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Yeah ST also had a bunch of companies producing development tools so anybody with a standard ST could get started developing games, didn't need Atari knocking at your door to beg you to port something. For consoles you need to obtain a dev system. Jaguar had a Falcon-based dev system that by all accounts didn't work very well and had documentation that was problematic. So for a developer, developing games for it was a headache, for an audience that wasn't guaranteed to materialize, add in the Tramiels tendancy to burn bridges, it's not surprising they'd have trouble attracting developers to an unproven and complicated system.

I think too often a CEO is judged by the bottom line. By that measure Ray Kassar would be the best ever (Atari became the fastest growing company in US history under his tenure) and worst ever (losses of $1 million per day before his ouster). But I don't think there was a vision for that era, the company was in the right place at the right time to ride the early 80s videogame wave. But they couldn't have planned for the boom, they didn't know it would be so short-lived there's lots of signs of them flailing around trying to figure out what worked and doing things seem dumb in retrospect. Still someone at the company had the foresight to license Space Invaders and Pac-man, which put them above their competition.

Haha, for a minute I thought TrogdarRobusto was Wade Rosen, Yeah Leonard is more of an engineer, definitely doesn't come off as cutthroat like his father. True but he made a fundamental business error assuming everything is a commodity like bananas or textiles. Bananas are essentially the same no matter what plantation grew them. But for videogames, you want hits, and want developers who can produce hits, definitely not interchangeable!

Well Warner could have hired anybody too, they didn't have to put Ray in charge. I forget which documentary I watched, but they interviewed both Ray and Ray's former boss at Warner. (forgot his name) It was clear from the interviews that Ray's boss understood the game business (Warner is an entertainment company after all), but it was obvious Ray did not. He came from the textile industry. He thought he could run Atari like a textile company. He couldn't conceive why game programmers wanted credit, they didn't do that in textiles!

Dip switches can be annoying, especially if you have large fingers like me. Back in the 80s, XONOX found a low-tech way to put multiple games on cart, the Double-ender: So I present the 4-ender And 10-ender for the 10-in-1 games, it comes in a pizza box

I criticize the Tramiels a lot, but at least they knew what they wanted to do, and had some success. They just did a lot of it half-assed and burned bridges Ray Kassar though.. I thought people were too hard on him until I watched him interviewed in a documentary.. He really didn't understand the business or knew what he was doing. The company still had its best years in spite of him, but burned through cash at an unsustainable rate, creating the fire sale conditions that allowed the Tramiels to come in.

Thanks, searching for "Pools of Radiance" and even "Dungeons and Dragons" wasn't returning results- their store interface could use some work.

I think I cracked the code Instead of complaining about them repeating inaccuracies about this game, we just start telling these journalists to "git gud" Then watch the narrative change from "ET is the worst game ever" to "Why ET needs an easy mode"

Was this a recent purchase? I can't find it on GoG

Heh, When I buy a game that I can add to my emulation setup, I'm curating a library and the purchase was totally worth it, even if I never play it When I buy a game that sits in my Steam or PS5 and never gets played, it's a backlog and I feel guilty about wasting money I guess it helps that the former is ususaly cheaper than the latter

The nice bonus of rebuying games on GoG that I have on CD/DVD is they will run without the requirement of needing the CD in the drive. So yeah I have done this. Especially at the bargain prices you can find sometimes.

Some of the games sold on VCS are native 2600 games and 7800 games and could run on real hardware, but most of these games are available outside of the VCS too.

One of my kids has gotten bitten by the retrogame bug and has started hitting retrogame shops to collect physical media Only thing... for him "retro" means Wii/GBA era

The better question is why are there 6 ghosts?

More like we're told how great the Jag could have been if only developers could figure out how to unlock the hidden power The system held promise, but had a weak games library. You hit the nail on the head, Tramiel Atari never spend enough on game development/marketing to be truly competitive.

Release some ST content first, then we'll talk

Not everything is listed but it would barely account to 1% of the entries. I know you were joking but that's not a lot. The different releases for the same title would make up for something like 1 or 1.5% of the total number. Not huge either. Yeah it's an exaggeration, but when I'm researching games on the site, I do encounter a lot of Boulder Dash type games and also Pinball. Are those actual releases or just something created in Boulderdash Construction Set/Pinball Construction Set?

If the sale had not happened, the 7800 would have released in 84 and almost certainly Atari would have continued to port their arcade titles to their home systems. Also Nintendo did not want to compete with this Atari iteration so they may never have entered the American market.

True, there was a team. Also I think the fact that Atari had the rights to the Amiga (until Commodore swooped in at the last minute) stings. But we don't really know what the Amiga under Atari would have looked like. Supposedly they were working on a console design for the chips and/or use it in an unreleased 1850XLD. It may have been quite a bit different from the Amiga we know and love today. Maybe the project would have gone the way of the Transputer once Jack was in charge? Keeping the chipset out of Commodore's hands being enough reward for him?

Could be, but seeing that Jack was mainly interested in creating a new C64, I doubt he had much interest in the arcade division so it was likely a mutual agreement

It was Infrogrames, who was an Ubisoft-like publisher who acquired the Atari name and changed their entire company name to "Atari". They were based in France, so it's not likely they had any old employees. At the time I found it a little bit much to swallow... on one hand it was cool that the name was back from the dead, on the other hand, the games that they were publishing didn't feel like proper Atari games, even though I liked a lot of the games they published. Atari was "supposed" to be arcade/action games, not Dungeon and Dragons RPGs, or point and click Tycoon games. Guess it didn't help that they were using that fat-fuji logo instead of the classic one. Then a funny thing happened, they went bankrupt and that era came to a close. I started to actually miss the time when Atari was a relevant publisher of modern games! I suppose the moral of the story is just be glad the brand is still around in some form doing something.. because given the history, you never know how long it's going to last

If I remember right, at the Belagio you could come and go and avoid walking through the casino floor. A lot of the others you can't avoid it. Might have something to do with how nice the hotel is. You don't want to subject your wealthy guests to that

I don't think if has anything to do with being a rival. Most of Coleco's games library is owned by something else, there's not much to be gained from purchasing the small amount that isn't. Parker Bros is similar, they published lots of popular games, but almost all of it was licensed from someone else.

In addition to the arcade ports, many of Coleco's original games based on licensed properties like Smurfs & Wargames. If you bought the Coleco catalog at best you get a few unencumbered sports and educational games.

I guess ultimately it shows that to create a real Atari product, you don't have to be an original employee nor do you have to even work for Atari (not even as a contractor), and you can create the product without Atari's knowledge. So what makes an Atari product an Atari product seems to come down to the logo and the styling. Styling is hard to quantify, but for instance I always had trouble accepting the Atari PC2, 3 4 & 5 as real Atari products because they looked like generic 80's PCs that any clone maker could have cranked out. On the other hand, I can accept the new VCS as an Atari product even though it too is essentially a PC because it had a lot of effort put into styling. Maybe a good example is Star Wars. Ralph McQuarrie created a lot of the visual designs for the original trilogies that have become iconic. Disney doesn't have Raplh McQuarrie, so visually the new Star Wars seems to mix and match some of his ideas, but they never seem to quite get it right. It always looks like a knock off instead of something new, bold and iconic like Ralph would have designed.