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Jaynz

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Posts posted by Jaynz

  1. Posted

    True, but none of them have the same insane marketing as they did back then, and both the Cube and Simon are largely 'nostalgia' pieces more than mainline sales toys. (The Pet Rock actually enjoyed another release in the past few years as well.) When I worked with a toy agent in college, I was told up front that all they want to sell is the 'next fad', period. Brand building, and long-term sales are a "waste of time" ... apparently toy agents still say that, yet Mattel and Hasbro (much less Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo) are all about building their brand to stay competitive and even dominant.

  2. Posted

    Let's not kid ourselves. The real truth of the matter is that Atari needed to let the 2600 go, but were understandibly too scared to do it. By the time of 'the crash' that 2600 was long in the tooth and looked it. Pac-Man had happened and it was game that looked and played better EVERYWHERE else. Whatever technical failures or bad decisions you can cite, the real one was that Atari wasn't moving on, and not gearing itself to move on (neither the 5200 or 7800 ever had serious pushes) as technology moved forward.

    To put it into terms, imagine if Sony had come out with the PS2 and PS3, but decided to not push them at all and still milk the original PS1 instead of either of their new systems. Where do you think Sony would be? That's EXACTLY what Atari did. The big difference between then and now is that most people saw Atari as 'the entire video game industry' and when Atari failed in the US, the bottom dropped out. Coleco nor Mattel didn't have the mindset of Microsoft or Nintendo and said 'now we can move in and take their place'... they said "Crap, Video games are DEAD! Switch to badly made computers instead!"

  3. Posted

    I think it really depended mostly on when. I know that in the 1970s, and the first year or so for Atari, they were tied as 'electronics' very closely to the television department. (Not quite as drastic as Magnavox, though.) That really seemed to change once Space Invaders went out and it was more obvious that the kidlets were picking up the games rather than the bar-patron adults.

    Doing some checking in, I did learn that LS Ayers, Sears, Woolworth, 3-D, and Ayr*Way all moved their Atari stock over to toys for Christmas of 1980, where they stayed pretty much until the crash. (Compare where Sears put the Telegames in its catalog.) The thinking and marketing definitely changed that year, and there are some adverts and commercials calling the Atari "The Toy of the Year". Thus the 'toy fad' thinking begun in earnest.

    Keep in mind that 1980 is pretty much when I got into video gaming hard.. the years before that are a bit hazy... I was young. ;) I do remember playing some video games in Arcadia, Indiana in a pinball parlor that very reluctantly picked up a few old 'EM Machine' ports...

  4. Posted

    Bob > If you can find them, look for some of the old "Game Programming Gems" books. A couple of them had some insanely fast line-drawing algorithms in them making use of bitwise math rather than division. (Sadly I don't remember the specifics of them anymore, it's been too long). That's about the only way you can get a vector-engine going on the 7800, I think.

  5. Posted

    Yeah, some of the toy companies were VERY upset that this 'old fad' was still dominating shelves at retail toy aisles when they wanted to push their 'next big thing' instead. But, yes, the Atari generation was sold through the toy aisles more than anything (I remember the very nice Atari display at Greenwood Park Mall's LS Ayers being hidden with their four tiny rows of toys in the back, for instance.) It wouldn't be until about midway in the NES era that Video Games would be thrown into the electronics departments, where they've been ever since.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    Because journalists at the time and a lot of the people who ran the toy industry did not understand the concept as a medium. To the toy industry (which is what controlled video gaming at the time), the Atari 2600 was just another pet rock, Rubik's Cube, Simon, or UNO deck. And even though the Atari 2600 was dominant on the shelves for six years, it never got accepted by these guys as anything more than 'the next fad' - one they really wanted to kill dead to make way for the NEXT fad. The people running the companies were two generations removed from their market and it showed.

     

    What saved video games in the US was NOT just the launch of the Nintendo, which certainly helped, but was the rise of stores like Software Etc., which took some of the control of the market OUT of the hands of the toy industry and into its own niche. It was really had to say that 'no one wants video games' when the little game shop across the aisle was outselling Sears' entire toy department in 1985... and it did.

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    As for the video crash if 1984, keep in mind that as far as the US distributors were concerned, Atari was the video game industry. When the 2600 became effectively obsolete, gamers were indeed ready to move on, but retailers like Children's Palace had stockpiled HUGE amounts of 2600 games, some of them going all the way back to the 1978 launch. They really didn't understand what was going on, so when the Atari 2600 posted a really bad year, the toy 'industry' threw up its arms, declared video games 'finally dead' (which is what they were hoping for for years now) and liquidated absolutely everything. This caused a further panic with Intellivision and Colecovision to produce their computer line (which was seen as immune from the sell-off), draining their resources and shutting them down as well. In 1984, though, demand for video games in the US actually went UP substantially... it was just that the 2600 was now past its prime.

