Console Debate #19 Atari 2600

[Tulpa | 3,509]

7 hours ago, Dr. Morbis said:

Haha!  There you are; what took you so long?  This thread is like two days old already!!!  On a more serious note, though, when the time comes for these guys to finally do the NES poll, if you prance in with all your "utter trash, worst system ever made, most almighty garbage console on earth" schtick, I will hunt you down........

Nah, he's just going to use every one of these threads to comment on how much he hates the N64.

"Well, the R-zone sucked, but it was better than the N64... "

[mbd39 | 2,024]

6 hours ago, Strange said:

Isn’t the notion that Atari single-handedly caused the video game crash kind of... incorrect? I had always heard it was a number of factors, primarily being a large number of available consoles, a plethora of titles for these various consoles with no regulation on quality, etc. and so consumer confidence in the medium plummeted

The Atari 2600 being over-saturated with shitty games helped contribute to the crash. But to be fair, Atari pretty much gave rise to the home video game industry in the first place. Before the 2600, there wasn't much.

 

[DorkOverlord | 686]

I think it's an important system from a historical perspective and has some great games, but 80% of the catalog hasn't aged well. 

[Tulpa | 3,509]

7 hours ago, Strange said:

Isn’t the notion that Atari single-handedly caused the video game crash kind of... incorrect? I had always heard it was a number of factors, primarily being a large number of available consoles, a plethora of titles for these various consoles with no regulation on quality, etc. and so consumer confidence in the medium plummeted

When the crash happened, there were nine main consoles on the North American market:

Atari VCS/2600

Atari 5200

Intellivision

Colecovision

Magnavox Odyssey 2

Fairchild Channel F

Bally Astrocade

Emerson Arcadia

Vectrex

 

A few others were in Europe and Japan, and the RCA Studio II died in 1978.

Each one ranged from $170 for the Channel F to $300 for the Astrocade, but inflation was so rampant in that era, changing month to month, that it's hard to peg which one was the most expensive at launch in today's dollars. The Astrocade would have been about $1200 today.

But it was a pretty oversaturated market. The 2600 probably saw the most "unlicensed" titles, at least from Atari's point of view, as the NES era concept of licensing wasn't established yet. For them, if it wasn't first party, it was unlicensed. The other console makers were more tolerant of third party games (if they even got them, some were entirely first party libraries), as more games made for their console meant more chances to sell the consoles themselves.

Atari saw the brunt of bad titles, both their own and the really crappy third party games that made ET and Pac-Man look like Pitfall. But the other consoles had their share. I mean, can anyone name a Bally Astrocade or Emerson Arcadia game without googling? Yeah...

When Atari's stock plunged in 1983 due to lower than expected Christmas 1982 returns (stockholders expected a 50% growth, not the 15% that actually happened), the rest of the industry was pulled down with them.

 

Edited March 14, 2021 by Tulpa

[T-Pac | 7,559]

On 3/12/2021 at 6:21 PM, DefaultGen said:

Atari is like, you want to play some CHECKERS? It's gonna be with a god damn KING. LOOK AT HIS SMUG FACE, YOU JUST GOTTA BEAT HIM. And you're gonna have a FINE PRINCESS at your side cheering you on!

Are you ready to play some VIDEO CHESS? I don't think you are because you are competing with HALF-MAN, HALF SPACE MACHINE

Nintendo is like are you ready for the BEST ZELDA GAME EVER MADE? Here's the logo on a blank background.

[T-Pac | 7,559]

I personally love the 2600. Simple gameplay done right is a lost art, but the VCS has it in spades. 

And while Activision is seen as the powerhouse of 2600 games, I feel like there were fantastic offerings from a wide range of publishers (iMagic, CBS, 20th Century Fox, and most notably Atari's own first-party releases.)

Generally, my favorite type of game is 100% simple, progression-based arcade action (or puzzles). The type of experience where your average gamer can get the satisfaction of making it to the end of a course (like clearing all 4 phases of Gorf) or accomplishing a straightforward objective (like extinguishing the whole building in Towering Inferno), while the more experienced gamer can continue to loop the game for points. 
Games of this ilk were in their prime on the 2600 and early in the post-crash 8-bit era (like with Nintendo's Black Box games).

-CasualCart

[Strange | 1,700]

It’s simple: I see a CasualCart reply, I click and look for art.

