Alternate Atari History

[+KaeruYojimbo]

12 hours ago, JJohnson said:

It seemed like a generic platformer to me without innovation

You just described like 80% of the NES games I played in the 80's and 90's.

[Jasonhrb]

On 4/23/2021 at 8:34 PM, JJohnson said:

Hi folks,

 

I'm writing up an alternate history timeline and I wanted to do a slightly different Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 history, and wanted to run it by everyone to see if the numbers make sense, and to figure out what the changes would mean for Atari gamewise.

 

So here goes:

 

etc. etc.

I know I'm coming to this very late, but I find the whole "what if" thing far more interesting than I should, so here goes.

 

If I'm honest, I think you're probably barking up the wrong tree by  thinking about alternative tech specs as being the thing that would have made the difference. The 2600 was king of the consoles for several years, and remained so even when more powerful competitors had hit the market. So I don't think spec was ever the issue here. In terms of successors, the 5200 was in hindsight fundamentally the wrong product for the time imho (more of that below), while the 7800 failed for marketing / promotion reasons and the lack of compelling titles rather than a poor spec imho.

 

So what would have made the difference ?. For me, it's three things :

 

1) The right successor product to the 2600 wasn't a console imho. It was a games led computer. Atari actually had the right product to fulfil this role in the 400. But to work, it needed to be a lot cheaper than it was, and Atari's route to success here was probably to be a lot more aggressive on pricing a lot earlier (if need be, adopting the later console model of selling the hardware at a loss to make money on the software later on). Doing that would have led to big sales imho, and also a lot of upselling later on either in turns of add ons to increase the capability of their 400 in other computing tasks, or by people upgrading to the fully compatible 800 to get access to a more serious computer. In this scenario, there would have been no need to develop and release the 5200 at all (saving a fortune in costs in the process). The (much cheaper than it was) 400 would have been the target product for that section of the market

 

2) Not release the versions of Pac Man or ET that hit the shelves, instead putting more time and money into a decent version of Pac Man, and making a simpler game for the ET franchise. These two games were huge self inflicted wounds, and both could have been avoided. The 2600 was perfectly capable of producing an enjoyable version of Pac Man, as the later conversion of Ms Pac Man (and a couple of excellent homebrew versions) have proved. And as for ET, it was bonkers to try and do something so involved in the time that they had to develop ET. An ET game didn't have to be great or innovative to keep the market happy at that time, it just had to be playable and half decent.

 

Now in one sense the importance of these two mis-steps is overdone, as they certainly didn't cause the 1983 crash all on their own. But what they did do imho, was  put a serious dent in Atari's reputation for developing quality product. In a short space of time, Atari were seen to make a total hash of converting the arcade smash of the time and of making a game of the biggest film. Two such high profile failures in a short space of time did massive reputational damage, made worse by the fact that (with the benefit of hindsight) the industry as a whole was starting to struggle anyway

 

3) Release the 7800 in 1984 as planned, and support it properly from a marketing and game development standpoint. The success of the NES (and the Sega Master system in other areas) showed that by 1984 / 5, the market was ready for the next generation of consoles. The 7800 was perfectly capable of competing with those two consoles on a technical level, and releasing it earlier with proper marketing and game development support would imho have given it a significant share in that market.

 

Those three changes would have given us a very different outcome for Atari imho. Whereas imho the kind of technical changes to the consoles that you refer to wouldn't have done imho, as I don't think the technical specs were ever the issue. Indeed, as others have said, trying to "improve" the winning formula of the 2600 might have actually priced it out of the market at the outset, killing the company and making the rest of the discussion moot.

[zzip]

2 minutes ago, Jasonhrb said:

2) Not release the versions of Pac Man or ET that hit the shelves, instead putting more time and money into a decent version of Pac Man, and making a simpler game for the ET franchise. These two games were huge self inflicted wounds, and both could have been avoided. The 2600 was perfectly capable of producing an enjoyable version of Pac Man, as the later conversion of Ms Pac Man (and a couple of excellent homebrew versions) have proved. And as for ET, it was bonkers to try and do something so involved in the time that they had to develop ET. An ET game didn't have to be great or innovative to keep the market happy at that time, it just had to be playable and half decent.

