How powerful was the cancelled Atari Panther compared to the Atari ST/Amiga?

[empsolo]

28 minutes ago, zzip said:

This is why I say the 7800 was a panic move by Atari, and a mistake.  Their reaction to CV was "OMG we need better sprites!" apparently, and they got a console with kick-ass sprites, terrible sound, and slightly better graphics than 5200 (almost every game using 160w pixels, just like 5200).  Probably should have rode the 5200 out for a few years, focusing on high-quality games, and designing a killer replacement to come out no sooner than 1986

What was the original plan for the 7800 anyhow in terms of Game development? Was GCC going to handle the whole thing or was Atari Inc going to handle game development post 84 launch? Howard Scott Warshaw, interviews where the 7800 comes up, points out that nobody working on home console games had seen the schematics let alone work with any prototypes or dev kits. He is pretty sure that Ray Kassar would’ve forced Atari Inc employees to work on a system they had no clue on how to program and learn it by the seat of their pants.

[Lost Dragon]

@zzip

At a time Jack Tramiel was talking tough about Atari's plans for the CD ST and ST CD Drive. over here in the UK, Bob Gleadow was painting it in a very different and far colder light. 

 

He felt such systems were only of use to the database market. 

 

 

Atari and to be fair, Commodore UK, often found themselves lumbured with directives and hardware from the US arm. 

 

Commodore UK for example, knew the CDTV was far too expensive and the marketing angle being used was the wrong one, but had to stick to the rigid policies imposed on them and it bombed. 

 

This is the first interview with Michael Katz i have listened in on and from 48 mins in, he talks of Jack Tramiel main motivation with the 7800 was seeing it as a revenue base/cash source, with which to fund the ST. 

 

Jack had no interest in the video games market. 

 

 

[zzip]

12 minutes ago, Lost Dragon said:

This is the first interview with Michael Katz i have listened in on and from 48 mins in, he talks of Jack Tramiel main motivation with the 7800 was seeing it as a revenue base/cash source, with which to fund the ST.

Which always seemed to me to be the case.   But that idea is contentious in this thread for some reason.  ?

 

47 minutes ago, empsolo said:

What was the original plan for the 7800 anyhow in terms of Game development? Was GCC going to handle the whole thing or was Atari Inc going to handle game development post 84 launch?

Not sure, but Atari was negotiating with Nintendo for the NES around this same time,  and the deal there was going to be "Atari picks the titles and Nintendo programs them".   They might have had the same plans for GCC

[Lost Dragon]

As for Atari doing everything right in the UK from a games perspective... ? 

 

When Atari International UK were asked why games on the Atarisoft label were so expensive, Pole Position on Cassette for the BBC and 48K ZX Spectrum, £14.99, Donkey King Jr on Spectrum at same price, Ms Pac-Man on BBC and Electron at £12.99, they replied there would be no compromise for the sake of cost. 

 

The failure to realise both hardware and software was priced far too high for the UK market, cost them dear. 

[empsolo]

I still don't get how in the world Atari UK was dismissive of the CD-ROM. Did they not pay attention to what was happening in the PC Clone market and understand that CD-ROMs were going to break open the market rather quickly with the multimedia revolution?

[Lost Dragon]

19 minutes ago, empsolo said:

I still don't get how in the world Atari UK was dismissive of the CD-ROM. Did they not pay attention to what was happening in the PC Clone market and understand that CD-ROMs were going to break open the market rather quickly with the multimedia revolution?

I think Jack was watching the Commodore CDTV closely to see how it fared. 

 

Bob Gleadow did accept it's potential for massive games. 

 

[ColecoKing]

While there are many problems with the viewpoints of the OP I don't see much better viewpoints from the opposition. Nintendo and Atari were in two completely different situations that weren't comparable, Nintendo didn't have any games we hadn't already seen before and it took years before the NES was widely praised by reporters across the board. It wasn't instantly like recent gaming press or wikipedia have said for years and year, mostly due to the fact that many grew up as fans of the console. IGN itself for example was a Nintendo fansite originally.

This was never a discussion about the games, that belief was something that became the standard caused by biased magazines as the years went on, just like the completely nonsensical reports that would place ET and PacMan 2600 as core reasons behind the crash which is completely wrong.

To be crystal clear it didn't matter how many side-scrollers or Rpgs the NES had, which neither were new outside the subgenre Jrpg, which itself wasn't even successful in America until 1997, the truth is people still wanted Atari after the crash. In America people would have bent backwards for Atari and it showed in what happened after the smoke started to clear. Atari game software grew leaps and bounds in a near V-shaped recovery while console inventory was starting to clear shelves prompting a price drop that would clear even more inventory.