     

    In Europe the market simply moved on to microcomputers for a few years (which still do well there), and Japan had something big coming just around the corner. The Atari 2600 didn't tank the markets there as it did here.

    • Like 1

  8. Posted

    I believe that both Asteroids Deluxe and Space Duel 'fake' the vector graphics with raster images. One of the reasons that Tempest never seems to get done is that all those vectors SCALE (unlike the two games I just mentioned) meaning you would either need a true vector driver written (which would be difficult to store in the 7800's ram) or 'fake it' with a LOT of raster images to make up for it.

  13. Posted · Edited by Jaynz

    Ah, that's it, when I was testing player 2, he obviously wasn't moving... so the game got much more lethal for player 1... Shades of Wizard of Wor?

     

    Edit: A little oddity. I had a scenario (single player) where I died, was started a new screen, and Otto immediately leapt out on my side (no noticeable delay). Needless to say, I died. It LOOKS like the 'Otto Timer' isn't getting reset properly. :S

  14. Posted

    Okay, just some points: (Assume everything else is absolutely great except for what I post here.)

     

    You can die on player 2's 'ghost' (IE, where he was even if he's dead and no longer on the screen).

     

    "Location" detection has robots will shooting diagonally in a far miss rather than nailing the player when going left or right, but a few pixels up or down.

     

    Otto shows up insanely fast pretty early on. By screen four or five, he was typically on the screen within five seconds.

     

    Overall difficulty and robot movement/shooting speed seems high, though I may be too used to home versions at this point.

  15. Posted

    That's a great idea, but it would have to be a whole new project. It's definitely not something I could just tack onto this game. But thanks for the suggestion.

     

    Ah, I wasn't sure how tightly packed the ROM was already. I had thought that if the XM was still a few months out, the 'special' levels may have been a good option - but if there just isn't room in the code, no worries. I would much rather games get completed than suffer the death of 'feature-itis'.

  19. Posted

    Pac N Pal would be the most logical choice for the 'next' PacMan game, since it heavily uses Super PacMan's code already. PacMania would probably be the most recognizable one not done yet... Baby Pac would require a pinball-level code (which may be fun, and something I've looked at). PacLand would be a good candidate for an XM game.

  20. Posted

    Bob, if you're willing to help me relearn ASM (my rust is too thick to penetrate it again, unfortunately, and most of my game design work is in C/C++), I would love to work with you on getting an Apshai game to the 7800. Of course, I still want Bezerk and Gorf... and a pony!

  23. Posted

    Okay, don't want to over-bump this one, but just checking in on the progress of this puppy. A couple of months without news makes me a sad Jaynz.

  24. Posted

    Jinks, one of the reasons that our 'new' versions can sound so much better is that they give extra memory and code-space and processing time for processing sound... memory that Atari did not make available for most 7800 carts 'way back when'. It wasn't that the programmers sucked, it was that they were limited in both time and resources in everything that they were doing. TIA is a raw sound output chip with NO mixing capabilities at all - all that had to be done via software, and Atari (as we now know) didn't want to pay the money for it.

  25. Posted

    I agree that if Atari really tried, they could have made some doable modifications and enhancements to the 7800, bringing it closer to a real contender for the NES. But Atari was legally locked out by Nintendo from producing certain great selling game titles... this would have hurt the 7800 regardless.

     

    It was less of a limitation than most people think, though. Atari had a huge catalog of games they could have drawn from. Not just the 2600 standbys, of course, but a large amount of games for 'gaming computers' that had started to take off. They did this a little bit with games like Kareteka, of course, but the 7800 could have also taken titles like Pool of Radiance, and a large number of 'computer only' RPGs that were becoming gaming's new dominating force.

     

    As Trebor said, the lack of games, particularly games that looked and sounded as good as the NES games, really hurt the system. Where were games like Phoenix, Kangaroo, Vanguard, etc., that Atari already had locked up? Sure, they were a little old, but the NES library at launch wasn't all that spiffy either. If Atari had proven the 7800 with a diversity of titles... but, yes, we're going 'if only' once again. It really seems like Atari dropped the ball on the 7800 on every single opportunity it had.

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