How Nintendo bled Atari games to death

You seem to be confused (which is fair, this is a little confusing). In 1984, Warner Communications sold Atari's home and computer game division to Jack Tramiel, which became Atari Corporation. Atari Corporation was the company that made all the future Atari consoles (7800, Jaguar, etc) and computers (ST line). Atari Games, Atari's arcade game division, remained with Warner. This article is entirely about Atari Games, who had nothing to do with anything sold for the home market with the Atari name. They were entirely separate companies. The reason why they did business as Tengen was that as part of the split, Atari Games wasn't allowed to sell games to the home market using the Atari name.

I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end. Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.

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.

I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise.

Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.

Part of the problem is that the 7800 was a decent/good system when designed in ‘84 terms of tech, other than sound which I think was identical to the 2600.

But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel?

However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too.

In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games.

By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more.

The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had.

The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap.

So it didn’t do well at all.

Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.

As the article mentions, by that time Atari had split into Atari and Tengen. Atari was dying of self-inflicted wounds, but Tengen was going strong.

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The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game.

Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)

Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts

This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees.

Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).

And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.

That is a good thing. It allows for niches to be filled. Less generic games, more organic-made ones.

$100 is pretty cheap for this kind of lottery ticket. You have to pay way more to get a start in other marketplaces.

This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many

I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.

Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.

Steam is not capitalized.

> commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun

I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area

In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own?

Please help me understand

Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.

As a long time Nintendo fan, I've always joked with my friends that the people who design the games are incredibly talented and passionate, and the people that run the business throws all of that good will alone.

They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too.

I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library.

The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...

Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on.

A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...

When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down.

For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry?

Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies.

Don’t even get me started on Toyota.

If that's the case, imagine if you were trying to buy games back in the SNES days. The cost for many new games was the same or higher in absolute dollars as today, but much higher if you do the calculation to 2025 dollars.

Have you played Super Mario Odyssey? They are not copy pasting SM64.

You don't know what "MBA-type" is.

I always wondered who they learned from. What caused Nintendo to be this thorough, with technical and multiple legal hurdles so early on. Was rom cartridge piracy a big problem for previous cart-based consoles? What were their contemporaries doing to combat piracy?

I'm fine with pretending that a game console focused on kids is not a general purpose computer, but this is unacceptable threat to liberal democracy when applied to PCs. And nothing (yet) is as much of a PC as a smartphone.

> Atari was not. Atari had many cash grab games like ET the extraterrestrial where most budget was spent in box art and marketing than game development.

It's a little bit ironic that Spielberg's love of videogames kinda ruined Atari.

It was Spielberg who pursued Atari, not the other way around.

Basically, the video game companies weren't looking to do movie tie-ins at the time. Spielberg loved videogames, and made a request to have Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw come out to SoCal to meet Spielberg.

That meeting led to Atari's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" game. Warshaw had previously done "Yar's Revenge" and "Adventure."

Then Spielberg asked Atari to make an E.T. game, and the rest is history.

Basically, if Atari had ignored Spielberg's call to make "Raiders," they wouldn't have made "ET" and they might have remained dominant for a few more years, preventing Nintendo from taking everything over in the mid 80s.

The patent on the lockout mechanism has expired and clean software implementations of the algorithm have been created. So the old legal protections no longer apply.

And while Nintendo still aggressively enforces their copyright on their old games, they probably don't care very much about unlicensed games being created for their very old hardware. It's just not commercially relevant to them.

A great history of Tengen is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwMsr0zFhnA

I took a class from an ex-executive. It was trajecially worse. Almost every morning for them was a jaw dropping knuckle dragging experience.

This is the Harvard text book example of "let the adults handle it."

Mainly because they were the only game in town back then. At the time they were the fastest growing company in history... So many $$$, for a time everything they touched turned to gold. Being first in a new industry, they made all the mistakes that subsequent companies learned from and avoided. For example, putting a textiles executive in charge, treating developers like assembly line workers, etc.

This all laid the seeds for their subsequent implosion... Epic rise, epic fall. I wish someone would make a movie about that story.

> Every story I hear about Atari is wild. Hard to believe they managed to have the success they did.

It was a different era.

I worked in a mall arcade in the early 90s, and because we purchased arcade games, I had access to the trade shows and various promotional events. For instance, E3 invited me to come out for their first event.

The size of the teams in the early 90s was TINY; I met the dudes who made Mortal Kombat at the AMOA convention, and the entire team was less than ten people. The main programmer had so little experience, he was largely known for doing the voice of "Rudy" in the pinball game "Funhouse."

Basically, the tech community was tiny and the gaming community was a tiny subdomain of the tech community.

Atari's big innovation may have simply been that it was founded in the right location (Silicon Valley.) If it wasn't for that, Steve Jobs wouldn't have worked at Atari. (And Wozniak wouldn't have moonlighted at Atari.)

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/steve-jobs-atari-empl...

I'm doing this from memory, but IIRC:

Atari was the only major gaming company based out of Silicon Valley

A lot of the games of the time were basically just Japanese games that were licensed by US distributors. Pac Man came from Namco in Japan and was distributed in the US by Chicago's Midway, Space Invaders was made by Taito in Japan and licensed in the US. (Also by Midway, IIRC.) "Defender" was one of the first 'homegrown' games in the US that wasn't coming out of Atari in Silicon Valley. (Defender was made by Eugene Jarvis in Chicago for Williams, who later merged with Midway.)

Although Nintendo was NOT based in Silicon Valley, they had the dumb luck of locating just up the hill from Microsoft. If you've seen "King of Kong," the dude from the documentary basically lives halfway between Microsoft in Redmond and Nintendo in Snoqualmie: https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Nintendo_North_Bend

Sega WAS based in Silicon Valley, but their slow decline was arguably due to a political tug-of-war between Sega of America (based in Silicon Valley) and Sega (based in Japan.)