The 7800's Backwards compatibility, after reports that Atari was getting release it again in late 1985, was considered a big deal and consumer interest was high despite media skepticism at the time. Some of the write-ins to columns would comment on articles assuming the BC would mean the replacement of the 2600, and were excited they would still be able to play all their old games while new and exciting titles would come out specifically for the new gaming device

The year after Atari had issues fulfilling orders for both its consoles because it was only recently that the ST rejuvenated the companies bottom line and they had to rush to increase production of software and hardware. Atari had the biggest marketshare by far and had the industry in the bag again.

But that ended as the year closed, November 1986. The decision to sell a new 2600 was always one that made people scratch their heads but when they decided to CONTINUE selling the new 2600 despite the demand meant that Atari would split their install base, which pissed a lot of people off, especially those who were investors that stuck to the company like glue through think and thin. This is when Atari gave the market to Nintendo.

The new 2600 was sold at fire sale prices with adequate marketing and new software, competing and selling against the companies own flagship machine. The whole reason for having 2600 compatibility was to remove the 2600 off the scene while moving the userbase to the newer device. To entice even more potential buyers, the new machine would also aim to be the cheapest gaming device on the market. Instead they made the new 2600 the cheapest device on the market and the result caused the 2600 to outperform the 7800. Things got worse in 1987 when Atari decided to delay the 7800 launch in Europe because they believed that a TV compatible XE computer would have a better chance of penetrating the market since the A8 machines were still popular gaming computers there, outdated but popular.

The game was over when Atari and Sega were written in the same sentence as failures that would struggle to sell a quarter million machines during the entire summer quarter with both companies cutting the price of their "unappealing" consoles to try and stay relevant. The narrative was set and couldn't be shaken off. While Nintendo only sold above 4 million consoles in America that year despite the collapse of its competitors, it was becoming more clear that the previous mindset believing all 3 consoles were competitive would cease and never return giving birth to a new mindset that Nintendo was either the only gaming device in town, or that the other two were unappealing machines that only catered to those who had fringe interests and so everyone brought Nintendo systems and retailers most of the time only stocked Nintendo consoles, and when magazines, TV, and Radio amplified this the game was over.

Of course I'm not saying games don't matter, but there wasn't a way for Atari to turn things around even if they had similar games at that point just look at Sega who did have similar games. Instead what Atari should have done was keep to the original plan of making the 7800 the one and only flagship gaming machine as well as being the most affordable option available. By the end of 1986 Atari would have had similar or higher sales numbers than the NES which would help in attracting old developers back, as well as appeal to new ones since the 7800 would have been considered competitive in this scenario. Sure, there would still be games Atari would never get but it would work in reverse order as well.

Atari was actually given time that they unfortunately squandered, and that's something that is almost never touched upon in retrospective media because just like the media of the time they ignored how badly the 2600 cannibalized sales.

The narrative that Atari should have tried harder or weren't interested in games was never the problem because they had the race won when it started and decided to sabotage themselves making it so that they would no longer have enough time to cement themselves in the market and ended up becoming an also-ran or as the media said back then "an unappealing fringe device" which is not a label you want attached to your flagship gaming product.

I don't put as much blame on the XEGS as other people sometimes do though. Yes, I suppose that the brief interest from the American market at the start may have cannibalized some sales, but that was so short-lived I don't think that even mattered. The XEGS was made specifically for Europe and from information I have seen over the years it was more popular than the actual XE computer. I have found forums where people shopping online for old XE machines would use XE and XEGS interchangeably. Years ago I had looked through some online European auction sites and saw several listings under XE and every picture was a XEGS machine except a handful at the bottom of the page.

Based on this I am making an assumption that Ataris' quest to penetrate the European market with the XEGS must have had some success, even if it may have been just a little. if so it would be the only console decision they made that didn't blow up in their faces so I supposed credit is due.

But in summary all Atari had to do is sell the 7800 by itself meaning more consoles manufactured, which meant more product on shelves, which in return would make it easier to rebuild connections with retailers that were less than pleased by the brands previous actions, and almost every Atari game cartridge available in store would all work on one machine. It seems awfully simple in hindsight, have one machine selling at $80 with new powerful graphics.

