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Why didn't later atar 7800s have built-in AV ports as well as RF out?


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Interesting thread. I didn't expect this one to take off.

 

I'd like to ask this group about how consumer spending changed during "The Crash." I've suspected that while sales of video games and consoles dropped that spending increased in the home computer market. Perhaps overall spending on technology actually increased? Marty or Bill (or others knowledgeable) do you have data on that?

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Interesting thread. I didn't expect this one to take off.

 

I'd like to ask this group about how consumer spending changed during "The Crash." I've suspected that while sales of video games and consoles dropped that spending increased in the home computer market. Perhaps overall spending on technology actually increased? Marty or Bill (or others knowledgeable) do you have data on that?

 

I don't have any hard data accessible, but it was something of a myth that consumers switched to spending on computers when they "tired" of videogames for those few years. The fact is, all relevant industries were affected by the Crash, be they home videogames, arcade videogames, or the home computer market. Just look at all the companies that left the computing scene around that time, be they hardware manufacturers or software publishers. I think it's important to remember that all segments had companies trying to cash in and make a quick buck, and none of the markets could really support the volume of stuff being produced. It was really a wild west period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Many of these companies didn't have the resources to stick it out long-term, either. It was boom or go bust, and many of them did the latter as the markets matured and more or less corrected themselves into sustainable models.

 

It's also important to remember that outside of North America, it was more or less business as usual during this time, and growth trajectories and the makeup of the markets were quite different. The various major territories didn't really start to become truly homogenized until the 90s.

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The computer crash was caused by Commodore's price war, not due to the console crash. Timex, Texas Instruments, Coleco, and others quit the market which orphaned their platforms and the hardware was liquidated and often given away at time share seminars. It wasn't clear "Atari" would survive either so plenty of consumers avoided buying the Atari XLs until the smoke cleared. So mainly the Commodore 64 benefitted at the bottom end while upper middle class consumers stuck with the Apple // line. The IBM PCjr also failed and even Commodore suffered with the Plus 4.

 

Japan went with MSX and the UK suffered with those atrocious Sinclair "computers".

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Commodore's price war was certainly a factor, but not the only factor, and it certainly didn't explain the loss of third party peripheral and software publishers. A big factor in the Crash again was too many companies creating too many products for too few potential users. Whether you want to split hairs in calling what happened on the computer side as being part of the Crash or not, it did happen right around the same time period and did result in a significant shake out in that part of the industry. There's no one root cause of course for any of the Crash-related events. It was a combination of factors mostly related to a new type of industry being born and the resulting chaos before settling down into something more manageable.

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Commodore's price war was certainly a factor, but not the only factor, and it certainly didn't explain the loss of third party peripheral and software publishers. A big factor in the Crash again was too many companies creating too many products for too few potential users. Whether you want to split hairs in calling what happened on the computer side as being part of the Crash or not, it did happen right around the same time period and did result in a significant shake out in that part of the industry. There's no one root cause of course for any of the Crash-related events. It was a combination of factors mostly related to a new type of industry being born and the resulting chaos before settling down into something more manageable.

Well said. After the smoke cleared, we were left in the 90s with Microsoft and Apple making home computers, with Nintendo and Sega (and later Sony) making game consoles. There were other competitors on the market at the time during the early 90s (for instance, Lynx/Jag, Turbo Grafx, Neo Geo on the console side) but none made much of an impact on market share.

 

To this day, we still have two or three competitors making consoles, computers, and mobile devices. Microsoft/Apple in the PC sector, Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft still make consoles, and Apple/Google Android competing in the mobile market. That was part of the problem in the wild, wild west days of video games and home PCs, when you had a dozen companies all flooding the market. A similar potential shakedown may be occurring with micro-consoles (I'm in the Ouya camp myself), but these seem to thrive with smaller ecosystems despite not making a real dent in the overall market.

 

 

Tengen was Atari Games, not GCC.

GCC developed arcade and home console games for Atari Games. Due to the split between parent company Atari Games and Atari Corp,

GCC continued to develop games for Atari Games Coin-op, as well as Tengen. Had GCC been on board and developed games for Atari Corp's 7800 rather then the "competition" (NES), then maybe the 7800 may have had a better library.

 

The fact that none of the Tengen NES games were ported over to the 7800 is a travesty in itself, considering that as an unlicensed developer they were not bound by the same licensing restrictions as other NES devs. Several Sega developed SMS games also saw new life on the NES through Tengen.

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Well, Sam Tramiel DID take over Atari Corp., and promptly ran it into bankruptcy!

 

Atari Corp. never went bankrupt.

