"Great Atari Crash?"

[Lynxpro]

Like bell bottom pants?

 

Coin-op, single-screen, high score chasers in cabinets (and the home games that simulated them) are no longer in fashion.

 

Arcade video games were a strong force from 1972 to the late 1990s when economics killed it. That's almost 3 decades. Not a fad there, home slice.

[Lynxpro]

ET the game itself wasn't much/if any worse than lots of other shovelware crap that was being put out at the time. It was just that all the companies keep producing volumes of stuff in excess of what the market wanted. Boneheads at Atari (actual Atari mind you, not the french douche-bags who stumbled upon their name tag on the floor of a glory hole stall) produced as many or more cartridges of Pacman and ET as there were 2600 consoles produced. They banked on the game licenses moving more consoles, and they lost. Add to that more competitors in the space and the rise of home computing, and video came consoles were completely out of demand. It's been debated that the Colecovision might have been able stay marketable if Coleco hadn't totally botched the Adam Computer and overproduced Cabbage Patch dolls after the hysteria ran out. If they hadn't put themselves outta business, I bet the Colecovision would have survived a while.

 

The Atari 5200 had the sales momentum and was projected to outsell the Colecovision at the time Warner order Atari to discontinue the 5200 in favor of the 7800. Had Atari Inc. stayed together and not been broken up into pieces in July 1984 and had released the 7800 at Christmas 1984 as originally intended, it would've killed off the Colecovision outright and prevented Nintendo from gaining any ground outside of Japan. They would've then followed up with the 16-bit Amiga Lorraine chipset based console - codenamed "Mickey" - at Christmas 1985. It would've been a completely different outcome.

 

As for pontificating on the Atari crash, a lot of folks in here should read Atari Inc - Business is Fun instead of rehashing discredited info and legends.

[youxia]

 

The Atari 5200 had the sales momentum and was projected to outsell the Colecovision at the time Warner order Atari to discontinue the 5200 in favor of the 7800. Had Atari Inc. stayed together and not been broken up into pieces in July 1984 and had released the 7800 at Christmas 1984 as originally intended, it would've killed off the Colecovision outright and prevented Nintendo from gaining any ground outside of Japan. They would've then followed up with the 16-bit Amiga Lorraine chipset based console - codenamed "Mickey" - at Christmas 1985. It would've been a completely different outcome.

 

As for pontificating on the Atari crash, a lot of folks in here should read Atari Inc - Business is Fun instead of rehashing discredited info and legends.

 

I'm not sure rehashing legends is so much different from gazing into a crystal ball and predicting a "would've" future

[JBerel]

Yeah, there's an awful lot of would've could've there. I realize atari was dealing with a shakeup, but there's very little evidence to show the 7800 could have taken the lead based on what it put in front of people game and hardware wise. It's all revisionist history now, and no one will ever know. I remember it clearly, and folks were already tired of the same rehashed stuff on the 7800. They all screwed the pooch, which is why it all came crashing down.

[+RichG1972]

Always believed the crash was more to the lifespan of the system. Just like most consoles of a 5 year lifecycle, the 2600 was fading in interest. With other systems coming to the market to resume the brilliant idea of playing video games - at home - in your living room - on your own TV. The novelty was wearing off and most these new systems really didn't offer a whole lot more for a hefty price.

 

The PC age was starting to boom and that was considered a useful tool aswell as a system to play games on. I remember my family and many others having to save for over 12 months before even considering to buy entertainment goods. Most had to wait for birthdays to see if we were lucky to get a radio or a cassette player. The 5200 and the Coleco Vision were not offering enough to justify the price when people already had a similar system.

 

I lean more towards the crash is what threw Atari "down the drain" due to poor judgement in predicted sales. They were running like a steam train with the burner on full tilt. Failing to notice the drop in sales and arrogant enough to think one movie based game will fly off the selves like hot cakes. While most were back outside riding push bikes and the console collecting dust. As for the games being dumped im fairly convinced it was a by product of the crash.

 

By all means in not saying no one at all was buying games and systems but rather the novelty had died off. Neither am i saying there wasn't shovelware pushed onto shelves left right and center either. That's why it's not hard to find many games released in 82-83 that are far worse then E.T by a long shot. Anyway wasn't till Nintendo raised the bar enough offering a system that was capable of justifying the hard earned cash. They brought back the excitement, desire and want.

 

That's my take on the whole crash

If you want the REAL story of the crash I suggest you watch the movie "Atari: Game Over", the clear reasoning for the crash is GIVEN in that movie

[+RichG1972]

That's definitely true, but it was the *biggest*. It would be like if Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto 6 and it suuuuuuuuuuuuuucked and everyone hated it. Oh, and Sony had bet the future of the PS5 on it as one of its major tentpole exclusives.

