Atari 2600 as a lesson to game designers ... and a foreshadowing of the Wii

[BTFeather55]

masschamber said:

BTFeather55 said:

Ail said:

masschamber said:

Ail said:
That's not an analogy I would actually try to make seeing how the success of the Atari2600 heralded the video game crash of the 80s.....

 

 

the 2600 didn't herald the crash, the problem was the next generation of consoles. The 2600 was 6 years old when the industry crashed, and the crash occured on the backs of things like the colecovision and atari 5200,

the 2600 and intellivision actually managed to weather the crash and live on until the late 80's/ early 90's

anyway well though out write up there, plus racing the beam, mercy is that true about programming the 2600 you basically have to write your program to feed the next pixel into the TIA just as the television reaches it

I thought the crash really started the holydays ET was released for the 2600....

 

 

I think so too, strangely enough I think that was the holiday season when I received the most ever games for Christmas from my parents and grandparents. I remember getting ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, multiple games from Imagic and for my Coleco, and it seems like by the next Summer you couldn't find games in stores.

 

that's a bit of a misconception, both pacman and e.t. came out in 1982 and were treated as the big release for the 2600, and they were flops and didn't help the situation,

but at this point the 2600 was already 5 years old with an original intended shelf life of 3 years (hence the gimped 6507 as opposed to the 6502, 1 button controller,  and limitation on the TIA and so forth),

and had built something out of nothing. dedicated systems and the studio 2 and the channel f weren't sufficient nor were they released  enough ahead of the 2600 to learn from

The fate of the industry was now with the colecovision and 5200, neither of which delivered a worthy successor to the 2600

the vectrex joined the party to late, and the intellivision was competition for 2600  and already 4 years old when the crash occurred.  Neither of them could carry on for the 2600 either

 

     I think Pac-Man must have come out earlier than 1982 because the one I have looks more like a vcs game (the label on the cartridge more closely resembles the label of (Haunted House, Asteroids, Superman).  A couple of years after Pac-Man was released, we were getting the silver labeled 2600 games (and no one was using the name VCS anymore).  These silver labeled games tended to be more advanced and featured better graphics than VCS games.  They included Ms. Pac-Man, Kangaroo, Jungle Hunt, Phoenix, Vanguard, Centipede, Crazy Climber, RealSports Baseball and Tennis, ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Swordquest games.   These games were in my mind all released a couple of years after Pac-Man, yet sometime before the crash, and several years before the NES and 7800.