What would you want to be able to buy from Atari…

[christo930]

2 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Because it technically is.

 

No, it's a company that owns the logo, font and some old IP which they endlessly recycle. 

[+x=usr(1536)]

[zzip]

6 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Crosley was gone long before the 80s. This is mostly true of the other companies as well. Also, this trend started in the 80s. Thompson put out fake cathedral radios with AM/FM cassette and sometimes CD, sometimes with a brand name from the 40s or 30s. When this trend first started, that I can tell, was in the 1960s with transistor radios.  But at least it was the REAL RCA or Zenith slapping their names on products they had ZERO involvement in making.

 

You can say it's not worth their effort to try and make a radio, but that's not the point.  Everyone has good excuses for not doing something.  My point is these appliances are NOT the label on them.  There is ZERO connection between Crosley and the modern stuff with that logo slapped on them.  Whatever importing company who owns the Crosley name is no more Crosley than Atari is Atari.

This has been going on forever.   Even in Atari's heyday,  if you bought an Atari printer or monitor, you might find the monitor internals was made by Goldstar and the printer by Okidata, just with Atari designed case.  Same with disk drives, CD-roms, hard drives etc.

 

It just requires way too much expertise and R&D to do it any other way.   Especially once the technology has been standardized and perfected the companies that specialize in producing the internals of those devices can do it better and cheaper than you can ever hope to,  so it just makes sense to use it.

 

It would be like expecting home builders to bake their own bricks, quarry their own stones, cut down their own trees and mill their own 2x4's,   It's much easier to buy it from suppliers that specialize in those things.

 

The only real reason for doing it yourself is if you think you can do it better-  like with Sony pushing Trinitron while most other TV manufactures had settled on CRT TV design.

[christo930]

3 minutes ago, zzip said:

 Even in Atari's heyday,  if you bought an Atari printer or monitor, you might find the monitor internals was made by Goldstar and the printer by Okidata, just with Atari designed case. 

But nobody was insisting these were Atari made devices.  They were just slapping their label on someone elses' products.

 

I'm not criticizing "Atari" because of the VCS.  But are you actually denying the VCS wasn't a cash grab based on nostalgia?  There is a reason they call it "VCS" and not some other name.  They weren't saying "buy this new awesome games powerhouse!"

 

Has "Atari" put out anything in the last 10 years, say, that isn't nostalgia based with no connection to the early 80s?

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, christo930 said:

But nobody was insisting these were Atari made devices.  They were just slapping their label on someone elses' products.

No but you were saying that the brands on the label aren't the manufacturer anymore,  I'm just pointing out that this isn't a recent thing.

 

11 minutes ago, christo930 said:

I'm not criticizing "Atari" because of the VCS.  But are you actually denying the VCS wasn't a cash grab based on nostalgia?  There is a reason they call it "VCS" and not some other name.  They weren't saying "buy this new awesome games powerhouse!"

 

Has "Atari" put out anything in the last 10 years, say, that isn't nostalgia based with no connection to the early 80s?

If Atari was a band, they are in their 'greatest hits' phase.   Every band that's been around long enough hits a point where their audience largely stops caring about new album releases and just wants to hear the classics.   In the early 2000s they were still trying to be a relevant publisher of the Infrogrames-acquired IP, but it didn't work out.

 

I don't know how much cash the new VCS actually grabbed because it seems to have sold in relatively low volumes.   But they made a useful mini-PC in cool Atari-themed case.   Obviously not everybody wants such a device, but I like mine and maybe I did buy it for the nostalgia factor, but so what?  I'm sure we all own something that we bought for nostalgic reasons.

[Lord Mushroom]

42 minutes ago, christo930 said:

 

No, it's a company that owns the logo, font and some old IP which they endlessly recycle. 

The brand is the entity. So whoever owns it, and whatever is done with it, it is still Atari. You could say it is not like the "good old" Atari, but that is a subjective thing.

