/vr/ - Retro Games

ET on the Atari isn't even the worst 2600 game. It's OK as far as games go. The problem is that Atari made too much of an overstock of ET carts that went unsold by retailers. Which lead to many of them, along with other 2600 carts being dumped in landfills.

It was $80, in 1981 dollars, back when most games were maybe $20-30.

Atari was banking on it and Pac-man being two of the biggest sellers for the system, so they produced loads and loads of copies of both. Neither sold anywhere near the numbers expected. It wasn't helped by the fact that neither game was very good.

>>5380678
i thought people hated the atari port of pacman.

>>5380708
They did. That was a big reason it didn't meet sales expectations. Note how damn much better Ms Pac-man and Pac-man Jr.'s 2600 ports are.

>>5380552
>were people back then just more disappointed because it was associated with a huge movie at that time?
Nah, they just made more copies of the game than consoles were produced at the time.

It wasn't just over-production, though; at that price point people who bought the game returned it. It might've been a decent game at a normal price but at near triple the average game people expected more. I have a relative who worked retail in the early 80s and they told me returns of ET (and Pac-man) were practically an hourly occurrence.

>>5380781
This. I don’t remember the exact numbers but the copies of the game vastly outnumbered the actual systems. I don’t know what they were thinking.

>>5380814
>I don’t know what they were thinking.
"Cocaine!"

>>5380814

It outnumbered the known sold systems but not the available ones, they thought it would be a system seller, so they made a cart for pretty much every unit in existence. Still amazingly dumb, even if the game had been the second coming of Christ.

>>5380552
Yes

>>5380767
>>5380678

i'm kind of surprised the lack of quality was able to actually hurt sales as much as it did back when there was no internet and "games journalism" basically amounted to Byte magazine and word-of-mouth.

>>5380872
See
>>5380813
Return policies in the 80s were much looser than they are now; you could buy a game, throw away the box it came in, and still return it three months later for a full refund.

>>5380552
Its an ambitious title that I think has a lot of merit, but is ultimately not the kind of thing most gamers went for. People come on boards like this and act like "normies" playing games is a new thing, when in reality the Atari 2600 sold millions of units and was a cultural touchstone. A lot of kids didn;t have the patience to learn how to play.

>>5380678
>Atari was banking on it and Pac-man being two of the biggest sellers for the system, so they produced loads and loads of copies of both. Neither sold anywhere near the numbers expected. It wasn't helped by the fact that neither game was very good.

Pac-Man did become the best selling game on the VCS, but the game really was notoriously bad port. It did not resemble Pac-Man in the slightest. All four ghosts shared the same AI behavior and would break apart and become kinda random.The 2600 can only really handle like 3 sprites total in hardware. A player sprite and two "missile sprites". So Pac-Man 2600 could only display two ghosts in frame at once, so the ghosts had to flicker every frame. Bu this is a problem in the other Pac-Man games too including the homebrews. From what I understand, there were a lot of returns for Pac-Man because it was a pretty bad game. Ms. Pac-Man and Jr Pac-Man are much better games.

I was a kid when my parents had their 2600jr, and they had a ton of games for it, including Pac-Man and ET.

To be honest, they never kept the manual for ET, so I had no idea what the fuck I was doing. 2600 games were cryptic at times if you didn't have some sort of manual. But I replayed it years later to see if it really was bad, and it actually is a decent "point grab" type of game. It's not the worst game I have ever played.It's not even the worst licensed game featuring an alien that I have played. That award goes to ALF on the Sega Master System. I had a friend with a Master System and ALF. There is even a fan-hack that fixes some of the graphics and bugs of ET, and it is not bad.

Pac-Man looked like ass. I remember my But even as a kid,mom buying the boot-leg TENGEN NES cart a few years later and that game was a great port. The sound and sound effects are iconic. They were used in crappy movies and TV shows.

>>5380949
Man. My stepdad brought a PS2 to a totally different chain of stores with no box years after it came out and got a new system and a $50 credit. How's that for loose return policies?

>>5380767
dude jr pac man was awesome on atari.

>>5380953
>People come on boards like this and act like "normies" playing games is a new thing, when in reality the Atari 2600 sold millions of units and was a cultural touchstone.
Finally someone who gets it! I'm sick of seeing all those kids trying to fit in by accentuating how different they're from the crowd and thinking they're unique because they like video games.

>>5380953
>A lot of kids didn;t have the patience to learn how to play.
And they still don't. When you look on any place where people can leave comments behind about video games there's a very high chance you'll encounter some brat who'll say "Waaah I played this game for a short period of time and I don't get rewarded just for playing it and I have to do the whole game all over again why is everything so haaaaard!!". I guess some things will never change.

>>5380552
Things to consider:
1) Game was over-priced to hell and back
2) They've made more of them than they could possibly sell
3) As in - more than amounts of consoles out there.
So in the end they had a fuckload of product that cost 3 times more than anything else, was shit and in quantity that was impossible to liquidate.

>>5380965
interesting

>>5380552
There was no orchestrated policy of destruction against ET cartridges -- the official narrative is impossible and absurd. The so-called "video game crash" was a hoax. You've been hoodwinked.

>>5382648
The North American game crash was real but not directly caused by E.T. It was more of a cumulative effect from a couple years of shitty games being pawned off on consumers.

>>5380552
>>5380568
Both of these posters are delusional. It is THE worst Atari 2600 game and arguably the worst game of all time period.

>>5380552
that's a horseshit pic. the label would have long disintegrated had it really been buried or left to the elements

>>5383078
>It is THE worst Atari 2600 game

No it's not. ET is an adequate game when you know how to play it. It actually does have some thought put into the design. There are far worse 2600 games, some real trash. ET still didn't exactly excite the masses. And it was a combination of overstock and returns that caused retails to dump home consoles.

>>5383032
This, ET just became the poster child of the crash, but all the crapware shoveled into the market was a gradual manifest.

>>5383192
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/landfill-excavation-unearths-years-of-crushed-atari-treasure/

I remember the week before this happened I was suck in Albuquerque with no car or way to get out there to witness the excavation. It still hurts to think about.

Fallout 76 is getting the same fate.

>>5382648
Underrated

>>5382648

I get that the folk wisdom surrounding the crash is wrong but you don't need to go so far in the other direction.

70% of all Atari 2600 games were released in 2 years: 1982 and 1983.

>>5380552
No. The game sold over 1.5 million copies, and was one of the best selling games for the system. The reason it caused such huge financial problem for Atari was a) that they had produced FIVE million carts (one cart for every other 2600 system sold) and b) the ET license had been extremely expensive to purchase.

