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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Could have Atari prevented the crash of 1983?

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Answer:

Atari was doomed anyway. 33 53.23%
 
They might have survived. 11 17.74%
 
No crash => dark age of gaming. 11 17.74%
 
They would've thrived an... 1 1.61%
 
Atari 6900? 6 9.68%
 
Total:62
BraveNewWorld said:
The answer is yes. Atari could have controlled its own destiny.

1. Atari 2600 needed to have built-in measures to prevent unauthorized games from being developed.
2. Atari needed to have quality control for all games released on the system.
3. Atari needed to make the 5200 exceptionally better. It needed to be $120 cheaper and have a better and more practical controller.

There would have been no crash and Atari would have released the 7800 around the same time Nintendo would release the NES.



There would've been a crash regardless there we're still too many consoles on the market and the market on the whole was still incredibly unregulated, though I agree with you that Atari would've come out much better if they did what you stated.



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BraveNewWorld said:
The answer is yes. Atari could have controlled its own destiny.

1. Atari 2600 needed to have built-in measures to prevent unauthorized games from being developed.
2. Atari needed to have quality control for all games released on the system.
3. Atari needed to make the 5200 exceptionally better. It needed to be $120 cheaper and have a better and more practical controller.

There would have been no crash and Atari would have released the 7800 around the same time Nintendo would release the NES.

If the crash never happened, would Nintendo's entrance to the American market be a different one? I mean, if Nintendo wouldn't become as influential as it is now.



i think so...

if they only limit the production of the games (Esp. 3rd party) to the quality requirement and funded their own games to release with great quality.... esp video game is still on it's infancy age...

you know the same thing how nintendo handled their games



 

S.Peelman said:
There's no way Atari could have known though, and in an industry that young it was bound to be just one big experiment.

This.



JazzB1987 said:

Everyone could have stopped that from happening but they were busy milking consumers with crappy products  and one day noone not even the idiots could be fooled in buying that crap anymore.

Same shit is happening right now the only difference is that the industry is pumping alot of money into marketing so people dont realize that the stuff they buy is crap

Well..

It's actually because today prices have barely changed from 1980, and the quality has skyrocketed. We call some games today "unplayable", but there actually were unplayable games back then. Hell, I remember some old Nintendo games where I was so confused as to what to do. The same shit is not happening right now.

The main problem with console back in the day was that they couldn't even come close to the standards set by PC games or arcades. Arcades back then were magic. The same problem doesn't exist today because the main competitor now is smartphones, yet, at least Sony is working on being able to have the same content and utility.



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they actually have some nice games IMO



sry for my bad english - it is not my 1st language

theprof00 said:
JazzB1987 said:

Everyone could have stopped that from happening but they were busy milking consumers with crappy products  and one day noone not even the idiots could be fooled in buying that crap anymore.

Same shit is happening right now the only difference is that the industry is pumping alot of money into marketing so people dont realize that the stuff they buy is crap

Well..

It's actually because today prices have barely changed from 1980, and the quality has skyrocketed. We call some games today "unplayable", but there actually were unplayable games back then. Hell, I remember some old Nintendo games where I was so confused as to what to do. The same shit is not happening right now.

The main problem with console back in the day was that they couldn't even come close to the standards set by PC games or arcades. Arcades back then were magic. The same problem doesn't exist today because the main competitor now is smartphones, yet, at least Sony is working on being able to have the same content and utility.


And the pricing is only a problem because developers and publishers dont make games anymore. They make movies or tech demos or whatever but every product that focuses on visuals more than on gameplay is not a good game in my opinion. Calling this quality is debatable. And handholding is something I see as a negative thing.....

Noone forces devs to make a game that needs a big budget.  Tomb Raider being a failure because it "only sold so many millions and not SOO many millions" shows how stupid the industry is.  There is alot of indie games with small budget that surpass AAA games in quality. The stupid mentality of the big companies makes creating new experiences a risky thing and if someone else creates something new everyone starts a copy marathon. If games would be cheaper to make we would have much more variety. And noone would need to deal with all the crap. Devs would not have such a tight schedule and all the milk-stuff like on disk DLC and horse armor and all the other crap that just exists "because games kept prices since the 80s" would have no reason d'etre.

Most big games are not made by creative people or gamers for gamers anymore but most are made by talented devs under control of some monkey in a suit that wants short term profit and their games are made for easily impressed mainstreamers who love to buy everything someone tells them to buy in a commercial etc.


Btw making movies also got more and more expensive and yet I can buy a bluray for $5 why do games go from 50 to 60? Even tho they are more mainstream than ever?



Thats a fair complaint and one I share.
however, that is not a reason for an upcoming crash.
maybe you should watch a documentary on the crash and why it happened. The industry was WAY different than today.
Imagine that 7 different companies made "the last of us" and called them similar names like "the end of us" "last of us" "the last ones".
Then make them indistinguishable except that in "the last ones" theres a gam breaking glitch in the school that is never fixed. And in "last of us", the ost is country pop music that sounds like its been recorded from a radio speaker.

Meanwhile, there is no internet, and game reviews dont exist.
Also there are 15 major consoles and iphone games look like real life.

It creates a response by consumers to say "why would I even risk putting any money into that"
It actually reminds me of old nes games. I got maybe one game a year and I was usually really disappointed. The benefit though, was that everyone only had nintendo or Sega, so borrowing made sense unlike during the crash.

Your problem though, is you have become a connoisseur. You can tell quality right away. Im similar. However, thereare games out there for us.



No. Bushnell didn't have the kind of long-term vision for Atari that Nintendo had for video games. Nor did any of its subsequent corporate owners.

During the 2600 era, Atari was owned by Warner Communications (the predecessor to the present-day Time Warner, Inc.) Warner was interested in milking the Atari "fad" for all it was worth, and as soon as they overstepped in 1983, they bailed.

When the crash went down, Atari's arcade and consumer divisions split. The former spent its entire existence being traded back and forth between Warner, Namco, and Midway. Ironically, Time Warner again owns the games Atari produced after the game crash, which they acquired when they bought the remains of Midway's game division. The consumer half was bought by Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, who believed there was absolutely no future in home consoles and tried to turn Atari into a computer manufacturer with a format to rival MS-Dos, Mac, and Commodore. By the time they realized Atari couldn't compete in that arena, Nintendo had a 95% market share of the home video game console market and had grown it to many times the size it was during the 2600 era.



I blame Warner Communications. :)