Food for thought from a 7800 fan

[Inky]

Atari had some inkling because Nintendo actually came to Atari, wanting Atari to masrket the NES

[+-^CrossBow^-]

It's plain and simple.

 

The NES was superior in some ways technically...but it had a more limited color pallette to that of the 7800..and the the 7800 ran faster and was able to handle more objects (even for a scanline renderer).

 

What killed the whole 7800 from being more popular was the fact that the Tramiels Shelved the damn things in 84 instead of releasing them. If they had...I think things would have been much different for Atari and the 7800 especially.

 

But no...they released it too late after the Big "N" was already taking the market.

[Gunstar]

Another thing you guys have to remember is that for a while, the Tremiels wanted to turn Atari into a "strictly" computer company, They came from a computer company they started(commodore), and that is what they knew. They knew nothing about consoles and thought they were dead anyway. When they realized this wasn't the case, they were not ONLY to late and lacking good marketing, but they also never gave ANY of their consoles the proper support they needed, because they were concentrating on their computer lines. This was the case with all their game systems upto and including the Lynx. When the Jaguar came out, they tried to do a 180, and change back into a strictly gaming company, but because of a lack of confidence in the gaming community due to their lack of supporting their previous systems properly, the Jaguar also failed. They were also a much smaller company by then, after losing their shirts against Commodore, Apple and IBM in the computer arena, so even with the full backing of the company with the Jaguar, they just didn't have enough anything; money, designers&programmers, infrastructure, or 3rd party support. If they had stuck to consoles in the first place, or at least continued Warner Atari's dual computer&console company structure, it may have gone a lot different. One more point that I'd like to make, just because I've been reading stuff about why Atari failed lately, is that Atari was a computer and videogame company to start with, the Tramiel's did not attempt to turn a videogame company into a computer company, it was that too, already. They just wanted to drop the gaming side of it. The Tramiels just tried to ride the fence when they never had the resources to do so. I grew up with both Atari consoles and Computers, so I loved both versions of Atari. I know some people are either Atari "computer" company fans or Atari "console" company fans. I'm both and wish both could have survived and succeeded.

[utamav91]

I've heard about all the stories about the way the company was alledgedly run, but I've got another question...even if the marketing department didn't do the best job...

 

did Atari's engineers get caught by surprise? Are you telling me that they had NO warning or rumor of the NES?

 

The NES was likely released a full year earlier in Japan, like most of Nintendo's stuff.

 

The graphics on the NES system are light-years beyond the 7800.

 

I was working in a retail store at the time of release, and we had the NES and 7800 sitting side-by-side in a display area. The only reason any 7800s were sold was because a lot of our customers had a zillion $$$ and 3-5 years already invested in 2600 carts. We couldn't keep even relatively weak/simple games like NES Excite Bike and NES Golf in stock...but my 7800 area stayed nice and full.

[MrRetroGamer]

There are a few good books out there worth reading on this topic.

 

If you can find one vintage copy of "ZAP!, The Rise and Fall of Atari", it's a good primer, but it only covers up to 1984. I think this book is being re-released pretty soon, check out borders.com for details.

 

"The First Quarter" is a good general info book, and "Game Over" is an excellent read on Nintendo. I'm still waiting for Phoenix to show up this week, I hear that is pretty good also.