 

E.T. wasn't much worse than a lot of games at the time, but it was a lot more culturally significant than any of those other games.

If you are buying into the myth that "millions" of ET cartridges were buried in the Alamogordo New Mexico landfill, you couldn't be more wrong, in fact here are the EXACT totals of each cartridge title found at the excavation site:

 

 

Centipede-190 copies

ET-171 copies

Defender-116 copies

Missile Command-59 copies

Warlords-99 copies

Asteroids-53 copies

 

[+GoldLeader]

It was a Pretty Good Atari Crash...Don't know if I'd call it "Great".

[+TwentySixHundred]

If you want the REAL story of the crash I suggest you watch the movie "Atari: Game Over", the clear reasoning for the crash is GIVEN in that movie

I have seen the movie and many of the Portland Atari panels...

[Schizophretard]

I think the crash was just an ordinary console cycle with the only difference being that now companies know how to manage them because they plan on their consoles going obsolete in the first place. Going from the NES to Super NES was a "crash", going from the PS2 to PS3 was a "crash", etc.

[MrMaddog]

I think the crash was just an ordinary console cycle with the only difference being that now companies know how to manage them because they plan on their consoles going obsolete in the first place. Going from the NES to Super NES was a "crash", going from the PS2 to PS3 was a "crash", etc.

 

Sorry but that's more of a transitional stage where retailers sell off remaining stock of last-gen stuff to make room for next-gen games & systems.

 

A crash is when "all or most" console sales go drastically down because nobody wanted to buy them. There was a smaller crash in 1995 when systems like the Saturn, Jaguar and Virtual Boy sold so poory they had to be reduced to liquidated prices to get rid of them. (Only the Playstation survived, N64 came out a year later)

 

Usually a game crash will happen when the industry doesn't do a new generational replacement...

[Schizophretard]

Sorry but that's more of a transitional stage where retailers sell off remaining stock of last-gen stuff to make room for next-gen games & systems.

 

A crash is when "all or most" console sales go drastically down because nobody wanted to buy them. There was a smaller crash in 1995 when systems like the Saturn, Jaguar and Virtual Boy sold so poory they had to be reduced to liquidated prices to get rid of them. (Only the Playstation survived, N64 came out a year later)

 

Usually a game crash will happen when the industry doesn't do a new generational replacement...

All or most NES sales dropped drastically because nobody wanted to buy them anymore but wanted to buy the Super NES. My point is that the crash happened because it was a transitional stage but since it was new to them they didn't understand how to cope with it.

[youxia]

All or most NES sales dropped drastically because nobody wanted to buy them anymore but wanted to buy the Super NES. My point is that the crash happened because it was a transitional stage but since it was new to them they didn't understand how to cope with it.

 

You're confusing a "crash" with "end-of-life" of a product. First is a pejorative, and has severe negative consequences - in this case causing a long-lasting recession in the industry and impacting wide range of businesses, from console manufacturers through arcades to game mags.

 

The latter is a totally expected event and a normal thing in business. Nobody really suffers because they are prepared for it and the new product guarantees new revenue streams.

[Flojomojo]

The number of cartridges that were "found" is irrelevant. Atari themselves said that they buried 700,000 units. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

 

I can't imagine a more messy "end of life." Atari never really recovered, and a bunch of competitors went down too. It was the beginning of the industry so important lessons were learned by all.

[JBerel]

Yeah, the landfill hole they excavated was just a probe. They were almost shut down before they even got down to the layer where some of the stuff was. What they pulled out was just enough to prove it was there before they got shut down by the county. All the folklore was funny because it was documented fact that the stuff was dumped. That's the way they did things back before the internet. Companies would often destroy stock to write it off as an expense rather than have it count as assets on the books. I know people that worked in book stores then who had to rip the last page and cover off thousands of books they were ordered to destroy a few times a year. I don't think anyone appreciates that kind of waste now that everyone can find out about it easily.

 

I think today, retailers send stock back that doesn't sell. They probably don't want to waste shelf space on liquidations. Back then, they had so much that no retailers would take anymore. Retailers were liquidating the stuff they already had for pennies on the dollar. I bought a number of 2600 games and accessories for under $2 at Sears. Also got lots of Colecovision stuff at Camelot music in the discount bins. All that was while a 20MB disk drive for a computer was $400+, only to become worthless a few years later. A product's natural end of life doesn't result in mountains of stock being given away at 95% off. If it did, I doubt people would ever pay full price for anything.

[Schizophretard]

You're confusing a "crash" with "end-of-life" of a product. First is a pejorative, and has severe negative consequences - in this case causing a long-lasting recession in the industry and impacting wide range of businesses, from console manufacturers through arcades to game mags.

