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Fair enough. Enjoy being eaten by your crocodiles, and I'll just continue dying from umm... frogs?

I did say "MORE THAN twice" I don't notice that at all. Price tag isn't increasing. I'm getting more now, not less. I don't even bother with buying DLC / season passes /microtransactions for most games, because there is usually more than enough in the base game. I usually get tired of playing it before I run out of content. And yet you used the 'adjusted for inflation' in your first line, and in the next you say it's meaningless. Which is it? I used to pay $30 in the 80s for new games. Even if you don't adjust game prices for inflation, they only doubled in sticker price since then while my salary more than quadrupled since then. So they are more affordable at $60 now than at $30 then. Some games had higher $70 or $80 price tags in the 90s. By what metric are they getting more expensive? Look at it another way, a 4 KB game used to cost $30, now a 25Gb game costs $60. All those Gb of data requires teams of people years to make, who all must get paid for their time. That 4K game used to be programmed by a single guy in a matter of weeks. So it so costs much more to make a game today, but the price hasn't risen at the same rate as development costs. How exactly are we getting ripped off today again?

I think it was an overreaction to a non-issue. You never saw DVD/Bluray players fail because there are "too many bad movies on the market" (and there are) or music players fail because of too many crappy albums. Most successful game consoles have a much larger software library than the 2600, including more bad games than the 2600 had games in total. Retailers generally know which titles to stock, which are titles are budget titles, which titles are niche, etc. And stock, price and place them (or not) appropriately. So the idea that the 2600 got killed by poor quality third party releases I don't think is quite accurate. This problem isn't unique to the 2600 and doesn't kill other systems, so what gives? I think the real problem around 81-82, the VCS was so hot, retail believed they could sell any game in that format. They took on unknown titles from unknown companies and mixed them with the proven publishers. They made a bad bet, and lost. So they marked down the games that couldn't sell. Again, bargain-bin media was nothing new, it existed in music before this. But other publishers weren't prepared to suddenly compete with bargain-bin games and they suffered as consumers were all of a sudden spending money on several $5 games instead of a single $30-game. But that's a problem that would sort itself out too as consumers found they had all the games in the bargain bin they wanted or realized they were $5 for a reason. So it wasn't that the existence of those games themselves that were a problem. It was retailers overestimating how many games from untested publishers they could sell simply because they were VCS games. These were just speed bumps for a young, developing market. And those problems would have sorted themselves out and struck a balance in another year or two if everyone hadn't panicked and written off consoles as dead in response.

Is it really though? You had pit with alligators, pit without crocodiles, same pit opening/closing, and swinging vines for when there were no crocodiles. Sure the pit changed from blue to black sometimes to designate water/void/quicksand, but the graphic was identical otherwise. Or you could take the underground route and encounter a scorpion on virtually every screen. It was just a few variations on the same basic screen Pitfall II added swimming, balloon riding, ducking under birds, vertical and horizontal levels, strategic falling to avoid creatures, and checkpoints so you don't start from scratch, and an actual objective other than "how many screens can you survive?" Yes Pitfall II is frustrating and I usually switch it off after a couple of deaths. But I don't feel like there's a point to playing the first at all anymore.

Exactly, Adventure is a great example. Games in that genre today have vast open worlds where you can spend hours exploring, and completing quests. But gamers today seem convinced they are getting ripped off left and right and have never had it so terrible. Perspective is sorely missing. And yet we have Witcher III today with 200+ hours of content. But why do you need a game to last a year? Whenever I'm still working on my first playthrough for two months, I just want it to finally end already so I can move onto something else.

You're complaining that a game only lasts you "months"? What other form of entertainment gives you "months worth" of entertainment for $60? You can barely see a two-hour concert or broadway show for that, only a few two-hour movies, etc. I've bought many games in the past where I was lucky to get a week's worth of enjoyment out of. Games back then didn't usually provide hours and hours of content. It was often the same basic gameplay played over and over. But of course with gamers expectation that games must have 30 hours of content minimum is bound to cause developers to add padding. Some stories just don't need 30, 40, 50 hours to tell them.