[Lord Mushroom]

31 minutes ago, christo930 said:

are you actually denying the VCS wasn't a cash grab based on nostalgia?  There is a reason they call it "VCS" and not some other name.  They weren't saying "buy this new awesome games powerhouse!"

Who knows what the original idea for the VCS was. A cash grab? Perhaps. A low risk, potentially high reward project? That is my guess. Whatever the idea was, it turned out to result in huge losses.

 

The VCS name was indeed a cheap nostalgia thing, though.

[Keatah]

3 hours ago, christo930 said:

Maybe they are doing more than I know about, but everything I hear about what Atari is doing today is all based on nostalgia.

And this is where/what I mean when I say nostalgia/retro is manufactured. Real nostalgia is going to have some sense of being on the frontier. Real nostalgia is going to capture a piece of the aura of discovery and exploration. A simple example is the 2600. It's nostalgic for us grups that had it as a kid. But at the same time it has new material coming out today. New material that pushes the limits, expands, explores boundaries. New games still exhibit genuine old-school creativity.

 

In manufactured nostalgia that sense of "frontier" has stagnated. There is no new catalog of atari games to look through. They are all remakes. The 2600 experience of 1977 through 1985'ish is filled with stuff to look forward to.

 

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

The US empire is in the end stage which has been characterized by financialization.

Commoditization. Commercialization. Other words I use in addition to financialization. Once that happens it seems innovation and creativity slow down or stop entirely. I've not seen these rebrands (and the rebranding activity) lead to much worthiness in new products - just feature stripping and cheapness.

 

1 hour ago, christo930 said:

  This re-branding of crap is just another way of trying to suck every bit of value from anything that ever meant anything in the US in the business world.  Atari is no exception.  As long as people keep buying their crap, they're going to keep shoveling it out there.

This is one of the reasons I downright refuse to buy so many "new" things that have been rehashed or based on old IP. It's boring. Recharges, re-releases, re-makes, old names on new products..

[christo930]

39 minutes ago, zzip said:

If Atari was a band, they are in their 'greatest hits' phase.   Every band that's been around long enough hits a point where their audience largely stops caring about new album releases and just wants to hear the classics. 

This is not true of other game companies.

 

However, your point is well taken.  Since a lot of bands are re-releasing their stuff on vinyl, does this mean new Atari 2600 physical cartridge releases?  Personally that is a nostalgia trip I would buy. A re-release of the 2600 and maybe multi-game cartridges?  Like all the "space" games on one cartridge.  After all, ROM size is no longer an issue.  I know they didn't develop it themselves, but how much could it possibly cost to create a 2600 on a chip again?  Perhaps they could just license the old FB2 design.

[christo930]

1 minute ago, Keatah said:

This is one of the reasons I downright refuse to buy so many "new" things that have been rehashed or based on old IP. It's boring. Recharges, re-releases, re-makes, old names on new products..

 

It wouldn't be that bad if the new stuff wasn't utter garbage you wouldn't buy for any other reason.  If they actually made a good quality cathedral radio, I'd buy it.  Instead, they take the cheapest mech they can buy and stuff it into the cheapest case they can make which superficially looks like the original, but is just trash.  It's like those "Crosley" record players.  They take the cheapest 2 dollar mechanism and stuff it into the fakest silliest "suitcase" they can possibly build, put the cheapest cartridge and stylus available anywhere in the world hold it all together with hot-snot and then put a 100 price tag on it. They cannot even put a proper plug on the things.  They are based on models that were built incredibly well and were incredibly good performers for their day.

 

Nintendo and Sega have done the same thing with their PNP machines.  The only ones to do this right were the Amiga people and the C64 people. The C64 crowd and the Amiga crowd both love these machines.

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Likewise, Atari couldn't put a modern console together from proprietary chips that can outdo what nVidia or AMD chips can do.   The proprietary system would cost more, be less powerful  and it would have trouble attracting developers.   Using an integrated system from AMD makes sense.  Even Sony and MS do this now.