 

The latter is a totally expected event and a normal thing in business. Nobody really suffers because they are prepared for it and the new product guarantees new revenue streams.

I'm not confusing them. Me understanding them clearly while people back then not is my point. For an example, when we were transitioning from the Wii, PS3, and XBOX 360 to the Wii U, PS4, and XBOX ONE I understood that the old consoles were approaching end of life while the new consoles were their replacements while back during the crash the new wave of consoles being added gave a feeling of too many consoles flooding the market.

[youxia]

1982 videogame crash and subsequent industry transitions are completely different words/scenarios. But its seems you are really convinced that they aren't, so I guess we best leave it at that.

[+davidcalgary29]

The number of cartridges that were "found" is irrelevant. Atari themselves said that they buried 700,000 units. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

I can't imagine a more messy "end of life." Atari never really recovered, and a bunch of competitors went down too. It was the beginning of the industry so important lessons were learned by all.

I think Atari might have pulled through if there had not been a concurrent home computer crash (or war,if you like) that left it with no room to recover. And that one certainly wasnt caused by ET or shovelware or aliens in space, yet took out TI and all the rest which didnt have a foothold in the console market. Too much product, poor marketing, and cutthroat competition in overlapping industries in an emerging market was the killer. To get to the same place today wed have to get to a place with five or more competing platforms in both consoles and PCs, combined with widespread consumer fatigue, and its highly unlikely to happen. Average consumers today regard consoles and PCs to be essential household purchases, and that was certainly not the case in 1982.

[Schizophretard]

1982 videogame crash and subsequent industry transitions are completely different words/scenarios. But its seems you are really convinced that they aren't, so I guess we best leave it at that.

I'm not convinced they aren't. You are just misunderstanding me. I'm saying that the people of 1982 didn't realize they were going through a transition and didn't know how to deal with that. Therefore, instead of it being a smooth transition it resulted in a crash. But now that we understand how it works when we go through these transitions we don't have crashes. To use the consoles flooding the market example again, if I went there with my decades of experience going through these transitions, saw on the shelves the ColecoVision, Atari 5200, and Vectrex being added with the Intellivision, Atari 2600, and Odyssey 2 then I wouldn't be thinking,"There are too many consoles flooding the market! What do I do with all these choices?!" I would be thinking,"The new consoles are the next gen that we are transitioning into and the old consoles are approaching the end of life." Also, as the sales of old consoles and their games are dropping I wouldn't be thinking,"Video games is just a fad!". I would be thinking,"People are tired of this gen and are ready for the next gen."

[Nebulon]

Quite a few of the points raised in this thread were debated by the actual early Atari employees in the 1990s:

https://youtu.be/PfPtQUMFiSY?t=1902

[Flojomojo]

Maybe I'll dig some of them up later, but I remember news stories about parents that were legitimately pissed that Super Nintendo wasn't backwards compatible. Nintendo's response was that you could have both systems hooked up at the same time.

Now multiply kind of anger and confusion 10x for the end of the Atari/Intellivision/Coleco lines. There wasn't nearly as clear a line of succession, and not as many big hits to look forward to.

[zzip]

ET was not a bad game. Conceptually it is very similar to Haunted House-- find 3 pieces of an object and escape while avoiding the "spooks". It has some extra challenges and functions that I would say make it more fun than Haunted House. Yes the pits were annoying, there is a hack online that makes the pits much less sensitive, so try that one if the pits frustrate you.

 

But the idea that ET caused the crash needs to end. It makes zero sense. ET was only on the 2600, so how did it manage to kill off the Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, 5200, Arcades, etc? That alone should be proof that something bigger was afoot. Also ET didn't fail because it was a bad game, We know you easily sell popular movie tie-ins based on name alone no matter how crappy the product. ET should have sold big based on name alone. But it didn't. Why? I think that's a good sign that the crash was already underway by the time ET hit the shelves.

[Flojomojo]

It's a handy symbol/shorthand/scapegoat, easy to understand. Like how we put anger into the person of the CEO/president when an organization or government goes off the rails. We talk about Tramiel-era Atari in the same kind of way.

[zzip]

It's a handy symbol/shorthand/scapegoat, easy to understand. Like how we put anger into the person of the CEO/president when an organization or government goes off the rails. We talk about Tramiel-era Atari in the same kind of way.

 

Good point! I'll try to remember to not blame Jack Tramiel for his sons running the company off the rails

Edited February 6, 2019 by zzip

[Flojomojo]

"market forces at work" are bigger than any one person ... or his sons

[zzip]

"market forces at work" are bigger than any one person ... or his sons

 

I know, they made a losing bet on computers (against inevitable PC dominance) instead of maintaining their console lead where they would have had a chance. But that wasn't obvious to anybody in 1984...