Why was 7800 discontinued

[+x=usr(1536)]

3 hours ago, John Stamos Mullet said:

Carrier are head and shoulders above Trane. I work in the industry. Trane are highly overrated. Also - their calculation software Trace 700 absolutely sucks, and is so outdated that it's still being built on a Windows NT 4.0 code base. 

Speaking as someone who has done a Trane-to-Carrier migration for a datacentre: this is truth.

[MrTrust]

12 hours ago, Zonie said:

Marketing. Marketing. Marketing. VHS vs Beta. Yadda yadda yadda. Nintendo did come out with some good games. They all did, but Nintendo made the best marketing... until Sega came out with "SEGA!!!" and "Nintendon't"

 

This might be another one of those just so stories, but wasn't the adoption of VHS by the porn industry considered the decisive victory in that war?

 

Sega did get better at the marketing with the Genesis, but also they had, just off the top of my head Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, ESWAT, Shadow Dancer, Alien Storm, Castle of Illusion, Quackshot, Dynamite Duke, Mystic Defender, Ghostbusters, Phantasy Star II and Toejam & Earl.  I don't recall the specific dates on those, but they were very early on.  So, right from the jump, they hand a bunch of high-quality, first-party games that actually did rival the arcade counterparts graphically where applicable.  Also they had lots of good sports games, which was a big deal.  In the post-sonic years, they were really off and running making games that were worth having a Genesis to play, even though the color pallette was dingy and it sounded like crap compared to the SNES.  The third party support was there in the beginning, but if you ask the average 90s kid if they remember Herzog Zwei and Thunder Force II, I'm not so sure you'll get a lot of positive responses.  

 

I think Sega's bad, and Atari's nonexistent marketing actually hurt the SMS and 7800, but I'm not sure they could have changed their fortunes much with bettet marketing.  Similarly I think Sega didn't hurt themselves with bad marketing for thr Genesis, but the underlying product was good enough that I wouldn't chslk up its success much to the marketing.  Probably it's a different story with something like furnace filters, which to me and I imagine most people, look like identical, undifferentiated goods and I wouldn't have any idea how to judge one against another.  Though I am surprised how passionate people seem to be about it, so maybeI am missing something.

[+x=usr(1536)]

3 hours ago, MrTrust said:

This might be another one of those just so stories, but wasn't the adoption of VHS by the porn industry considered the decisive victory in that war?

Not really, though it gets repeated enough that it's become accepted as fact.

 

The truth of the matter is that Sony's near-refusal to licence out Betamax manufacturing rights to other companies is what killed it.  VHS was an open enough technology that practically anyone could afford to make the units - and while Sony was trying to capture first-time buyers with Betamax, VHS sales were growing rapidly.  This was largely due to VHS' lower price point, but also the major studios putting their support behind the format as well as VHS' longer playback and recording times.

 

Porn had very little to do with it.  There was plenty of it distributed on Beta, but VHS was able to eat into Beta's market share (both real and potential) quickly enough to become the de facto standard videocassette format.

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, x=usr(1536) said:

Porn had very little to do with it.  There was plenty of it distributed on Beta

 

Ask him how he knows, amirite?  Kidding aside, though, that's kind of what I suspected.  I never really looked into it because I never had any experience with or interest Beta (but man I would've loved a Laserdisc player), but that always kind of felt like one of those too-good-to-be-true explanations.

 

These things were wicked expensive at the time, and cassettes were also (hence the start of video rental) and you'd have to assume that the sort of people who could afford them would be largely upper middle class and rich males, most of whom would be married at the time.  Not exactly the sort of thing you could hide from your wife very easily at the time (if you have a rebuttal based on personal experience, I'll take your word for it; no need to elaborate if ya' know what I mean).

 

But I think that's a good illustration of how these narratives come about.  I mean, there's got to be some kernel of truth in the porn story; it stuck around for so long I heard people bringing it up during the Blu-Ray/HD DVD shakeout, plus it doesn't flatter anyone but pornographers, really.  It feels like a satisfying answer to the question.