It had nothing to do with "hurr the game is very bad" like dumb eceleb memesters pretend it is.

>>5384374
>sold over 1.5 million copies
... eventually. I bought mine at KB in the late 80s for maybe $4-5.

>>5384457
Still more copies than Metal Gear Solid 5 sold on any one platform.

>>5380872
>>5380949
A bit of both return policies of the era and word of mouth. You played it a friends house, then steered clear. This was before CD keys and DLC codes became a thing, so games could usually be returned. PC software was a different story, it was too easy to copy that floppy.

>>5384373
This. Lotta good games were released during those two years, but a lot of trash as well.

>>5384306
>>5384550
Stop dragging /v/ related shit into the conversation.

>>5382648
Nice

>>5384572
>This. Lotta good games were released during those two years, but a lot of trash as well.
The crash was mostly caused by an evil circle of cheaply produced and cheaply sold crap pushing the higher quality developers out of the market since they couldn't compete with those prices, then pushing each other out of the market because the games weren't very good.
Couple this with video game consoles still being somewhat of a fad in burgerstan at the time and a lack of reviews and shit that would tell people what was and wasn't good, plus Atari getting into heavy financial trouble at the time due to some very poorly thought through decisions.

>>5384691
>cheaply sold crap pushing the higher quality developers out of the market
This, but also because too much shovelware dissolved consumer confidence in the entire platform. This is part of the reason Nintendo went with the lockout chip and licensing for Famicom/NES, to force developers to only offer up their best work and keep the garbage to a minimum. (Also to skim more off the back end, but hey, they did revive an industry.)

>>5380552
Their customers were already ready to riot by then. It was a combination of things that led to general angst about Atari and videogames in general. ET was an anticipated franchise game that was expensive and turned out mediocre. After years of shovelware flooding the market and then the phoned-in effort on the first-party Pacman port earlier that year while Atari became mustache-twirling levels of greedy with the industry people just had enough of their BS.
Atari honestly deserved to die off by that point. It's only a shame that they took a bunch of good designers and programmers down with them.

>>5384691
There's something else people forget when factoring in causes for the crash: the rise of affordable home computers.

>>5380552
ET was massively popular. Much more popular than the Atari 2600. A lot of people whose only gaming experience were arcades played ET as their first home console game. This immediately exposed them to the disparity between the Atari 2600 and arcades and resulted in "popular opinion" being that ET was shit even though it was objectively in the top 50% of Atari 2600 games.

>>5380552
I don't usually say it much, but my god this guy looks like the embodiment of the "30 year old boomer".

>*crt-shh*
>*sip*
>*ahh*
>YEP... THEY DON'T MAKE 'EM LIKE THEY USED TO...
>UP FOR SALE IS A NUMBERS MATCHING E.T. CARTRIDGE FOR THE ATARI
>NO LOWBALLERS
>NO CART BLOWERS
>I KNOW WHAT I GOT

Even if you don't give it extra points for being ambitious and somewhat innovative... even if you don't give it extra points for being developed under extraordinarily tight time constraints... ET is not the worst game for the 2600. Not. Even. Close.

>>5380953
>Its an ambitious title that I think has a lot of merit, but is ultimately not the kind of thing most gamers went for. People come on boards like this and act like "normies" playing games is a new thing, when in reality the Atari 2600 sold millions of units and was a cultural touchstone. A lot of kids didn;t have the patience to learn how to play.

Tons of normies bought home computers too in the 80s and gave up on them. They'd buy a C64 and quickly put it in the closet because typing LOAD"*",8,1 to start a game was too much for them to deal with.

>>5380965
>I remember my But even as a kid,mom buying the boot-leg TENGEN NES cart a few years later and that game was a great port.

That was just Namco's Famicom port of Pac-Man that Tengen brought over to the US.

>>5380965
>.The 2600 can only really handle like 3 sprites total in hardware. A player sprite and two "missile sprites".

The programmer (Todd Frye) wrote a game engine to use sprite multiplexing but they wouldn't let him have an 8k ROM to do it. Ms. Pac-Man used the engine he wrote and so it looks much better.

David Crane explained what went wrong with ET. "Atari paid a huge fee to Universal for the license. Problem was, to make up for it, they had to sell something like 30 million copies of the game and there is no video game in history that has ever sold that many copies."

>>5385134
Which youtuber fed you that line?

>>5385306
Sounds like malicious compliance to me. Code takes very little space, it's all graphics. You'd have to lose the better sprites on a smaller cart but there's no conceivable reason why you'd have to lose a simple sprite multiplexer due to space restrictions.
Sounds more like he was butthurt over having to desecrate his "masterpiece" to fit the smaller cart and butchered it.
I bet he was even told the cart size but tried to pull the "look how much better it would look in 8K!" bullshit that so many tried.

>>5380552
It's really just a mediocre game brought down below average by being buggy as shit. If you patch it (which you couldn't), it's actually playable.
Not endearing for what they charged for the game.

>>5382648
They buried literally all kinds of things, not just ET, but also really good games and perfectly good machines and peripherals.

They realized they couldn't afford to keep a bunch of stock they couldn't sell, so they just shoved it all in a landfill.

>>5383192
It's in the fucking desert, away from the water table, and buried pretty much exclusively with other electronics.
What would make the label degrade completely away in just a few decades?

Are you Down's Syndrome?

>>5384374
It's by no means the worst game ever, but it's not exactly great either.

>>5385564
I don't think you realize just how small 4k actually is.

>>5386248
>all
Most. There was a warehouse (in a converted cave system, no less) near me that had Atari overstock for YEARS. I got a shitload of brand new sealed 2600 and 7800 games (in the 1990s) for $0.80 per.

>>5384713
The Nintendo Seal Of Quality always struck me as a little funny, because the NES had its fair share of trash games too.
It probably did much to stem the tide of shovelware though, so it certainly wasn't a useless practice.

I think however that even without Nintendo, the market would have rebuilt (because vidya was here to stay), but it'd probably be very different.

>>5386270
Well I didn't mean all their stock, it was just like one warehouse worth of unsold goods that they put in the landfill.

>>5384874
I agree, Atari deserved to die.

>>5384983
Exactomundo.
>You mean I can do my taxes on it AND play vidyagames?

>>5385564
>Code takes very little space
Not on a little low capacity cartridge like that.

>>5386275
Fair enough, I just wanted complete strangers on the internet to know exactly how uncool I am.

>>5384983
>affordable home computers
Yeah, but Atari made those, too.

