EG Nov 1983, Atari was top selling before the crash of 1984

[high voltage]

Industry leader no less.

Edited January 4, 2017 by high voltage

[BassGuitari]

Interesting snapshot of an interesting time.

"Atari rebounded powerfully in 1983 after a weak year..." In terms of quality of software, perhaps.

"...industry leader." Besides Coleco, who else was there, really? Mattel was almost completely out of the industry by this point. Magnavox, Astrovision, and Zircon were never serious threats even in whatever primes they had. Emerson was never even a blip on the radar.

This makes me think of Russia under Nicholas II in the years before the revolution--an aristocratic facade of opulence and grandeur masking a bubbling cauldron of abject poverty and misery that was about to boil over. Or the Titanic for a short time after it hit that iceberg and everybody thought everything was fine.

[empsolo]

Wait. Isn't this the same E.G. Magazine that would say in January of 1985 that the console industry is dead and that Nintendo shouldn't even bother trying to shop around the NES to prospective retailers at the CES?

 

 

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[BillLoguidice]

Wait. Isn't this the same E.G. Magazine that would say in January of 1985 that the console industry is dead and that Nintendo shouldn't even bother trying to shop around the NES to prospective retailers at the CES?

 

 

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The infamous AVS quote. I'd argue that as originally envisioned, it very well might have failed. The redesigned AVS that became the NES was quite a bit different than what EG actually reported on in that quick blurb. Anyway, with every videogame company suffering major losses or out of the business entirely, what reason was there to think at the time that a Japanese company would rediscover the secret sauce?

[empsolo]

 

The infamous AVS quote. I'd argue that as originally envisioned, it very well might have failed. The redesigned AVS that became the NES was quite a bit different than what EG actually reported on in that quick blurb. Anyway, with every videogame company suffering major losses or out of the business entirely, what reason was there to think at the time that a Japanese company would rediscover the secret sauce?

Look, all I'm saying is that E.G. Magazine in a 1984 issue paints a Baghdad Bob type picture of the state of both the industry and Atari and then turns around in 1985 and tries saying that the console industry is dead and that companies not named Atari shouldn't even bother.

 

What EG magazine did wasn't journalism, it was out and out corporate cheerleading masquerading as as gaming journalism.

 

 

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[BillLoguidice]

Look, all I'm saying is that E.G. Magazine in a 1984 issue paints a Baghdad Bob type picture of the state of both the industry and Atari and then turns around in 1985 and tries saying that the console industry is dead and that companies not named Atari shouldn't even bother.

 

What EG magazine did wasn't journalism, it was out and out corporate cheerleading masquerading as as gaming journalism.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

All I'm saying is that no matter how they got there, their later assessment was arguably correct.