Pac-man was a serious misstep.    But I think the issues around ET are overblown.   The main reason it is considered a flop is because they produced an unrealistic number of cartridges, expecting a runaway hit.   It still sold over a million which would have been considered a hit for most games.   As for complexity..  that's what Atari did with movie games, Superman and Raiders were complex too.   Raiders was far more complex than ET.   ET was about as complicated as "Haunted House":  find 3 pieces of an object and escape while avoiding "spooks".    Sure they could have made some adjustments..  like making the pits less sensitive.

 

Pac-man was a far more important game because it was the game most responsible for the early 80s videogame boom.   As such, Atari NEEDED to get it right   Nobody really asked for an ET game, and nobody was going to lose faith in Atari if the game wasn't good (movie tie-in games usually aren't very good).   The media seized on the disappointing ET sales and made it the poster boy of everything that ailed the videogame industry,  but I suspect Pac-man damaged the Atari brand far more than ET did

 

19 minutes ago, Jasonhrb said:

3) Release the 7800 in 1984 as planned, and support it properly from a marketing and game development standpoint. The success of the NES (and the Sega Master system in other areas) showed that by 1984 / 5, the market was ready for the next generation of consoles. The 7800 was perfectly capable of competing with those two consoles on a technical level, and releasing it earlier with proper marketing and game development support would imho have given it a significant share in that market.

I would say they shouldn't release the 7800 at all and instead focus on fixing the 5200 issues.   Abandoning the 5200 after just over a year alienated a lot of Atari fans.   Why would you buy a console from a company if you can't trust them to support it?   They should have sent GCC back to the drawing board and had them improve their tech to deliver a true 5200 successor no earlier than 1986, with a real sound chip and better graphics.   The NES didn't start to take off in the west until after 1986 anyway.   Atari didn't need a new console in 84 because consoles weren't really selling well at the time.   People were buying C64s instead

 

What Atari did need to do was focus on games.   NES didn't win because of superior tech, it won because of games like Super Mario.   Atari simply had nothing to compete with that until it was too late.

[Jasonhrb]

26 minutes ago, zzip said:

Pac-man was a serious misstep.    But I think the issues around ET are overblown.   The main reason it is considered a flop is because they produced an unrealistic number of cartridges, expecting a runaway hit.   It still sold over a million which would have been considered a hit for most games.   As for complexity..  that's what Atari did with movie games, Superman and Raiders were complex too.   Raiders was far more complex than ET.   ET was about as complicated as "Haunted House":  find 3 pieces of an object and escape while avoiding "spooks".    Sure they could have made some adjustments..  like making the pits less sensitive.

 

Pac-man was a far more important game because it was the game most responsible for the early 80s videogame boom.   As such, Atari NEEDED to get it right   Nobody really asked for an ET game, and nobody was going to lose faith in Atari if the game wasn't good (movie tie-in games usually aren't very good).   The media seized on the disappointing ET sales and made it the poster boy of everything that ailed the videogame industry,  but I suspect Pac-man damaged the Atari brand far more than ET did

 

I would say they shouldn't release the 7800 at all and instead focus on fixing the 5200 issues.   Abandoning the 5200 after just over a year alienated a lot of Atari fans.   Why would you buy a console from a company if you can't trust them to support it?   They should have sent GCC back to the drawing board and had them improve their tech to deliver a true 5200 successor no earlier than 1986, with a real sound chip and better graphics.   The NES didn't start to take off in the west until after 1986 anyway.   Atari didn't need a new console in 84 because consoles weren't really selling well at the time.   People were buying C64s instead

 

What Atari did need to do was focus on games.   NES didn't win because of superior tech, it won because of games like Super Mario.   Atari simply had nothing to compete with that until it was too late.