 

GCC developed arcade and home console games for Atari Games. Due to the split between parent company Atari Games and Atari Corp,

GCC continued to develop games for Atari Games Coin-op, as well as Tengen. Had GCC been on board and developed games for Atari Corp's 7800 rather then the "competition" (NES), then maybe the 7800 may have had a better library.

 

GCC stopped developing games in '84. As Marty said, they went into Mac peripherals.

 

One was, at least — Klax, não?

 

As far as Atari Games games go, Road Riot, Pit-Fighter, Rampart, Paperboy, and Gauntlet were announced and/or in the works. There are very early versions of Pit-Fighter and Rampart out there.

Edited by CRV
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Commodore's price war was certainly a factor, but not the only factor, and it certainly didn't explain the loss of third party peripheral and software publishers. A big factor in the Crash again was too many companies creating too many products for too few potential users. Whether you want to split hairs in calling what happened on the computer side as being part of the Crash or not, it did happen right around the same time period and did result in a significant shake out in that part of the industry. There's no one root cause of course for any of the Crash-related events. It was a combination of factors mostly related to a new type of industry being born and the resulting chaos before settling down into something more manageable.

 

Bill, that's not really splitting hairs, the issue is people normally confuse three separate industries and markets each of which went through their own separate crashes/shakeouts as a single one. They try and promote a single "video game industry" that didn't exist (what you had was three separate industries each of which had video games in them and some companies that were in all three), and point to there being one major crash that hit the whole thing. It seems you're doing that above as well, which I'm surprised at. Coin, consumer (console) and computer are all separate industries, each with their own resources, distribution, markets, etc. While certainly companies that operated in all three were affected by the consumer crash, the consumer crash was still a separate industry crash. Coin had already been in it's own crash before the consumer one even started and was just coming out of it as consumer was getting to it's worst point in late '83 (a point I was educated on by Gary Stern as well as a plethora of ex-Atari coin people). And the computer industry crash (which really involved the low end market computers) certainly was seen at the time as mainly being driven by the Commodore and TI and price war, but that was already stabilizing by '84 which is why a lot of the consumer companies (and developers) that survived the consumer crash made the move over to the (by that time) more stable computer industry.

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Nothing is being conflated. The fact of the matter is, all three sectors had issues. There's no real consensus on what the Great Videogame Crash specifically was. The term is just as applicable to all of the related industries and the issues they were all having around the same time. There was plenty of overlap with the fortunes of one impacting the fortunes of the other.

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GCC developed arcade and home console games for Atari Games. Due to the split between parent company Atari Games and Atari Corp,

GCC continued to develop games for Atari Games Coin-op, as well as Tengen. Had GCC been on board and developed games for Atari Corp's 7800 rather then the "competition" (NES), then maybe the 7800 may have had a better library.

 

The fact that none of the Tengen NES games were ported over to the 7800 is a travesty in itself, considering that as an unlicensed developer they were not bound by the same licensing restrictions as other NES devs. Several Sega developed SMS games also saw new life on the NES through Tengen.

No. GCC didn't develop for Atari Games. GCC made unauthorized add-on boards for arcade machines. Atari Inc sued them and as part of the settlement, GCC designed a couple of arcade games for Atari Inc's arcade division [Food Fight being one of 'em] and then they approached Warner about coding console games for Atari's consoles. Since they worked cheaply, Warner contracted out a lot of work to them instead of Atari Consumer's own programmers. GCC did a lot of 5200 titles. They then approached Warner about designing a successor console which became the 7800. They [GCC] coded the launch titles.

 

Atari Inc's Atari Consumer division went to Jack Tramiel's Trammel Technologies Ltd in July 1984 [becoming Atari Corp] and Atari Inc's arcade division [Atari Coin, Coin-Op, etc] became Atari Games. Atari Games couldn't use the "Atari" brand outside arcades so they created the "Tengen" brand. GCC didn't work with Atari Games/Tengen at all.

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No. GCC didn't develop for Atari Games. GCC made unauthorized add-on boards for arcade machines. Atari Inc sued them and as part of the settlement, GCC designed a couple of arcade games for Atari Inc's arcade division [Food Fight being one of 'em] and then they approached Warner about coding console games for Atari's consoles. Since they worked cheaply, Warner contracted out a lot of work to them instead of Atari Consumer's own programmers. GCC did a lot of 5200 titles. They then approached Warner about designing a successor console which became the 7800. They [GCC] coded the launch titles.

Right said, Fred!

Edited by stardust4ever
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My opinion is that 84-86 was the dividing-line between Generation-X and Generation-Y.