Edited March 14, 2021 by Strange

[T-Pac | 7,559]

5 minutes ago, Strange said:

It’s simple: I see a CasualCart reply, I click and look for art.

Haha - I think this might be true for a lot of people, which sometimes makes me feel a little guilty whenever I just make a text-post.

-CasualCart

[Strange | 1,700]

36 minutes ago, CasualCart said:

Haha - I think this might be true for a lot of people, which sometimes makes me feel a little guilty whenever I just make a text-post.

-CasualCart

Not at all! Your reply/analysis in this thread is really great too.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,540]

@CasualCart We really don't deserve you

[DefaultGen | 5,407]

David Crane and Garry Kitchen's new game just went on sale: http://audacitygames.com/editions.html - Pretty neat

[mbd39 | 2,024]

2 hours ago, CasualCart said:

I personally love the 2600. Simple gameplay done right is a lost art, but the VCS has it in spades. 

And while Activision is seen as the powerhouse of 2600 games, I feel like there were fantastic offerings from a wide range of publishers (iMagic, CBS, 20th Century Fox, and most notably Atari's own first-party releases.)

 

 

Parker Bros was another great third party. Frogger, Qbert, Popeye, Empire Strikes Back, etc. Love the cart design as well.

(Not my carts.)

[T-Pac | 7,559]

21 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

@CasualCart We really don't deserve you

[T-Pac | 7,559]

7 minutes ago, mbd39 said:

Parker Bros was another great third party. Frogger, Qbert, Popeye, Empire Strikes Back, etc. Love the cart design as well.

Sick - I've got a Parker Bros Frogger cart, but I didn't even know they ported Popeye to the 2600. That one will be on my radar now for sure.

And I saw you mentioned Cosmic Ark earlier - that game is one of my favorites as well. I love the balance of twitch-style asteroid phases with more strategic "beam-em-up" phases haha.

-CasualCart

[GPX | 1,370]

2 hours ago, CasualCart said:

Haha - I think this might be true for a lot of people, which sometimes makes me feel a little guilty whenever I just make a text-post.

-CasualCart

Yeah, less commenting and more pics! We have plenty of commenters on this forum already!

Nah, I’m kidding! The pics are comments too, I see it for what they are!

 

[mbd39 | 2,024]

4 minutes ago, CasualCart said:

Sick - I've got a Parker Bros Frogger cart, but I didn't even know they ported Popeye to the 2600. That one will be on my radar now for sure.

And I saw you mentioned Cosmic Ark earlier - that game is one of my favorites as well. I love the balance of twitch-style asteroid phases with more strategic "beam-em-up" phases haha.

Atari 2600 Popeye has increased nostalgia factor for me because it was the only video game that my dad ever got into.

Don't expect much in terms of graphics because it's the 2600 but it plays just fine. It has all three levels from the arcade.... albeit stripped way down.

 

[mbd39 | 2,024]

Parker Bros. also ported the obscure Nintendo arcade game Sky Skipper to the Atari 2600. I guess the original arcade wasn't that fun so never got a wide release. Cabinets were later converted to Popeye.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_Skipper

 

[GPX | 1,370]

5 hours ago, Tulpa said:

When the crash happened, there were nine main consoles on the North American market:

Atari VCS/2600

Atari 5200

Intellivision

Colecovision

Magnavox Odyssey 2

Fairchild Channel F

Bally Astrocade

Emerson Arcadia

Vectrex

 

A few others were in Europe and Japan, and the RCA Studio II died in 1978.

Each one ranged from $170 for the Channel F to $300 for the Astrocade, but inflation was so rampant in that era, changing month to month, that it's hard to peg which one was the most expensive at launch in today's dollars. The Astrocade would have been about $1200 today.

But it was a pretty oversaturated market. The 2600 probably saw the most "unlicensed" titles, at least from Atari's point of view, as the NES era concept of licensing wasn't established yet. For them, if it wasn't first party, it was unlicensed. The other console makers were more tolerant of third party games (if they even got them, some were entirely first party libraries), as more games made for their console meant more chances to sell the consoles themselves.

Atari saw the brunt of bad titles, both their own and the really crappy third party games that made ET and Pac-Man look like Pitfall. But the other consoles had their share. I mean, can anyone name a Bally Astrocade or Emerson Arcadia game without googling? Yeah...

