This is a blog I wrote back in March on Google Drive. Enjoy!
I think many of us know that Atari basically started the home video game market trend. But at the same time Atari was the cause of the U.S 1983 home video game market crash.
Before their new home video game console was going to be released, the Atari 2600, they
decided that they wanted to work with Warner Bros. in business. Warner accepted, however this came with a price. Warner did not want the “hippy” and “laid back” culture at Atari. To change that, the founder of Atari Nolan Bushnell was booted off, and he was replaced with Ray Kassar. Now this guy was a total buttoned down, suit and tie guy. This would be a total change for Atari.
Unfortunately, problems striked out. Besides now having to wear shoes at the office, the
programmers weren’t pleased with their check. And yet they would not get any credit for the games they were making. Their names didn’t get mentioned in the game. They were basically programming monkeys. Back then and even today, video game designers don’t get enough credit. It’s not just programming, there is a thought process to it as well.
In 1982, Atari’s top designers like David Crane decide to leave Atari and start their own business because of their poor treatment. They started the phenomenon that would be Activision. Today it’s common that a different company is developing games for a particular console. This is called third party support. And Activision would become the first ever third party developer. Believe it or not, Activision was producing better games than Atari was. They released classics like River Raid, Pitfall, and Kaboom. Activision's success just opened the doors for everyone else to make their own games.
So people thought “Hey, I can get rich making games for the Atari 2600”. But all those people who made those dreadful games for the 2600 needed to learn what Ray Kassar learned. Video games require much more than programming. You can’t make a game with no thought put into it. And for that, that is why the 2600 was filled with garbage. There were many Atari 2600 games that had no thought whatsoever put into them which were terrible. This needed to be stopped.
Atari at this point had to pull out the big guns to clear away these games. They were going to release two big titles, but in the end those two games would be Atari’s nail in the coffin. The first one was Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the biggest arcade game at the time; so Atari must have thought that the name would be enough to sell millions and millions of copies. When in reality, it was and is regarded as
a terrible port to the classic arcade game and a failure of a game overall. After that flop, the snakebite was E.T the Video Game. This is a great example of the corporate guys vs. the designer. The corporates say “We have this new E.T game that we want you to make”. Then the designer says “Okay, that’ll probably take me about 5 months”. But the corporals say “You kidding me, you got 5 weeks”. Yes, Atari gave the designers 5-6 weeks to develop the game just so it will be on shelves for the entire holiday shopping season. That is outrageous. So the game was released, and it was so horrendously bad that it was hard to call it a video game. Today E.T is now considered one of, if not the worst game
of all time.
It’s now 1983, and Atari was left with over 2 million copies unsold which were
dumped in a landfill somewhere in New Mexico. Because of E.T the Video Game,
Atari posted a 530 million dollar loss, and home console video games had died
out. Home computers became the next big thing from 1983-1985. But a company with
the name of Nintendo would rise to revive the home video game market back to the
U.S.
Before their new home video game console was going to be released, the Atari 2600, they
decided that they wanted to work with Warner Bros. in business. Warner accepted, however this came with a price. Warner did not want the “hippy” and “laid back” culture at Atari. To change that, the founder of Atari Nolan Bushnell was booted off, and he was replaced with Ray Kassar. Now this guy was a total buttoned down, suit and tie guy. This would be a total change for Atari.
Unfortunately, problems striked out. Besides now having to wear shoes at the office, the
programmers weren’t pleased with their check. And yet they would not get any credit for the games they were making. Their names didn’t get mentioned in the game. They were basically programming monkeys. Back then and even today, video game designers don’t get enough credit. It’s not just programming, there is a thought process to it as well.
In 1982, Atari’s top designers like David Crane decide to leave Atari and start their own business because of their poor treatment. They started the phenomenon that would be Activision. Today it’s common that a different company is developing games for a particular console. This is called third party support. And Activision would become the first ever third party developer. Believe it or not, Activision was producing better games than Atari was. They released classics like River Raid, Pitfall, and Kaboom. Activision's success just opened the doors for everyone else to make their own games.
So people thought “Hey, I can get rich making games for the Atari 2600”. But all those people who made those dreadful games for the 2600 needed to learn what Ray Kassar learned. Video games require much more than programming. You can’t make a game with no thought put into it. And for that, that is why the 2600 was filled with garbage. There were many Atari 2600 games that had no thought whatsoever put into them which were terrible. This needed to be stopped.
Atari at this point had to pull out the big guns to clear away these games. They were going to release two big titles, but in the end those two games would be Atari’s nail in the coffin. The first one was Pac-Man. Pac-Man was the biggest arcade game at the time; so Atari must have thought that the name would be enough to sell millions and millions of copies. When in reality, it was and is regarded as
a terrible port to the classic arcade game and a failure of a game overall. After that flop, the snakebite was E.T the Video Game. This is a great example of the corporate guys vs. the designer. The corporates say “We have this new E.T game that we want you to make”. Then the designer says “Okay, that’ll probably take me about 5 months”. But the corporals say “You kidding me, you got 5 weeks”. Yes, Atari gave the designers 5-6 weeks to develop the game just so it will be on shelves for the entire holiday shopping season. That is outrageous. So the game was released, and it was so horrendously bad that it was hard to call it a video game. Today E.T is now considered one of, if not the worst game
of all time.
It’s now 1983, and Atari was left with over 2 million copies unsold which were
dumped in a landfill somewhere in New Mexico. Because of E.T the Video Game,
Atari posted a 530 million dollar loss, and home console video games had died
out. Home computers became the next big thing from 1983-1985. But a company with
the name of Nintendo would rise to revive the home video game market back to the
U.S.