But of course some incompetent ass or maybe even a group of them came together and said lets cannibalize ourselves and make one of the main selling points of our flagship product irrelevant because....................We snorted to much of the good stuff up our nose? I mean it was the 80's I don't know. Lol.

[empsolo]

I guess the operative thinking for the 2600 jr was this idea that low income families may not yet be able to afford a 7800 even whatever it's launch price was. And that $50 price point would mean that 2600 software and console molds that had been sitting Atari's warehouse shelves would be cleared for newer inventory as these lower income families saw the 2600 at fifty bucks as a steal. True, it may have taken away from 7800 advertising  and game development resources, but here's the thing though. Post generation console revisions aren't a bad idea. The operative idea behind them is to get lower income families into your ecosystem who aren't ready to upgrade to the latest and greatest. A good example of this how Sony marketed the PSOne as a more portable and cost reduced Playstation 1 and promoted games such as Spyro the Dragon, Alien Resurrection and several other late generation PS1 games to get people onto the Playstation ecosystem. This was despite the fact that the Playstation 2 was just around the corner and was touted as being backwards compatible with most ps1 games. And it seemed to have worked successfully for Sony considering how long the PS2 era would end up lasting in terms of time and sales.

Edited September 10, 2020 by empsolo

[ColecoKing]

zzip

Atari 7800 was much more powerful than the 5200 don't discount Maria, the problem was that they cheaped out on the architecture which reduced the size of the bus they used. Issues in architecture would cause the GPU, CPU, or both to freeze while other parts of the console were executing and lie in wait which made the system more difficult to program for.

I would like to add clarity to the 5200 vs. Colecovision argument as well, the 7800 may have been a panic move but not for the reason you cite as the 5200 was a tile-based console based on a flexible computer platform with simple straight forward architecture for the time. One could look at the 5200 as a famicom that released 2 years early with lower rom space and no PPU. Power was always in the 5200's favor and its more efficient design made it easier to produce better results consistently:

http://www.atarihq.com/5200/cv52/junglehunt.gif

http://www.atarihq.com/5200/cv52/pitfall2.g

http://www.atarihq.com/5200/cv52/frogger.gif

http://www.atarihq.com/5200/cv52/miner.gif

http://www.atarihq.com/5200/cv52/zaxxon.gif

The left is the 5200 the right is the CV. The difference are night and day.

As a fan of homebrew maker of the 5200 I do agree with your other statement that Warner should have kept the 5200 running. Not until 1986 but until 1985.

5200 is often said to have been cancelled because of the controllers but it was due to the computer wars that Warner wasn't smart enough to jump out of. The computer war lost them more money than the crash by a wide margin. It was ahead of its time in several ways and was clearly the most powerful home consoles on the market in 1982. CV can only display 4 sprites per scanline while the 5200 doesn't have a limit, 5200 can add more colors through tricks that aren't difficult to pull off like overlapping players or generating two halfs of a sprite as two different sprites and displaying them together to create a single character. Only the former the CV can barely due and takes up to much memory.

CV doesn't even have hardware collision detection, it has to be coded by software. 5200 had higher color palette, several graphic modes, hardware scrolling and can shift sprites from line to line which allow for the 3D style viewpoints in certain games, while the best the Coleco cvan do in that regard is Dukes of Hazard which is anything but smooth.

It is definitely ashame they didn't keep the console going.

Edited September 10, 2020 by ColecoKing

[ColecoKing]

Empsolo

I guess the operative thinking for the 2600 jr was this idea that low income families may not yet be able to afford a 7800 even whatever it's launch price was. And that $50 price point would mean that 2600 software and console molds that had been sitting Atari's warehouse shelves would be cleared for newer inventory as these lower income families saw the 2600 at fifty bucks as a steal. True, it may have taken away from 7800 advertising and game development resources, but here's the thing though. Post generation console revisions aren't a bad idea. The operative idea behind them is to get lower income families into your ecosystem who aren't ready to upgrade to the latest and greatest. A good example of this how Sony marketed the PSOne as a more portable and cost reduced Playstation 1 and promoted games such as Spyro the Dragon, Alien Resurrection and several other late generation PS1 games to get people onto the Playstation ecosystem. This was despite the fact that the Playstation 2 was just around the corner and was touted as being backwards compatible with most ps1 games. And it seemed to have worked successfully for Sony considering how long the PS2 era would end up lasting in terms of time and sales.

It wasn't $50 at first but that's besides the point. Yes, it would be $50 but the 7800 was $80 and that's not much of a difference still affordable. Over time they would have deals that would put the new 2600 at $30 or less depending on the retailer. This helped kill the 7800 when the primary selling point is deemed void.

