Question for people who remember the 5200 as a new console

[atarian63]

Best thing about today is you can own the, all from the era and there are new titles video upgrades and so much more. Retro is alive!

[+FujiSkunk]

Best thing about today is you can own the, all from the era and there are new titles video upgrades and so much more. Retro is alive!

 

You're drooling again.

[atarian63]

 

You're drooling again.

Probably!

[toiletunes]

I first played the 5200 in 1988-89. The sound and graphics were great, but the controller was difficult. You could get used to it, and there were alternatives, but that was my first impression.

Atarimania.com lists over 100 new releases for the 2600 in 1983. I don't think any console could compete with that- as a consumer, I'd be motivated by price and quantity, and 2600 wins both.

[Major_Tom_coming_home]

 

AtariBlast! is excellent. What a thrill! Not only is this game a good reason to own a 5200, its a great reason to own an Atarimax Ultimate SD cart.

I was just thinking the same thing. I have a good sized 5200 collection so I couldn't justify the Atarimax, but this game and other homebrew is making me reconsider.

[arcadegeek23]

I got my 5200 pretty close to launch with breakout. I never recall ever thinking anything bad about the controller. I enjoyed the upgraded graphics and games. I have very fond memories of the 5200. The 5200 Pac Man and Centipede was awesome. I was 13 at the time and I enjoyed it until I ran out of games when Atari discontinued the console. I moved on to computers from there. I also had a colecovision for its titles as well but I viewed them as equals and both had strengths.

[Major_Tom_coming_home]

 

Yes, If the crash hadn't happened, the NES wouldn't just be in completion with the 7800, but also Colecovision or a newer Colecovision 2, and an INTV 3, 4 or whatever by then. It would have been an uphill battle. Nintendo knew this, and that's why they approached Atari to market the NES for them originally.

I have a serious love / hate relationship when it comes to the NES. Nintendo took the risk to enter the post-crash American market and for that they deserved the huge profits, but the monopolistic practices they used to lock out any competition was disgusting, shameful, and should have been ended by the courts of the era. The NES hands down had the best games of the era, Ms. Pac Man and Asteroids on the 7800 are fun games but aren't in the same league as Metroid, Super Mario, or Zelda. Sadly though, your console wouldn't work properly after 6 months due to design flaws but according to Nintendo it was because you were spilling soda into the control deck.

 

I think Nintendo earned the success they had with the NES, but at the same time they earned the initial butt kicking from Sega and the later butt kicking they got from Sony. Twice the pride, twice the fall.

[NE146]

I got my 5200 pretty close to launch with breakout. I never recall ever thinking anything bad about the controller. I enjoyed the upgraded graphics and games. I have very fond memories of the 5200. The 5200 Pac Man and Centipede was awesome. I was 13 at the time and I enjoyed it until I ran out of games when Atari discontinued the console. I moved on to computers from there. I also had a colecovision for its titles as well but I viewed them as equals and both had strengths.

I think that's the first I've heard of someone who had a 5200 and the controllers didn't go bad on him. You're a lucky guy. All the rest of us had to deal with buttons (like START) stopping working and the joystick going out of alignment.

[Oldschool80skid]

Sadly though, your console wouldn't work properly after 6 months due to design flaws but according to Nintendo it was because you were spilling soda into the control deck.

 

Ironically, my NES did not experience the Blinking Light until maybe '91. I've since installed the Blinking Light Wins.

 

Until the internet era I had never thought the 5200 controllers were that bad, but do realize they are now. I wish Best Electronics would also offer 5200 paddles converted from the originals with their upgraded gold contacts and pedometers. I have a set of the upgraded best controllers as well as a set of the stock controllers that I would like to have converted to paddles.

[5200Fanatic]

I got one at launch. The thing about the 5200 was that the games really looked like the arcade. Sure, most of the games were available in some form on other systems, but they didn't look anywhere as good as they did on the 5200. The controllers were a problem from the very start. The buttons would stop working, the rubber shroud on the joystick would tear. If you tried to open them to fix things, it was tough to get it back together.