 

Generation-X got their start with the 1st generation of consoles and as they entered high-school, they graduated into home-computers. I think it's hard to deny that there was a desire on the part of console owners to eventually get into home-computers, even if they didn't want to learn to program or use a word processor, they would have wanted to gain access to fancier games. Price was the main obstacle. Luckily on platforms like the Atari and C= you could use them like consoles and play games on cart, but if you really wanted to branch out you'd need to spring for a floppy drive and get games on disk.

 

Generation-Y were too young to appreciate home computers and so they latched onto the NES. Since the NES was the first thing they knew, they keyed on the Japanese style of gaming: level-based games with bosses and side-scrollers rather than more twitch-style games, and the joypad where your left thumb does most of the work rather than right-hand sticks with left-thumb on the fire-button.

Edited by mos6507
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My opinion is that 84-86 was the dividing-line between Generation-X and Generation-Y.

 

Generation-X got their start with the 1st generation of consoles and as they entered high-school, they graduated into home-computers. I think it's hard to deny that there was a desire on the part of console owners to eventually get into home-computers, even if they didn't want to learn to program or use a word processor, they would have wanted to gain access to fancier games. Price was the main obstacle. Luckily on platforms like the Atari and C= you could use them like consoles and play games on cart, but if you really wanted to branch out you'd need to spring for a floppy drive and get games on disk.

 

Generation-Y were too young to appreciate home computers and so they latched onto the NES. Since the NES was the first thing they knew, they keyed on the Japanese style of gaming: level-based games with bosses and side-scrollers rather than more twitch-style games, and the joypad where your left thumb does most of the work rather than right-hand sticks with left-thumb on the fire-button.

Mine was most definitely the Y generation, but I definitely see more X'ers sticking with Atari and more Y'ers sticking with Nintendo. I really believe the dividing line by birth year was closer to 1980 than '85-86 as I was born in 1981.

 

I remember as a child when my mom took a long bus trip on business and my dad (who left to work very early) dropped me off at 5:30am at the neighbors to wait for the bus in the mornings. They had an old computer with some games. I don't remember if it was an Atari 8-bit or a Commodore or what but all my buddies at school were hardcore into Nintendo, the very one I nagged my parents for at Christmas time every year but never got.

 

Atari games have a very different vibe to Nintendo, which I think goes much deeper than system capabilities and into Japanese versus western culture. Either way I now enjoy both gaming camps very much. And I do like modern games as well as retro, just really not into the whole FPS thing. I kinda feel bad for these millennial kids growing up on their parents iPhone and Android tablets; they have no clue what they are missing out on...

Edited by stardust4ever
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Uggg, Wikipedia was no help at all. The Wikipedia article for "Generation Y" is lumping them with the Millennials. :P

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_x

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_y

 

When I was a teenager, we (meaning all the people who were born in the early 80s and subsequently teens in the 90s) labeled ourselves as "Generation Y". Lumping us with Millennials (children born from late 90s to early 2000s, or who grew up in the post 9-11 era, with iphones and Facebook) as the Wikipedia article attempts to do, is just insulting. X, Y, Millennials, all very distinctive groups of people. No offense to any forum members who may belong to the Millennial demographic (as I'm sure there are a few). In many ways I consider myself closer to late gen X or early Y. I love Nintendo, Atari, Rubik's Cubes, 80s pop music, and classic rock, but that is besides the point. Millennial teens these days are an entirely different culture.

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The generational thing has never been anything but arbitrary associations. It's absolutely meaningless if you're looking to actually categorize people. Yeah, you'll always find someone who fits what type you've created, if you've created such a type, but you created the type arbitrarily, and thus many people won't fit in that as well. People talk of hippies, but most people during the late 60s and early 70s weren't hippies. Not all gen-Xers were really into punk. I was born in 86 and still I have early memories of the 2600 and was really big into computer games. Yeah, I played later consoles, too, but so did many people my age, not because it was a generational thing, but because literally that's what came out when I was young.

 

The division of generation is supposed to be based on the previous generation being able to give birth to the next. That's inherent in the root (*gen- meaning "to beget") and even in its base in current English (to generate). It doesn't make sense to distinguish generation X from generation Y based off a few years because someone that young couldn't have given birth. And, as Usotsuki noted, huge gaps exist, and people at tail ends might have more in common overall despite being in different gens or even being different based on just a few criteria.

 

So in discussing why the later 7800s didn't have AV out, perhaps we shouldn't even think about generational differences. In fact, let's pretty much ignore that entirely abstract, arbitrary, and essentially meaningless distinction altogether.

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