The 2600 had already existed two generations previously and had numerous models during that time having another new 2600 model was and would have always been a bad idea when their flagship had the ability to play its games already, the low-income angle doesn't work as the 7800 even by late 1986 you could get it for $60-$65 or kept at $80 but with free games meaning would be like getting a $160 value for $80.

PSONE example doesn't work here PSONE was a cheap version of a console that was a huge hit and the price gap between it and the PS2 was much wider. The PSONE was also not a new design released 10 years after launch and only sold for a few years. You aren't paying attention to the difference in decades, the 7800 was built to remove the 2600 off the market and be the cheapest console available, by making a new 2600 make both of those features pointless coming off a crash where people were used to cheaper software. The 2600 also went through two waves of consoles, it's own and the 5200's which was shelved. It was near 10 years old in 1986 and the decision caused it to outperform the 7800 in sales, another major difference to the PSONE.

[mr_me]

19 hours ago, ColecoKing said:

....

As for Nintendo they didn't really come in and dominate. I know the wive tale goes that the NES released in 1985 and swept up in 24 hours but that's not what happened. Atari was still the number one manufacture of home video game consoles until late 1987. 1987 is when the media started giving prompts to Nintendo and that increased ten-fold by 1988 with people doing raindances and throwing flowers at them for leading the industry out of its rut.

...

The best selling video game system in north america between 1984 and 1987 was the commodore 64.  None of that hardware or software are counted as video game sales not to mention all the pirated games.  Atari was selling previous generation hardware at a fraction of its price.

[zzip]

30 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

While there are many problems with the viewpoints of the OP I don't see much better viewpoints from the opposition. Nintendo and Atari were in two completely different situations that weren't comparable, Nintendo didn't have any games we hadn't already seen before and it took years before the NES was widely praised by reporters across the board. It wasn't instantly like recent gaming press or wikipedia have said for years and year, mostly due to the fact that many grew up as fans of the console. IGN itself for example was a Nintendo fansite originally.

I don't know the exact moment when Nintendo stole the Videogame crown from Atari,  but the later in the 80s it happened, the less excuses can be made for Atari.  They had successful product lines by then,  they went public, raising cash.

 

32 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

But that ended as the year closed, November 1986. The decision to sell a new 2600 was always one that made people scratch their heads but when they decided to CONTINUE selling the new 2600 despite the demand meant that Atari would split their install base, which pissed a lot of people off, especially those who were investors that stuck to the company like glue through think and thin. This is when Atari gave the market to Nintendo

The earlier decision to abandon the 5200 after only two years on the market in favor of the 7800 also pissed off a lot customers.   It's why I keep pointing to this as a mistake, although this is one that you can't blame the Tramiels for.   The XEGS announcement upset 8-bit computer owners.   Atari was good at upsetting their base

 

42 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

Of course I'm not saying games don't matter, but there wasn't a way for Atari to turn things around even if they had similar games at that point just look at Sega who did have similar games.

Having similar games is not enough,  they had to find the next big hit.   The old Atari understood this,  that's why they had Pac-man, not Mousetrap or KC Munchkin.  Space Invaders and not Astroblast, etc.   Atari corp didn't seem to grasp this until it was too late.   The only game I can think of that comes close to meeting this criteria was Alien Vs Predator on the Jag.

 

48 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

Instead what Atari should have done was keep to the original plan of making the 7800 the one and only flagship gaming machine as well as being the most affordable option available.

Having too many consoles on the market is definitely one big mistake that the successful game companies don't make.

 

51 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

But of course some incompetent ass or maybe even a group of them came together and said lets cannibalize ourselves and make one of the main selling points of our flagship product irrelevant because....................We snorted to much of the good stuff up our nose? I mean it was the 80's I don't know. Lol.

I suppose the question is what was Atari's real goal in gaming?  From their actions it looks like they were mostly trying to generate short-term cash at the expense of long-term product health.   The Michael Katz interview above says that is exactly what Jack was trying to do.

 

I also think Jack (and Ray Kassar before him) made the mistake of thinking games were commodities.   Games are not commodities.   As they say, "Content is King".   Nintendo understood this.   Jack seemed to think all you had to do was put your product on the market cheaper than everyone else, people would come, because it worked out for him once before.   But they were not taking the steps they needed to to remain the dominate force, but taking plenty of steps that would hurt their long-term prospects.

