More Fun With Jack Tramiel

[NovaXpress]

I found an interview with Jack Tramiel's assistant from Commodore. Here's a fun bit:

At one point, I negotiated a contract with Nintendo for all of their games to be ported to Commodore computers, and got them pretty excited about the prospect of being on home-based machines. At the last minute - when the contract was ready to be SIGNED - Jack without warning told me he was canceling the deal I negotiated. I was extremely humiliated by that, and lost face as a result. I believe that my efforts to evangelize home computing to Nintendo had a direct impact on their decision to go into the game console market, because they weren't really thinking about that before I approached them with our licensing deal. I have always regretted Jack's decision because I desperately wanted Donkey Kong and other games on our machines. I believe that Jack decided to snub Nintendo because we had an agreement in place with Bally-Midway.

Smart guy, that Jack. So flash forward to his Atari reign of terror: did he rebuke Nintendo's Famicom offer because of past bitterness? He clearly screwed up by losing the Donkey Kong rights and he had to know it. Maybe the word "Nintendo" conjured up bad memories for him. I never realized that he said "no" to them twice.

http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/michael_tomczyk.htm

[Rybags]

But did the Atari knockback happen BT or AJ (Before Tramiel, or After Jack)?

 

In any case, it cost them about 80% worth of the console market. If they had taken up the request to market the NES, they probably would have had a monopoly that Bill Gates would have been proud of for most of the remainder of the 1980s.

[Bryan]

I thought it was Warner who called off the Famicom distro deal before Jack took over, as they were buying time for the 7800 to be completed. In either case, it appears that Nintendo was dealing with everybody and being treated like crap.

 

-Bry

[NovaXpress]

From what I can find on the web, Nintendo approached Atari about marketing the Famicom in 1984 after Tramiel took over. Considering that Nintendo was doing business with Atari in 83 (Mario Bros), that timeline makes sense.

[jbanes]

From what I can find on the web, Nintendo approached Atari about marketing the Famicom in 1984 after Tramiel took over. Considering that Nintendo was doing business with Atari in 83 (Mario Bros), that timeline makes sense.

Nintendo was negotiating with Kassar to bring the Nintendo console to America. Kassar was really just trying to kill the Nintendo so that it wouldn't compete. When he saw Donkey Kong demoing on the Coleco Adam at the CES (Atari had the rights for the home computer version) he blew a gasket and accussed Nintendo of double-dealing. Conveniently, this was right before the contract was supposed to be signed.

 

By the time Tramiel took over, serious damage had already been done to the relationship. According to Nintendo, dissolution of the talks was a "mutual decision". Which is to say, Atari was never serious, and Nintendo woke up to the fact.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari#The_1980s:_Hurdles_ahead

[NovaXpress]

And this is why Wikipedia sucks. The Atari page says that the Atari-Nintendo negotiations happened in 1983, while their Nintendo page says that it happened in 1985. Screw wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo

[+Allan]

And this is why Wikipedia sucks. The Atari page says that the Atari-Nintendo negotiations happened in 1983, while their Nintendo page says that it happened in 1985. Screw wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo

 

Here the real story from the creators of the 7800.

 

http://www.applefritter.com/mp3/vcf2004/atari.mp3

 

Allan

[jbanes]

And this is why Wikipedia sucks. The Atari page says that the Atari-Nintendo negotiations happened in 1983, while their Nintendo page says that it happened in 1985. Screw wikipedia.

I just posted that because it was the first reference I came up with. Atari7800 has internal memos that help corroborate the story. The Coleco Adam bit is repeated in many books on Classic Gaming. ClassicGaming.com references the book Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames as its source.

 

Basically, it's a well corroborated story. Even if we assume that the Coleco incident was made up or exaggerated, Ataris memos show that negotiations had started by the time of Kassar, not Tramiel.

 

Edit: It looks like the author of the Nintendo article meant to say the same thing as the Atari and Famicom articles. However, his wording was a bit clumsy, resulting in the impression that the events were happening around 1985. Which would make no sense given that the author references the Video Game Crash. I've modified the wording a bit, and added a reference at the end.

Edited June 21, 2006 by jbanes

[NovaXpress]

There's the real stuff.

 

Wikipedia is a piss-poor source of information. What's the point of a reference spource when it requires extra reference sources? This is why "open source journalism" is a bad idea at the core.

[Godzilla]

man just imagine if nin had gone commodore... super metroid programmed on the amiga... :-)

[Student Driver]

man just imagine if nin had gone commodore... super metroid programmed on the amiga... :-)

 

If the suppositions are correct that the loss of the Commodore deal spurred Nintendo's entry into home systems, a Commodore deal could have effectively sidelined Nintendo as an arcade-only company-- no Metroid, Zelda, etc.