An interesting little article from back in the day

[DracIsBack]

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=9B8qAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aioEAAAAIBAJ&dq=atari%207800&pg=6904%2C3114594

[Rex Dart]

Neaaaaaaaaat

 

edit: Shit, and Dio on page 41!

Edited February 10, 2011 by Rex Dart

[+MattelAquarius]

I used to read Semrad's articles every week in the Milwaukee Journal. I belive most of them were on the Wednesday's Green Sheet (an insert for kids). After the time of that article, he covered NES ans SMS, heavily. I remember him covering Double Dragon for the 2600, at one point.

 

Later (or simultaneously, but unknown to me), he wrote for a couple video game magazines.

 

I ended up buying a Master System, just for Phantasy Star, because of his article. Great purchase.

[jbanes]

That's really cool! I searched the archives some more and came across this article:

 

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lORNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=GoQDAAAAIBAJ&dq=atari%207800&pg=3305%2C5630866

 

While the experts have no illusions about the [Video Game] industry's (sic) climbing back to its former heights, they do say there is still substantial consumer interest in the games.

 

Little did they know...

[kool kitty89]

Wow, $9 millon for Sega in '86 vs 6 million for Nintendo, really shows how much better Nintendo was organized for the US market. (not too surprising given they'd been attempting to enter the consumer electronics sector for about 3 years by that point) Kind of a shame they screwed up like that though. (ie didn't invest more in building up a US subsidiary infrastructure or licensing to/partnering with a prominent US distributor -Tonka came in '88, a big improvement but not enough to make a real difference by that point)

 

I wonder what Atari Corp's budget was. (presumably in the sub million dollar range)

 

I do wonder if they priced too low though, I think others have brought this up too. $10 seems pretty low, and all they probably needed to do was maintain a significant gap below the competition for that tactic to work well. (it's a good strategy, but this makes me wonder if they took it a little too far, more so with the games than the hardware -software is where the money is, so the $80 price was probably fine -especially if it was for a slim profit margin, maybe they could afford to drop it a bit more even, maybe a "core system" with no game pack-in- but they probably could have pushed for $15-20 initially if not a fair bit more and still had a big price gap from the competition -but more profits to invest back into other things)

I wonder what the 2600 games were priced at.

 

 

Here's another article from early '86 with a similar topic:

http://tnca.myrmid.com/art9.htm (that also has a quote from Katz mentioning the strong sales of the 2600 in mid/late '85 and how they had shortages)

The reason why Atari is cranking up production of a refurbished 2600 and the new 7800 system is that "last fall, with no advertising or promotional effort on our part, we sold plenty of 2600s. We could have sold hundreds of thousands more if we had the production capacity. It proved to us that the industry is alive and well."

Edited February 12, 2011 by kool kitty89