[ColecoKing]

zzip

No I'm not making that assumption. I knew Jack had his sights on various business markets, that was obvious from the product line. Like the high-speed laser printer they made. That was a little much for most home users. But looking at how much R&D they were doing for business markets vs what they were doing for the console market -- which was basically zero.. they just took the old Warner designs and put them on the market without updates, save for a new case for the XEGS

It was obvious at the time that they were trying to clean up their image as a serious business company and shed the game image. But then games became unexpectedly popular again, and they couldn't ignore the easy money there. But my point is they never made a serious effort to counter Nintendo. They were just milking a slowly dying cash cow, until they realized they had better get some new console designs out there.



I also realize that the experience with the gaming side was much different in the UK, and maybe a certain user here who insists Atari did everything right when it comes to games is looking from a UK perspective. But I'm talking about Atari corporate, and I believe Atari UK often had to battle with them to get their way.

14 hours ago, ColecoKing said:
Jaguar? The Jaguar didn't come out until the 90's.

Yes the Jaguar came out in the 90s, but it was a lost cause from the start because Atari had already squandered their gaming mindshare in the mid-80s. You can't just put out new hardware and expect to win back all your old fans, especially when some are still bitter about your past gaming moves. Plus there was now a whole generation of gamers raised on NES and the name Atari meant nothing to them. It would be a long, hard battle to win back those fans, and win new ones. But in the end, like the 5200 before it, the Jag was dead within two years.



15 hours ago, ColecoKing said:
So I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here, the people involved with the decision to sell a redesigned 2600 below the 7800's price when the 7800 had backwards compatibility,m need to be hit with a baseball bat, repeatedly.

When the Atari 2600jr was announced, a lot of people were surprised. Atari said it was aimed at the third world countries which missed out on it the first time around. But yet it was still sold on the US market.. It's just another case of Jack dumping old inventories I think.



15 hours ago, ColecoKing said:
Consoles have different business models and thrive based on what's available on one and not on the other. The big issue with Commodore and Atari is that they could have put out their own unified standards but didn't and they kept fighting over a market that was shrinking. They ignored the new emerging business market that were buying up PC's, they did not try hard to get into the educational market which arguably is why Apple was largely spared, they were known for their video, audio, and media capabilities but they didn't dive into the markets related to media priduction, they ignored editing and film, they never took the music industry seriously outside a few nods, and basically didn't even consider the digital art and construction niches as something that ever existed.

I agree except I would argue that the music industry is one of Atari's few success stories.



15 hours ago, ColecoKing said:
Warner they would have never dropped the computer lines, that was worth more than the console division after the crash. The price wars hurt originally but created enormous revenue that would have been beneficial as the prices returned to normal. Meanwhile gaming would stay at fire sale prices for another couple of years hardware and software.

After the crash yes, but in 87, 88? No, the console line would have been more valuable. Of course a lot depends on how things developed. 1) does Warner produce a 16-bit computer line? They had prototypes, but would they come to market? 2) Does Warner successfully obtain Amiga chips? if so, are they used for computing or gaming? 3) Does the 7800 launch in 84 as planned? Do they continue producing new hot titles from their arcade division. Do they produce hot original games.



I think #3 at least was likely to happen, which would give them a stronger position against Nintendo than Atari Corp ever had.

I get that you saw the 7800 looking back launching with few games and taking time to gradually add more titles while Nintendo brought in tons of software per quarter but you have to remember that wasn't because of a lack of effort from Atari but that the famicom had been out in japan for 3 years by that point and they brought all those games and developers overseas. It basically had a monopoly in Japan. Bringing up Sega, while they weren't very popular in japan like Nintendo they to had some software they brought over from japan.

As much as it may not seem so Atari spend millions of dollars on their console and increased the budget overtime.

You are also confusing things on Europe, the country with the gaming focus in the late 80's was America not the UK or any other EU member, that's why the XEGS was released there first and the 7800 was delayed for 2 years because they didn't think the 7800 would penetrate the european market, and since the A8 was popular there they thought the XEGS had the better chance of success. The ST was NOT doing well in the UK in terms of gaming but was doing better as a business machine with small marketshare.

In America everyone called the ST a gaming machine and every attempt to shake that off failed. Music industry had taken a liking to it a few times but outside of that it wasn't ever considered serious across its entire life compared to PC or MAC in America. You seem to believe that in America that the business angle was a success I assure you it wasn't even close.

