Explain Donkey Kong, then.
I had a series of Ataris growing up. The games may not look like much now, but a lot of them were genuinely fun. Our city had an enthusiastic group that traded programs and ran bulletin boards.
I remember a friend, wide-eyed, marvelling at the highly advanced technology. “It’s like a miracle. You move this, and all the way over there, the thing on the screen moves in the same direction!”. And he meant every word of what he said.
Oh, no joke. It was impressive that video games could be played at home, had swappable cartridges, and were in full color. I know Atari wasn’t first for any of that stuff, but they did a great job.
Spider-man was a big hit in my house.
I see now that Spider-man for PS4 is coming to PC in August and I’ll get to play it. Stunning to me to compare the two.
Our parents got us a Pong machine, then later an Atari 2600. Which is amazing to me looking back, my parents weren’t financially well-off by any means, dad was a farmer and mom worked part-time at a bank, yet my brothers and I living on this rural farm in southeastern Iowa had an Atari. I couldn’t narrow down the years, but my older brother was still in high school when we got the Pong (so before 1979) and I think the Atari was around 1979 or 80 maybe. Which means, looking it up, that it wasn’t the 2600 yet but still the VCS!
We had Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Missile Command, Frogger, Asteroids, Superman (which was pretty lame), and a football game with just four players on a side, I think. My little brother always wrecked me in football, for some reason. We might have had some others, I don’t remember, we might have had Berzerk and Centipede. I always wanted Pitfall, but never got that one.
Looking at the list of games on Wikipedia seems to indicate a little bit later timeline, as games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong weren’t released until 1982, but considering I left home for college that fall I know I played that system longer than just a few months.
My first computer was an Atari 400? I immediately upgraded the ram. I loved that the entire code and hardware was available. I got one book that told me everything about the entire machine. I learned from machine to Basic coding on it, as well as how a computer worked on every level.
I also loved the arcade racing game. Can’t remember the name. Lots of quarters into that one.
Yeah, but the whole thing had nothing to do with Atari’s later problems. They had only opened one location when Bushnell bought the rights and left the company in 1979.
This was pretty high on the “What did they do wrong?” front.
They printed more copies of E.T. than they had in total console sales up to that point, expecting that it would spur more console sales.
And it might have worked if it was actually a good game.
It wasn’t. So they buried the extra cartridges.
yeah, the et mess and if they had released the 7800 instead of the 5200 would have helped … a lot of people didn’t know they had a working prototype of the 7800 first but someone thought since the xt was popular they thought they could accomplish the computer in a game console with the 5200 that Coleco couldn’t with the adam …
Of course, what even would have been better was Coleco not screwing up the atari/Nintendo deal either
The Atari ST was one of the best home computers of its time. I had a 1040 ST, which had amazing specs for its time (mid 1980s). It used the same 68000 processor as the Mac, had a higher resolution screen (640 x 400), a graphical operating system with a mouse, MIDI ports, and a whopping megabyte of RAM. It had a dual-sided 3.5" floppy like the Mac, an improvement over the IBM PC.
At the time of the ST, the competition was the IBM PC, the Apple II, the MacIntosh, and the Amiga. The ST and Amiga were a much better value than than the others. In Canada, the 1040ST was $1399 while the base Mac was $3400, and the base PC with floppy was around $2700. ST had better specs, more support chips to make it faster, etc.
The ST was the first computer to have a megabyte of RAM under $1000 ($999 US). In fact, the next cheapest machine with a megabyte was over $2500. In the old RAM constrained days, this was a big deal. The IBM PC had 640K, and the Mac was 512K. Cheaper computers like the C64 or RS Color Computer typically had 32K, 64K, or later 128K.
The Amiga and ST gained a lot of support among musicians becuase of native MIDI, and the Amiga had some amazing video circuitry that made it popular with video production peoole for a couole of decades, hut both ultimately failed in the market. The ST also found a market emulating the VT200 terminal, making it a better VT200 than the original at a fraction of the price.