 

Atari seems to end up on the receiving end of a lot of these kinds of stories.  If the FCC hadn't mandated all that RF shielding in the old 8-bit machines, for example, or if the Lynx's battery life was only as good as the Game Boy's, things of that sort.  Maybe it's just because I pay more attention to that.  Are there people out there musing like this over why, say, the PalmPilot never caught on?  I suppose there could be.

 

 

[zzip]

On 4/9/2021 at 11:58 PM, oracle_jedi said:

I've never understood the attraction of SMB.   I've played it a few times.  And I have what I am told is an almost pixel perfect conversion on my C64.   I get that it is an interesting game.  But damn, it is dull compared to Boulderdash, or Dropzone, or Elektraglide, or Star Raiders.   Am I missing something fundamental or is the lure of Mario as much marketing as it is substance?

I actually hated that game with a passion back then!   For several reasons.   One,  "Ewok effect",  I was well into my teens by then, and that game was too cutesy and too happy, and therefore too irritating.   I was also playing games on an ST by then, and the 8-bit graphics of the NES felt like a step backwards.    Finally, the way the game handed out bonus lives like water changed the way hanging out with friends playing video-games worked.   It used to be that you played your 3 lives, and you passed the joystick to the next person for their turn.  Your game lasted no more than 5-10 minutes.   With SMB and it's crazy amount of bonus lives and ability to continue.  One person would inevitably hog the game while everyone else was sitting around staring at the screen in boredom.

 

I will grant that it innovated in some ways.   We had never seen such a massive side-scrolling world with so many things to do up to that point.

[John Stamos Mullet]

Yeah the longer one player adventure games of the NES era definitely changed the socialization aspect of home consoles to a more solo, long hours by yourself experience. 
 

This is both good and bad, but in the end, video games went from being a shared experience to a lonely one. 
 

I think this might be why the Arcades at the time shifted to multi-player fighting/beat-em up/wrestling games. Arcades were always a more social experience. Atari/early consoles too. 

[+GoldenWheels]

On 3/30/2021 at 9:37 AM, slx said:

Not to forget that the XEGS would be an easier ‚sell‘ to parents ready to buy an educationally valuable computer but not a pure console. 

I know my parents fell for this exact particular bullshit. Delayed my NES experience an entire year, which was NOT a fun year for them thanks to me.

 

That basic program I typed in on the Atari XE showing a flapping seagull though....WOW!!!!! AMAZING1!1!!!!!111

[pacman000]

On 4/8/2021 at 9:00 PM, MrTrust said:

 

Tengen, and a few others like those companies that made Bible games.  maybe even Galoob?  I know they got into a legal wrangling with them over the Game Genie.  Like I said, I'm not disputing the scumbagginess of their licensing policies at the time, although I think the avarice of this is a little overstated: Atari was having their lunch eaten left and right in the early 80s for not protecting their platform.

 

I'll put it this way.  Golf.  Plain ol' black label, generic Nintendo Golf.  That game sold more copies than any officially licensed third party game for the NES.  That game sold more copies than Atari sold 7800s, and over half as many as Sega sold Master Systems in Europe, the strongest market for it.  And not by a little bit, either.  The only ones that come close are things like Dragon Warrior 3, that had a huge following in Japan, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was the big IP for that generatiom of kids.  Golf still sold more than those, and when you go further down the line, even for big names like Mega Man 2, it ain't even close.  Now, to my knowledge, Golf was never a pack-in game.  Nor was Excitebike, or Dr. Mario., Legend of Zelda, and or others that outsold every officially licensed third party game.  These all would have been exclusive to the NES no matter what, and they sold on their own without being packaged wiyh the hardware.