The Jaguar didn't fail because of mindshare it failed because Atari was broke and couldn't promote the console. I know the internet has fogged peoples memories but most retailers didn't have a Jaguar, the ones that did would either have stock sit for weeks or sell out and not have stock for as long as a couple months. Infamous commercials like "do the math" were only seen by a small portion of the country. They discontinued all their existing products before the Jaguar even did a market test in 1993 except the Lynx which they stole all the funding they did have from and then sunset that 2 years later. Atari had no money to market the console, put it on shelves, make it, develop software for it, or license software for it. In 1994 journalists would note the difference in consumer adoption between the Jaguar and 3DO while giving hype to CD gaming in general. This led Atari to bet the equivalent of their life savings on a CD-ROM expansion for the Jaguar, which as we all know failed miserably.

I touched on the new Atari 2600 or the Jr. 2600 in the post above but to expand a little nearly all its sales were in the US. If the third world statement was true they never tried. It should have never been released except maybe as a limited edition.

[empsolo]

1 hour ago, ColecoKing said:

While there are many problems with the viewpoints of the OP I don't see much better viewpoints from the opposition. Nintendo and Atari were in two completely different situations that weren't comparable, Nintendo didn't have any games we hadn't already seen before and it took years before the NES was widely praised by reporters across the board. It wasn't instantly like recent gaming press or wikipedia have said for years and year, mostly due to the fact that many grew up as fans of the console. IGN itself for example was a Nintendo fansite originally.

 

I'm sorry what? According to the Chicago tribune, the NES had sold over 1 million consoles for fiscal year 1986. This was on the strength of Super Mario Bros and the Black Box games. 1987, would see the debut of most of the games that became household franchises such as the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, and Mega Man. By the end of the year, the NES would hit 4 million consoles sold lifetime and penetrating most markets in the US like New York, LA, Philly, Boston and Chicago.

[ColecoKing]

mr_me Commodore 64 is not a console. Atari still was the head of the console market and no not Coleco, I know someone claimed that Coleco was the leader but that's completely bonkers and I am the ColecoKing. Coleco sold small shipments of consoles and games only to look good because people were rabid that Coleco quickly cut the adam and left their customers in the dark so they wanted to look good for the papers by looking like they stuck to their product until the end to satisfy the customer. Lol.

ZZIP

The earlier decision to abandon the 5200 after only two years on the market in favor of the 7800 also pissed off a lot customers. It's why I keep pointing to this as a mistake, although this is one that you can't blame the Tramiels for. The XEGS announcement upset 8-bit computer owners.

Having similar games is not enough, they had to find the next big hit. The old Atari understood this, that's why they had Pac-man, not Mousetrap or KC Munchkin. Space Invaders and not Astroblast, etc. Atari corp didn't seem to grasp this until it was too late. The only game I can think of that comes close to meeting this criteria was Alien Vs Predator on the Jag.

Whoa there, Astroblast was a hit and sold many intellivision consoles. lol.

But Atari had games that sold well, they just weren't massive sales hits and that's because that wasn't there strategy. They had the same strategy as Sega where they would attempt to grab many different games hoping they all do well and if they grab a few hits well, hey cool. It worked before with the 2600.

Not that I agree that the strategy should have been used outside of the 2600, I don't, it has too many flaws. But even so they didn't necessarily need a hit game, they could have had a large library of games with good sales that could target different audiences. Too bad they decided to split their own install base and make that impossible.

Oh and yes the 5200 pissed off customers but to to the same extent, the console had negative opinion before it was cancelled so it didn't hurt as much as scaring away potential investors to fund your gaming division and loyal fans waiting years for this 7800 device with a feature that was no longer valuable.

Similar to how Commodore decided to cannibalize the C128 instead of giving the C128 exclusive games, software, and features to entice buyers Instead they tried to keep the C64 relevant as much as possible.

Interesting twin dummies.

[mr_me]

7 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

...

I touched on the new Atari 2600 or the Jr. 2600 in the post above but to expand a little nearly all its sales were in the US. If the third world statement was true they never tried. It should have never been released except maybe as a limited edition.
 

There's evidence to support atari selling about 5M atari 2600 consoles worldwide from 1984 to 1989 but how do you know where.  Central and south america was a popular place to dump obsolete electronics goods.

[ColecoKing]

Empsolo

I'm sorry what? According to the Chicago tribune, the NES had sold over 1 million consoles for fiscal year 1986. This was on the strength of Super Mario Bros and the Black Box games. 1987, would see the debut of most of the games that became household franchises such as the Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, and Mega Man. By the end of the year, the NES would hit 4 million consoles sold lifetime and penetrating most markets in the US like New York, LA, Philly, Boston and Chicago.

