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Game Informer's 40 years of videogame milestones-- ignores Atari


zzip

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Saw this in the most recent issue. I'd link to it, but it's behind a paywall, so you will just have to take my word for it :)

 

Anyway they printed a timeline of what they considered significant milestones in gaming since 1977. There's not a single Atari milestone, barely even a mention of them in the article (they mentioned Activision was founded by ex-Atari employees).

 

The VCS had a pretty significant impact on gaming one would think, but nope! not a mention. For 1977 they mention some obscure Nindendo Othello handheld you probably never heard of instead. Mattel, Coleco, etc? Forget about it!

 

It is what it is. I've long said that game journalists act like nothing significant happened in gaming before Nintendo, and this just illustrates it more clear than ever. Well on the bright side, at least they didn't blame the crash on ET!

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I read that article last night myself. I suppose their mention of Activision forming and the video game crash was "Atari" enough for them. I thought it was even weirder that the release of the Sega Master System got it's own entry, but I would hardly call the SMS a milestone in (US) vg history. That spot belongs to Atari VCS.

 

I have to agree zzip - game journalism loves to overlook everything pre-NES. Considering that a lot of younger gamers are probably the main audience of Game Informer, I guess I was glad to see any vg history mentioned, even if it is skewed against the very systems and people that created the whole darn industry!

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These millennial game journalists are so Orwellian in their mindset that they're hell bent on erasing Atari from history books because they never grew up with the 2600.

 

"Nintendo invented video games, and there has only been Nintendo games!" , they constantly cry out.

 

I just wish there was some effort of preserving Atari history (both good & bad) on YouTube so non-reading gamers would at least acknowledge that yes Atari existed and it mattered to video games.

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Thanks zzip, now I want to read a Game Informer article. That isn't something that usually happens.

 

I guess people write what they know, and when writers are short-sighted youngsters who only know about the ancient NES through revivals anyway, it's a lot to ask for them to dig up old Atari.

 

Just you wait: arcade games will be the next thing to "vanish from history" in this way.

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Thanks zzip, now I want to read a Game Informer article. That isn't something that usually happens.

 

I guess people write what they know, and when writers are short-sighted youngsters who only know about the ancient NES through revivals anyway, it's a lot to ask for them to dig up old Atari.

lol, yeah but yet they bothered to dig up that old obscure Nintendo Computer Othello device. It was so significant, It doesn't even have it's own Wikipedia page, it's just listed as a line-item in the "list of Nintendo products" page. :P

 

Although I was mistaken when I said it was a handheld, it's actually a cocktail-style arcade machine, image below.

 

nintendo_computer_othello_brochure_2_03.

 

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My gut reaction was along the same lines [as MrMaddog's].

 

I don't think that the age the writer/s were born into is much to blame. Revisionist bias plays a role for sure. Atari's place in video game, cultural, and consumer media history is more of a well cemented fact than an opinion. I point the blame at a culture of irresponsible and lazy journalism more than anything. Credibilty and integrity takes a backseat on the part of those up the ladder, from the writers to the editors to the publisher.

Edited by MadZiontist
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>_< >_< >_<

 

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~gkomatsu/Text/don1<-Someone email this to Game Informer

 

Seriously, this makes me mad. Wasn't Nintendo's earliest video game product a home pong knockoff?

 

It's just time; in the late 90's most classic gaming websites were focused on Atari and the early 80's arcade scene. I'm looking forward to the day the NES is ignored for the PS1, but for some reason I doubt that'll happen. Nintendo's still around; they still have influence. That raises their prominence so they'll be remembered and written about. It's like Disney. He didn't found the 1st popular animation studio, but how cares about Bray today?

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There's really no excuse here. It's not like glossing over Intellivision or ColecoVision. Even Joe Average knows about the Atari 2600 for the most part. Without reading it, I can only assume there was some explanation for why so much was glossed over.

 

Even the opening paragraph which tries to trace back the first video game finds some old examples of video games, listed some oscilloscope "game" from the 40s as an early example of video games, but couldn't find room to mention Pong (not even Ralph Baer's work for that matter)

 

But it does go into quite a lot of detail about the pre-NES history of Nintendo

 

My guess is that it was written by a Nintendo fan who put too much weight into their importance given the length of the article, and this came at the expense of other early pioneers.

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Did they skip the Channel F too?

 

I think so. I mean I don't have the article in front of me, so I could be wrong about some of the details. But I can't recall any pre-NES home consoles mentioned. I remember it mentioned pacman fever, the founding of Activision, and the crash (explained as simply "too many consoles on the market") from that era.

 

If I scanned it in and uploaded it, would that be too much of a copyright violation? Or is that fair use?

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Anybody have Twitter? Tweet at GameInformer and GameStop for skipping any mention of the granddaddy of the modern video game era.

 

Ah, I think you just hit on something there. GameStop (who publishes GameInformer) doesn't sell Atari stuff, and has nothing to gain from pumping up dead companies, even for a "history" article.

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I've heard people my age frequently undercut the 2600, it caused the crash! It was 6 years old and simply needed a fitting successor

the vic 20 was available! 4 years after the 2600

I always find it in sufferable when people don't do their research first

 

It's real successor was the C64, but nobody sees that as a console even though I'd bet 90%+ of its owners probably used it mostly for games.

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It's real successor was the C64, but nobody sees that as a console even though I'd bet 90%+ of its owners probably used it mostly for games.

 

I'm sure 80 - 90% of the owners of most of the popular home computers we know used them mostly for games (say, 75% of the time used) up to at least the early 90s. I think that's a good thing, because if they didn't, there'd be far fewer of us around today still discussing and using the old machines.

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I'm sure 80 - 90% of the owners of most of the popular home computers we know used them mostly for games (say, 75% of the time used) up to at least the early 90s. I think that's a good thing, because if they didn't, there'd be far fewer of us around today still discussing and using the old machines.

 

absolutely! But so many people bought the C64 in particular that I feel it's like the missing 'console' that bridges the gap between the 2600 and the NES

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I'm certainly not defending them, but I see the article was by Andrew Reiner, who has been at GI from very early on, if not Day One. I'm not sure who's still left there, I guess it certainly could be a buncha hipster millenials by now.

 

GI is a locally based (Minnesota) magazine, just as GameStop was based here & started as FuncoLand. I met some of the original staff when their band Unbelievable Jolly Machine played a downtown Mpls. bar. They must all be about my age now (mid 40s).

 

That said, the last time I looked thru a GI issue, it took about 2 min, there was nothing of interest to me in it (classic gaming). That was years & years ago.

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(haven't read the article yet)

 

I still get the magazine and usually read it cover to cover. A few years ago they had a top 200 games of all time that excluded Space Invaders. That issue also excluded the C64 100%, but they had room for multiple Final Fantasy games - lame. That was the moment that convinced me they weren't interested in actual gaming journalism. I get that you want to write the article for your audience, but at least MENTION Atari or (in the case of SI) the game that almost single-handedly kicked off a cultural phenomenon.

 

I will say though that for about a year they had a very nice classic gaming section at the back of the magazine (usually 2 pages). They still kinda do, but it has lost some of its quality recently. I'm going from memory, but that segment featured topics like the Art of Atari and the history of game controllers (which included multiple Atari controllers), so there was some early gaming representation.

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