Thanks for the considered reply Zzip. I think I agree with you on the Pac-man / ET thing. Pac-man was such an important game for all the reasons you describe. And it's one that they could have got right with a bit more care, as they showed later with Ms Pac Man. It was a classic case of a self inflicted wound.

 

On the 5200 / 7800 issue, things are a bit different imho. In the scenario I describe above, there would be no issue around abandoning the 5200 a year after launch, as it would never have been launched in the first place. The 7800 would have been Atari's second dedicated console rather than the third. But yes, you're probably right that perhaps they could have taken more time in development and at the least made sure that pokey was in the console itself. A 1985 launch with a pokey enabled console would have been a different proposition to what eventually came out, but imho for the  7800 to have worked, it would have needed to be established in the market before the NES really took hold. And as you say, it needed games to make it competitive in the market too.

Edited December 3, 2021 by Jasonhrb

[zzip]

18 minutes ago, Jasonhrb said:

On the 5200 / 7800 issue, things are a bit different imho. In the scenario I describe above, there would be no issue around abandoning the 5200 a year after launch, as it would never have been launched in the first place. The 7800 would have been Atari's second dedicated console rather than the third. But yes, you're probably right that perhaps they could have taken more time in development and at the least made sure that pokey was in the console itself. A 1985 launch with a pokey enabled console would have been a different proposition to what eventually came out, but imho for the  7800 to have worked, it would have needed to be established in the market before the NES really took hold. And as you say, it needed games to make it competitive in the market too.

If the 5200 doesn't exist, that changes the equation.   My gut says they did need a console to take on INTV and Coleco, but on the other hand the market collapsed soon after 5200 and Coleco released, so mmaybe that didn't matter and they could have gotten away until 1984 without a 2600 successor.   Whatever they released they needed to put their weight behind and support it.  

 

[MrTrust]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

If the 5200 doesn't exist, that changes the equation.   My gut says they did need a console to take on INTV and Coleco, but on the other hand the market collapsed soon after 5200 and Coleco released, so mmaybe that didn't matter and they could have gotten away until 1984 without a 2600 successor.   Whatever they released they needed to put their weight behind and support it. 

 

Certianly the crash still happens 5200 or no 5200, and the 2600 still does respectable sales through the mid 80s (I said respectable, not blockbuster).  Presumably, they could have ridden things out all the way up to, what, 85-86 without a new machine and still have been bringing in money?  The question is could they have shifted over to becoming a games company in time to meaningfully compete with Nintendo (who cares what their hardware is; Sega had better hardware than Nintendo and flamed out)?

Sounds a little off to say it about 80s Nintendo, but they consistently survive because they are fundamentally a games company.  They could never make another piece of hardware again and still be profitable.  Could Atari ever have said that?  I don't think so, and I don't see how anyone who can't say that survives in that market until much much later.

[widowsson]

Alternate Atari History: 

Nolan Bushnell becomes the most famous adult film star of all time, and Atari becomes becomes a production company for adult films!!!! 

[RJ]

7 hours ago, widowsson said:

Alternate Atari History: 

Nolan Bushnell becomes the most famous adult film star of all time, and Atari becomes becomes a production company for adult films!!!! 

I'm afraid to ask what the Fuji logo turns into...

[RJ]

Hey OP it's been almost 8 months, how's the book coming?

[+jgkspsx]

The only thing I have to say is that 2600 Space Invaders is a gem and I would not trade it for anything.

[+jgkspsx]

13 hours ago, widowsson said:

Alternate Atari History: 

Are you having a crisis? Do you need help?

[Cebus Capucinis]

What if Atari wasn't Atari and WE WERE ON THE MOON and space aliens took over and robots fought them and then Godzilla showed up....

 

Man, good times.

[Draxxon]

I just want to say I was only 5 years old in 1983 when the crash happened, but I don't remember it being a thing at the time. Again, I was 5.