 

Now, why's that relevant?  Well, if the proffered explanation is correct, that is, Nintendo didn't figure out what consumers wanted and delivered it better, but instead just dishonestly snatched up all the good games from third parties, then you'd expect some of those games to have outsold their own, in-house generic golf game.  Other than Tetris, none of them did.  The vast majoriy of them didn't even sniff at doing it.  And the big names we're talking about all came out years after the launch.  In the very first few years, the third party stuff was not that exciting.  For every one Commando or Ghosts n' Goblins, there were 2-3 Chubby Cherubs or Dragon Powers.

 

Now, look, we had Chubby Cherub in my house in '86, and we all very much liked it.  We had it because, if ya' already got all the black-box games, there wasn't much else to get at the time.  Fine game.  I'm not shitting on Chubby Cherub ot anyone who happens to enjoy that game.  But if you're going to tell me that, in that year, the NES outsold the SMS nearly 10-1, not on the strength of Super Mario Bros. and their very slick marketing, but rather on having the exclusive publishing rights to fucking Chubby Cherub, then yes, I do think you have lost the plot somewhere along the way.

 

Unless the sales numbers for all this stuff are just wildy, crazily inaccurate, for every SMS or 7800 owner, there were 4-10 NES owners.  That alone would be enough to kick the legs out from under Atari and Sega when it came to third-party support even in the absence of Nintendo's shady practices.  And for every for every ill-gotten Castlevania cartridge sold under Nintendo's shady regime, there were 4 copies sold of Golf.  Now, for my money, the best explanation of these facts is that Nintendo made, not just published but made, consistent best-sellers at a time where their competition did not, and even if every single third-party game of that era had appeared on both the 7800 and Master System, those exclusive games would have tipped the balance in favor of the NES such that it still would have been far anf away the best selling console of the time.

 

Now, later on, when Sega came out with the Genesis, things changed.  Why?  Maybe it was the licensing deals, maybe it was the fact that the Genesis had Revenge of Shinobi, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, things like that.  Right off the bat, they big games that could sell consoles instead of Ghost House.

 

Now if I'm wrong about that, then fine, I'm wrong.  But if I am, it will have been wirher because I have the numbers wrong, or I'm missing some big third party license that Nintendo had prior to '88 that made the big difference, or I'm missing some case of history where third parties full-throatedly support platforms that have a comparatively tiny market share.  If any of those things are true, by all means lemme' know.  Otherwise I stand by my position.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

According to an old interviews with a former Tengen employee, Nintendo was holding back production on all games except 1st party games: http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/special/el/el.html

 

tsr: So how did the Tengen division of Atari Games come about?
EL: EL: Well, we couldn't use the name Atari in consumer, basically. So we had to come up with our own name. Now, Tengen has some connotation.. I forget the Japanese usage for it, but it was decided to use that name for our coin-op ports and products.

And at one point we did have a license from Nintendo to sell games, and Nintendo the first year was jacking everyone around with "ROM shortages". Their contract was very one-sided; you paid all the money up front, assume all risk, they tell you how many [cartridges] you're gonna get...
tsr: Well, what were the conditions that you had to satisfy if you wanted to be a licensee of Nintendo?
EL: There was a lot of exclusivity involved, and being a company where we were trying to port our games to every platform... that's not our business model. And Nintendo is jerking us around with all sorts of stuff, they say "Oh sorry, you can't have your quota this Christmas," or it was delayed, and so on. They did that to everybody, probably except themselves. So then we decided to reverse engineer the lockout chip. Unfortunately there was a fiasco; one of our lawyers went to the patent office and actually sent a copy of the stuff [Nintendo's patents] to Atari. And whether or not we actually looked at it, we basically were tainted.

