burninmylight said:
This is a common misconception. The Seal of Quality was never about promising or ensuring better quality games, but to guarantee that a cartridge for a Nintendo console would work AT ALL when placing it into the appropriate console, and that there was a certain standard of professionalism and quality when a customer bought it. Atari didn't have that quality control, and any so-called developer that got its hand on a dev kit and producing games out of a garage could pump out carts claiming to be legit games. There were devs out there not even bothering with proper materials, using scotch tape and Sharpies to label their games instead of proper labels and graphics, and repurposed VCR tapes as sleeves to hold games. Buying Atari games got to be such a crapshoot that it was a cause for celebration just to put in a game and feel confident that it would work every time you turned the damn thing on. That's what made customers feel ripped off, but it was standard for the times. Nowadays, the industry has come such a ways that we are pretty much guaranteed that the console games we buy will work for the intended console full-stop, no questions asked. If you want a modern example of how much like the Wild, Wild West the Atari business model was, look at the indy Steam community and all of the garbage pumped out daily for it. So many asset flips, broken "games" that barely run, and screensaver simulators. One more thing: every single popular console ever is a shovelware factory. The NES, SNES, PS1, PS2, DS, Wii all have giant landfills worth of shovelware carts/discs lying around somewhere. A lot of this filth has now been relegated to the smartphone market and digital storefronts, but the deluge is definitely still there on every single console that's even remotely successful. I will never understand why people act like the popular Nintendo consoles are the only victims. |