>>5384983
I'd imagine this was somewhat regional. In ruralish Iowa the only people with computers were schools and professional offices. Home use was VERY VERY low around here. People around here didn't get into them until W3.1 but honestly that was the early adopters, computers weren't common at all here until W95.

>>5386272
>>>5384713
>The Nintendo Seal Of Quality always struck me as a little funny, because the NES had its fair share of trash games too.
>It probably did much to stem the tide of shovelware though, so it certainly wasn't a useless practice.

The Seal of Quality was basically an anti-pirate measure developed by Nintendo. One of the problems Atari had with the VCS was that they had no control over third parties. Activision made their own VSC "compatible" cartridges that were completely unlicensed. Other third parties like Parker Bros, Mattel, and so forth jumped on the Activision bandwagon and released their own unlicensed games as well. Atari never got money from any of the third parties. When Nintendo entered the western market, they incorporated a lockout chip in the NES and kept the unlock codes a secret with their manufacturing plants. 3RD party publishers had to give Nintendo upfront cash to manufacture their cartridges in Nintendo's factories. In order to get published, they had to follow a bunch of strict guidelines that earned their games the "Nintendo Seal of Quality". If Nintendo caught retailers selling cartridges without the Seal of Quality, or games with plagiarized Seal of Quality logos, Nintendo could pull their products.

>>5386401
Thanks, Ernest Cline.

>>5386430
>Thanks, Ernest Cline.

who?

>>5386451
Some 'author' who basically takes shit from wikipedia and turns it into 'novels' that 'gamers' eat up because they recognized something and then they clapped. Nothing special.

Reminder that

the "home console market crash" was never the entire game industry as a whole and was exclusively in the US

Home computers were doing fine in Europe

Nintendo didn't fucking save gaming and people need to stop pretending they had anything to do with gaming's "revival"

>>5387391
>Home computers were doing fine in Europe
And America as well.

>>5386401
It wasn't just that, it was a requirement that games actually be completed, beatable, and not crash on you, and that they met Nintendo's content guidelines. Developers were also required to provide assurance that they had suffiicent funds to complete a game.

>>5380949
>vintage return policies
just thinking about that was a blast of nostalgia for me

>>5387391
The "home console market crash of 1983" sounds more dramatic. Dumb Nintendo fanboys usually set it up as this catastrophic event in which their fucking lords and saviors cross the sea and deliver upon the populace their Japanese technology and wisdom. In reality, no one paid attention or even cared. They were all busy playing games on something else.

I'll never not be mad about the western design of the NES. My disgusting grimy 40 year old Atari 2600 plays games the first time you stick the game in it, while my NES had problems reading games since the mid-90s.

>>5380552
>dude this'll be so hot we'll make more carts than consoles that exist
how fucking stupid do you have to be to do this

>>5383078
The atari fucking sucked and ET was honestly par for the course.

>>5380552
Coleco vision was out at the time

Coleco vision games were cheaper then a $80 e.t. game.

People were playing donkey kong at home instead of buying E.t

>>5380665
>80 bucks

No fucking way, they thought they could charge that for ET?

>>5380708
>>5380767

Sucks that they didn't give the dev more time, the homebrew 4K and 8K versions of 2600 pacman are both good ports. As it is, the fucking Alien game from Fox is a better pac-man for atari than the actual pac-man.

>>5380836
Did that count clone systems? Maybe they thought that coleco andromeda owners would pick up atari pac-man just because it would be that good.

>>5387927
>they thought they could charge that for ET?
In 1982 dollars. That's close to $200 today.

>>5380665
Was ET that big of a thing back then to make them that confident that it would sell world record amounts? The movie always seemed really boring

Folks gotta remember, games like this are often more famous for being bad than they are actually bad. Similar example is Night Trap, that game isn't very risque at all, it was just the concern of it being sold to kids that brought it under the spotlight.

>>5387990
yeah I know it was '82 bucks, I can't fuckin believe it. No atari game is worth 80 bucks, certainly not E-fuckin-T.

>>5387995
>>5388028
Remember that merchandise tie-ins were still a relatively new thing. Star Wars was only five years prior and still making serious bank, and Spielberg was a hot-shit young director with a property tailor-made for kids. Pac-Man was everywhere and any random yuppie would have bet the yacht on an E.T. video game being a goldmine. Throw in a little cocaine and it's no surprise they did everything that they did.

>>5388078
... Okay, probably a LOT of cocaine.

>>5387995
>Was ET that big of a thing back then to make them that confident that it would sell world record amounts? The movie always seemed really boring

It was the biggest movie of 1982, and ET merchandise was everywhere as well. I was never a fan of ET. But it was huge.

>>5387404
>It wasn't just that, it was a requirement that games actually be completed, beatable, and not crash on you, and that they met Nintendo's content guidelines. Developers were also required to provide assurance that they had suffiicent funds to complete a game.

Basically, Nintendo did everything they could to prevent another situation of over flooding their market with bad and/ or unlicensed games.

>>5387415
I returned Last Alert to Babbage's after playing through the whole thing and the reason I told them for the return was "it sucks."
I got Shapeshifter in exchange, that was a pretty cool game

>>5387995
It was a combination of the movie being really popular, Atari having lots of unsound business practices already, and also paying an exorbitant price for the license, meaning they were kind of fucked evem before development started.
I mean, the game could have been groundbreaking and awe inspiring, and actually have caused sales of 2600 systems to spike, and Atari would still be in trouble just because of overall finances and decisions.

>>5388021
Night Trap mostly got shit for being "a game where you assault and kill naked women" too, which was just blatant lies.

>>5388616
How do awful decisions like that even happen? Surely someone at one time said "you know we wont be able to make money with this deal"

It was at least as good as about half of the 2600's library, it was pretty bad but even an Atari fan I can recognize that fact. The issue was that it was the first real licensed home video game and for whatever reason Atari thought that the game would just start selling like hotcakes and literally produced more games than consoles because they thought that E.T. on name alone would make kids go on an Atari frenzy, buying consoles like bottles of water before a hurricane.

In fact if you read the manual (as you're expected to for 2600 games) and understand what you're doing... it's average for Atari VCS standards. Want to know why there aren't youtubers making fun of most bad 2600 games? There's not too many games like River Raid......

>>5388920
>Want to know why there aren't youtubers making fun of most bad 2600 games?
There's also not a whole lot to the games in general. Due to the whole arcade style stuff that was the norm, you see whatever the game has to offer. Then you have trash like Dragster which is over in less than 10 seconds. You can't make some typical "angry reviewer" videos off of games like that.

>>5388915
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.