I'd argue that Blitter was actually a big deal for business apps, since it made everything text-based and GEM base feel much snappier. Using text-based apps even on a slow PC felt faster than doing the equivalent on an ST because PC still had fast character modes, while all text on ST is bit-mapped. Adding blitter helps close that gap

I found the original Pitfall to be monotonous. I loved Pitfall II because it mixed things up

I did pick up a classic IBM PC when my school was getting rid of them. I too thought it would be fun to see what it could do. It ended up not being much fun at all. Anything it could do, my modern PC could do better. The IBM just did everything slowly. Painfully slowly. Plus it was large and took up alot of space. The build quality was great though-- built like a tank, great keyboard.

Some of the videos you find online were likely captured through an emulator because it's easier. They don't always get the colors right. Also games designed for CRT look better on CRT in general. The designers created the graphics on CRTs to look good on their screens. Plus the scanlines on those displays help hide the blockiness of low res graphics.

I thought there were minor differences between XL and XE os too, nothing compatibility killing like going from 800->XL though. Also Atari Basic on XEs finally fixed the system-hang bugs that plagued XL and 400/800 BASIC

Even the early PC got many of the same games that other platforms did. It seemed well-supported as a gaming platform from the magazines I was reading. But it was ill-suited for action games, and those were usually inferior to the 8-bit versions. It was fine for other genres though. Oh and there was the short-lived PCjr which was better for games.

yeah, Print Shop was kind of a killer app in the mid 80s, wasn't it?

I think the difference was Atari's position was only they should publish for their own platform. Because up to that point, there had been no precedent for third-party publishers on game consoles. Nintendo's stance was "only 5 games per publisher per year on NES", and they had to give exclusivity. This was enforced through technology. In retrospect, Nintendo's was far more anti-competitive and they got away with it for years. Atari's didn't survive the first court case, so it was not even effectively enforced.

Add these lines for additional protection: 5 print "Please pry off the Break key with a screwdriver before continuing, then press any key to continue" 6 input $a

Yes, it's exactly like those expansion packs. In some cases things were worse back then. For instance I remember when I got Rollercoaster Tycoon 2-- It was practically the same as RCT 1, except with added content. Would have been DLC today, but they charged full price for it then, calling it a new game. :/

Except I get far more content in todays games than I ever did in the past. Games drop in price quicker than they ever did- if you can wait 3 months you can probably get the game 30-50% off And I know I earn more than twice what I earned in the 90s. The sticker price of new games hasn't doubled since then. In some cases, it was even higher back then https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/an-inconvenient-truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time/

For me, I learned to program with it. I did also use it for word processing for school. I remember the program "Print Shop" becoming a major thing for producing flyers and banners in school too. Also BBSing As for businesses, I wouldn't be surprised to see them in mom-and-pop shops, but not serious business

There's a revisionism in games media that tends to ignore or downplay anything released before NES and NES and Nintendo franchises get placed on some kind of weird pedestal. I wouldn't call it hostility, but those of us who don't have nostalgia for the NES just see it's importance differently than those who grew up with it I guess.

So why did your Mom let you use the computer but not the disk drive?

Well I was a kid who couldn't drive, and Kmart was within walking distance of me. And I swear they weren't as crap as they are now! Sounds like your wife gave you an "Error 138 - Device does not respond / device timeout"

I totally understand why professional musicians/audio people hung onto Atari longer than the others, it wasn't just the hardware but the software too. But for someone like me, everything I needed from a PC to make the jump was available by 1992-93

The gravis was not just limited to the included sounds, it could play any digital audio. But when it came to midi music, it sounded miles ahead of the OPL2/3 chips that Ad-lib/SoundBlaster was using at the time, as did all wavetable cards. Gravis was also proactive with developers, ensuring their cards got widely supported-- no point in buying an expensive soundcard if software support for it is hit and miss. Yes you could play Midi through an actual midi device, if 1) you had one 2) didn't mind cords running everywhere. But I was an end user, gamer, multimedia user. I am not an "audio professional", I didn't have much use for audio recording. This rig was fine for my needs. As much as I loved Atari, the Falcon CPU was too weak and support was almost non-existent by that point.

Error 143 = "You keep feeding me tapes from that 3-pack of cassettes you bought for $1 down at the K-mart, then I'm not going to pretrend to try to retrieve your data"

Looks like Ultima, on a 2600?!? *head explodes*