Would Atari had been better off if Bushnell hadn´t sold it?

[Lord Mushroom]

8 hours ago, Matt_B said:

I don't think you need the benefit of hindsight to be critical of Kassar's poor record with labor relations and his failure to engage with the technology being developed by the company under him.

 

That said, when his period in the top job pretty much coincides with the entirety of the Atari glory years, it seems hard to deny that he must have been doing plenty of things that worked for the bulk of that period.

He started to promote games all year round, and not just around Christmas, which increased sales. He was against making a game based on E.T.. And as mentioned earlier, he was in favour of the NES deal. So he did plenty of things right.

 

On the other hand, at the time he left, Atari didn´t have a popular next gen console. The overestimation of the longevity of the 2600 resulted in huge losses before he was fired. Losses which would continue for a while even if he was replaced with someone who ran the company well.

 

I don´t think he would have done well if he had got to continue. The video game/computer business requires emphasis on development, and that wasn´t his strong suit. He even freezed software development for the VCS in 1979. When he took over, he was handed a company which was by far the best video game maker in the world, a high quality console already in the market and excellent next generation technology in development. The company was all set to do well.

 

I have also read that the insider trading thing happened over half a year before he was fired, so that probably had very little to do with him being fired. He was later cleared of any wrongdoings. I think I remember reading a long time ago that he was selling Warner stocks steadily over a long period, and those few he was accused of insider trading for were just one of the many sales he made in that period.

 

I found an interesting piece from 1982 about Atari´s early history here:

https://www.landley.net/history/mirror/atari/museum/cut2pin.html

 

Some things I didn´t know:

- From 1974-1978 a guy called Joe Keenan was the president of Atari. Nolan was chairman. Joe was demoted (at the same time Nolan was demoted) by Warner because they had produced too many 2600s that year, which wasn´t a huge problem as they expected to sell them next year.

- A guy called Bob Brown (I think he was an engineering supervisor at Atari at the time) had the idea to turn Pong into a home console.

- Gene Lipkin, vice president of marketing of Atari from 1974, then president of the coin operated business (and later president of Sega of America amongst other things), says Atari was a well-run company with good financial discipline when Bushnell owned it.

- The 2600 was conceptualized at Atari's Grass Valley think tank, primarily by Steve Mayer, later chief Atari architect for home games and computer systems.

 

It (almost) ends with:

 

Keenan, however, is still mischievous enough to take a last shot at Atari.   "I'm proud of the fact that already four years after we left they're stll growing on absolutely the same products that we put into position.   Their big success story has been the VCS -- well, that was our concept.   We engineered it, we built it, we brought it into the market.    I'm actually disappointed that Atari hasn't innovated a thing since we left.   If that doesn't change, Atari is going to lose its commanding position, and I might be embarrassed by having been associated with it."

 

Atari needn't worry for now.   It's not about to lose its commanding position in the video games business, especially with George Lucas (Lucasfilm and Atari have agreed on a joint game venture) and McDonald's ("Taste the thrill of Atari at McDonald's") on the company's side.

[zzip]

6 hours ago, DavidD said:

You know, I have to admit that I've never really thought much about the fact that the American success of the NES overlaps with the rise of the IBM compatible computer.  "Cheap" family friendly computers kind of went out the window (to a degree) as IBM stuff slowly took over...

 

What year did "home computer" become synonymous with "IBM clone"?

 

(I still love the fact that the NES had a pile of early/mid 80s home computer ports -- Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, MULE...)

 

I don't know an exact year but It was sometime in the later part of the 80s when the PC clone market started to really take off, bringing prices down..   but not cheap enough to be used as a console.  Most PCs of that era didn't have a TV-compatible port anyway.

 

yeah the "home computer" concept went out the window.  Largely because the new ones came with built-in floppies and soon built-in hard drives, and they required hi-res monitors.  This all ran up the price.