When Atari's stock plunged in 1983 due to lower than expected Christmas 1982 returns (stockholders expected a 50% growth, not the 15% that actually happened), the rest of the industry was pulled down with them.

 

I didn’t game until after the supposed crash of 83. But I can help to add another theory..

The technology back then was simply too limited. You will get your classics in Space Invaders, Pitfall and River Raid, but after several years, you’re likely to run out of ideas to make new sprites or new types of gameplay. 

What the ‘83 era needed was more third party support, and the console companies (eg. Atari) to come up with more advanced technology. Maybe revenue-wise there was no confidence to progress, but perhaps to make a leap in technology would have needed much more hefty funding. So my added theory, is that by natural selection, the primal consoles needed to “die off” so to speak, until the right technology level came along. Bring on Nintendo a few years later, the timing was perfect, the population grew, and kids needed some “new toy” to play.

The key point here is that technology in the current era is growing exponentially with each year. Back in the early gaming years, technology was growing at a snail’s pace by comparison to the present.

[mbd39 | 2,024]

5 minutes ago, GPX said:

I didn’t game until after the supposed crash of 83. But I can help to add another theory..

The technology back then was simply too limited. You will get your classics in Space Invaders, Pitfall and River Raid, but after several years, you’re likely to run out of ideas to make new sprites or new types of gameplay. 

What the ‘83 era needed was more third party support, and the console companies (eg. Atari) to come up with more advanced technology.

There was better console technology by 1983. There was Colecovision. There was the Supercharger for Atari 2600 that allowed for more sophisticated games on cassettes. Atari tried with the 5200. Programmers got better at pushing the 2600 and Intellivision. But for consoles the focus was still high score arcade type games (with some exceptions of course) until the NES came along with SMB, Zelda, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[elprincipe | 142]

56 minutes ago, mbd39 said:

 

Parker Bros was another great third party. Frogger, Qbert, Popeye, Empire Strikes Back, etc. Love the cart design as well.

(Not my carts.)

I spent so much time with Empire Strikes Back (being a massive Star Wars fan at that point in time). Just tons of fun to play and I always loved the snowspeeders in the movie!

[Tulpa | 3,509]

29 minutes ago, GPX said:

I didn’t game until after the supposed crash of 83. But I can help to add another theory..

The technology back then was simply too limited. You will get your classics in Space Invaders, Pitfall and River Raid, but after several years, you’re likely to run out of ideas to make new sprites or new types of gameplay. 

What the ‘83 era needed was more third party support, and the console companies (eg. Atari) to come up with more advanced technology. Maybe revenue-wise there was no confidence to progress, but perhaps to make a leap in technology would have needed much more hefty funding. So my added theory, is that by natural selection, the primal consoles needed to “die off” so to speak, until the right technology level came along. Bring on Nintendo a few years later, the timing was perfect, the population grew, and kids needed some “new toy” to play.

The key point here is that technology in the current era is growing exponentially with each year. Back in the early gaming years, technology was growing at a snail’s pace by comparison to the present.

The gold standard was the arcade games. That was the cutting edge in terms of graphics, and the 2600 was waaaaay behind in that regard. It was fine for 1977, but they were really pushing it by 1983.

They sort of caught up with the 5200 and to a lesser extent the Intellivision and Colecovision. Those had near arcade graphics in some respects. But each had flaws.

The 5200 had those awful analog controllers and consumers were turned off that they couldn't use their 2600 games.

Intellivision controllers weren't much better, and their arcade port library was lacking.

Colecovision had the arcade library, but they also had bad controllers (stiff joysticks) and financial mismangement on the corporate end. They also put all their chips in the Adam computer add-on that no one wanted.

All three could have benefited from an actual arcade stick controller.

 

Nintendo's big innovation was the emphasis on tile-based graphics instead of relying mostly on drawn graphics, though I think the early systems had primitive tiling. That's why NES games look so much more vibrant and alive. Everything else in their empire stemmed from that approach.

Edited March 14, 2021 by Tulpa

[mbd39 | 2,024]

4 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

The gold standard was the arcade games. That was the cutting edge in terms of graphics, and the 2600 was waaaaay behind in that regard. It was fine for 1977, but they were really pushing it by 1983.

