[jerf]

Yeah, Atari really "imprinted" on a style of game in the 2600 era and could never move on from it.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is completely disconnected in personnel several times over from the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.)

And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics. If you really, really like that, they've got you.

Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time, but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also imprinted.

Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but the genre-definer. And so forth.

Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what came before only prettier". It shows effort.

The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.

[KerrAvon]

A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely unplayable unless you read the manual.

“Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.

[jerf]

It's not a literal point, it's an observation of how far we've come. A single texture blows away 2600 and NES games in size quite handily. The emulation effort for either is a sneeze compared to what we pour into a single frame nowadays. Compared to modern stuff they're both just primitive beyond primitive as far as a modern kid is concerned.

And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I don't understand that so many people seem to have in their brains that if you explain why a thing is true, it is no longer true. I do not understand it. Explaining why they haven't moved on does not suddenly make it so they have moved on. They haven't moved on. Best of luck to them but I doubt it's going to work very well as a strategy in 2025 any more than it did in the 1980s.

[anthk]

Even in early and late 00's, NES, SNES and MD games were emulated everywhere.

[HFguy]

"And as for your second paragraph, it has that thing I don't understand that so many people seem to have in their brains that if you explain why a thing is true, it is no longer true. I do not understand it."

This is an interesting observation. I've seen the same thing.

I think the clue is in the "it is a choice"...perhaps they are perceiving seeing some sort of judgement being made of Atari implicit in your argument???

In other words, it can be true at the same time that (1) The are not moving on and (2) It is a choice.

And #2 does not invalidate #1.

[MYEUHD]

What is a "modern kid"? :) Super Mario Bros. 3 is very enjoyable, even for a "modern kid"

[kjkjadksj]

Dude. There is no way in hell they probably even could move on. They probably simply do not have the organizational structure to develop modern games. They are like one of those companies making retro style record players. That is their niche. Not trying to go toe to toe with nintendo or playstation. Just a completely different business model.

[Dwedit]

Star Fox was made mainly by Argonaut Software, including the development of the Super FX chip. Only the scenario and characters were from Nintendo.

Donkey Kong Country was all Rare, except for use of the Donkey Kong character. If you look carefully at the DK sprite, you can even see design elements from Battletoads in there.

[jeromeb_la]

I agree with you up to a point. Epyx made the Lynx for Atari and it was by far better than the gameboy for the gaming of its time. It had hardware-based sprite scaling. It could’ve done a Mario kart type of game very well if someone had the foresight to. But Atari didn’t have Mario or any cutesy ideas that kids wanted. Nintendo was very smart in that they made the main target audience the kids. Nintendo also knew parents would only spend a certain amount of money so the gameboy had the price advantage.

[deaddodo]

Man, I remember learning that the VCS/2600 had successors well after there time and was like "gee, I wonder how powerful those were". The difference between a 2600 and 5200 is a small step up, and the 5200 to 7800 is damn near imperceptible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMXi1lAVow

Atari just never did....anything. It's so obvious in retrospect why the died.

[bluGill]

The 5200 was essential the 8 bit Atari computer hardware on the inside. The controllers were different, and no keyboard, but almost exactly the same (IIRC one graphics mode was different in their GPU [not related to the GPU of today]). The 8 bit XEGS of 1987 was the same hardware as computer.

They did have some interesting handhelds in later years, but didn't have enough good ideas to make them catch on.

[MBCook]

Early NES games were absolutely arcade style games too. It took a while for developers to figure out they could go more and it would work well.

Jeremy Parish’s YouTube channel does a fantastic job of documenting this on the NES and other consoles.

If Atari has been able to survive significantly longer I’m sure they would have learned too.

[agumonkey]

Even as a young kid I noticed that split. The NES included some posters and flyers listing all the original line up of games, with the same visual design (even cartridges stickers) and they were all simple arcade-like games. It already felt vintage even though this wasn't my generation, and rapidly the feel of games changed radically, it also merged with the current culture, with tv shows and movies of the 80s.

[badsectoracula]

> And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics.

FWIW various Atari incarnations did try to move on to newer stuff but they all ended up with various levels of fail. The current Atari incarnation is probably the most (relatively) successful this side of the 2000s - though they're probably also (relatively) the smaller one.

I think they were close to closing shop before deciding to focus on the retro and indie gaming stuff.