As much as I dislike AMD for the desktop, they actually make good low/mid tier fully integrated solutions. With attractive power efficiency ratings. And I wouldn't be opposed to getting some. Sound, graphics, i/o, controller, all on one SoC. Think recent Ryzen releases. There are miniPCs available now that will run everything from Channel F through PS4.

 

When I see "proprietary" nowadays in 2023 I see "limitations" and "less support".

 

In the old days early standards weren't always where the general consumer needed them to be. But between the dotcom epoch and today, 20 years, they are. And there's minimal or no need for specialized proprietary anything.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, Lord Mushroom said:

The brand is the entity. So whoever owns it, and whatever is done with it, it is still Atari. You could say it is not like the "good old" Atari, but that is a subjective thing.

There's little or no question atari is atari. It's that way on paper, in the news, on the internet, and everything and everywhere else. Ok.

 

But, and the big Brazilian BUTT (lift) here is is the driving forces behind the name. What are the motivations? What are goals? What is the corporate philosophy? From what I see these are significantly different from the Warner & Tramiel Atari of the 70's & 80's.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

If Atari was a band, they are in their 'greatest hits' phase.   Every band that's been around long enough hits a point where their audience largely stops caring about new album releases and just wants to hear the classics.   In the early 2000s they were still trying to be a relevant publisher of the Infrogrames-acquired IP, but it didn't work out.

Very true. I go to a classic rock concert, and I'm not interested in the new material. I'm going there for the vintage sound. The vintage hits. Mostly. There's so much old stuff that's good. And I'm happy to hear live variations/improvs/retakes of the old classics.

 

A few bands I am excited to see new stuff from be like Boston, Jeff Lynn's ELO, ABBA, Alan Parsons, Moody Blues, and a few others. But be damned. None of it would ever show up on traditional AM/FM radio today. Or make the rounds on tickertocker.

 

Thing with Atari though is that "Atari" meant "electronic games" to us elementary school aged children back then. Blanket term. And it was a whole culture, too, that happened as a national craze. I think many Atari enthusiasts want nutari to bring back that craze and the heady times. Ain't gonna happen. Too many other things have to be in place. And these other things are far outside of nutari's pervue.

 

I was blessed with not only having a firehose of early electronic gaming, but having access to books and magazines that explained how things like the microchip worked (on a layperson's level). And it was fun seeing what this brave new frontier was all about.

[+Yurkie]

33 minutes ago, Keatah said:

There's little or no question atari is atari. It's that way on paper, in the news, on the internet, and everything and everywhere else. Ok.

 

But, and the big Brazilian BUTT (lift) here is is the driving forces behind the name. What are the motivations? What are goals? What is the corporate philosophy? From what I see these are significantly different from the Warner & Tramiel Atari of the 70's & 80's.

I would say that a company can loose the magic and not really be the company anymore, regardless of holding a copyright. RCA is a prime example of what I mean. RCA was a huge reputable company, now it is just a name. I personally don't like the idea of buying a name. I think the new Atari is a fucking joke. I liked them at first and was rooting for them, but after them selling over priced reproductions and then sending them out fucked up I think it is just a money grab for suckers. Al is way more professional with this site and his howebrews, than the asshats that call themselves Atari.

[Keatah]

1 minute ago, Yurkie said:

I would say that a company can loose the magic and not really be the company anymore, regardless of holding a copyright. RCA is a prime example of what I mean. RCA was a huge reputable company, now it is just a name. I personally don't like the idea of buying a name.

Right. Company in name only. Totally.

 

I've said it many times before, Atari died in my eyes about midway through the Tramiel era. I've also been known to define OG Atari's death as when they released their last 2600 or 8-bit game. IDK. It's still very nebulous.

 

If I want to buy a name, like OG Atari, I'm just gonna get an Atari emblem/sticker from ebay and attach it to my emulator PC. After all it's what nutari did. Didn't they? Put their logo on a generic x86 AMD system?