I had the 2600, 5200, and 7800. (Still do). The 5200 was an awesome system, except for the fucking controllers. Use one for a month, guarantee it breaks down. Usually the fire buttons. The 2600 blazed the trail. The 5200 was much more robust in the graphics, and IMO the 7800 didn’t do anything the 5200 didn’t but the controllers were better. They did right in aping a lot of the arcade games- PacMan, Space Invaders, Missile Command, and so on. What they did wrong was the 5200 controllers and never really building a great library of 7800 games.
We had an Atari branded console, but would often buy our game cartridges from Sears because IIRC they were cheaper than Atari games. (Although I don’t know, maybe they just had a better selection.)
Lots of great games mentioned already. One that I remember was called Kaboom. You controlled a bucket along the bottom with a paddle controller and a guy at the top would run back and forth across a wall dropping bombs and you had to catch them in your bucket.
We had an Atari in the late 70’s. My Ma got it for nothing through one of her refund clubs, mailing in labels and such.
Liked it at the time. Younger brother and I would play for hours.
But you can go online and play most of the games now. Many of them look like a cave man made them.
It surprises me to note than in Canada in 1983, the best games cost over a hundred dollars and mediocre ones were pushing fifty. It is the same surprise when I see thousand dollar, fifty-function calculators in old Sears catalogues. To get current dollars, multiply by 3.5!
We got the Atari around the same time, but I think Combat was the only game that came with our system. I knew another kid with an Intellivision, but most people I knew who had a system had an Atari. Although I liked video games, I didn’t spend a lot of time playing my Atari. It was something I’d occasionally play in the morning or the evening when I wasn’t otherwise outside playing.
The biggest mistake I think Atari made was not maintaining the quality of games released for the system. I liked Pac-Man as a kid, but it wasn’t a very good game, there was the high profile failure of E.T., but there were a lot of third party publishers releasing terrible games for low prices. Grandma would go to the store, and didn’t know the difference between the $40 catridge and the $15 catridge. They were both racing games, so what’s the difference?
There were a lot of good games for the system. I have a soft spot in my heart for Yar’s Revenge, the story of mutated fly in spaces defeating evil invaders. Good times.
When NES was out, how was Atari’s latest system graphically? I agree that NES had Mario, Dragon Qest, and Final Fantasy. It’s hard to beat those games back then.
Here is Xevious on Atari 7800, probably around the NES days. It looks nice, but Nintendo was better.
I honestly don’t know. I got my NES in 1987, and I don’t think I knew anyone with an Atari by then.
We had Pong, then the Atari 2600, and – somewhere in there – the Magnavox Odyssey:
Somewhere in there I got an Interact PC:
Before I lost a bet, or something, and got a Radio Shack TRS-80:
“It’s a wonder I can think at all”
Dad bought us kids a Magnavox Odyssey one year for Christmas. I can only remember two games - Pong, and some kind of shooting game where you had to shoot “ghosts” that appeared in the window of a haunted house. The haunted house was actually a plastic sheet that you taped over the TV screen.
Only one we ever had was the Original Pong. Had 4 thrilling games and you were damn glad to have them. It was hooked up to one of those TV’s that the beans pour out onto Ann-Margaret in the movie Tommy.
original pong game console - Bing images
tommy movie ann margaret beans - Bing images
Can’t find a picture of that funky TV. EDIT: Found it on youtube. I’m wrong. We did not have that TV, but an equally ‘Mod’ one for the day.
I had essentially the equivalent the Timex Sinclair and had a traumatic 
experience with an Atari. We were at someone else’s house and my sister was playing pac-man (I think) on the Atari they had and got really into it and swung the joystick at the same time as she was trying to move the character and connected with the side of my head. No blood, but a bump and bruise.
So what they did wrong is made joysticks too hard and without rounded edges (?) 
//i\\