12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Once the XE and ST were brought to market there was another radical downsizing of the company down to just 150 though. I can readily believe that there weren't too many A8 people left at that point, as there were few further developments, but merely putting the XE out probably added another five years to the A8 life cycle.

Makes sense.   They got the ST to market rather quickly.  But after that, enhancements were always too slow in coming.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Lord Mushroom said:

He started to promote games all year round, and not just around Christmas, which increased sales. He was against making a game based on E.T.. And as mentioned earlier, he was in favour of the NES deal. So he did plenty of things right.

The E.T. game idea was sound from a marketing perspective.   People bought all sorts of things based on popular movies-   lunchboxes, toys, coloring books, so why not games?   The video game industry has a long history of movie tie-in games, and a long history of most of them being poor quality.  Parents buy them as Christmas presents for their kids and nobody gets too upset when they suck.

 

I think the failure of E.T. to sell was a symptom of something else,  not the fault of the game itself.   One Atari manufactured far too many ET carts.   Two, this was shortly after the disappointing Pac Man and Donkey Kong, and I think there was some blowback from that--  people not in the mood to buy the next thing.

 

For the NES deal-  we don't know how that would have turned out.   One of the things that might have unsettled Atari execs was the amount of control Nintendo wanted over it--   They would only allow Atari to pick 10 games per year to be on the console, and Nintendo would program them.

 

1 hour ago, Lord Mushroom said:

On the other hand, at the time he left, Atari didn´t have a popular next gen console. The overestimation of the longevity of the 2600 resulted in huge losses before he was fired. Losses which would continue for a while even if he was replaced with someone who ran the company well.

The VCS kept selling well.  They had a next-gen system ready.  The Colecovision released the same year as the 5200 and it stumbled too.  It was a bad year to launch a console

 

But what he didn't anticipate was the chaos of the Commodore price war pushing the price of computers down into the price range of consoles.  He didn't anticipate that demand for videogames could actually drop.

There were some quality issues--  a game as important as Pac Man should never have been released in that state.   The 5200 should have had better joysticks.  

2 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

I have also read that the insider trading thing happened over half a year before he was fired, so that probably had very little to do with him being fired. He was later cleared of any wrongdoings.

Insider trading can be tough to prove, so investigations can take time.   On the other hand yeah it could have just been the excuse they used to get rid of him.

[pacman000]

I thought the ColecoVision was, initially, a success.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, pacman000 said:

I thought the ColecoVision was, initially, a success.

At first yes, but it was ultimately a victim of the crash and cancelled prematurely

[Lord Mushroom]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

The E.T. game idea was sound from a marketing perspective.

Yes, but Atari paid too much for it, and they didn´t have time to do it properly in time for Christmas. This mistake would have been avoided if Ray had had his way.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I think the failure of E.T. to sell was a symptom of something else,  not the fault of the game itself.   One Atari manufactured far too many ET carts.   Two, this was shortly after the disappointing Pac Man and Donkey Kong, and I think there was some blowback from that--  people not in the mood to buy the next thing.

I agree that at some point people stopped believing the hype. But the game should also have been more action packed. Adventure games didn´t appeal to kids, but they didn´t have time to make such a game.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

For the NES deal-  we don't know how that would have turned out.   One of the things that might have unsettled Atari execs was the amount of control Nintendo wanted over it--   They would only allow Atari to pick 10 games per year to be on the console, and Nintendo would program them.

We don´t know how the deal would have worked out for Atari and Nintendo, but without a deal, Nintendo would have been a potent adversary, and probably would have won even if Warner hadn´t sold Atari.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

The VCS kept selling well.

But much less than he expected. If there had been a good next gen console available, the sales of the VCS would have been even lower.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

They had a next-gen system ready.

That is too late. They should have released a good console in 1982 at the latest. Then it would have been difficult for the NES to get established in the U.S., at least without a deal with Atari.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

The Colecovision released the same year as the 5200 and it stumbled too.  It was a bad year to launch a console

 

But what he didn't anticipate was the chaos of the Commodore price war pushing the price of computers down into the price range of consoles.