Not sure what you're disagreeing with me here.

Nintendo wasn't an instant success, Atari had the market until 1987 same year reporters started acting as if Nintendo didn't have competition and was the only game in town which would solidify the next year with explosive retail orders, millions more cartridges printed, constant praise from magazines, and cameo appearance in comics and movies more than ever before leading to a massive sales surge that wouldn't stop until the peak in 1989.

Atari messed up their chance. As you noted NES picked up in 1987 as well. Don't see the disagreement?

[ColecoKing]

mr_me

let us not kid ourselves, 2600 sales were reported in American media and rarely anywhere else during that time. I'd be surprised to here half a million were shipped to third world countries. Even Sega systems that would be more popular in that area took years to sell worthy numbers it would have to be very small.

Atari partners one time put out a lie about South East Asia numbers nearing 1 million ended up being less than 10,000. Was on old defunct Atari site.

Edited September 10, 2020 by ColecoKing

[zzip]

4 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

Whoa there, Astroblast was a hit and sold many intellivision consoles. lol.

Ok, well I reached for a space shooter, and maybe I picked the wrong one, but space-invaders type games were a dime a dozen back then, so pick any other

 

6 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

But Atari had games that sold well, they just weren't massive sales hits and that's because that wasn't there strategy. They had the same strategy as Sega where they would attempt to grab many different games hoping they all do well and if they grab a few hits well, hey cool. It worked before with the 2600.

I'm not even sure this was the strategy for the 2600.   Maybe in the beginning, but later

 

Atari was using a "we have the hottest arcade games" strategy.   And people were buying 2600s to play Space Invaders.   Not so much to play "Air-Sea Battle" or "3D Tic Tac Toe"

 

1 hour ago, empsolo said:

A good example of this how Sony marketed the PSOne as a more portable and cost reduced Playstation 1 and promoted games such as Spyro the Dragon, Alien Resurrection and several other late generation PS1 games to get people onto the Playstation ecosystem. This was despite the fact that the Playstation 2 was just around the corner and was touted as being backwards compatible with most ps1 games. And it seemed to have worked successfully for Sony considering how long the PS2 era would end up lasting in terms of time and sales.

Sony supports their consoles for 10 years, which is several years into the next generation.   So the problem isn't so much that the 2600jr was on the market,  it was more that the 7800 was hardly an expensive console itself and didn't cost much more.

[ColecoKing]

zzip

Atari did have hottest arcade games, a game that did really well but not light the charts on fire was still a hit arcade game.


Sony did support their consoles for a long time, but BC was a much bigger deal back in the 80's than later. The price gapes were further apart, new games that would have been made for the 7800 were made for the 2600 instead, it was 3 generations in while the PSONE was cancelled around the launch of the PS3 which was only two generations of consoles, and the PSONE wasn't aiming for the same market as the PS2.

It's more of a PS4 vs. PS4Pro situation but instead they are close to the same price, and replace being a marginal upgrade to being much more powerful and have the PS4pro renamed to the PS5.

Now you are getting the picture lol.

[ColecoKing]

Anyway talking about Ataris mistakes is fun but we are talking about old mistakes this thread is about the Panther and new mistakes.

Some people believe that the Panther should have been released as scheduled and thins would be different but I disagree. People will always put Atari in a vacuum when discussing their mistakes but forget about the competition. Correct me if I'm wrong but the Panther was originally scheduled for possibly release in 1992. The 3DO would only be one year later. Maybe the Panther would have sold more than the Jaguar but I don't see much of a difference.

People lauded over 3DO graphics compared to the Jaguar. The Panther was according to Atari much weaker and if so that would mean that the 3DO would look even more like a mystical consle that came form the future than it already was. They may have even sold well at the initial $700 price tag with a difference that huge!

No ifs, ands, or buts, Panther would have been too late to make a difference. Atari would have needed a console in 1990 to be competitive and it wasn't the Jaguar. What they could have done is make a console Lynx with more memory, a faster chip with similar featureset, better audio, and support for high-resolution televisions. I can't think of any other object they would have had without coming to the market late.

But maybe they should have skipped the early 90's entirely? Just kept the Lynx and put out a console in 1994? That would probably have been the best move instead of wasting resources on canned products.

