/vr/ - Retro Games

Australia-kun's mental state is steadily deteriorating with each thread he makes.

>>7260752
Even worse... their industry had to be revived by the japs... pfffhahahahaha.

>>7260752
just get so greedy and full of hubris that you think its a good financial move to get one person to make a game in 4 months and try to sell it.
and you try to bully the developer to work faster and for less money.
atari home division should have died and stayed dead.

>>7260752
Atari was the cheap console and had no standards in regards to what games released on their platform. Given it was the bargain bin console it’s what most people owned so it’s fuck up screwed over it’s competition (matell and Colleco especially) and Atari themselves

>>7260752
>How is it possible to fail that hard?
No quality control. Third parties ran rampant. When Atari Launched the VCS in 1977, there were no third party developers for the cconsole. The first one to appear was Activision, and they were made of former Atari game designers. Activision was an unlicensed publisher who made games that were "compatible with the Atari 2600 VCS". Activision was a succccess on the 2600, and it lead other toy/ game companies to follow suit (Mattel, Parker Brothers, Coleco, 2th Century Fox) and release unlicensed third party games as well. Atari had to compete with these other publishers on their own platform. Which caused Atari to flood retailers with overstock that went unsold. Retailers dropped consoles because of so much unsold inventory and returns from people who would buy a game, complete it in a week and return for refund. Nintendo basically had to do everything to control the flow of third party games on their platform, including making the Seal of Quality.

>>7263219
I used to buy games for my 2600 from literal bins in thrift stores for $1 each or less when the NES was popular. There was a ton of shovelware. I ended up with over 100 cartridges and ended up giving them away to some kid related to my mom's friend when I got a SNES.

Not how it went.
Executive types, as they usually do fucked everything up for the creative types (the developers) and basically started rushing shit out the door rapid fire with little to no quality control. They figured they could just slap atari on anything and get it to sell. Eventually developers were treated like night janitors, as if their contribution to the success of the company overall was that minimal.

aka business/executive types are retarded and ruin everything.

>>7264323
>Nintendo basically had to do everything to control the flow of third party games on their platform, including making the Seal of Quality.
> still had major problems with bootlegging in asia and japan
great "seal of quality". the market was flooded with unofficial shit by the time 1990 came around. nintendo made no difference to the market except making it slightly more difficult. didn't stop piracy at all, didn't stop bootleggers. it was just as bad as it was on the 2600, even with their extremely shitty lockout chip.

Australia-kun, America purged shitty games from the market while you lot lopped up that Speccy shite. That’s why we got superior Nippon games, folded 10 000 times, and you got jet set fuck all

>>7266431
Aren't most bootlegs Famicom-compatible, not NES-compatible, and the Famicom doesn't have stuff like the lockout chip and the seal of quality cuz those were NOA's ideas?

>>7266443
the NES unofficial titles always had a cart port on top of the cart to plug in an official cart with a lockout chip.

>>7260752
No rules or regulations. Anyone could jump in and make a system, anyone could jump in and make a game. Unlicensed Atari games were quite common, and the general audience didn't know any better, especially when genuinely licensed games like Pac-Man existed and were rushed garbage. Once the bottom fell out, everyone but Atari exited, leaving room for Nintendo and Sega to fill a niche.

>>7266431
>it was just as bad as it was on the 2600
Not even close. Unlicensed games still existed, but it was very easy to tell the difference between "genuine" games and Tengen/etc games. I never even seen unlicensed games being sold at reputable retailers (outside of Game Genie, which isn't a game anyway), and only found Tengen games at a smoke shop in my hometown.

>>7266507
This was because Nintendo would threaten retailers with not supplying genuine products if they supplied non-genuine products. And then of course, there was that company that started making Bible-focused games and sold them in Christiqn bookstores fuz companies don't like to go after religious stuff. (I actually remember how I was once in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood once and I saw some store selling a CD with a ripoff Snap, Crackle, and Pop on the cover. I asked my mom how they could get away with this and she said the companies don't know half of what they were doing and even if they did it would look bad to go after religious people.)

>>7260752
I was hoping that you would have died of smoke inhalation.