The Colecovision had a bad controller too. At launch, the Commodore 64 was about 3 times more expensive than the Colecovision. And I figure the cost of making the 5200 was about the same as the Colecovision. A good version of either of these consoles should have been able to do very well from the start.

 

As computer prices dropped, consoles would have become less attractive options of course, unless they were able to respond.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Insider trading can be tough to prove, so investigations can take time.   On the other hand yeah it could have just been the excuse they used to get rid of him.

 I think that the source where I read that he was fired due to this event was simply false.

 

It is possible as you say that it was insider trading, but with a small quantities of stocks, I doubt Warner would care much even if he was guilty. As demonstrated by him staying in power for over half a year more (unless it wasn´t discovered until shortly before he was fired). 

 

Ray Kassar´s Wikipedia page says he was fired due to the losses. It then goes on to mention the insider trading thing, but doesn´t explicitly say that that was a contributing factor.

[Lord Mushroom]

49 minutes ago, zzip said:

At first yes, but it was ultimately a victim of the crash and cancelled prematurely

Colecovision came with a good port of Donkey Kong. They had exclusive rights to the console port. They allowed it to be ported to the 2600 6 months later, but never the 5200. Once those who really wanted a good port of Donkey Kong had bought it, it was considerably less attractive to consumers.

[pacman000]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

At first yes, but it was ultimately a victim of the crash and cancelled prematurely

I thought the ColecoVision's failure had more to do with the Adam's failure, & Coleco's over investment in Cabbage Patch dolls, which proved to be a fad.

[zzip]

38 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Yes, but Atari paid too much for it, and they didn´t have time to do it properly in time for Christmas. This mistake would have been avoided if Ray had had his way.

They probably did..   and produced too many cartridges.  One of the problems is the idea of licensing movies to games was a new idea and nobody had any metrics to guide them on how well they could expect such a game to sell.

 

40 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

I agree that at some point people stopped believing the hype. But the game should also have been more action packed. Adventure games didn´t appeal to kids, but they didn´t have time to make such a game.

Well E.T. is basically "Haunted House" in a different skin-  "find 3 parts, avoid the spooks, and escape"   I think the game mostly works.   The pits are the biggest problem.   Maybe the pits should have been bushes for you to search instead..   I mean who has a lawn full of giant pits?  It's not as much an Adventure game as "Adventure" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" were.  And the action in the movie was escaping the the govt agents just like the game.   Maybe it could have had a bicycle action section where you try recreate the iconic moon shot from the film.  

 

Apart from that I don't think the game is anywhere as close to as bad as its reputation suggests.    I can probably easily name 10 worse VCS games, and a good number of them would start with the word "SwordQuest..."  :)

 

52 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

That is too late. They should have released a good console in 1982 at the latest. Then it would have been difficult for the NES to get established in the U.S., at least without a deal with Atari.

 

1 hour ago, Lord Mushroom said:

The Colecovision had a bad controller too

You keep referring to "good console".   The tech inside the 5200 was fine for 1982.  It was very impressive at the time, as was the Colecovision.   Biggest issue was the controllers.  Yes Coleco had bad controllers too.   Seemed like both were copying what Intellivision did with the keypad and added some tweaks.

 

  Now Atari had enough foresight to start working on the VCS replacement so early that it is inexcusable for the 5200 to have the quality issues it did.  Even still they could have done something to address the controller and stuck with the 5200.    Instead they abandoned it early creating more chaos in the market.

 

The NES hardware wasn't the end-all be-all either.  It had some quality issues reading cards.  The controllers were passable but not particularly great.  Many games had to put additional hardware in the carts.   The deciding factor always were games and price.   The VCS succeeded wildly because it had the right games and was inexpensive.   Same with the NES.

 

In the meantime, Atari abandoned the 5200 and launched the 7800 (late) with mostly the same games.  Atari stopped being on the cutting edge of games for home systems in 1984.   That's why Nintendo won.

