Atari's Biggest Mistake

[nester]

Even us die hard Atari fans know that Atari made a lot of business mistakes. And I mean A LOT. I've never known any company to be so plagued by such consistantly bad management. I was just wondering what you thought was the biggest error in their long history of mistakes? There's really a lot to choose from here.

[Cootster]

Trying to market the 2600, 7800 and XEGS at the same time . . .

[Lauren Tyler]

Letting Jack Tramiel take over Atari.

[Goochman]

Ray Kassar -

[Susuwatari]

I wouldn't blame Ray. He was responsible for Yars' Revenge if it wasn't for him, Yars' Revenge would have never been concieved or if it was written, it'd be under a different name. ie Kcajs' Revenge that takers place in Leimmart system.

 

I blame on the poor management. I mean who needs million of ETs if they didn't sell well? Or getting the wrong person to do Pac Man.

[sniperCCJVQ]

E.T.

[zenassem]

Relying too much on brand. After the success of the 2600 I think they just believed that everyone would "ALWAYS" buy Atari - and they couldn't see past the good years to something like Nintendo.

 

***

Ever since then it's been an endless script of great "Innovation" but weak marketing, production, and distribution plans.

 

It almost makes me cry to look at some of the vaporware, or coming soon panphlets. Engineering and design wise they had so much talent. Alot of money spent on products that were never to be.

 

Kind of like Sega's story, but at least they found a "working restructuring plan".

================================================

I agree with the above as well,

 

To many products/lines at one time. Within a few years I went form a

600xl->800->65xe->130xe-> and wanted an ST but no $$$

2600->5200->skipped the 7800 and eventually bought an NES!!!!

 

JT taking over, would be like Gates running Apple today. It just wouldn't mix. Though I guess for people looking at the Numbers comparing 1984 to 1985, and 1986 it looked as though he did a good job. I never believed that his heart was in Atari, and therfore he never understood Atarians.

[kevin242]

IMO Atari was always too late or too early with their products. Look at

the 7800, great machine, if it came out when it was intended it would

have been popular but when it did come out it was pathetic compared

to the NES, I mean if you were around at the time and played Super MArio

Bros you know what I am talking about.

 

But their out of touch or late/early approach didnt end there. Look at

the Amiga fiasco? Atari was sitting on technology that was almost 10

years ahead of it's time and Atari might have really done something

with it (the biggest prob with commodores Amiga was price, something

Atari alwys managed to cut) but instead they let it go to the competition.

 

What about some of the great products like the Lynx and Portfolio two

advanced portable units, niether ws marketed right and they are both

only footnotes now in the historybooks.

 

The list goes on and on... The Falcon? Too little too late. The Jaguar

one disassastor after another, I mean an expansion unit that looks

like a toilet bowl???

 

Tell me why Atari released a 5200 in the early 80's which was basically

a 400 with no keyboard and bad joysticks, but didnt make it compatible

with the computers? Then released the XEGS years later??? What the

hell is that? The time to capitalize on that tech had long since past..

 

 

you get the idea, this was basically Atari's problem. In the end when

Atari had focussed all their resources into the Jaguar they just didnt

have enough resources, clout or to be honest the best tech to see it

through.

[zenassem]

@Kevin, Nicely said!

 

Ouch! What a paradox they worked themselves into:

 

They were ahead of their time, but..... sometimes late.

[delennd]

Plain and simple: pac-man, and yes, this counts as a business decision because they chose to save money and produced a mediocre game with the belief that we wouldn't mind because it's "atari" and "Pac-man". The fans lost A LOT of confidence in atari and this gave other companies the chance to look and say "Hey, we could do better than THAT!"

[Mindfield]

Advertizing, advertizing, advertizing. Warner's Atari did advertize a fair bit, but not nearly enough. Tramiel's Atari on the other hand treated publicization as a chore and a hardship intended only to be employed sparesely and spread as thin as possible over what they considered to be the largest key markets.

 

From memory, I recall seeing exactly one campaign for the Atari ST on TV. ("Atari Shatters the Myth") Likewise, I recall seeing exactly one campaign for the Jaguar -- and from that, seeing only one of the ads (Alien vs. Predator). And I watched TV pretty regularly in those days.

 

Cripes. I remember more commercials from Activision and Parker Bros. in the early 80s than I do Atari ads for anything.

 

Sure, they were also notorious for bad timing for product releases, having a big mouth announcing products that never saw the light of day (in fact, Atari's vapourware was well known even around 1984; I remember being particularly enamoured of the 1400XLS and 1450XLD machines I read about in an issue Games Magazine). Internally, Kassar's autocratic management and the entire Tramiel family's ineptitude were legendary, but I've always said that in the end, the loudest mouth wins regardless of whether or not your product is any better than anyone else's. If you put it in enough people's faces often enough, they'll probably buy it over some other product they haven't heard as much (or anything) about. To me, that was always Atari's achilles heel.

[+Random Terrain]

How about selling Atari in the first place? If Chuck E. Cheese face would have kept Atari, maybe things would have been different.

[zenassem]

Anyone remeber the "under 50 bucks!" 2600 campaign?

 

That was their most agressive advertising and it was in the late 80's. Good campaign, wrong product IMO.

[+Nathan Strum]

The biggest mistake was Nolan selling to Time Warner. He has since said he'd wished he'd taken some time off instead to deal with his burnout, rather than selling.