>>5388926
>hen you have trash like Dragster which is over in less than 10 seconds.

Dragster is unarguably a worse game than ET. But of course Dragster wasn't attached to a movie that made over half-billion dollars at the BoxOffice in 1982 money. ET was more like underwhelming, plus overstock meets big Hollywood movie license.

>>5389527
Fuck you, Dragster is cool.

>>5388915
Garden variety incompetence for one, and people joke, but drug use seriously was common at Atari, you could walk down the hallway and notice a whiff of J from the office someone was working in (or "working" in).
I mean I get using stimulants as part of a creative process, really, some of my favorite things have been made under the influence (though it should be noted this isn't a good idea for everyone, some people will actually hamper their creativity this way), but the thing is that you gotta sober eventually, and take a look at what you're actually doing.

I also figure a lot of key people (accountants, executives, etc) were not just lacking in competence as stated, but were also frequently inebriated in some manner. Frequent cocaine use specifically seems like it could lead to the kind of hubris where you'd take such a stupid risk as with E.T

>>5383192
What do you think happened to plastic underground in the middle of a desert, anon? Not even humans disintegrate.

>>5387995
Biggest movie of all time on release. It's the movie that beat Star Wars.. so yeah

>>5388468
It's a good game, you just should have gone with the original Red Alert instead.

>>5389575
If you can hold your breath and play an entire game before you have to breathe again, it's not a game, it's a waste of money

>>5385232
I was following until the last part. 30 year olds check completed prices on Ebay. Real baby boomers are the lot slapping retard prices on shit at fleamarkets.

"Yep whole box of used pac mens. Super rare. First video game I hear. $300, firm"

>>5387391
But no one has ever cared about shitty PC games in Europe.

>>5387432
Just buy a famicom and a cart converter. That's what I did. Every game plays. First time.

Well, my carts play. Everything I buy used has to be cleaned because apparently all other kids literally shit inside their carts.

>>5388078
Yeah, pac fever was nuts. Arcades would buy or rent entire walls of pacman. Like 12 fucking machines across one wall. It was like one of the most popular games of that period.

I dont personally get, and personally like the fighter / beatemup arcade years more, but pac man was definitely a huge fucking thing.

i dont get all the 2600 hate. it had some trully brilliant titles, like this forgotten gem.

>>5390482
0/whatever you're trying to do

>>5389693
It's a drag racing game, that's how they work. Several systems had them back then, Atari themselves had an arcade one. They clearly sold and were clearly popular since people kept making them.

>>5390390
If you think that was crazy, Japan had actual "Invader Centers", ie arcades where every single fucking cabinet was a Space Invaders one. Back when Pac-Man was huge, there was at least enough other big games on the market people liked, back when Space Invaders was at its biggest, tons and tons of people saw playing other games as a waste of a coin they could've played Invaders with.

The management made a lot of blunders. Ray Kassar was from a background in the textile industry, he didn't understand video games and he objected to crediting programmers, paying them decently, or giving them the time to properly finish a game. He reportedly said that programmers were just the equivalent of a line worker in a mill and there was no reason to credit them.

Kassar was also a typical conservative, oldskool gray flannel suit Rust Belt executive and he didn't understand the California culture that Atari was rooted in, stuff like people doing drugs and coming into work in shorts and T-shirts with dirty slogans on them.

>>5390913
I honestly don't see the appeal, people have orgasms that last longer than a drag race. Why would anyone spend the equivalent of like $60 on something that short? How much replayability could there possibly be?

>>5380965
There was nothing bootleg about Tengen Pac-man. It was one of Tengen's only 100% officially licensed NES games.

Also they didn't bother investing in new technology, they assumed they could keep milking the Atari 2600 cash cow forever even though the console was getting really outdated by 1982. The first real sign of trouble was when Atari's Christmas 82 sales proved disappointing and layoffs began early the next year. After the Warner buyout, Atari essentially didn't develop anything new. Attempts at a next generation console were just half-assed efforts like the Atari 5200.

>>5390951
That's a big issue too. You could spend that much money on a game only to end up with something like Warplock or Froggo--Karate. There weren't any rentals yet back then and no Internet to tell you if a game was worth buying.

Atari didn't release the tech info for the 2600, that was considered a proprietary company secret. The first third party developer was Activision, but they were ex-Atari guys so of course they already knew how the thing worked. During 1981 however, information was leaked out and it turned into open season where anyone and their dog could make an Atari 2600 game.

It should be pointed out that this was exclusively an Atari 2600 problem because Mattel and Coleco did have lockout systems on their consoles and developers had to be licensed.

The really ironic part is that those terrible shovelware and porn games for the 2600 are some of the most collectable cartridges because there weren't all that many of them around. Most were made by fly-by-night developers who folded after a short time and the porn stuff would have only been sold in adult bookstores or through mail order.

Arcade games were another thing that everyone and their dog tried to get into. At the peak every goddamn bar, hair salon, pizza shop, dentist's office, bowling alley, and wherever had arcade cabs even when they were somewhere where they couldn't possibly make a profit from them.

It's interesting because this was a very short time after everyone in America had overinvested in the disco boom which quickly folded up. Probably the same people in many cases. Once disco died, they moved onto the next get rich quick scheme, which happened to be video games.

>>5388210
>Basically, Nintendo did everything they could to prevent another situation of over flooding their market with bad and/ or unlicensed games.

NOA did at least, NOJ had a lot fewer restrictions and would pretty much sell Famicom dev kits to anyone willing to pay.

Arcade games were another thing that everyone and their dog tried to get into. At the peak every bar, hair salon, pizza shop, dentist's office, bowling alley, and wherever had arcade cabs even when they were somewhere where they couldn't possibly make a profit from them.

It's interesting because this was a very short time after everyone in America had overinvested in the disco boom which quickly folded up. Probably the same people in many cases. Once disco died, they moved onto the next get rich quick scheme, which happened to be video games.

Something weird in the drinking water back then.

ET was unlike other 2600 games at the time because it doesn't play like an arcade game, it plays like a home computer-style game squeezed into 8KB. The closest games to it were Raiders of the Lost Ark, Adventure (which was far simpler) and the SwordQuest games (which would be even more infamous than ET had anyone actually played them). On top of it not being fun, you can't just plug in the game and start blasting away like in Phoenix or even Yar's Revenge.

>>5390967
The Intellivision and 2600 incredibly were sold until 1992, while the Colecovision was killed in 85.