Atari needed to address the 5200 shortcomings with improved controller and stuck with it.  By the time the NES showed up in North America in 1985, the 5200 should have had a library 3 years in the making with some compelling games.  Then in 86/87 Atari could have dropped the successor to 5200 (not simply the 7800 as we know it), and it should be an NES killer.  But again it can't just be better hardware, they needed a compelling games strategy

 

 

[Lord Mushroom]

6 minutes ago, zzip said:

But again it can't just be better hardware, they needed a compelling games strategy

I agree.

[high voltage]

The pits in E.T. were only a problem if you're not a good player. But basically, you'd just avoid them. It's like Super Mario: Oh I always fall down the holes....what a stupid game...Well, you 'jump', like 'avoid'. Same principle.

 

E.T. a failure? A million seller nevertheless.

 

NES had shitty controllers (The worst of all controllers). Wrong way 'round for starters (designed for Japanese, not western folk). They were just bad. 

 

And the NES didn't have a great start in USA in the beginning. People (Kids) hated it.  Took them a couple of years, if not more, for success.

You can read about it in this excellent book:

 

 

 

What I thought about Atari: You played , let's say, Galaxian, on the 2600. Great game on the VCS. Later, you've got a 5200, and wow, that Galaxian must be lots better. Of course, it looked and played just like the 2600 version. Not very good. But you couldn't change much, that was the thing.

 

Super Mario Bros. (NES) and later Super Mario World (SNES) , totally different. That's the way to do it.

 

Mind you, after the VCS and the failure of the 5200, we were already playing the best games on the Atari 8-bit or C64 computers. NES couldn't reach those.

Edited August 11, 2021 by high voltage

[Lord Mushroom]

48 minutes ago, high voltage said:

And the NES didn't have a great start in USA in the beginning. People (Kids) hated it.  Took them a couple of years, if not more, for success.

I don´t think that is true. In 1985 they just did a small test release in a limited area, and results were promising. In 1986 they gradually rolled out over the U.S. and sold 1.1 million, and they estimated they could have sold 1.4 million if they hadn´t run out of inventory.

[high voltage]

Of course, you don't think it's true. I didn't expect any other answer from you. I believe the book more than believing you.

Edited August 11, 2021 by high voltage

[zzip]

3 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

In 1986 they gradually rolled out over the U.S. and sold 1.1 million, and they estimated they could have sold 1.4 million if they hadn´t run out of inventory.

That's not really a great number, it's about what the 5200 sold in the first year.

 

The NES popularity explosion came later.   It seemed by 1988/89 they were everywhere.  But not so much in 85/86

[Lord Mushroom]

4 minutes ago, zzip said:

That's not really a great number, it's about what the 5200 sold in the first year.

Not a great number, but a good start. They weren´t struggling in the beginning which high voltage was suggesting.

[harlock76]

Atari would have been in beter positions if they would  have accepted to distribute the NES in North America ...sadly they said no

[pacman000]

Naw, Nintendo would’ve just found some way to double cross them once the system started selling well. And Jack Tramiel wouldn’tve known how to market it anyways.

[DavidD]

14 hours ago, zzip said:

For the NES deal-  we don't know how that would have turned out.   One of the things that might have unsettled Atari execs was the amount of control Nintendo wanted over it--   They would only allow Atari to pick 10 games per year to be on the console, and Nintendo would program them.

I could be wrong, but I thought the deal was that Nintendo would program and provide 10 games of Atari's choice for release on the Atari/Nintendo NES.  That sounds far more positive than negative -- Nintendo provides Atari with 10 games "free" as part of Atari's distribution deal.

 

Was Atari not allowed to produce their OWN games for the system? I assume they would have had some sort of "preferred licensee" deal...

