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by purpled_haze 3776 days ago
> It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.

Yes, the real problem is that they expected something comparable in quality to his previous games with less time to develop it. He did agree to it, though. Watch "Atari: Game Over" and you'll be able to tell from interviews with him that he held a lot of guilt about it- for years.

The fact is that he was one of the best game developers in history that accepted a job that he couldn't do without making sacrifices that killed the game. He shouldn't take credit for killing Atari though. They ended up being split focused on computers (that did fairly well but were competing against giants) and consoles. And they messed up by releasing both the 5200, which was a bomb partially due to its controllers, and the 7800, which came too late. Even if Atari had done everything right, it would have been really difficult to compete with Nintendo.

I still love Atari, though. The NES was great, but the 2600, for its time, was the best thing that ever happened in the home gaming industry. It was the first proof that a home gaming console could be a staple to a first-world kid's life.

1 comments

The NES set an awful precedent that we're still dealing with today.
What precedent was that?
My best guess is how the NES was marketed, to boys. Here's a link to an Adam ruins everything video about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08CVkBxvBM

Did I guess correctly?

Sidenote, somehow googling "youtube video nintendo marketing video game crash analysis boys" had the video I was thinking of at the very top.

I suspect he may have meant the 'requiring all games to be licensed' thing, since a lot of older systems and home computers let pretty much anyone make games if they figured out how to get them working.

Or maybe the centralised content censorship thing. Nintendo waa pretty infamous for that in the olden days, and it may have been the inspiration for sometimes rather insane guidelines for modern day app stores and the likes.