 

I remember there being a lot of stinkers of games, and I remember clearance bins with games for $5 bucks and flea markets and yard sales with games for 50 cents to a dollar. During the crash years, kids I knew were buying up all the carts for pennies on the dollar they could find. I know I sure did. That was a great time in my memory.

 

Arcades didn't crash and the Famicom came out in Japan. So, the crash has to be mostly only in the USA. The NES came soon after here. It's crazy to me that we still talk about it like it was a huge thing. Maybe it was to Atari and their sales.

They call it the video game crash, but I see it more as people got sick of buying shitty Atari titles that never should have came out. After buying one crappy game after another, people got tired of Atari. It was the Atari crash of 1983 IMO. Not the Video Game crash of 1983.

I hear that people lost faith in video games at that time and thought they were over and done with. I never heard anyone say that back then. But, understand I was a little kid. Maybe people in the industry were saying it, but regular kids in their living room or at the arcades weren't saying that. People continued to play games until the NES came. It never stopped. The only thing we noticed as players was there were a shit ton a lame 2600 games pumped out. That's all.

there was no or very limited ways to rent games then, I do remember renting Popeye (and other games) for 2600 from Family Video, so that was cool. You really didn't get to see many games before you played. So, buying a new game was like rolling dice. Kids would ask their parents to buy them a new game and it often times was crap. Kids and parents got tired of that. That's really when I discovered flea markets and yard sales. Buying a game for 50 cents and if it turns out to be a stinker isn't as bad. So, while game sales probably slumped in stores at that time, I'm betting the resale/used market really boomed.

Much how the ET fiasco get blown out of proportion, I feel the Crash gets the same treatment. It was barely a blip on any young kids radar. I would like to hear the memories of people who experienced it that were much older than I was at the time.

Anyways... I dont think anything Atari could have anything to stay successful. No matter what system or PC followed the 2600. No matter how you shuffle specs or releases of consoles, it wouldn't matter. People were done buying new Atari products. They shot themselves in the foot letting such lackluster titles come out by the dozens. Something else that never gets mentioned is, 2600, 7800, 5200 graphics all looked the same. I don't think people appreciated that newer systems were better. To the untrained eye all atari stuff looked the same. We didn't have all the experiences with newer consoles every couple years back then like we do now. Not to mention, the average person back then only had a handful of games so even though you had a 7800, you had a bunch of 2600 games and a few 7800 and how much better were the few you happen to get to experience than the older 2600 titles?

Something that should be pointed out about early PCs... most people did not have them. They weren't very impressive. The few I knew that had Commodores, Tandys or Ataris really had barely any games. And the ones they showed me sucked. I think we sometimes think of the systems as they are today, with the entire library on an sd card. PCs were expensive and they barely did anything at all. It wasn't until the internet that they started showing up in everyones homes.

 

I truly feel like an idea as simple as this could have saved Atari.

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by Draxxon

[6502wrangler]

2 hours ago, Draxxon said:

I just want to say I was only 5 years old in 1983 when the crash happened, but I don't remember it being a thing at the time. Again, I was 5.

 

I remember there being a lot of stinkers of games, and I remember clearance bins with games for $5 bucks and flea markets and yard sales with games for 50 cents to a dollar. During the crash years, kids I knew were buying up all the carts for pennies on the dollar they could find. I know I sure did. That was a great time in my memory.

 

Arcades didn't crash and the Famicom came out in Japan. So, the crash has to be mostly only in the USA. The NES came soon after here. It's crazy to me that we still talk about it like it was a huge thing. Maybe it was to Atari and their sales.

They call it the video game crash, but I see it more as people got sick of buying shitty Atari titles that never should have came out. After buying one crappy game after another, people got tired of Atari. It was the Atari crash of 1983 IMO. Not the Video Game crash of 1983.

