ATG was probably aiming for via BSD+Snowcap all those years ago... quote name='SpaceDice2010' date='Thu Feb 10, 2011 9:53 PM' timestamp='1297403630' post='2207100'] Why did Atari need to boost their image in the computer market? Wasn't the goal to sell computers? Changing your brand from a games company to a computer company costs money, something that Atari at the time did not have. If Nintendo decided to enter the US computer market today do you really think they would use the name Nintendo? I can see the press release now... Atari could've done it with "Amiga" had they acquired the company and the tech. After all, when the Amiga 1000 was released, you didn't see the name "Commodore" attached to it in the fliers except at the bottom and listed as "Commodore-Amiga Inc." One of the worst things about the Amiga 500 on was having that cheap Commodore logo affixed to the case.

And this is one of the cases where I have to question his strategy... It is not just RJ who states Jack Tramiel point blank said that he was interested in acquiring Amiga's tech but would can all of its staff. Multiple Amiga people said the very same thing. What rational business person would say something like that? Unless hindered by the agreement to purchase the company, you buy the company and then fire the staff. You don't tell them ahead of time before serious negotiations begin! That's a total WTF and it is a main reason why Amiga went running to Commodore to save them. I believe Jack Tramiel may be Jack Tramiel's own worst enemy, not the late Irving Gould nor any of us irate old school Atari owners. But in another case of a computer company executive behaving stupidly, you gotta hand it to Steve Jobs who dismissed acquiring Amiga because the tech was too complicated. WTF? Of course, that was Steve Jobs 1.0. I doubt post-1997 Steve Jobs v. 2.0 would make a similar statement even in a dismissive one sentence reply from his iPhone...

According to who??? That's kind of like saying, "I heard from someone, who heard from someone, who knows someone, who says that Rik likes to dress up in women's clothing and run around downtown Palm Beach singing No Doubt's 'I'm Just A Girl"." Clearly it must be true! Seriously, Atari Corp was publicly traded and answered to the stockholders, subject to the laws of traded companies and requiring independent auditors to review their financial numbers. The stock broker that I bought my Atari stock from said the very same thing; that the Tramiels actively traded the stock all the time...pumping and dumping. But my infinitely small amount of stock was meant just so I could attend the shareholder's meeting and pester the board with questions... And you gotta remember that Atari Corp alleged stock manipulation was rather small potatoes versus what Ray Kassar was accused of at the near height of Atari Inc's success... I wish I could get my friend - a former Atari dealer - to jump online and share his story about the latter days of Atari Corp. and getting hit up by Sam to sell his buddy a Playstation for wholesale...

Atari didn't maximize the 5200 to its potential. For example, they failed to store the bodies of the executives of Nintendo Japan in the unit's joystick bin. For all of Steve Ross's alleged mob connections, he just wasn't gangsta enough!

JTS became rather [in]famous around Northern California since it had a record number of BBB complaints since Computer Warehouse was cramming a bunch of their [JTS] products into Computer Warehouse's screwdriver shop PCs. KCRA 3 also harassed them too in their "Call 3" segments during their news broadcasts roughly during the same time the BBB was sticking it to them. India didn't turn out to be paved in gold silk for Atari/JTS and Amiga Inc. with their Amiga Nowhere platform.

The rumor was that the Jag Rayman was finished an entire year before the PSX version but Sony paid off UBI soft to hold off the release until the PSX version was ready. That year head start on such a cool platformer may have made some difference. It wasn't a rumor. UbiSoft sent via mail teasers and pre-order forms for Rayman to Jag owners and then they delayed the release date. If I remember right, the PS1 version ended up being released first... I shouldn't have opened up about what I thought of UbiSoft - because of that incident - in an interview with Prima Publishing a few years later.

What self respecting electronics company voluntarily ships products with cardboard inside them? F'n Commodore where the "C=" always stood for "cheap". Speaking of Commodore's early products, has anyone ever had the [dis]pleasure of using a Commodore calculator? My mother had a friend from Croatia who had a 70s era Commodore calculator. It was fugly, like the giant power supply of the Commodore Plus 4. Jack Tramiel likes to claim TI did him dirty which almost led to Commodore's collapse but it might be because their products sucked.

No kidding. I get so tired of seeing some of the lazier devs out there refer to Wii as "GameCube 1.5" and then trying to blame their crappy "GameCube .25 level effort" on Wii hardware limitations. The way some tell the story, you'd swear the Wii had less processing power under the hood than a Super NES. It is still an incredibly weak system compared to the competition and yet again another classic example of Nintendo making a fortune off inferior hardware, imho. And they have no shame - or pride - in terms of milking their franchises to death's end. Say what you will about Bungie but they've voluntarily turned over the reigns to Halo. They went out on high.

The Tramiels were rich off Commodore so I don't understand this "woe is me" attitude that some are posting about Jack having to put some of his money into getting Atari Corp. going. He certainly had more to spare than Jay Miner and the Amiga Inc. guys had to keep the financing going with their pet project. It's interesting that "they were desperate to find 7800 developers". If I hadn't gone "off the grid" right after IM was released, I wonder how different things would have turned out. Computer Magic was, at this time, late 1988, early 1989, insolvent, or so I was led to believe. I can't imagine they wouldn't have JUMPED at the chance to develop more games, nor would they have ignored me, as I had the most knowledge about my own development system. I didn't leave them on bad terms, neither, except for the "pay me to fix IM or nothing happens" thing. I'm not seeing a lot of info commented on about Atari's Chicago development operations from 1989 on... [until 1992?]... And if it's not personal, why did you go "off the grid"?