>>5391037

It is still crazy that something like this can fit into 8 KB, the whole game logic, graphics etc. Like you could write those few thousand bits onto one sheet of paper, weird

>>5390951
...because the point of the game is to see how fast you can reach the finish line, not to reach the finish line once and then toss the cart in the bin, you dingus.

>>5391073
How fun could it possibly be though?

The 6507 CPU in the Atari 2600 had 13 address lines, it could address 8k of memory but the cartridge slot had 12 lines on it because Atari got a cheap deal on 24 pin edge connectors and 4k seemed like more than enough in 1977. So games >4k needed to be bank-switched, this required an additional TTL chip and it was why management refused to pay for an 8k Pac-Man cartridge--in addition to the bigger, more expensive ROM, the TTL needed for banking also added to the production cost.

>>5391078
>yeah we could pay a bit extra to make sure the port of the biggest arcade game at this point works properly but fuck that
It's honestly amazing how incompetent Atari were

>>5391085
I doubt the management knew a lot of technical stuff, just that bigger ROMs costs more money.

>>5381427
>if it's hard that means it's automatically better.

>>5391074
Pretty fun. It was one of Activision's bigger sellers, wasn't it?

It was also made by ex-Atari guys who would've had first-hand info on how profitable Atari's arcade game Drag Race was, the two games were pretty damn similar.

>>5390958
Successful businesses are always the ones governed by paranoia, like Commodore was under Jack Tramiel. Complacent businesses end up failing.

>>5391078
>>5389194
David Crane thought that it was a waste of time to try and port arcade games to home systems that weren't powerful enough to replicate them properly and they'd be better served making original games.

>>5391107
Everything about the atari era baffles me.

>>5391116
It was a different time with different exceptions. Before stuff like Space Invaders and Asteroids came along, most games were short two player competitions to see who won, or "how many points can you score in 2 minutes" single player deals.
Even Breakout ends after two levels.

>>5391124
I guess there's not really much else you can do given how the 2600 has about as much processing power as my spit.

>>5391130
4k ROM space+128 bytes of RAM+no video RAM, the screen has to be redrawn every frame+three sprites (one player, two missile)

David Crane loved it. He found stuff like the C64 boring because there was no challenge to writing a game.

>>5391130
Of course there is. Most later games can go on for hours if you're good enough and willing enough to sit there that long, it just wasn't the style of late 70s/very early 80s games.

Dragster is a simple skill-based score attack game where the object is to see how well you can improve your score, that can alternatively be played as a one-on-one competition to see who wins the race. This is what people expected from video games at the time, and nobody really cared that the game lasted 7 seconds rather than 2 minutes because it was clearly designed that way.

>>5391116
It was a new industry, only about a decade old and people didn't really know what they were doing yet.

>>5391078
Ms. Pac-Man cartridge PCB. It's actually two 4k ROMs (one is removed here) and the TTL.

>>5391061
Coleco was a smaller company than Atari or Mattel, they couldn't afford the losses of the video game crash as much and the Adam fiasco also cost them a lot of money.

>>5386394

That's the way it was pretty much everywhere.

Schools and offices were the basis for most home computer technology. For crying out loud, that's all Apple and Microsoft did until the mid 90s.

>>5391394
No that's how it was in poorfag regions. In California computer ownership was commonplace.

>>5386304
Um no, that was Commodore.

>>5385508
It's called actually being alive at the time, kiddo. People were obsessed with that shit. You couldn't go 10 feet without a guy trying to sell you a bootleg VHS recording of ET from a camcorder he sneaked into the theater.

>>5391414
Now I know this guy is underage because given the size of the average video camera in 1982, you weren't going to be sneaking it into any theater.

>>5391395

Not much more than anywhere else. California was same as everywhere else, with schools and businesses accounting for the majority of desktop computer sales.

>>5391448
>>5391395
>>5391394
>>5386394
ITT: Underage zoomers claim to know who did and didn't have computers in the 80s

>>5391420
Not him, but people were doing that shit all the time in the 80s. Go to a swap meet and everyone was selling bootleg VHS recordings of the latest releases. Nobody's going to grope a fat minority guy to see if he has a camera under his jacket, and a lot of theaters just straight up didn't care that much.

>>5391078
Actually the slot has 13 "lines". A12 is used as CS and inverted in the system using additional TTL that they were allegedly so averse to paying for. They would have had to have got a pretty sweet deal to justify skimping on the connector causing them to having add additional logic to the console and every single >4k game made ever. Maybe they were retarded and that's what really happened?

>>5391397
Okay.

>>5391394
Well there it is, the dumbest thing I'll read today.

>>5391617
Check how much that cost you compared to a VIC-20+Datasette. The Atari 800 was not a cheap computer, in fact it was only $100 less than an Apple II.

>>5391654
The post said affordable, not cheap. You just want to argue.

>>5389575
>Fuck you, Dragster is cool.

Dragster is a misunderstood game. It's all about timing the gearing and getting the fastest time. It's fun for how simple it is.

>>5380965
I had fun with alf on sms, just give it a chance

>>5387404
pac man is not beatable

>>5391414
>projecting this hard
Top kek kid. I guess it's just your unlucky day to run into someone who was actually alive at the time you're LARPing about. Tell me more about how you waddled around your 3rd world shithole in diapers dodging pirates. lol

>>5391471
>camera under his jacket
Hot damn you underage LARPers are funny. Clearly you weren't even a child in the early 80's or you'd remember how big cameras were. Lemme guess. The biggest camera you've ever used is you ipad.

>>5390956
Didn't they do a black cartridge version of that one too?

>>5391097
Well of course not, but there's certainly people playing games today who are averse to challenge. People forget how fun it can be to best some really rough odds!

>>5391114
I don't know this Crane person, but I'd say he had a good point.

>>5392004
>Didn't they do a black cartridge version of that one too?

Yeah, are two versions of Pac-Man for the NES from TENGEN. One is officially licensed NES cart, while the other is a black unlicensed cartridge manufactured by TENGEN. I'm pretty sure the licensed cartridge was first. The black one may have came later, after Atari found out how to break Nintendo's NESTEN lockout chip by reverse engineering it through the patents. But I could be wrong.

My parents had the black cartridge for their NES when I was a kid. We also had the bootleg Ms Pac-Man cartridge as well.

>>5392026
Activision co-founder? Derp?

>>5393426
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNg1XO1fJ2k

It's just the Famicom Pac-Man with a different copyright notice on the title screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807P-DT7AZ4

Tengen decided that Ms. Pac-Man was crap so they didn't bother with that, they just made a new port from scratch.

>>5393459
>It's just the Famicom Pac-Man with a different copyright notice on the title screen.

