One of the reasons why the Nintendo Entertainment System destroyed Atari
The Nintendo Entertainment not only completely destroyed the former people’s favorite and creator of the home console market, but it also literally buried it. While Atari is still living as a zombie living of it licensing past, Nintendo is one of the “Big Three” - the three most successful console Makers.
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The answer to the question why the Nintendo Entertainment System destroyed Atari 2600 of course isn’t as stating the fact that while both were and 8-bit system, Atari 2600 was technologically frozen in the middle of the seventies while the NES was modern. No, that’s isn’t generally true – while the NES was being shown on the American and European markets it was obsolete and outdated by the coming 16-bit computers. The NES was obsolety not only in Europe, where it competed with already established 8-bit computers of European and American making, but it was even obsolete when compared to Japanese products, specifically with MSX2 computers that had much better options.
When I analyze the failure of Atari 2600, that is much more logical then the success of the NES. Even In the year 1980 was Atari VCS tragically outdated and just the giant amount of games created and the fact that the programmers managed to go around the limits of the hardware kept the console alive. The tries of Atari to keep this obsolete console running is almost touching- in reality it shouldn’t have survived the year 1980, but Atari kept producing it even-though it had much better models Atari 5200, Atari 7800 and a parallel in form of gaming computer Atari 400 and Atari 800. The fact that this obsolete console was still being sold was enough for the company to still support it.
The architecture of the NES was a generation younger but the console this came to the market one generation too old. Technically it wasn’t any beauty, the CPUs of Atari and the NES were very similar but a big difference came in their videoarchitechture, which the Atari derived from Arcades while the NES’s one was similar to other 8-bit machines.
Even this one small difference meant that the programmer, whether he was trying to create anything, had a pretty much normal 8-bit machine that allowed him to do similar to things as on a home computer. Atari somewhat illogically gave up the idea of a uniform platform, while Nintendo focused on a single thing- to make their consoles good
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It is about the games. No fun gameplay games, no profit.
Nintendo's library of games for the most was pretty good. It's nice to see the faces of those that played Nintendo growing up; they have a huge smile on their face while describing their favorite NES games....and talk about the hours they spent in front of their tv.