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, pacman000 said:

According to an old interviews with a former Tengen employee, Nintendo was holding back production on all games except 1st party games

 

Okay, but if that's true, that just weakens the case that the NES's massive market share advantage was due primarily, or at least in significant part, to getting all the hot third-party games.  If those games were secretly the real driver of sales of the console, and presumably Nintendo knew that, it would make more sense to privilege them over their own in-house developed games, or at least equally.  Or, more crucially, why didn't Tengen just say "Screw you, then, Nintendo.  Sega's got a technically superior machine anyway, and the 7800 doesn't flicker all over the place, so we'll just take Gauntlet and Rolling Thunder and so on over there instead"?  Why go to all the trouble of the lockout chip and the ensuing legal fiasco if there were a commercially viable alternative?  In fact, they couldn't have been the only company to notice what a lousy deal this was for the licensees, so why wasn't there a mass exodus from the machine once it became clear they were getting jerked around, or if the contracts didn't allow it, why would they have signed up in the first place?

 

I suppose there's an argument along the lines of "They didn't care about actually selling the games, they just wanted them off the market on their competitors' machines."  That's at least plausible, though I think it's undermined by the fact that third parties say to this day they don't like releasing their stuff on Nintendo consoles because they don't want to compete with their first-party IP.  But I think the question remains "why get into bed with known shady characters in the first place if there's a reliable path to better fortunes with a competitor?"

[zzip]

24 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

 

Okay, but if that's true, that just weakens the case that the NES's massive market share advantage was due primarily, or at least in significant part, to getting all the hot third-party games.  If those games were secretly the real driver of sales of the console, and presumably Nintendo knew that, it would make more sense to privilege them over their own in-house developed games, or at least equally.  Or, more crucially, why didn't Tengen just say "Screw you, then, Nintendo.  Sega's got a technically superior machine anyway, and the 7800 doesn't flicker all over the place, so we'll just take Gauntlet and Rolling Thunder and so on over there instead"?  Why go to all the trouble of the lockout chip and the ensuing legal fiasco if there were a commercially viable alternative?  In fact, they couldn't have been the only company to notice what a lousy deal this was for the licensees, so why wasn't there a mass exodus from the machine once it became clear they were getting jerked around, or if the contracts didn't allow it, why would they have signed up in the first place?

 

I suppose there's an argument along the lines of "They didn't care about actually selling the games, they just wanted them off the market on their competitors' machines."  That's at least plausible, though I think it's undermined by the fact that third parties say to this day they don't like releasing their stuff on Nintendo consoles because they don't want to compete with their first-party IP.  But I think the question remains "why get into bed with known shady characters in the first place if there's a reliable path to better fortunes with a competitor?"

I suppose it would take several years for these companies to notice the pattern of how they were getting jerked around by Nintendo and then more time to make the case that there's a value proposition in publishing on everything but Nintendo.   Companies like to go where where the biggest market is, and they will put up with an insane costs of doing business in order to be there.

 

Someone suggesting such a strategy would go against the consensus and likely be looked at like a crazy person, and it would take some time and additional abuse by Nintendo in order for the realization to sink in.   Eventually it did, Nintendo can't pull that crap anymore,  and they had a hard time courting third parties for years.

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Companies like to go where where the biggest market is, and they will put up with an insane costs of doing business in order to be there.

 

This is exactly my contention.  The question is "how did the biggest market get to be what it was?"  This is Computer Entertainer.  I don't know how accurate the sales numbers are, but they would have to be waaaaay off to affect this point.  At any rate, their numbers on the games themselves are legit from what I can find.

 

  

 

So, by the end of '86, the NES is ahead more than 10:1.  I say this shows that, if the third party stuff was the dispositive factor here, that has to be established prior to the beginning of '87 since the gap was already so large that your above quote is enough to explain what followed.  So, what were those 9 third party games available in North America at the end of '86?  They were Tag Team Pro Wrestling, Chubby Cherub, M.U.S.C.L.E., Ninja Kid, 1942, Commando, Ghosts & Goblins, Gradius, Karate Champ, and they don't list it as a third party title but 10-Yard Fight was actually Irem.  Some of these were hits, but do they really account for that huge sales gap?  I'm very skeptical of that claim.

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Eventually it did, Nintendo can't pull that crap anymore,  and they had a hard time courting third parties for years.