I know that. But Tengen still had the rights to release Pac-Man in North America and they did as a licensed publisher with Nintendo, and then released their own unlicensed carts. I think the Tengen carts look better than the official Nintendo ones. Though many of these games did also get official licensed releases too. Though Tengen worked with Mindscape to release licensed versions under their label.

Also Tengen ported Pac-Mania to the NES and for some reason Namco never did a port of the game themselves.

>>5393495
Gauntlet isn't a straight port either like the Master System version, it has some improvisations like in-game music.

>>5387915
Was the coleco vision even that popular? During the 80s nobody I knew had one but everyone had an Atari, even after the crash.

>>5393459
>Tengen decided that Ms. Pac-Man was crap so they didn't bother with that, they just made a new port from scratch.

Tengen Ms. Pac-Man for the NES is great. Namco didn't have the source code for the original Ms. Pac-Man because it was not made by them. So Tengen gave the person who was in charge of the NES port a MS Pac-Man arcade cabinet with a pause button, so the arcade game could be paused at any time to study the ghost behaviors and for copying the sprites. The NES have has a simultaneous two player and a bunch of extra game modes.

>>5380818
This isn't what cocaine does to you. Stop trying to be edgy.

>>5380568
It wasn't even that bad of a 2600 game. People just can't talk about videogames now without everything being shit and the worst thing ever. This is because they can't get girlfriends.

>>5393718
>Tengen Ms. Pac-Man for the NES is great. Namco didn't have the source code for the original Ms. Pac-Man because it was not made by them.

That's not the problem. The problem was they already had the Famicom port of Ms. Pac-Man that Namco had done, but it was pretty crap, so Tengen decided to just make a new one instead.

Of course the reason it was crap probably did have to do with Namco not having the arcade source.

>>5385232
Zoomers pay exhorbitant amounts of money for different outfits for characters in video games.

Yet Namco ultimately ended up releasing it in the US anyway in 1993 along with Pac-Man, despite the same game having already been released by Tengen years earlier.

>>5386401
No the seal was to trick consumers into thinking that all the games were good. They weren't as trusting after the crash.

Bandai then released the Famicom ports of Galaga and Dig Dug II in North America. They skipped Galaxian and Dig Dug because there were already plenty of home conversions of them while there weren't any of Galaga or Dig Dug II other than the Atari 7800 port of the former.

>>5393742
Given what unlicensed NES developers like Color Dreams and American Video Entertainment stuff were like, you ought to be thankful for Nintendo's harsh but ultimately for the better policies.

>>5393742
Given what unlicensed NES developers like Color Dreams and American Video Entertainment were like, you ought to be thankful for Nintendo's harsh but ultimately for the better policies. Many of those games serve no purpose whatsoever outside of providing material for AVGN.

>>5393746
How come there weren't really any home conversions of Galaga despite its huge popularity?

>>5393761
Probably related to the video game crash coming along and killing the budgets of any potential licensor. There WERE home conversions, but they were mostly for nip home computers.

>>5393601
It was a high end system, the Neo Geo of its day. It's the one everyone WISHES they owned, but their parents wouldn't let them have because of its price.

>>5393761
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvjapcHsqXY

The game would be a huge bastard to pull off on early 80s home computers and consoles, in fact probably impossible with the amount of sprites and the looping patterns the enemies go in. When they turn in those curves, a lot of frames of sprite animation are needed and those also take a lot of memory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPcO0HvIhkA

The NES version gets pretty close although it still has to sacrifice some stuff such as the bugs moving in and out in the formation. The NES can flip sprites in the H or V axis which does help somewhat and saves a few animation frames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYQOH5eWapo

The Atari 7800 version doesn't look or sound as nice but the animation is smoother than the NES and the bugs also move around in more complex patterns.

>>5393779
How well has the games held up though? I could never really get into it because of the weird controller

>>5393804
The Colecovision specialized in arcade ports that were "just like in the arcade", so the games are for the most part as-close-to-arcade-perfect-as-you-could-get ports of the big arcade titles of the early 80s.
If you like that generation of games, they've held up brilliantly.

Colecovision had 32k ROM space, 16k VRAM, 1k WRAM, 3-voice sound (square waves or white noise), 32 monochrome sprites (four per line) and 16 color tile graphics at 256x192 resolution.

Compare with the Atari 2600 which had 4k ROM space, no VRAM, 128 bytes WRAM, 2-voice sound, and three monochrome sprites (one player and two missile).

>>5393804
Most games don't use the keypad, if that's what you're referring to. It's there for more advanced games in case they need additional buttons to do shit.

>>5393758
>Given what unlicensed NES developers like Color Dreams and American Video Entertainment were like, you ought to be thankful for Nintendo's harsh but ultimately for the better policies. Many of those games serve no purpose whatsoever outside of providing material for AVGN.

CodeMasters and Tengen had a pretty good output on the NES as unlicensed publishers. CodeMasters made the game genie. They also had success with their Micro Machine games. Which used unlicensed gold carts. Camerica published their games in the west. Which was a Canadian group. But outside of those exceptions, unlicensed third parties were trash. Wisdom Tree made bible themed games on purpose so they could use Christian bookstores as a method to distribute games.

But Nintendo, went great lengths to create a walled garden around the third party developers. Kinda of impressive how they made it all work. Atari didn't didn't have licensed publishers on their console. I don't think that concept existed for them. Activision were formed by disgruntled Atari game designers who found out they could produce their own comparable VCS cartridges without giving Atari any royalties. They were Atari's best talent and their games were instant hits that caused many other companies to jump on the bandwagon and produce their own 2600 carts. The people at Atari couldn't do anything to stop that.

>>5394082
>>5393758
It was also hit-or-miss as to whether these games would even work on your particular console as Nintendo made frequent modifications to the NES to stop third parties from bypassing the lockout chip (Camerica carts have a switch on the bottom to select two different lockout-defeating methods). Only Tengen carts are guaranteed to work on all NESes because they literally used cloned lockout chips.

NOJ had fewer restrictions on third parties and would pretty much sell Famicom dev kits to anyone willing to pay. Compared with NOA, they didn't have many restrictions on game content, although they still refused to license adult games because Hiroshi Yamauchi wanted to retain Nintendo's image as a family company. Consequently, all adult Famicom titles (a large portion of which were for the FDS due to lower costs) are unlicensed although since there was no lockout system, unlicensed games in Japan were quite common.

What's notable with adult Famicom games is that they're still pretty restrained and tasteful and normally just have nude/topless women in them, genitals and sex acts aren't depicted. There's nothing like Custer's Revenge or Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em on the Famicom.