I hear that people lost faith in video games at that time and thought they were over and done with. I never heard anyone say that back then. But, understand I was a little kid. Maybe people in the industry were saying it, but regular kids in their living room or at the arcades weren't saying that. People continued to play games until the NES came. It never stopped. The only thing we noticed as players was there were a shit ton a lame 2600 games pumped out. That's all.

there was no or very limited ways to rent games then, I do remember renting Popeye (and other games) for 2600 from Family Video, so that was cool. You really didn't get to see many games before you played. So, buying a new game was like rolling dice. Kids would ask their parents to buy them a new game and it often times was crap. Kids and parents got tired of that. That's really when I discovered flea markets and yard sales. Buying a game for 50 cents and if it turns out to be a stinker isn't as bad. So, while game sales probably slumped in stores at that time, I'm betting the resale/used market really boomed.

Much how the ET fiasco get blown out of proportion, I feel the Crash gets the same treatment. It was barely a blip on any young kids radar. I would like to hear the memories of people who experienced it that were much older than I was at the time.

Anyways... I dont think anything Atari could have anything to stay successful. No matter what system or PC followed the 2600. No matter how you shuffle specs or releases of consoles, it wouldn't matter. People were done buying new Atari products. They shot themselves in the foot letting such lackluster titles come out by the dozens. Something else that never gets mentioned is, 2600, 7800, 5200 graphics all looked the same. I don't think people appreciated that newer systems were better. To the untrained eye all atari stuff looked the same. We didn't have all the experiences with newer consoles every couple years back then like we do now. Not to mention, the average person back then only had a handful of games so even though you had a 7800, you had a bunch of 2600 games and a few 7800 and how much better were the few you happen to get to experience than the older 2600 titles?

Something that should be pointed out about early PCs... most people did not have them. They weren't very impressive. The few I knew that had Commodores, Tandys or Ataris really had barely any games. And the ones they showed me sucked. I think we sometimes think of the systems as they are today, with the entire library on an sd card. PCs were expensive and they barely did anything at all. It wasn't until the internet that they started showing up in everyones homes.

 

I truly feel like an idea as simple as this could have saved Atari.

 

It was a general video game (and home computer crash). Lots of platforms disappeared, lots of arcades and software houses went under. 

 

For instance, Colecovision and ADAM collapsed, TI-99 collapsed, HESware (big early game publisher) collapsed and so on. 

 

It was bad and way beyond Atari. Even Amiga pivoted from a games console to a home computer. 

 

On the other hand, I really enjoyed getting tons of 2600 and C64 games super cheap. I did not really understand what was going on. 

 

The golden age for flea markets was 1990 to 1995. I built my collection for a song. My big win was a 5200 and 15 games for $25. And the controllers weren’t even broken!

[Draxxon]

I can only give my limited perspective. We had a pong, an odyssey and a 2600. other kids had 2600s. The only ones that I knew as a small kid with no internet was some random people who had various early and primitive (even then) PCs, colecos or intellivisions. But those people were few. And as a kid, I wasn't impressed and felt I had an Atari, and it was superior. It was only a novelty to play "other" home games. Arcades thrived here in the midwest until much later. Some came and some went, but there was never a shortage of game rooms, basically everywhere. The cabinets didn't disappear, in fact, they are still around today.

I totally get what you are saying, and I know you are correct, I'm just saying kids weren't running around on fire in the streets because there was some game crash like a stock market crash. We just quietly played warlords and kaboom and arcade games when we went to the bowling alley, or movie theatre, or skating rink, or restaurant, or laundromat, or corner store, anywhere at all. I personally had a 7800 and loved it. Nintendo came pretty fast after in retrospect.

 

Combine that with flea market, and yard sales too, everyone had used atari games. To this day its way easier to collect for. I agree for the business side, the crash was real, and it was bad. On the gamers side, that was almost forty years ago and we only went a small time without a new system. And for most everyone 2600 was the only system we knew. You can't miss what you never had.

Did people stop buying new games/systems? Yes, because there was a lot of crap titles. And the graphics were all the same to the layman. It appeared as if nothing advanced until the NES. Looking back now, I can see the difference, then, it was all blocks on a black screen to my little kid eyeballs.