[DavidD]

12 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Colecovision came with a good port of Donkey Kong. They had exclusive rights to the console port. They allowed it to be ported to the 2600 6 months later, but never the 5200. Once those who really wanted a good port of Donkey Kong had bought it, it was considerably less attractive to consumers.

Question time...

Atari released Donkey Kong for home computers.  Does anyone know how Atari/Nintendo/etc. officially defined "computer" versus "console" in this context?

 

I feel like I remember reading that this actually came down to Yamauchi selling the rights to both Atari AND Coleco, and browbeating the argument away with the notion of "console" vs. "computer," but I wasn't sure if we had access to any Atari/Coleco correspondence referring to that.

 

(I am reminded of the infamous Tetris licensing rights, where ELORG appeared to distinguish between "computer rights" and "game system rights" only after Nintendo specifically inquired about the latter.)

[high voltage]

and...D.K. on some

15 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Not a great number, but a good start. They weren´t struggling in the beginning which high voltage was suggesting.

 One of those Nintendo fanboys who doesn't know the facts. I wasn't suggesting anything, I quoted the book.

Educate yourself, read the book.

 

You better get back to your original question, not de-railing

Edited August 12, 2021 by high voltage

[pacman000]

7 hours ago, DavidD said:

Question time...

Atari released Donkey Kong for home computers.  Does anyone know how Atari/Nintendo/etc. officially defined "computer" versus "console" in this context?

 

I feel like I remember reading that this actually came down to Yamauchi selling the rights to both Atari AND Coleco, and browbeating the argument away with the notion of "console" vs. "computer," but I wasn't sure if we had access to any Atari/Coleco correspondence referring to that.

 

(I am reminded of the infamous Tetris licensing rights, where ELORG appeared to distinguish between "computer rights" and "game system rights" only after Nintendo specifically inquired about the latter.)

If I remember right, it was actually "magnetic media rights" (Atari) vs. "cartridge rights" (Coleco.) But I could be mistaken.

[zzip]

7 hours ago, DavidD said:

I could be wrong, but I thought the deal was that Nintendo would program and provide 10 games of Atari's choice for release on the Atari/Nintendo NES.  That sounds far more positive than negative -- Nintendo provides Atari with 10 games "free" as part of Atari's distribution deal.

 

Was Atari not allowed to produce their OWN games for the system? I assume they would have had some sort of "preferred licensee" deal...

It sounded like Atari would not be allowed to produce their own games, but instead would rely on Nintendo to produce the games in Atari's name-  unless I'm misreading the deal.

 

[zzip]

4 minutes ago, pacman000 said:

If I remember right, it was actually "magnetic media rights" (Atari) vs. "cartridge rights" (Coleco.) But I could be mistaken.

So the Adam version of Donkey Kong that upset the Atari execs...  was that on Tape or Cart?

 

It always sounded like the deal was console vs computer, but on the other hand, Frogger seemed to be licensed by media.  Parker Bros producing carts,  Sierra OnLine and Starpath production cassettes/disks often leading to multiple versions of the game on the same system.

Edited August 12, 2021 by zzip

[high voltage]

 

 

Just for Mr Fungus, it is a very interesting, I would recommend it.

 

Edited August 12, 2021 by high voltage

[pacman000]

There are apparently some factual errors Game Over gets wrong: Hardcore Gaming 101: Video Game Book Reviews - Game Over (kontek.net)

Quote

Game Over is also riddled with factual errors that show Sheff either wasn't too much concerned with detail, or how much he was at the mercy of his interviewees. He attest's Nintendo's R&D teams the achievement of developing carts with 8 megabytes of memory for the original Famicom (an amount barely reached with the largest SNES cartridges), introduces Enix, a mildly successful publisher of home computer games before their first Famicom game made the market, as "a start-up formed specifically to create Nintendo games," writes about the 1984-released The Black Onyx that its creator "Rogers sold 100,000 copies in 1980."

The pages posted here are interesting; if true it means Nintendo was planning a lock-out chip before the U.S. market crashed, but we'd need another way to verify things.