 

There are three reasons subsequent to this, why Atari would have fared better:

 

1) The 400/800 was originally planned to be a videogame system - not a personal computer - and follow up the 2600 in 1979. Warner felt it was too expensive to produce as a video game, and slapped a keyboard on it instead. This caused the 2600 to languish for years longer than it should have. Imagine what a stir the "5200" (or whatever it would have been called) would have caused if it had come out several years earlier, and how much better arcade conversions (and games in general) would have been if that became the focus of software development.

 

2) Nolan wanted to slash the price of the hardware, and make money off the software (which is common practice now). This coupled with the early introduction of the "5200" would have made Atari even more dominant over its rivals. Nolan said the best way to dominate the industry overnight was to air-drop free 2600s into LA. Give the systems away, and people will flock to buy the software. Again, Warner didn't agree.

 

3) The third party software glut may never have happened. On the video Stella at 20, the Activision guys state that if Nolan had stayed in charge of Atari, they probably never would have left, since he would have treated them fairly. With the original Atari programmers sticking around, Atari would have been the sole software supplier for their systems, and it would have been harder for other companies to gain a foothold, unless their products were first-rate.

 

Anyway, that's my 25 cents.

[+davidcalgary29]

Not bidding more for Tetris. This probably would've gone a long way in saving the 7800.

 

Hey, Atari wasn't alone in making poor decisions; the history of home video gaming is littered with the corpses of companies that just couldn't hack it.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Ray Kassar

Ditto. He's the reason Activision happened. He was Atari's first mistake.

[NovaXpress]

How about selling Atari in the first place? If Chuck E. Cheese face would have kept Atari, maybe things would have been different.

Remember, Bushnell sold Atari for a reason. It would be impossible to jump start the video game industry without the deep pockets of a Warner. Bushnell never could have afforded to do it himself, so if he'd never sold out then perhaps we'd be singing "Have you played Oddysey today?"

 

Atari blew it in the transition from the 2600 to the 5200, period. They confused and annoyed their core base of customers, who then turned to the Colecovision and C64s for their gaming. There were multiple mistakes in this transition, primarily the repetition of 2600 titles (notice that every company ever since has issued a completely new slate of launch titles for their new systems?) and the stupid decision to promote two systems equally at the same time. They set the blueprint for how not to launch a system upgrade.

[jaybird3rd]

In my opinion, the biggest mistake was keeping the 2600 around as long as they did. I've always thought that the 2600's thirteen-year lifespan was an engineering triumph and a business tragedy all at the same time. The 2600 engineers deserve a lot of credit for creating such a versatile system that could be stretched and made to do new things throughout its lifetime (and beyond). But it was a bad idea to keep on selling it and publishing games for it through the mid-1980s instead of giving more support to more advanced machines like the Atari 7800.

 

The second-biggest mistake was probably the Tramiel's attempt to morph the company into a computer manufacturer. The PC and Macintosh were already market leaders by the time the ST came along and the Amiga was a superior alternative, and there was never really much of a chance for the ST to establish itself. If Atari had stuck with the video game market in the pre-Nintendo years, where there was still a chance for growth and market development, perhaps things could have been a lot different.

[+Random Terrain]

How about selling Atari in the first place? If Chuck E. Cheese face would have kept Atari, maybe things would have been different.

Remember, Bushnell sold Atari for a reason. It would be impossible to jump start the video game industry without the deep pockets of a Warner. Bushnell never could have afforded to do it himself, so if he'd never sold out then perhaps we'd be singing "Have you played Oddysey today?"

 

Atari blew it in the transition from the 2600 to the 5200, period. They confused and annoyed their core base of customers, who then turned to the Colecovision and C64s for their gaming. There were multiple mistakes in this transition, primarily the repetition of 2600 titles (notice that every company ever since has issued a completely new slate of launch titles for their new systems?) and the stupid decision to promote two systems equally at the same time. They set the blueprint for how not to launch a system upgrade.

Oh, I thought he was good at getting the money he needed for things back then. I guess we were always screwed.

[Cootster]

Precisely, title duplication = not good. . .

 

That's why the NES made sure it didn't bring any titles over that had been on the 2600/5200/CV and instead went with sequels . . .

[Cootster]

Not bidding more for Tetris. This probably would've gone a long way in saving the 7800.

 

7800, no . . . Lynx, indeed . . . If it had Tetris and the GB didn't, we'd be saying "Game What? Oh, that black-and-white thing."

 

Hey, Atari wasn't alone in making poor decisions; the history of home video gaming is littered with the corpses of companies that just couldn't hack it.

 

As in, eventually all of them.

[ZylonBane]

The second-biggest mistake was probably the Tramiel's attempt to morph the company into a computer manufacturer.  The PC and Macintosh were already market leaders by the time the ST came along and the Amiga was a superior alternative

Ahem. Don't forget that the Amiga was supposed to be an Atari product originally.

[Mindfield]

Ahem. Don't forget that the Amiga was supposed to be an Atari product originally.

 

That was Jack's fault. He screwed Amiga over, so they took the Lorraine to Commodore, who were more than happy to oblige. A twisted bit of irony if you ask me, given the timing and Jack's origins.

 

Ever since then it seems like Jack (or eventually his sons) kept trying to make up for that fatal mistake by buying into revolutionary ideas from other companies later on -- the Portfolio from DIP, the Lynx from Epyx, the Jaguar from Flare II...

[Vic George 2K3]

The 7800 should have been its sole marketing focus in the late 1980s.

[Mindfield]

The 7800 should have been its sole marketing focus in the late 1980s.

 

It wouldn't have done much good. By the time the Tramiels decided to dust off the 7800, superior technology already existed. Moreover, at the time that the 7800 would have enjoyed its peak, The NES and SMS were already about to be trumped by the Genesis and SNES, which would have doomed the 7800 anyway.