 

When the "crash" happened, you really didn't know it was a crash. But, I remember going to TRU and buying a whole new 5200 system just because I couldn't find controllers anywhere. People just sort of moved on from video games for a little while until the NES arrived.

[FOX2600]

I just picked up an Atari Age magazine, the "E.T." Edition. While flipping thru the pages I noticed the 5200 ad. Looking at it first glance you wouldn't tell their advertising the newest edition in their line of home consoles. Seemed...dull, for lack of a better word.

[retroeight]

The 5200 didn't flop. The Crash happened. Atari made some poor choices relating to how they sold their games. They over sold games to retailers as well as not controlling who could produce games for the 2600. Lots of poor games on the market and too much inventory sold to stores caused the Crash. Producing some not-so-great games like Pac-Man and E.T. didn't help either.

 

I bought a 5200 when they first came out in '82. I bought most of the games as well as the Track-ball and VCS adapter. The joysticks had some reliability issues but were great to use. Much better than the horrible 2600 controllers.

 

The 5200 had some great games. I was dissappointed with the Activision games because they didn't bother to improve the graphics on many of the them. The Atari games were mostly fantastic. It had the best baseball game of any system of that era. I just wish they had made more games and had gotten Atari 8-bit computer game companies to have done some conversions for the 5200. I still wonder why no one but Activision, Sega, and Parker Bros. didn't convert games. It would have taken very little effort and would have brought in more sales for them.

 

Atari themselves had some great games in the APX line that they could have ported to the 5200. Many of them are only 16K.

 

Allan

 

Baseball was the absolute best. I have to agree on that one.

[Bryan]

I don't know if the controllers hurt initially. The whole industry was trying to figure out what made a good controller and we'd generally put up with whatever shipped with the machine. The 5200 certainly looked cool and I remember that by 1982 there was a whole aisle at Sears with one game console after another on display. I can understand why parents might throw their hands up and walk away.

 

It doesn't make sense to mention the 7800 in the same context because it wasn't developed in-house and it wasn't developed until after the 5200's release. Since the 5200 would have only been two years old at the original release date, I can only imagine that they intended to support both for a while.

[darthkur]

I bought my 5200 when they started to add Pac-Man in along with Super Breakout as pack in games. It wasn't a new thing for me to buy a system on account of a particular game since I had gotten a ColecoVision beforehand on account of Donkey Kong. I really loved it at first but sadly the damn controllers broke not all too long afterward. Dig Dug was the only other game I got back then in addition for it. I had a friend that had one as well and he was much more fortunate to have functional controllers for much longer, plus having the Trak-Ball controller. So I played Pole Position, Missile Command, Centipede and Defender when I was over there.

[AtariWarlord]

Not sure if I've written this here or not, but I never, ever saw a 5200 where I live in Canada. Zeller's still had 2600 kiosks (with woodies, no less) in 1984 but no sign of the 5200.

[CZroe]

I have an Atari 5200 as an adult, but I was around 6-8 years old when the 5200 was released and I never even heard of it until much later.

Me either, but I was even younger when it came out. Years later I saw Cloak and Dagger and still didn't even realize that it wasn't a 2600! Now I cringe when I see the kid tear open the game and toss the packaging right into the trash. D:

 

I'm curious about the experiences of folks who either had one or knew about it when it was current generation in 1982-1984. Was the main reason the console flopped really because of the Joysticks and a lack of backwards compatibility, or is that more of a myth? I suspect the joysticks may have hurt it somewhat, but was it really a fatal flaw or just an annoyance? My theory is that if they at least lasted 6 months to a year I don't think that alone killed of the system, and worse case scenario Atari should have been able to redesign and improve them. I also can't imagine that lack of backwards compatibility was a deal breaker either, it would have been nice but I suspect most buyers understood it was a different and more powerful piece of hardware and most of them probably already had a 2600 anyway.