[mr_me]

20 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

mr_me Commodore 64 is not a console. Atari still was the head of the console market and no not Coleco, I know someone claimed that Coleco was the leader but that's completely bonkers and I am the ColecoKing. Coleco sold small shipments of consoles and games only to look good because people were rabid that Coleco quickly cut the adam and left their customers in the dark so they wanted to look good for the papers by looking like they stuck to their product until the end to satisfy the customer. Lol.

Colecovision was definitely the leader in 1983, at least in north america.  It beat out the Atari 5200 for the next generation of video game systems.  Colecovision is a big part of the reason atari abandoned the 5200 and quickly countered with the atari 7800.  But in 1984 the Commodore 64 took over as the best selling video game system as it remained, selling millions of units until the nes took over in 1986/87.  Kids wanting to play the latest video games didn't care that the bean counters didn't count it as video game hardware or software.  Piracy was a big attraction for kids and teens to go this route.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, ColecoKing said:

zzip

Atari 7800 was much more powerful than the 5200 don't discount Maria, the problem was that they cheaped out on the architecture which reduced the size of the bus they used. Issues in architecture would cause the GPU, CPU, or both to freeze while other parts of the console were executing and lie in wait which made the system more difficult to program for.

I think Maria was its only good point.   The rest was just not enough of an upgrade, and in some cases a downgrade over the 5200.

 

1 hour ago, ColecoKing said:

The left is the 5200 the right is the CV. The difference are night and day.

As a fan of homebrew maker of the 5200 I do agree with your other statement that Warner should have kept the 5200 running. Not until 1986 but until 1985.

5200 is often said to have been cancelled because of the controllers but it was due to the computer wars that Warner wasn't smart enough to jump out of. The computer war lost them more money than the crash by a wide margin. It was ahead of its time in several ways and was clearly the most powerful home consoles on the market in 1982. CV can only display 4 sprites per scanline while the 5200 doesn't have a limit, 5200 can add more colors through tricks that aren't difficult to pull off like overlapping players or generating two halfs of a sprite as two different sprites and displaying them together to create a single character. Only the former the CV can barely due and takes up to much memory.

CV doesn't even have hardware collision detection, it has to be coded by software. 5200 had higher color palette, several graphic modes, hardware scrolling and can shift sprites from line to line which allow for the 3D style viewpoints in certain games, while the best the Coleco cvan do in that regard is Dukes of Hazard which is anything but smooth.

It is definitely ashame they didn't keep the console going.

I can't see the pics you posted (no permission),  but I have tried a number of CV games.    I'm not an expert on CV hardware like I am on the Atari 8-bit hardware, so I honestly don't know which is superior,  but judging from the games I've played,  some shine on Coleco, others shine on 5200.   One that comes to mind is Mr. Do.   Though technically not on the 5200, the 8-bit version blows the CV version away.

 

So I think with the right games, the 5200 was perfectly capable of competing against CV,  as you said it's flexible hardware with a lot of tricks up its sleeve.  If the tech was good enough for the XEGS in 87, it was good enough for the 5200 in 82.  Just release better controllers to satisfy that criticism,  not an entirely new console!    Weren't they working on a 2600 adapter for the 5200 too?

[zzip]

12 minutes ago, ColecoKing said:

It's more of a PS4 vs. PS4Pro situation but instead they are close to the same price, and replace being a marginal upgrade to being much more powerful and have the PS4pro renamed to the PS5.

They also took great pains to ensure that all games release this generation will run on both PS4 and Pro,  and that all games on pro would have some sort of enhancement.   They didn't want to repeat the mistakes made by Sega and Atari.

 

1 hour ago, ColecoKing said:

I get that you saw the 7800 looking back launching with few games and taking time to gradually add more titles while Nintendo brought in tons of software per quarter but you have to remember that wasn't because of a lack of effort from Atari but that the famicom had been out in japan for 3 years by that point and they brought all those games and developers overseas.

That's true, but had the 7800 launch gone according to plan and come out in 84, it too would have had more titles in 86 than it did.

[ColecoKing]

Since Commodore also in the title I think they should be mentioned to along with the Panther.

Amiga wasn't profitable and was dying and their first CDTV console was a massive flop.

Atari maybe could have released Panther in 1992 after all if they could get several games made for the Amiga1200 on the console to increase the amount of available titles which would be comparable to SNES games and better than Genesis titles.

The main differentiator between Panther and SNES would be polygons built-in so you wouldn't have to pay $60 for an SNES FX cartridge with a Bubsy T-short to get your polygon games:



the 3D would be weak but sufficient until maybe Super Jaguar in 1995.

Edited September 10, 2020 by ColecoKing