Atari's Fall From Mediocrity

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Imagine blowing your chance to chance to work with both Nintendo & Sega only to be known as the company with all the ET cartridges that got dumped in a desert.

"This company didn't peak in high school, it peaked in elementary school" is such a raw line jesus

I remember as a 5 year old and my mom took me to get a game system at a local furniture/electronics store here. The sales man was trying sooooo hard to push the Jaguar. I remember he kept going oooon and oonn about how powerful it was and wanted to show me how it played on one of their displays (Super Burnout?) My mom just asked is Sonic available on it and he said no…so she got a sega genesis. (Mom was obsessed with that Sonic Pinball game)

The Nintendo situation was even crazier than you described. A few years after the deal fell apart, Nintendo learned from a former Warner employee that Atari never intended to do the deal in the first place. They just planned on tying up Nintendo in negotiations while they studied the Famicom and released their own clone of with without Nintendo's approval.

When I was a kid my grandma let me play on her Atari 2600, until one day it froze, then started emitting smoke. So that was cool

I know this will sound fake, but my grandfather has always been really into computers and my dad and uncles always loved videogames. So of course, that Christmas of 83 (82? My dad told me the story, whenever the game came out) my grampa bought my dad and his brothers all the new atari games. ET included. And you know, of course, my dad and his brother hated. But gramps? Apparently his favorite game. He went back and kept buying copies because they were so cheap and he thought it was HILARIOUS that such a "good game" was such a steal. He thought his sons were just childish and couldn't see the glory of it. My dad told me to ask him about it when I started getting into retro games, and I did, AND HE STILL STANDS BY IT AS A GOOD GAME! To this day, 2023, old gramps still loves ET for Atari!

someone i know described melody as "fagotthewoz"

The Atari Famicom thing is crazier than just "Atari rejected it". The deal was accepted, and was to be finalized and signed at Summer CES 1983, but then Atari saw Coleco demonstrating Donkey Kong on their Coleco Adam computer at that same event. It was then that Atari pulled out, believing their exclusivity deal with Nintendo had just been violated right out of the gate. In truth, the Coleco Adam computer was simply compatible with all existing ColecoVision console games - and, in fact, one of the ways you could get yourself an Adam was via an add-on for the Vision which simply contained the Adam's additional components! By the time that misunderstanding was cleared up, though, the great video game crash was already in full swing.

Game design: $200. Licensing fees: $150. Office rent: $800. Scrapped consoles & peripherals: $500,000,000,000. Utility: $150. Someone who is good at the economy, please help me budget this. My company is dying.

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Atari calling the jaguar a 64-bit system is like Nintendo calling pikmin a relaxing game

I love the recurring bit of Mel collecting Pac Man carts like a squirrel preparing for winter lol

The 5200 controller feels like something you'd issue a speeding ticket with

The Atari Jaguar blew up my entire house. Powerful stuff.

The fact that my first exposure to atari’s two biggest games (Asteroids and Pong) as a kid was through a cd-rom included in a taco bell kids meal speaks miles about how far they fell

So Atari was so incompetent that they made Sega look like geniuses?

That was... a lot more depressing of a tale than was aware of originally. Atari really couldn't stop fucking up every single chance they got to redeem their brand, did they? Oh well. Great video! I liked it very much.

To be fair to Coleco and their lawyers, at the time of the Atari suit you really could go to a place like Radio Shack and probably buy most or all of the components to put together an expansion dongle or an adaptor by hand, and people did. Steves Wozniak + Jobs famously started out designing Atari games which at the time meant literally designing how many chips were going to go into a cartridge and whatnot. The original Apple computer was similarly built by hand using entirely off-the-shelf components. Nowadays that argument would probably fail in court for the reasons one would expect. Complexity has gone up exponentially and components are much more IP-dependent (ie good luck doing graphics without going through some kind of vendor, etc)

I once saw a store selling a sealed E.T game for thousands of pesos before the whole "they were in the desert!" thing and then it turned out it was true and went sometime later to find the same E.T. item had lost more than half it's value. I thought it was funny.