 

Well, the SNES had about a thousand more games for it than the Genesis did worldwide.  Unless they were really cranking games out themselves, they couldn't have had that hard a time doing it.  And when it comes to handheld systems, forget about it.  This didn't come into really noticeable effect until the N64, for which you have to take into account the cartridge format where the industry standard had already changed to CDs, so doing cross-platform games was a much different proposition than between Genesis and SNES.  Wii and Wii U, same story with the hardware.  The Gamecube didn't actually get snubbed that hard at first; some of the Resident Evil games were exclusive to it for a while, for example, but in the end, the PS2 just sold way too many damn systems and GC way too few.

 

It's true that they have for many years made a show about how this time is going to be different with third parties, and it never is.  They also don't seem to care, however.  So, I don't know if that explanation is quite right.  I just keep coming back to people go where the market is biggest, and while third party support and exclusive games are important, there are probably much more intangible, uncontrollable things that dictate that, in the early stages.

[pacman000]

I was trying to figure out why a generic game, like Golf, would outsell 3rd party titles.
 

The reasons behind NES’ success are more complicated than simply the presence of 3rd parties or Super Mario.

 

As to why 3rd parties kept with Nintendo...that’s probably a complex tale as well. I can make some guesses, but they’d just be guesses, & they’d take some time to type up. I may do that tonight, then bring ‘em in tomorrow & post ‘em.

[zzip]

27 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

This is exactly my contention.  The question is "how did the biggest market get to be what it was?"  This is Computer Entertainer.  I don't know how accurate the sales numbers are, but they would have to be waaaaay off to affect this point.  At any rate, their numbers on the games themselves are legit from what I can find.

The "how" is because Atari was asleep at the switch.   They went from a company that Nintendo was afraid to compete with in 83 to a company that posed no real threat to them by 85.   The sale to Jack Tramiel threw the company into chaos for awhile.   Leonard Tramiel admitted that they were too busy during 84 & 85 building the ST to worry about "a little company called Nintendo".   Warner wasn't in great shape either, but at least they had a plan for the future of the console market, which Jack didn't.

 

33 minutes ago, MrTrust said:

It's true that they have for many years made a show about how this time is going to be different with third parties, and it never is.  They also don't seem to care, however.  So, I don't know if that explanation is quite right.  I just keep coming back to people go where the market is biggest, and while third party support and exclusive games are important, there are probably much more intangible, uncontrollable things that dictate that, in the early stages.

It does seem like they are in a better situation with third parties with the Switch than they had been.   Wii had a lot of shovelware, but not a lot of the big 3rd party games.  Wii U was even worse.   

[empsolo]

I’m sorry but I must say that I roll my eyes whenever I read an Ed Logg piece. I’m not sure if Ed Logg made himself the designated PR man for Tengen’s history, but some of his stories tend to be really exaggerated. (I.e his claims that Atari Games/Tengen had clean roomed the lockout chip despite dummied out code present only in the patent was in the Rabbit Chip code.) Sure third party’s did suffer in 1988 due to shortages in cartridge manufacturing. But so did Nintendo. Nintendo had barely any for themselves to get Super Mario Bros 2 out the door and that game was the hardest to find in its early print runs. 

[pacman000]

Part 1: The NES - Why did it Win? (neocities.org)

[Geoff Oltmans]

On 4/8/2021 at 9:00 PM, MrTrust said:

 

Tengen, and a few others like those companies that made Bible games.  maybe even Galoob?  I know they got into a legal wrangling with them over the Game Genie.  Like I said, I'm not disputing the scumbagginess of their licensing policies at the time, although I think the avarice of this is a little overstated: Atari was having their lunch eaten left and right in the early 80s for not protecting their platform.