Though it was technically more powerful, it's pretty telling that they used the low-spec of their 1977 computer platform to replace their 1977 game console. Then again, it was noticeably more powerful than the competing dedicated game consoles.

 

My guess is that the problem was:

 

1) Lack of a killer app and innovation. Many 5200 games were just updates of 2600 games. If you had a 2600 already, the 5200 wasn't going to be much different gameplay wise.

I dunno. Even considering that it was basically the low-spec (16k) version of their 1977 computer platform that was effectively always sold with 48k or more, I wouldn't say it failed to innovate. If anything, it was one of the biggest leaps in overall innovations we've ever seen... before or since.

 

-Multiple fire buttons (SORELY needed)

-Pause button (this is a big one)

-Analog stick (Atari 8-bit computers used standard digital 1-button CX-40 sticks)

-Full keypad with action buttons for deeper games (this enabled keyboard-class complexity for Atari 8-bit PC ports without relegating them to console switches or unresponsive membrane keypads)

-Rubber/carbon action buttons (would become industry-standard on the NES and later consoles)

-FOUR controller ports

-Sound that was superior to even their 1987 console (7800)

-Automatic RF switch (also walked back in later Atari consoles)

 

All in all, they made a lot of first-time innovations for the console market. Of course, many of these were rolled back over the years with successive consoles and some were even rolled back in the revised 5200.

 

Rather than blame lack of innovation, I'm more inclined to say that the problem was too much innovation all at once or that each innovation was so half-baked that they ultimately hurt the platform (controller oxidation/wear issues, awkward RF switch power pass-thru, unlikely to ever find 4 working controllers, etc).

 

2) The video game market was reaching saturation. Lots of competition for too few buyers. Gaming had become somewhat of a fad as well as a get rich quick bandwagon scheme.

 

3) I'm thinking Atari was very out of touch. Management saw their product as a kids toy and didn't care about their consumers. They thought you could sell a box of dog shit if it had the Atari logo on it. Same with the controllers designed by accountants to be as cheap as possible to produce quality be damned. The kiddies would not know the difference so screw them.

Well, they revised the CX-52 controllers internally over and over in an attempt to fix the issues. I think most would say that the design was very complex/expensive compared to anything else on the market, so I don't think it was a cost-cutting issue. I think it was growing pains, since so few controllers used the carbon pad on rubber method at the time. There was a lot of material science to develop.

 

4) My guess is the marketing of the 5200 was terrible and people didn't understand that the 5200 was different from and more powerful than the 2600.

Watching Cloak and Dagger today, it seems very much like Atari and the 5200's version of "The Wizard," and the Wizard was considered very good/successful marketing for Nintendo (as bad as it was as a movie). It clearly had a pretty big marketing push, even if it was somehow lost on me.

 

Yeah, I doubt I was the only kid who didn't understand that I was seeing a different console on the screen, so it obviously didn't have the same impact as The Wizard. When kids saw Super Mario Bros 3 for the first time, that movie made sure you knew it wasn't the same game you were used to!

 

5) Hardware wise the 5200 competed well against the intellivision, but was curb stomped by Coleco. Not to mention, the pack in of the 5200 was breakout which looked like just another 2600 game. Coleco packed-in Donkey Kong, which was hugely popular at the time and it looked nearly as good as the arcade version.

 

I'm curious to know what other folks have to say. Should be interesting and enlighting.

Well, a much-better pack-in didn't save the 5200 either (they switched to Pac-Man). With Pac-Man being Atari-exclusive and vastly superior to the 2600 version, it seems like it would be as big a draw for the 5200 as Donkey Kong was for the Colecovision.