>>5390359
The joke is that "30 year old boomers" are doing to video games what real boomers have done to cars.

>5 GRAND FOR A COROLLA? YOU MUST BE FUCKING NUTS...
>NOW THIS IMPALA WAS THE LAST MADE BEFORE THE GUBMINT FORCED CATS ON CARS, ITS MONSTER 454 IS FAST AS HELL
>15 GRAND, NO LOWBALLERS

>>5394103
>(Camerica carts have a switch on the bottom to select two different lockout-defeating methods)

I had a friend who had a Camerica Micro Machines cart that looked like the one in the photo. I remember the switch on the bottom. But I never really questioned why it was there.

when I was 7 or 8 we had a 2600 JR in the household with a lot of game carts that were purchased for almost nothing. We had those weird slanted M-Network cartridges from Mattel, Activision cartridges, Parker Bros. cartridges, and one of those white Coleco Carts. For me it was the norm to see these off-brand 2600 carts. So I never questioned it with the NES or even Genesis with EA and Accolade carts.

>>5394107
>NOJ had fewer restrictions on third parties and would pretty much sell Famicom dev kits to anyone willing to pay. Compared with NOA, they didn't have many restrictions on game content, although they still refused to license adult games because Hiroshi Yamauchi wanted to retain Nintendo's image as a family company. Consequently, all adult Famicom titles (a large portion of which were for the FDS due to lower costs) are unlicensed although since there was no lockout system, unlicensed games in Japan were quite common.


That's interesting. But the Japanese console market didn't implode like the north American one. Which was a top reason why NOA had so many control measures.

>>5394148
>But the Japanese console market didn't implode like the north American one. Which was a top reason why NOA had so many control measures.
That's the thing though, there was no Japanese console market prior to the Famicom. That was literally the beginning. Prior to that they had nothing but Game & Watch kinds of stuff. Sega had developed and test-marketed the SG-1000 in 1981 but for some reason didn't bother actually selling it until the Famicom was out and...whoops, too late.

>>5394082
Codemasters were an established company that had been in the games business for ages and just didn't want to bother with the licensing stuff, they're not entirely comparable to the rest.

>>5394151
They did have a console market, it was just mostly imported American stuff, and it was never all that big. Hell, Nintendo got into the video game industry as the Japanese distributor of the Magnavox Odyssey.

>>5394148
>I had a friend who had a Camerica Micro Machines cart that

This game has created some of the worst headaches for emulator coders because its title screen uses an obscure PPU register to read the sprite positions which was not present on PPUs made before about 1986, so Micro Machines is incompatible with earlier Famicoms and even the first US model NESes.

>>5394151
>there was no Japanese console market prior to the Famicom
Yes there was.

>>5394156
>Codemasters were an established company that had been in the games business for ages and just didn't want to bother with the licensing stuff, they're not entirely comparable to the rest.

TENGEN is kind of the same. TENGEN was an extension of Atari Games. Atari Games couldn't use the Atari name to sell console games because of Atari Corp. They tried being a licensed publisher with Nintendo for their first three games. But they hated that Nintendo took like 30% profit and found a way to circumvent their lockout. Camerica was more of the garden variety unlicensed NES publisher.

>>5394156
That also applies to Atari (and EA with the Genesis in the beginning). They were big, established companies who wanted to manufacture cartridges and keep all the profits for themselves. Color Dreams were more like the fly-by-night companies like Data Age who crashed the Atari 2600 market with horrible shovelware.

Camerica also brought us the only Dizzy game to ever show up on this side of the Atlantic.

>>5394151
Japan absolutely had a console market prior to the Famicom
https://muuseo.com/henly/collection_rooms/2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2et9K_O6Y8

Color Dreams also imported this slightly bizarre game from Taiwanese dev Joy Van.

The game was created just a few moments before the video game crash of 1983 so I guess people thought that was the end of video games so they just fucking buried the very worst games so they just buried all the copies that were not bought and buried them all along with the copies of the pac-man port on the atari 2600.

There was also the infamous Bubble Bath Babes which also came from a Taiwanese developer and is one of the only adult Famicom games to be released in North America.

>>5394165
>This game has created some of the worst headaches for emulator coders because its title screen uses an obscure PPU register to read the sprite positions which was not present on PPUs made before about 1986, so Micro Machines is incompatible with earlier Famicoms and even the first US model NESes.

I was actually pretty impressed with Micro Machines on the NES. Maybe using their own custom mappers had something to do with it? The NES game doesn't really look mush worse than the Mega Drive/ Genesis game. The NES game runs smooth and uses some neat fake parallax. I prefer the Genesis games, but the NES game is no slouch.

>>5394238
>mush
*much

The sprite position registers on the PPU were described in official docs as write-only, reading from them is not reliable. It is known that they cannot be read on the earliest PPU revisions. On later revisions, the registers are indeed readable but it is not clear at what point this was changed. It is known that they're write-only on Rev D chips and readable on Rev Gs.

>>5393848
Yeah, the numpad is just for calling up intergalactic fuckernauts and astrobastards.

>>5393495
They do look pretty slick.

>>5391468
i'm not sure what you're saying but i can attest to rural/poorer areas being behind in everything. my first pc was a 386 in 1995 and my first console was a nes in 1993 and this was in the US.

>>5396180
That's why it was mentioned that California had a higher rate of computer use than a place like Indiana--people there were above the average income level.

>>5393804
I know there wasn't a standard at the time aside from 1 button 1 stick, but why on earth would anybody think a numeric keypad+extra buttons was a good idea? Even if it only uses the buttons it looks pretty uncomfortable to use

>>5396530
>I know there wasn't a standard at the time aside from 1 button 1 stick, but why on earth would anybody think a numeric keypad+extra buttons was a good idea? Even if it only uses the buttons it looks pretty uncomfortable to use

Numeric keypads were the norm. They were always weird to me too. I had the Star Raiders 2600 numeric keypad when I was a kid. The only game it ever worked with was Star Raiders. It's interesting that even the Jaguar had one. But given the limited buttons on that gamepad, I'm sure the numeric keypad was used frequently.

>>5396643
It was? Shows what I know. Even so, did nobody think of ergonomics back then? I guess it seems so obvious these days

>>5396651
>It was? Shows what I know.

Yup, that pad was only supported by Star Raiders. Atari had another 2600 keypad for children too. This one worked with three different Sesame Street games.