 

I'll put it this way.  Golf.  Plain ol' black label, generic Nintendo Golf.  That game sold more copies than any officially licensed third party game for the NES.  That game sold more copies than Atari sold 7800s, and over half as many as Sega sold Master Systems in Europe, the strongest market for it.  And not by a little bit, either.  The only ones that come close are things like Dragon Warrior 3, that had a huge following in Japan, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles which was the big IP for that generatiom of kids.  Golf still sold more than those, and when you go further down the line, even for big names like Mega Man 2, it ain't even close.  Now, to my knowledge, Golf was never a pack-in game.  Nor was Excitebike, or Dr. Mario., Legend of Zelda, and or others that outsold every officially licensed third party game.  These all would have been exclusive to the NES no matter what, and they sold on their own without being packaged wiyh the hardware.

 

Now, why's that relevant?  Well, if the proffered explanation is correct, that is, Nintendo didn't figure out what consumers wanted and delivered it better, but instead just dishonestly snatched up all the good games from third parties, then you'd expect some of those games to have outsold their own, in-house generic golf game.  Other than Tetris, none of them did.  The vast majoriy of them didn't even sniff at doing it.  And the big names we're talking about all came out years after the launch.  In the very first few years, the third party stuff was not that exciting.  For every one Commando or Ghosts n' Goblins, there were 2-3 Chubby Cherubs or Dragon Powers.

 

Now, look, we had Chubby Cherub in my house in '86, and we all very much liked it.  We had it because, if ya' already got all the black-box games, there wasn't much else to get at the time.  Fine game.  I'm not shitting on Chubby Cherub ot anyone who happens to enjoy that game.  But if you're going to tell me that, in that year, the NES outsold the SMS nearly 10-1, not on the strength of Super Mario Bros. and their very slick marketing, but rather on having the exclusive publishing rights to fucking Chubby Cherub, then yes, I do think you have lost the plot somewhere along the way.

 

Unless the sales numbers for all this stuff are just wildy, crazily inaccurate, for every SMS or 7800 owner, there were 4-10 NES owners.  That alone would be enough to kick the legs out from under Atari and Sega when it came to third-party support even in the absence of Nintendo's shady practices.  And for every for every ill-gotten Castlevania cartridge sold under Nintendo's shady regime, there were 4 copies sold of Golf.  Now, for my money, the best explanation of these facts is that Nintendo made, not just published but made, consistent best-sellers at a time where their competition did not, and even if every single third-party game of that era had appeared on both the 7800 and Master System, those exclusive games would have tipped the balance in favor of the NES such that it still would have been far anf away the best selling console of the time.

 

Now, later on, when Sega came out with the Genesis, things changed.  Why?  Maybe it was the licensing deals, maybe it was the fact that the Genesis had Revenge of Shinobi, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, things like that.  Right off the bat, they big games that could sell consoles instead of Ghost House.

 

Now if I'm wrong about that, then fine, I'm wrong.  But if I am, it will have been wirher because I have the numbers wrong, or I'm missing some big third party license that Nintendo had prior to '88 that made the big difference, or I'm missing some case of history where third parties full-throatedly support platforms that have a comparatively tiny market share.  If any of those things are true, by all means lemme' know.  Otherwise I stand by my position.

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

You put this better than I possibly could ever... I owned all of Atari's consoles (save for Lynx) ex post facto, but I owned the NES contemporaneously and my own personal experience echoes your explanation. I had about a dozen games for my NES, and not a single one of them were third party titles, but all of them (including the early black box games) were extremely popular titles. Nintendo just had some damn fine games, and those are what people wanted. I also remember waiting in line to play Super Mario Bros in the arcade game before ever getting an NES, and I think that had a lot to do with its success.

 

 

Back to the original topic, I have wondered if the reason that Atari did the XEGS in the first place was that they had a massive inventory of chips to unload and the XEGS was a way to do it.

[pacman000]

Part 2: The NES in the U.S.

 

https://vgaa.neocities.org/articles/nesdominance2.htm

[pacman000]

Part 3: The NES - Why did it Win? (neocities.org)

 

I try to answer a few questions about why the NES was able to remain dominate till the early 90's.