 

Just my two cents, but I think the crash was an unfortunate confluence of many factors. I believe the primary one was oversupply of crappy shovelware over many platforms, though not the 5200 itself. The 5200 actually stands out as a particularly strong game library from the rest of that era, especially considering what compromises went into your average 2600 arcade port. Though in my opinion the 5200 didn't directly contribute to the crash, it was already struggling with its own issues and the crash put the nail in the coffin, so to speak.

 

Ironically, the Atari 8-bit PC platform was where it was at for the best home experience with arcade ports from the late '70s (Atari 400/800) right through to ~1990 with the XEGS.

https://youtu.be/JwPuuqTxV-I

 

If the 5200 had stuck around it would have benefitted from this due to being so similar that you could effortlessly port most Atari 8-bit PC/XEGS titles.

[bohoki]

i didnt get a 5200 till way after the game was over

 

but in 82-83 i was 10 and i would ride my bmx to my friend matt who had one i thought the games were great but we realized the buttons werent working so me being the destructive kid i am i just tore the buttons out the side and put a staple across the black then folded the torn flange back into the controller button hole it worked sometimes but other times it would just be holding the button down also tried glueing foil to the bottom but i couldnt find glue that would last

 

we mostly overlooked the analog stick problems to our lack of skill he got a wico stick but since we had to use an original for start (i dont ever remember ever hitting reset we would just turn it off and back on) so the start button ended up with thumbnail cuts from us shoving it down and trying to slide it a bit to make the connection eventually he just tore the button out and we used a paperclip

[Lynxpro]

 

I feel like one of the 7800's problems is that it wasn't that big of a jump over the 5200 - definitely not as big a jump as the 5200 was over the 2600. In 1984, it'd still only have had a year before the NES. (Maybe less than a year, because Nintendo wouldn't have wasted their time going to Atari first and would have instead jumped right in to trying to distribute the system themselves.)

 

Anyway, the crash is what kept all that from happening, not the 5200 or Jack Tramiel. Even if the 5200 hadn't existed, Atari was never going to release a console in 1984. You'd have to argue that the 5200 was *responsible* for the crash, which it may have been to some small degree, but remove it from the equation and the crash almost surely still would have happened.

 

I just don't think much would have been different, except that the 7800's lifespan would have moved up a couple years in the timeline.

 

I do agree that Atari's strategy throughout the 1980's was a confused mess, starting with the 5200. But it's easy to say that in hindsight, because we now have clear "cycles" that are established and that manufacturers all follow. That wasn't necessarily established yet in the early 80's; manufacturers would just release stuff when they could, and sell it for as long as it was profitable. So I cut them a little slack; they really had no way of knowing what the best strategy even was to follow up the most successful console of its time.

 

The NES would've been a non-issue had Atari Inc survived and the 7800 launched as originally intended in Christmas 1984. There was a ton of anti-Japanese sentiment at the time due to the perception that they were taking over America with their unfair trade practices and retailers were also stuck with a ton of 2600-compatible cartridges they were trying to get rid of. They weren't going to carry any new console that wasn't backwards-compatible with the 2600. The 7800 was what people wanted; a powerful new console that was backwards-compatible with their current investment. It would've been a huge hit and Atari Inc would've followed that up the following Christmas with the Amiga Lorraine chipset-based 16-bit console code-named "Mickey". Think about that; the 16-bit console war launched at Christmas 1985 instead of Christmas 1989.

 

I remember the 5200 well when it launched. I was 8 that Christmas. And I wanted it badly. We ate at McDonald's a lot then and we tried winning the 5200 and/or the 8-bit computers through those damn Atari scratchers. I got to play a 5200 at JCPenny's - or Macy's - and although it took a little time to get Pac-Man to play well with the analog joysticks, I thought they kicked a$$ since they had the Pause/Select/Reset buttons right on the controller. It was sweet and the graphics and sound were awesome. What kept me from getting it? That $250+ MSRP. And it seemed like right around the corner, the crash happened. Then I read about the 7800 in Infoworld's Essential Guide to the Atari that our local library had a copy of. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I was so happy when the small Sears Catalog appeared in early 1986 featuring the 7800 at long last. Electronic Gaming Monthly, known as Electronic Game Player at the time, also had a big positive story about the console. The gaming press knew the 7800 was more powerful than the NES/Famicom. Jack Tramiel caused the failure of the 7800 due to him not buying Atari Games. It's a wonder it sold so well in the States and that's probably all due to Michael Katz and what he was able to do with such limited funding.