 

1 minute ago, Yurkie said:

I think the new Atari is a fucking joke. I liked them at first and was rooting for them, but after them selling over priced reproductions and then sending them out fucked up I think it is just a money grab for suckers. Al is way more professional with this site and his howebrews, than the asshats that call themselves Atari.

I've always said time and time again, Atari was reborn here at AtariAge. And this is Atari.

 

Al's got a development team making new games to be sold in an online store. From the looks of it there's many desirable and affordable titles there done up with pro-quality. There's old-school "been there" members here to always set the record straight. There's (informal) repair and mod services happening. And plenty'o resources to keep the 70's & 80's hardware going. Not to mention a whole new expansion platform has been made standard for the 2600 (ARM games). And along with that tons of developer knowledge. Even tech books/guides have been written! The community IS NuAtari!

[+Yurkie]

3 minutes ago, Keatah said:

 The community IS NuAtari!

The community IS NuAtari!

[christo930]

8 hours ago, Keatah said:

I've always said time and time again, Atari was reborn here at AtariAge. And this is Atari.

It is the spiritual successor of Atari.

[MrMaddog]

The current Atari games I'll support by buying off Steam.

 

But cart reproductions that light up but have lousy construction?  Just...NO!

 

And now they sell arcade PCBs that you hang on the wall...WTF!?

 

That's the aspect of retrogaming I absolutely hate because it only attracts rich morons who also bought NFTs.

 

And I really wish the current Atari under Rosen would get away from that crap and focus on what people really want from Atari...the freaking games.

[+x=usr(1536)]

32 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

And now they sell arcade PCBs that you hang on the wall...WTF!?

Yeah.  That's...  Interesting.  There are two things about this that I'm not totally clear on:

1. Can these PCBs be used to build or repair an actual arcade game?  If so, the $245 price tag and claims of being actual reproductions is more justifiable; if not, then both are out of line.
2. Why Major Havoc, Gravitar, and Black Widow?  They're not bad games, but hardly the first ones that spring to mind for most folks when they think 'Atari'.

Choosing three vector games, sure.  I can see that.  It's just that the logic behind the game choices is somewhat baffling.

32 minutes ago, MrMaddog said:

That's the aspect of retrogaming I absolutely hate because it only attracts rich morons who also bought NFTs.

It's an attempt at mass-market luxury.  You know, convincing people that they're somehow buying (or buying into) something a bit more rarefied and/or exclusive than it actually is, even though any idiot with a credit card, $245 plus tax and shipping to blow, and a working internet connection can order one.

[Keatah]

Generally speaking collecting is a hobby for the well-to-do's. It's always a moneysink no matter how you approach it.

 

In looking through nutari's website I get the immediate impression everything there is designed around "cashing-in" on past IP. Past successes of a company long gone. They're looking to make money off "Atari" and not really be "Atari". They are NOT "Innovative Leisure" by any stretch of the imagination.

 

As far as those "decorative" PCB's go, I wouldn't louse-up my recreation area with such banal nonsense. There's really nothing $245 attractive about them. And they're not even populated.

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 4/29/2023 at 5:43 PM, Keatah said:

As far as those "decorative" PCB's go, I wouldn't louse-up my recreation area with such banal nonsense. There's really nothing $245 attractive about them. And they're not even populated.

And the description on the back of the Major Havoc PCB is lifting huge chunks of its copy from Wikipedia.  A buck says that ChatGPT rewrote them.

 

From Wikipedia's Major Havoc article:

Quote

The game includes a "warp system" that lets the player to skip levels and gain bonus points. Warps are activated by a Breakout game at the bottom-right of the screen, where there are two- or three-digit numbers. The player has to move the joystick until the number matches the number required to warp. For example, the red warp requires the number 23, so the player moves the joystick to the right or left until the first digit matches 2, then the player clicks the fire button, the Breakout ball starts moving, so the player has to play the game while moving the joystick to the 3 at the same time. When the player enters the warp code, the player is transported to a higher level.