To be fair, its not like the game publishers had much of a road map to follow. They had to have been figuring it out as they went, and mistakes were to be made. It was so early on. But, "The video game market is dead and it will never recover?" We all still bought the hell out of that NES though just a year or two later. Look at the industry video games has become. We stopped buying new systems since. Kids went nuts just to play NES.

I just cant buy that the crash is this short time where video games died. That part isnt true. The physical games didn't disappear, stop working or get confiscated or anything. Most importantly people didnt stop playing them. I'm sure there are a million reasons why things happened on the business side and that people know much more about that than my ass. But to think ET was so bad people stopped gaming, thats redonkulous.

 

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by Draxxon

[CapitanClassic]

I wasnt much older, and didn't really notice the video game crash, other than cheap games. We had a Atari 800, so we already had what the market was moving towards anyway, home computers. The video game sales crash was big, and no one could invest in new games until all the clearance titles were cleared out ('83 - '85) It makes sense that it took two years. (and even more if you consider NES didn't sell really well until '87.

Quote

The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of game consoles and available games, many of which were of poor quality, as well as waning interest in console games in favor of personal computers. Home video game revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent)

If you want a good read, check out Ken William's book about the Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line. The 1st quote is from a Sierra employee, the 2nd is regarding a secret meeting between Sierra and iBM regarding PCjr (which flopped, but leads to Sierra's resurgence, due to PC compatible clones, and excellent licensing terms with IBM due to antitrust issues IBM had with the government)

Quote

it was not just a look and feel lawsuit, but a ruling that set in stone forever that a play mechanic could not be copyrighted. I believe this changed the video/computer games industry forever and quite possibly set the stage for the industry crash a year later. After you beat Atari, many companies were free to make derivative products with the same play-mechanic as hits which created the “same thing different graphics” glut and consumer fatigue that diminished demand. Atari’s ET game gets far too much credit/blame for crashing the industry ... -- Ken A

Quote

After the videogame crash, and Sierra’s layoff, some employees were offered the chance to work without pay while we attempted to bring the company back to life. Only a few took us up on that offer. The company had no cash and couldn’t pay our bills. To survive, Roberta and I applied for a loan on our home. Given our company’s poor prospects, and the fact that our home was so overbuilt for the area, it’s amazing we were able to borrow. Had the loan not come through, the company probably wouldn’t have made it. We supplemented this with borrowing on our credit cards.

...

The reason that Roberta had the confidence to refuse any consideration of selling the company was that she had a project in development that was looking incredible. Several months before the videogame crash, Sierra had been contacted by IBM saying they had a top secret project they wanted to talk to us about.

 

I would guess that the biggest result of the crash was not that games disappeared,  but no new games (game systems) were being invested in. This would mean that the install base wasnt going to grow. Without new users being brought into the home video game market, few companies are going to invest in that market. Sort of why HD-DVD died.

Edited December 5, 2021 by CapitanClassic

[+Stephen]

23 hours ago, widowsson said:

Alternate Atari History: 

Nolan Bushnell becomes the most famous adult film star of all time, and Atari becomes becomes a production company for adult films!!!! 

 

7 hours ago, Draxxon said:

I just want to say I was only 5 years old

 

I see a pattern here.

[RJ]

17 hours ago, RJ said:

I'm afraid to ask what the Fuji logo turns into...

Aw c'mon guys ONE LAUGH on my post? I'm giving you my best material here!!

 

(Thx widowsson!!)

[MrTrust]

22 hours ago, Draxxon said:

I just cant buy that the crash is this short time where video games died. That part isnt true. The physical games didn't disappear, stop working or get confiscated or anything. Most importantly people didnt stop playing them.

 

This is correct.  What happened was there were a few huge boom years around '80-'81, and a bunch of companies got it into their heads that this was just going to continue exponentially on into the future.  They massively over invested for market growth that took much, much longer to happen.