 

A fond memory I have was at Macy's - I swear it was Macy's - in their computer/video game department in mid 1984. They had that robot that came with a 2600 and a TV in its torso so you could play it there. They also had a 5200 that was playable and they also had a brand new Apple Mac that was able to try out. The following year, I was able to test out the Atari 520STm the same way at a mall computer store while on vacation in New Orleans. It certainly was a hell of a lot cooler than the Mac!

 

As for the neighborhood I grew up in, everyone had Atari 2600s. Nobody I knew at the time had a 5200, Intellivision, or ColecoVision. Around 1984, some of the families were "upgrading" to the Commodore 64 [yuck!]. But as for consoles, most didn't upgrade until the NES got popular in late 1986-87.

Edited May 7, 2017 by Lynxpro

[CZroe]

 

...

Thanks for sharing this. I was completely oblivious to it all at the time and it was very interesting to read the perspective of a fan anticipating these systems. This is exactly the kind of thing the OP was asking for!

[CZroe]

 

The NES would've been a non-issue had Atari Inc survived and the 7800 launched as originally intended in Christmas 1984.

I just realized that my Rev A 7800 manual is Copyright 1984. Rev B is Copyright 1987 and Rev C is Copyright 1988.

 

Story check out.

 

The first difference I noticed is that they got rid of "Home Computer Expandability" on Page 1:

Edited May 8, 2017 by CZroe

[Lynxpro]

I was in high school when the 5200 came out, my best friend got one (I had the 2600) to go along with his Intellivision. We always liked the 5200, the only downside was a lack of games. And I agree about the half-assed Activision ports, they should have tried harder. We never even considered the Colecovision, probably because it didn't have any games we really had to have that weren't already on the Ataris or Intellivision (another friend had a Vectrex), none of us gave a fuck about Donkey Kong, either in the arcades or for the home consoles, we were fans of the "serious" games that usually involved killing everything that moved, haahaha, like Tempest and Star Trek and Missile Command and Star Castle. The Intellivision was cool for the more "thinker" type games like Utopia and whatnot, their sports games were good, too.

 

Enough about the controllers, already. I remember we thought that the Intellivision had the worst controllers ever (fuck you, direction disc or whatever you were) for games, the 5200 joysticks were fine by comparison though we were never fans of the mushy fire/keyboard buttons, it was hard to tell if you truly had pressed down far enough. I can understand the annoyance over a lack of self-centering but from what I remember we just adapted to it (centered them ourselves playing with our thumbs on the top of the sticks), you have to remember that back in those days arcade games were king and the main thing about arcade games back then was that you had a 40% chance of the game having oddball/less than ideal/unique controller schemes. So we were used to lots of choices including trak-balls and spinners and analog sticks. If I remember correctly Tail Gunner had an analog stick that didn't center, either, and we loved that game in the arcades (of course maybe that was just the one I played needing new springs?). I was glad that the 5200 had a "weird" analog stick because that was embracing the idea that there was more to video game life than simply 8-directional joysticks and paddles. I wanted more trak-ball games, too, and it would have been cool to have a joystick with a fire button on top for games like Battlezone or Red Baron.