[Dr Do]

On 4/1/2021 at 4:41 AM, John Stamos Mullet said:

So, I was searching the forum for advice on fixing my 65XE's keyboard and somehow ended up being directed to this thread. Half an hour later, I now realise I'm not going to get the answer to that question here...

Edited May 8, 2021 by Dr Do

[Keatah]

On 4/9/2021 at 10:58 PM, oracle_jedi said:

I've never understood the attraction of SMB.   I've played it a few times.  And I have what I am told is an almost pixel perfect conversion on my C64.   I get that it is an interesting game.  But damn, it is dull compared to Boulderdash, or Dropzone, or Elektraglide, or Star Raiders.   Am I missing something fundamental or is the lure of Mario as much marketing as it is substance?

God I hate smb and anything "mario" with a passion now. Oh sure it's nice to see new things, cutesy or lame platformers alike. But marketing overbeat this franchise to all hell. IMHO. And I believe it's all marketing. It's morphed into a mindless same-old same-old experience.

 

As for the 7800 being discontinued. IDK. I always felt that anything related to the Original Atari (the one that bought us groundbreaking games from Pong to I'Robot) had died immediately after the crash. The creativity and spark of exploration of the artform never really ignited anything thereafter.

 

Sure there were a few new campfires such as Assault, Blasteroids, S.T.U.N. Runner, and Road Blasters. But they were embers in a wasteland. Nothing compared to the Atari of 1980-1983.

 

For me anything "Atari" after 1983-1984 with the above noted exceptions, was pretty much all redundant and weak re-rehashes. This definitely extended to the home console scene. We didn't need any more ports. And new games were becoming too complex to run on existing hardware from the early 80's. Atari didn't develop any worthwhile groundbreaking hardware. Not even a general "all boats rise" with progressing technology.

 

The 7800 was not needed, it would be redundant, not advancing enough beyond other offerings, Atari or otherwise. And the Jaguar had to compete with Sega, PS1, NES and SNES. Not to mentions the burgeoning PC gaming market and its exciting new 3D accelerators and huge installed base.

 

 

[CPUWIZ]

Timeline "7800 Discontinued" -> "Mario sucks".

 

[John Stamos Mullet]

1 hour ago, CPUWIZ said:

Timeline "7800 Discontinued" -> "Mario sucks".

 

Because Atari was being run by morons and Nintendo pandered to 1st graders. 
 

that's why.

[+x=usr(1536)]

Also, the 7800 was discontinued due to a personal grudge that Jack Tramiel had with the OP ?

[Zonie]

On 4/12/2021 at 8:00 AM, zzip said:

I actually hated that game with a passion back then!   For several reasons.   One,  "Ewok effect",  I was well into my teens by then, and that game was too cutesy and too happy, and therefore too irritating.   I was also playing games on an ST by then, and the 8-bit graphics of the NES felt like a step backwards.    Finally, the way the game handed out bonus lives like water changed the way hanging out with friends playing video-games worked.   It used to be that you played your 3 lives, and you passed the joystick to the next person for their turn.  Your game lasted no more than 5-10 minutes.   With SMB and it's crazy amount of bonus lives and ability to continue.  One person would inevitably hog the game while everyone else was sitting around staring at the screen in boredom.

 

I will grant that it innovated in some ways.   We had never seen such a massive side-scrolling world with so many things to do up to that point.

I hated it and still do. They had an arcade machine in the student union at my college at full volume. The droning music and sounds of this game drove me nuts. I also don't see the appeal of the side scrolling coin collecting bouncing platformers. Pitfall and Prince of Persia were more fun.

[Jinks]

10 minutes ago, Zonie said:

I hated it and still do. They had an arcade machine in the student union at my college at full volume. The droning music and sounds of this game drove me nuts. I also don't see the appeal of the side scrolling coin collecting bouncing platformers. Pitfall and Prince of Persia were more fun.

I guess we are all in the minority.