>>5396651
>Even so, did nobody think of ergonomics back then? I guess it seems so obvious these days

It was due to simple limitations of period manufacturing. Plastic molding was not as advanced as it is today and they had no way to make game controllers in a way other than a square or rectangle that cut into your hands.

Not very nice to use, but it wasn't until the 90s that they could make curved joysticks or controllers that easily fit in your hand.

>>5396680
holy shit that's atrocious

>>5396682
These are Kraft sticks btw, they also sold the same joystick for the TRS-80 CoCo and Tandy 1000.

The original black and red CoCo joysticks were even worse as they're not self-centering.

The classic Atari stick was alright enough as far as its feel and it is better for some games especially Pac-Man stuff which never worked well with NES controllers.

>>5396680
I think it had less to do with molding than it did with design and demand for it. Simple functional stuff was was for most people. Curvy "ergonomic" shit looked like kitsch props from a cheesy scifi show and were usually all form short on function. I think the ergo stick was the fist actually usable device I ever saw.

>>5388713
hey, when the media is whipped up and a political power play is on the line, we can't afford to stop and actually look at the facts. Jack Thompson did the same shit 10 years later with his GTA crusade.

>>5390919
Don't forget the old 100-yen coin epidemic too

>>5390980
NoJ never saw a market like the US pre-crash market, so it makes sense.

>>5388915
sometimes, even for business professionals, it is very hard for them to make a sound decision, not for their own lack of competence, but for the culture around them.

Seems that atari had some serious culture problems at the time

>>5396651
>>5396668
The keypad worked with 10 or so different games, and the reason it had such poor support was that it was sold separately and companies generally don't like making games that require owning specific controllers. Lots of games for the 2600 had really awkward controls because they had more than one button-activated action, so you get Space Shuttle requiring you to dick around with switches on the actual system, Mouse Trap having the button do different things depending on whether you push it or hold it down, and Raiders of the Lost Ark fucking requiring you to use two joysticks at the same time.
This was not a good thing, and the Intellivision, Colecovision and Atari 5200 having keypads on their main controllers was so much better.

The kid controller was literally just a differently shaped keypad, it worked the same way and was 100% crosscompatible.

>>5397464
Yep. The keypad controller was released in 1978 with the three games Codebreaker (Mastermind clone), Hunt & Score (Memory Match clone) and Brain Games (I'd say "Simon clone", but it's actually based on Atari's arcade game Touch me, which Simon is a clone of).

It got some more games, but as mentioned, everyone saw it as preferable to just make games that didn't require the customer to own expensive optional controllers.

>>5380552
People are going to say the same thing about Fallout 76 and Anthem from Today. These games are publicly accepted as Trash and they become the symbol of an industry wide recession.

>>5397464
>The keypad worked with 10 or so different games

Are the Keypad Controller and Star Raiders Video Touch Pad (picture above) the same controllers? Looking at this Keypad Controller list of compatible games, it doesn't list Star Raiders.
http://atariage.com/controller_page.html?ControllerID=4

>>5397480
>Atari expected people to pay like 80 bucks to play Mastermind because it's not only a dedicated cart, it requires separate controllers too
It's fucking Mastermind, you can play that shit with a piece of paper and a pencil.

>>5397502
I'm willing to be wrong on this but my recollection is that they aren't the same. I have two of the keypad controllers (came with Basic Programming) and a small stack of Star Raiders pads, and though it's been at least two decades now I think I remember trying one set with the other game and having no luck. Take that with a grain of salt.

>>5397502
http://atariage.com/controller_page.php?ControllerID=5&SystemID=2600
It's just a sightly differently looking version of the Keyboard controller that was included with Star Raiders because Atari figured nobody owned the Keyboard controller. It works the same and all games that support one can be used with the other.

>>5397508
The keyboard controller, the video touch pad and the kid's controller all just vary in looks, they work exactly the same.

>>5397508
>I'm willing to be wrong on this but my recollection is that they aren't the same. I have two of the keypad controllers (came with Basic Programming) and a small stack of Star Raiders pads, and though it's been at least two decades now I think I remember trying one set with the other game and having no luck. Take that with a grain of salt.

I can't find any mention that the Star Raiders pad does work with other software. So maybe you are right. Maybe there was some lockout in the Star Raiders controller that prevented older and third party games from functioning on it? I could imagine that the people at Atari didn't want companies like Activision releasing their own games that use Atari's peripherals.

Also the Basic Programming keypad always looked so neat.

>>5397525
>>5397513
>functionally identical to the Kid's Controller and Keyboard Controller

>>5397538
>>functionally identical to the Kid's Controller and Keyboard Controller

Functionally identical does not mean compatible.

Looking at a video review on youtube, the review said that the Star Raiders pad does not work with any of the Keypad controllers.

>>5396643
>Numeric keypads were the norm
Only according to underage youtubers born this millennium

>>5391015
Do you ever think arcade games can make a resurgence ?

>>5397867
>>Numeric keypads were the norm
>Only according to underage youtubers born this millennium

I was born in 1980. Oh well... and just about every gave console pre-NES either had a keypad or a keyboard of some kind.

>>5398016
I'm not the guy you are replying to but it would be very easy to reboot the coin-op industry, the advances in the last decades would make it very easy. Real estate costs would need to go way down for it to make any sense.

>>5398024
>1980
>start of millennialism
Explains your inclination to pretend your personal definition of words like "norm" mean anything to anyone except you and the voices in your head

>>5398395
>Explains your inclination to pretend your personal definition of words like "norm" mean anything to anyone except you and the voices in your head

I'm not using any personal definitions. I thought I used the word "norm" correctly.

>>5397487
Anthem is hardly the worst, but it's pretty hard to look at 76 and say "Yeah, this is good!".
Even if it isn't even the worst game of 2018, and even if history may end up exaggerating its flaws, it's still objectively shit.

>>5398395
>>5397867
How old are you? 63?
Someone born in the 21st century wouldn't be a millennial, that's not what that means. Go take your brain medicine.

>>5385232
>NO CART BLOWERS
Kek

>>5398554
Either you didn't or you don't know what controllers were actually the norm

>>5398891
I'm not so old I can't still readingcomprehension and not so young i can't yet readingcomprehension. You're one of those. We all know which.

>>5380552
after playing this game i finally came to the realization that all 2600 games suck ass, and this one just happened to become a meme

>>5398016
The games will always be around in one way or another, but the days of dedicated arcades are past.

>>5399336
The thing wasn't powerful enough to properly replicate arcade games. Some of its arcade conversions are fun but they're not close to the originals by any stretch. I mean, what do you want? Defender's flicker-fest? Asteroids and its Fruity Pebble asteroids?