>>7260752
>How is it possible to fail that hard?
CORPORATE GREED

>>7266507
>Not even close. Unlicensed games still existed, but it was very easy to tell the difference between "genuine" games and Tengen/etc games. I never even seen unlicensed games being sold at reputable retailers (outside of Game Genie, which isn't a game anyway), and only found Tengen games at a smoke shop in my hometown.

This is true. During the 2600 days, there was no was for Atari to prevent Activision games or any other third party from selling their titles right alongside Atari's own. Back then,. Atari never got a cent from Activision. They never got any royalties from any of the 2600 third party developers. Atari lost a sale every time someone bought an Activision game. With Nintendo, they put that "Seal of Quality" system as am anti piracy device. If retailers sold bootleg NES games without the Seal, or with a forgery Nintendo could easily strip all NES products away from said retailer. There was no Activision situation with Nintendo. There were other publishers who tried to work around this, Tengen being a big one. Here's a great little documentary from 1991 explaining Nintendo's monopoly on publishers and retailers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwd56K7rp7A

>>7260752
When Warner bought atari they didnt understand that programming was a creative job and generally treated them poorly, soprogrammers left to form Activision and imagic, this caused all sorts of issues.

1. A brain drain at atari
2. Other companies realizing they could do that to.

So even though Activision/imagic generally made good games, others including what's left of atari did not. Plus you had other console, plus you had computers, and then pacman and et. So soon enough people just had enough of all that.

>>7267913
>So even though Activision/imagic generally made good games, others including what's left of atari did not. Plus you had other console, plus you had computers, and then pacman and et. So soon enough people just had enough of all that.

Courts ruled that it was legal for companies to release "compatible" 2600 games if it didn't break any patent laws or anything else of that nature. This also lead to the 2600 expansion model for the Colecovision. Basically an attachment that would allow Collection users to play all 2600 games on their Colecovision.

>>7267913
>When Warner bought atari they didnt understand that programming was a creative job and generally treated them poorly,

The main reason why David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Bob Whitehead and Alan Miller were not getting any credits for their work. Atari did not allow developer credits in their games. This was also because of head hunting developers and braindrain. But they all left and formed Activison. Activision would always list the developer name on the front of the box.

>>7267913
>then pacman and et.

{ac-Man was one of the best selling games on the VCS (no surprise, despite it being lauded for being a bad conversion. My parents had it on their 2600 (along with ET). I honestly had fun as a kid playing this version and the sound effects will always been burned into my brain.

https://youtu.be/SBlYr3dxm58?t=41

This game and ET caused a lot of returns at retail outlets.

>>7260752
Tfw op is american

>>7266469
>the NES unofficial titles always had a cart port on top of the cart to plug in an official cart with a lockout chip

Yeah no. There were very few unlicensed NES cartridges that used that. Games from Color Dreams, Camerica, Tengen, American Video Entertainment and even the bootleg Chinese carts always had their own lockout chips or some other hardware which disabled the chip rather than piggybacking a licensed game.

>>7260752
Having absolute shit taste and celebrating amateurism for decades meant americans literally couldn't do anything right.

Oh, and they sold out to a soulless media conglomerate almost immediately.

>>7264323
>people who would buy a game, complete it in a week and return for refund
like, you realize most atari games are not games you "complete", it's not like action adventure was a big genre on the thing.

"le video game" collapse is severely overrated by e-celebs

if you actually look at the numbers, it was more of an "atari collapse"

>>7268763
>>people who would buy a game, complete it in a week and return for refund
>like, you realize most atari games are not games you "complete", it's not like action adventure was a big genre on the thing.


Yeah, I realize that. But what I mean is, people would be bored/ underwhelmed and return the games within a short time frame that would leave retail outlets to deal with it.

>>7268773
>if you actually look at the numbers, it was more of an "atari collapse"


It did affect the whole console industry. Coleco, Mattel, Magnavox , and others all crashed in 1983 as well, leaving that industry dead. Home computers were still a thing (even in NA), and so were arcades. I think it was retail outlets dropping this stuff, until Nintendo showed up.