 

I hate the Crash so much, if only it hadn't happened (or waited 3 years), how cool would my favorite game consoles have gotten. I agree that the 5200 would have had more 3rd party games and controllers (I mean, the Wico joystick/keyboard combo works great, highly recommended), the Vectrex would have eventually gotten 3rd party games and controllers as well (oh my god, how cool would it have been for Atari to start porting their vector games to that?), I'd love to have a Vectrex trak-ball for playing Quantum and vector versions of Missile Command and Centipede, everything would have been better. Tempest and Xevious and a better Asteroids would have come out for the 5200, actual paddle controllers, maybe that Asteroids button controller, too. One of the worst things to me is the idea of a MAME cabinet where all the emulated games are converted to joystick controls out of misguided simplicity.

 

 

Amen to all of that. The Intellivision had the worst controllers of all time! I remember my Dad was so hot for that console due to the sports games and the constant advertising as such so we went down to Sears and we both tried it out and never again did he consider that console with its weirdo controllers.

 

As for centering the joystick with one's thumb, I did that with the CX40s and so did all of my friends. It was the only way to crank up the high scores. If you gripped the joystick, you wouldn't do as well and could snap the joystick itself.

 

I thought the Vectrex was so cool back then; the kid on the non-syndicated CBS version of Charles in Charge had one. And I agree, had the Crash not happened, I'm sure AtariSoft would've released titles for it.

 

Speaking of "The Crash", Nolan Bushnell is convinced it set back the video game - console and arcade - and the personal computer industry by a good decade. He bases that on all of the R&D that each of those companies, especially the startups, were sinking in at the time into everything, including holographics. Add that to the 2 decades of innovation that Microsoft curtailed and you have the exact reason why we don't have jet packs and flying cars!

 

Again, what really held back the 5200 back then was price. The ColecoVision was $100 cheaper because it was a screwdriver-shop caliber console with all of its off-the-shelf components. By the time Warner ordered Atari to discontinue the 5200, it was already projected to outsell the ColecoVision, both with industry projections and Atari's. But Warner thought the best way to revive Atari's fortunes was to bring out a cheap advanced console that was 2600 compatible and the 7800 fit the bill. We should also remember that the 5200 was originally going to be 2600-compatible per the engineers but that infamous French manager - the one that was so hated that some staff flew a helium filled inflatable frog balloon outside at one of the trade shows - nixed the idea. He's also blamed for rushing the 5200 joysticks when the engineers wanted them to be self-centering.

[zzip]

The NES would've been a non-issue had Atari Inc survived and the 7800 launched as originally intended in Christmas 1984. There was a ton of anti-Japanese sentiment at the time due to the perception that they were taking over America with their unfair trade practices and retailers were also stuck with a ton of 2600-compatible cartridges they were trying to get rid of.

It's true that there was an anti-Japanese freakout at the time, but I don't think it really stopped people from buying Japanese products, lots of Japanese cars and electronics sold. Most of the US TV manufacturers were still driven out of the market at that time. Plus Atari had a Japanese name, people might have assumed they were Japanese as well if they didn't know better.

 

The success of the 7800 in 84, would have depeneded on its ability to go against the downward sales spiral in games at that time, plus it would have needed more current games- The launch lineup was heavy on classic Atari titles, which even in 1984 already felt dated. Maybe Warner was better equipped to deliver the needed contemporary games than Tramiel's Atari was.

[Lynxpro]

I had a 400 and 800 early on, so finding out the 5200 was a 400 without the keyboard was rather disappointing. I had modded the 5200 controllers to be much more reliable though.

 

I'm convinced - it's an assumption - dome switches would work better than the gold dot mods. Dome switches were used for the keypads on the CX53 Trak-Ball Controller.

[NE146]

Yeah one thing that kind of took me by surprise was when I got my 5200.. I eventually felt like I was the only one i knew with it. (Well, later on I found one dude, but his library consisted of Super Breakout only ). This was an entirely different scenario than the VCS where I traded games with a number of friends/people.

[David Alexander]

Not sure if I've written this here or not, but I never, ever saw a 5200 where I live in Canada. Zeller's still had 2600 kiosks (with woodies, no less) in 1984 but no sign of the 5200.

 

My mother went to visit family in the USA and brought home an Atari 5200