 

Extra lives are earned not only by achieving a certain number of points, but also by completing the Breakout mini-game.

Compare that to the final paragraph on the back of the Major Havoc reproduction PCB.  Apologies for the poor quality of the image; this snippet was taken from one of Atari's own photos (with, amusingly, the word 'retouched' in the filename), so blame them.  You'll probably want to make judicious use of zooming to read this mess:

 

Now compare the remainder of the text of the 'Game Play' section on the PCB to the 'Gameplay' section in the Wikipedia article.  They're really close, with the PCB text being essentially a mild rewrite (in places) of Wikipedia's content.  The real giveaway is in the final paragraph, however: the original article erroneously refers to the game having joystick control on a few occasions; it was actually controlled with a single-axis roller.  You can see where the PCB text altered this for accuracy in all but one place, where the section states the following:

 

Quote

...so the player has to play the game while moving the joystick to the 3 at the same time...

 

Which is a one-for-one match with the Wikipedia article.  This is not the only error of its type to make it over onto the PCB, but it clearly demonstrates that not only did they copy & paste the info but couldn't even successfully edit it to make it accurate.

 

That's totally worth $245 plus tax and shipping 

 

For great lolz, certain of those sections - on both the PCB and Wikipedia - are using text that I recognise as my own.  Back in the 1990s, I did some writing for a website (not mine) focussed on arcade game easter eggs and the like; in some ways, it was kind of a proto-TCRF.  Not something that bothers me, since stuff like this has a tendency to kick around for years after the fact.  But I certainly am mildly-entertained by it.

 

Just for reference, the original PCB image is attached in the spoiler below, along with a massive screenshot of the Wikipedia Major Havoc article as it appears at the moment.

 

Spoiler

 

 

If anyone wants to audit the other two PCBs for further lazily-acquired content, by all means go for it.  This one's inertia has run out for me 

[+GoldLeader]

On 4/28/2023 at 12:47 PM, Lord Mushroom said:

The brand is the entity. So whoever owns it, and whatever is done with it, it is still Atari. You could say it is not like the "good old" Atari, but that is a subjective thing.

 

It's not like the "good old" Atari.

[Keatah]

I accept and respect a brand for what they do. Not for the name.

 

Now. Thing I learned about collections and collecting is that the best ones happen organically, spontaneously, over the years, over the decades. And if I apply that philosophy to stuff I accumulated I would only have a few "collections" that've stood the test of time.

 

Astronomy books - a bookcase or two, including the ones from my childhood and elementary school in the 70's. Periodically I add one here and there.

A virtual/emulation collection - a work in progress since the early 1990's.

Apple II and TRS-80 Pocket Computer stuff - none of it started out as a collection. Not even an inkling. It. Just. Happened.

 

All of it has deep meaning. The kind that can't come from a turnkey solution fed by $$$$$.

 

And to all but the millionaires among us, completionism can be "deadly". Completionism creates this irresistible urge to fill a collection with useless meaningless fluff. And it essentially wiped out my cartridge & console collection in the 80's. Headlong into overload! There are times I believe it a blessing in disguise however..

[zzip]

On 4/28/2023 at 4:29 PM, Keatah said:

But, and the big Brazilian BUTT (lift) here is is the driving forces behind the name. What are the motivations? What are goals? What is the corporate philosophy? From what I see these are significantly different from the Warner & Tramiel Atari of the 70's & 80's.

Of course it's going to be different.  Under Warner, it was the market-leading video game company,  under Tramiel it was trying to be a jack-of-all-trades computer company (selling everything from home computers to Unix workstations)

 

Today's Atari has inherited a brand that has been to hell and back.   They can't be what either Warner or Tramiel was,  there's much more powerful players that have cornered those markets,  so they must find a different path or fold

 

On 4/28/2023 at 5:04 PM, Keatah said:

Very true. I go to a classic rock concert, and I'm not interested in the new material. I'm going there for the vintage sound. The vintage hits. Mostly. There's so much old stuff that's good. And I'm happy to hear live variations/improvs/retakes of the old classics.

