ATARI 2600 commercial from 1987
By the late 1980s, Atari was trying hard to stay relevant. The way to do that when you're competing against a powerhouse in Nintendo is by making games for that system. Atari was doing that, but they weren't titles that made video game fans jump. The other way to stay relevant is by making a console to rival the Nintendo Entertainment System. Atari tried, but kept coming up with hardware that was not on par with the 8-bit king. So... they tried to push their 10 year old system back on us; the Atari 2600.
They repackaged it in a slick package, cut the price dramatically and came out with commercials with catchy jingles like the one below. But as we all know, it wasn't enough.
You have brought back some fond childhood memories !!! Thanks for the recap !!!
Ha, these commercials were all over the place then 🙂
It wasn't so much that Atari hardware wasn't on par, it's that they made incredibly stupid decisions. The Atari 7800 was ready to market before the NES (at least in the U.S. and probably Europe) and in terms of hardware it could have competed just fine. The problem was that they decided to not release the system until they saw Nintendo release their's and how well they were doing. By then it was too late. NES had third party developers pretty much locked up with their strict licensing agreements. In addition, when Atari decided to develop their own games they were very cheap about it, strictly limiting development time and the amount of memory on the carts. There's more to the story but it wasn't the hardware that prevented Atari from succeeding.
I'm aware of all of thus , but I stand by what I wrote. Tramiel supposedly was the one shelved the 7800. Atari had nothing to compete with Nintendo. Even with the 7800, the joystick alone was reason enough for players to look at the NES and even though they did have the Atari Joypad, players didn't like how it felt. Too little, too late. That we can probably agree on.
But Atari DID have something to compete and they had it nearly a year and a half before Nintendo came to the U.S. They even had manufactured a significant number and had them sitting in a warehouse ready to go for a launch in June 1984. They just chose not to sell them. The hardware that Atari had was on par with what Nintendo produced
Nintendo also approached Atari to market the NES in the U.S. Atari was going to buy exclusive rights to do that but then sit on it. Nintendo found out and decided to do it themselves. Atari was being run by a bunch of idiots at that time. Tramiel was good at doing things as cheaply as possible but not much else.
Atari's failure wasn't in lack of hardware it was in lack of marketing and securing third party hardware and software developers along the way. There's no reason Atari's hardware, sitting in a warehouse at the time, could not have competed well with the NES with the appropriate 1st and 3rd party software support. Even though their joysticks were not the best, there would have been plenty of 3rd party options and Atari could have easily improved upon what they had if they had only chosen to market the 7800 seriously in the first place. Yes, Tramiel was the one who decided to hold it back (along with numerous other projects), mostly because he refused to pay the developers of the hardware what they were owed, but it was already there, produced and ready to go. And as a plus, it was backwards compatible with the 2600.
It's not that they didn't have anything that could have competed it's that they chose not to until it was too late and only did so half-heartedly, mostly just selling what they already had sitting around and developing only a relative handful of actual new titles. And as I mentioned before, even those were severely restricted in terms of development time and memory because Tramiel was cheap. At the end of the day, it wasn't that Atari didn't have the hardware to compete, it's that Nintendo had already locked most of the 3rd party developers into exclusive development for the NES by the time they decided they wanted to compete. This is a big reason the SMS didn't sell better too.
Ironically, despite all this the Atari 7800 was technically a success for Atari. Though never anywhere near the popularity of the NES, it was profitable for Atari, supported until 1991, and it equalled or exceeded sales of the Sega Master System in North America.
I have mixed feeling about Tramiel. Without him there never would have been a Commodore 64, my favorite system of all time. But his philosophy of making cost the absolute most important aspect of everything he did cost both Commodore and Atari in the end.
So you're saying they had nothing on par at the time NES was popular. Then we agree 😀 I know, I'm an a$$ Oh, no, Jack was awesome, but he dropped the ball with Atari's video game market.
Software wise they had nothing on par (or very little), hardware wise they most certainly did :).