 

You had more consoles and proprietary computer game formats on the market in '82 than there are today, where the market is bigger by a few orders of magnitude.  There was no way there wasn't going to be a shakeout.  2600, 5200, Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, Astrocade, Odyssey 2, Aquarius, Apple II, TRS-80, 400/800, Vic-20, C64, ADAM... and on and on and on.  This stuff all came out within like a 4-year window, little of it was compatible with anything else, and at a time when most people did not own or wish to own anything that was capable of playing video games.  There was no way much of it would survive for long.

 

Some of the computer formats, since they were somewhat useful for other things, limped along until the IBM-compatible format pretty much put a stop to that.  What else could have happened?  Nobody's been able to answer that for me.

17 hours ago, CapitanClassic said:

After you beat Atari, many companies were free to make derivative products with the same play-mechanic as hits which created the “same thing different graphics” glut and consumer fatigue that diminished demand...

 

Well good thing that doesn't go on anymore, eh?  Except it doesn't diminish demand.  In fact, the whole genrefication of video games in recent years should put that theory to be for good.  People have been showing up to buy Quake with different graphics for going on 30 years now.  Don't see that slowing down any time soon.

 

And in terms of quality.  I've played some stinkers on the 2600, no doubt, but can anyone browse the Steam store or Google Play today and seriously make the case that the ratio of good to lousy games is not even worse now?

[Draxxon]

And just to throw my two cents in about the E.T. Bomb.

 

At my house, we didn't notice. No one cared. E.T. was definitely HUGE and everyone was into the merch, but if the game sucked, it didn't hurt the E.T. property as a whole and it didn't stop me and my friends from playing 2600.

 

I've been huge into games my entire life. The E.T. fiasco wasn't even known to me until I read about it years later. Again, I'm sure people at Atari were floored when it didn't sell, but as a kid gamer, no one I knew ever even noticed or ever talked about it. I also don't remember anyone I know anticipating that title. There was no shortage of titles to choose. I mean think about it, how long could they even had promoted E.T. in commercials? a few months before X-mas? Masters of the Universe ruled then, along with G.I. Joe, Star Wars and a million other cool kids properties. No one gave a shit about E.T for very long, let alone for Atari. LMMFAO.

 

Whereas on the flip side, when No Man's Sky came out and was complete shit, or crap like WWE 2K21, everyone talks about it. There were no real outlets for people to tell each other E.T. sucked other than by word of mouth. And in my experience, that word of mouth info never reached me. I'm just saying, for many kids at the time, the video game crash and the E.T. fiasco wasn't a thing, meaning, we didn't even notice it. We DID however bitch about that shitty Pac-Man port, that was very real.

I just want to add, my father was 21 at that time. I remember him and his friends playing the same games we all consider the good ones today. Those guys were big into Atari when having house parties, I never remember them mentioning any of this either, so I have to think regular people in general just didn't notice or care. Only the people that worked in the industry at that time and the "gaming historians" of today, I guess. LOL.

Edited December 6, 2021 by Draxxon

[widowsson]

On 12/4/2021 at 3:58 AM, RJ said:

I'm afraid to ask what the Fuji logo turns into...

One each of the Fuji's three legs, for each port!

[widowsson]

Alternate Atari history:

"Donkey Kong" is instead released as "Donkey Punch"!

[Draxxon]

Alternate Atari History:

Tengen Releases Paddle controllers and Paddle games for the NES.

Edited December 6, 2021 by Draxxon

[Draxxon]

Alternate Atari History:

Williams Bally Midway and Atari merge and Mortal Kombat Vs Primal Rage comes out. Yellow Wizard, Green Elf, Blue Valkyrie and Red Warrior are the first Kombat Pack DLC. Pong Kombat becomes a real game.

Edited December 6, 2021 by Draxxon

[widowsson]

11 minutes ago, Draxxon said:

Alternate Atari History:

Williams Bally Midway and Atari merge and Mortal Kombat Vs Primal Rage comes out. Yellow Wizard, Green Elf, Blue Valkyrie and Red Warrior are the first Kombat Pack DLC. Pong Kombat becomes a real game.

Rumored "Nudealities" become "realities"