They sort of caught up with the 5200 and to a lesser extent the Intellivision and Colecovision. Those had near arcade graphics in some respects. But each had flaws.

The 5200 had those awful analog controllers and consumers were turned off that they couldn't use their 2600 games.

Intellivision controllers weren't much better, and their arcade port library was lacking.

Colecovision had the arcade library, but they also had bad controllers (stiff joysticks) and financial mismangement on the corporate end. They also put all their chips in the Adam computer add-on that no one wanted.

Nintendo's big innovation was the emphasis on tile-based graphics instead of relying mostly on drawn graphics, though I think the early systems had primitive tiling. That's why NES games look so much more vibrant and alive.

Nintendo's other big innovation, even though they didn't invent it, was shifting the focus of games from score attack to beating the game. Games became more like an adventure rather than a repetitive quest for points. This is part of the reason why pre-NES era consoles seem extremely dated to many modern gamers while NES feels more like modern games.

 

Edited March 14, 2021 by mbd39

[GPX | 1,370]

5 hours ago, Tulpa said:

The gold standard was the arcade games. That was the cutting edge in terms of graphics, and the 2600 was waaaaay behind in that regard. It was fine for 1977, but they were really pushing it by 1983.

They sort of caught up with the 5200 and to a lesser extent the Intellivision and Colecovision. Those had near arcade graphics in some respects. But each had flaws.

The 5200 had those awful analog controllers and consumers were turned off that they couldn't use their 2600 games.

Intellivision controllers weren't much better, and their arcade port library was lacking.

Colecovision had the arcade library, but they also had bad controllers (stiff joysticks) and financial mismangement on the corporate end. They also put all their chips in the Adam computer add-on that no one wanted.

All three could have benefited from an actual arcade stick controller.

 

Nintendo's big innovation was the emphasis on tile-based graphics instead of relying mostly on drawn graphics, though I think the early systems had primitive tiling. That's why NES games look so much more vibrant and alive. Everything else in their empire stemmed from that approach.

I think your point doesn’t necessarily refute my hypothesis. Sure, there were consoles that improved upon the Atari 2600 around 83-84. However, were these advancements enough to allow developers to create a more deep and meaningful experience a la NES games from the mid-80s? 

You recalled correctly that arcades and home consoles were poles apart back in the early 80s, and this is linked with the theory that it wasn’t financially viable/profitable to create consoles of advance technology for the home markets at that particular era. The NES might have reinvented the console market, but it came with the help of a signicant jump in technology with the 8-bits and thereafter.

[Tulpa | 3,509]

1 hour ago, GPX said:

I think your point doesn’t necessarily refute my hypothesis. Sure, there were consoles that improved upon the Atari 2600 around 83-84. However, were these advancements enough to allow developers to create a more deep and meaningful experience a la NES games from the mid-80s? 

Well, the deep and meaningful experience from NES games didn't come at launch, it was developed over time. Most of what we think of  in terms of deep NES games started appearing around 1987. (Yes, the original SMB is pretty deep for a 1985 game, but they do reuse a lot of assets through the levels.) And many times it was the developers making these games despite the limitations of the NES.

Remember, the NES/Famicom came out in 1983, the year of the crash and a year after the Colecovision. (Interestingly, it was actually the Colecovision, stemming from Nintendo's working with Coleco for a home port of Donkey Kong, that may have inspired some of the development of the NES.) It wasn't THAT far ahead of the later pre-crash consoles. Indeed, the Sega Master System, in pure technological terms, surpassed it three years later.

I would argue it was the developers being extremely smart and clever regarding how to program for the NES tech that made it so lasting, not anything inherent in the tech itself beyond the emphasis of tile graphics.

Don't get me wrong, it was a pretty innovative and certainly an important console, but it wasn't like alien technology was suddenly bestowed upon Nintendo.

Edited March 15, 2021 by Tulpa

[Reed Rothchild | 9,540]

52 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

original SMB is pretty deep for a 1985 game, but they do reuse a lot of assets through the levels

I feel like going from the Atari to Super Mario Bros. is like going from Faceball 2000 straight to Doom.  So vastly different in scope that it's almost not even comparable.

Of course I'm not old enough to have been raised on Atari or to user in the dawn of Mario, so I can only guess as to how it really felt.