And that's how most fans are.  I'm not cynical enough to believe that old bands can't do good new music.  I still check out new music from my favorite bands and some of it is really good.   But the world that existed in the 70s and 80s that made it popular is gone.   Sure bands still make videos, but today's MTV won't blast it to the masses, and even if they did how many GenXers would still spend time sitting around watching?   Not too many, the fun of that wore off a long time ago, and there's other responsibilities now,  which is why MTV stopped playing videos in the first place.

 

On 4/28/2023 at 5:04 PM, Keatah said:

Thing with Atari though is that "Atari" meant "electronic games" to us elementary school aged children back then. Blanket term. And it was a whole culture, too, that happened as a national craze. I think many Atari enthusiasts want nutari to bring back that craze and the heady times. Ain't gonna happen. Too many other things have to be in place. And these other things are far outside of nutari's pervue.

Exactly, unless they can shove us all back in school, make arcades a thing again, nuke digital distibution so we have to buy cartridges and so on and so on.    There's no way to return to that point in time.   The stars that were aligned then to enable it are aligned differently now.    The best they can do is release things that remind us of that time.

 

On 4/28/2023 at 5:19 PM, Keatah said:

If I want to buy a name, like OG Atari, I'm just gonna get an Atari emblem/sticker from ebay and attach it to my emulator PC. After all it's what nutari did. Didn't they? Put their logo on a generic x86 AMD system?

It's not quite that simple,  they have a custom case, custom motherboard, custom interface,  custom joystick design,  etc.    It's not like they went on Newegg and ordered a bunch of parts and cases and slapped an Atari logo them.   It wouldn't have required the 2-3 year of product development to do that.

 

On 4/28/2023 at 3:39 PM, christo930 said:

It wouldn't be that bad if the new stuff wasn't utter garbage you wouldn't buy for any other reason.  If they actually made a good quality cathedral radio, I'd buy it.  Instead, they take the cheapest mech they can buy and stuff it into the cheapest case they can make which superficially looks like the original, but is just trash. 

I'm sure if there was a market for high-quality authentic catherdral radios,  they'd produce them.   But the transistor and other innovations turn radios into a cheap, throwaway thing.    

 

It's another relic from a different time-  When radio was considered hi-tech and people would pay a premium for it, when vacuum tubes and AM radio were the norm, and when there were repair shops all over the place to get it fixed when it broke.

 

Because getting things repaired is much less convenient, how many people are going to risk a large amount of money on a radio that could break?   It's almost necessary to build them the way the way they do to find a market for them.   You get the styling without paying a lot, it works well enough, and you get some modern features like bluetooth, and maybe CD/Cassette

[+GoldLeader]

 

I honestly feel like there's plenty here who miss the point.  A point that has been made convincingly IMO several times over.  (And once the point is made;  It's either instantly forgotten, ignored, trivialized, or all is forgiven and we "reset", or some say "No,  that version of Atari was different people...")  Well this isn't South Park and if Kenny died in real life,  he'd very likely still be dead next week...

 

It's not that a company (possibly, (well more than possibly) filled with some pretty bad people) bought the name,...as people do notice companies change hands all the time.  It's the things they did with the name.  It's the things they did to others (including some of us here and some of us who are no longer with us...)   (Bows out)

 

 

 

 

PS:  Since I know I left things unanswered (and I don't feel like rehashing the forgotten);  One example,  I'll just say if you can look up (in the Tacobox thread) what Fred Chesnais did to Curt Vendel and still want to support this version of "Atari"...Have fun.

Edited May 1, 2023 by GoldLeader
Edited to add one...of many.