/vr/ - Retro Games

Not much. And what impact it DID have had to do with how much money Atari spent on the license rather than some zoomzoom's opinion on the game's quality.

>>9489035
This is correct

>>9489031
As many times as you've made this thread over and over, it must have made a huge impact since it's rent free in your head.

>>9489035
Are you saying the game isn't mediocre? It's overpriced outdated garbage, like most games on the console. People knew Atari home games were shit even back then. It's inevitable that such an old console would eventually bore and frustrate people who wanted better quality which already existed on arcades. The "video game crash" is really just the market correcting itself with better standards.

>>9489075

What we do actually know that E.T. sold very well in 1982, but in 1983 Atari got flooded with returned cartridges. The infamous Pac-Man port surprisingly avoided that fate and continued to sell well in 1983.

>>9489098
The main issue is that they overproduced ET and Pac Man with more copies than there were 2600s in active use with the hope that it would lead people to buy systems to play them.
Even with the 2 games selling well they still had tons and tons of left over units which is what lead to the infamous burial.

>>9489108
>more copies than there were 2600s
This part is actually dubious as it is based solely on Ray Kassar throwing a number of produced cartridges during an interview taken decades after the fact. It makes zero sense to expect an adoption rate of over 1:1.

>>9489031
This and Pac Man wrecked Atari.

>>9489113
>It makes zero sense to expect an adoption rate of over 1:1.
well they didn't understand how to properly handle the gaming industry back then which is what lead to the crash

>>9489113
The movie license was so stupidly expensive they NEEDED an adoption rate of over 1:1 just to break even.

>>9489130
That's probably right, Atari paid something around 23 million dollars for the license.

>>9489035
>Not much.

I've heard that it caused a huge glut of returns at retail from people who thought the game was garbage or too short. Which caused retailers to push game cartridges out of the market. Also don;t forget the huge landfill of ET cartridges. I heard Atari even crushed up a bunch of them and used them as foundation for their offices. From what I can understand, retailers were rejecting games, because too many of them were just being refunded.

>>9489381

Also, Atari apparently forced retailers to purchase overstocks of Atari 2600 games. They did this to eat up warehouse space, so they wouldn't stock third party games. Atari did not make any money off of third parties, either. Activision and all the others were making games that were 'compatible' with the 2600, and Atari could do nothing to stop them, This is why Nintendo locked down the NES with the NES10 lockout chip and made it hard for unlicensed publishers to get any traction. See: Tengen.

>>9489384

Activision were the real stars of the 2600. Formed by former Atari employees. They were unlicensed. Their carts sold better than Atari's cartridges. Atari tried to shut them down in court, but failed. Activision made generally better games than Atari too. Acivision may be on some buyout by Microsoft, but they are still doing better than the remains of Atari. The only thing Atari has going for them is the nostalgic Atari name and logo. I bet Activision had way less refunded games too. One of the problems with Atari was that they made retailers overstock their games, and retailers has a hard time selling them, which lead to a lot of unsold inventory. You can see why Atari was knocked out of the gaming industry and pushed into the home computer market to save face.

>>9489031
who ever thought that this ugly ass mother fucker could be cute or appealing? this is the best creature design for horror.
I'd rather have an ay lmao then fucking glowing fiddle finger fucker. god I hate that wrinkly nigga.

>>9489031
As an oldfag who lived through this particular moment in time:

What people need to realize is that we were all used to games being kind of meh. Even the absolute best games of that era were still simplistic and repetitive, and licensed ones in particular were awful. Spider-Man was bad. Superman was bad. Raiders of the Lost Ark was...not exactly bad but weird and hard. E.T. also being meh was hardly a shock. Most new games were meh, and that was the real problem. It was less of a "that's it, this is the last straw" sort of thing and more of just a gradual loss of interest. E.T. being a killer app might have rejuvenated the market temporarily so it was a huge missed opportunity but the shit was already sinking. This didn't cause it, it just didn't help.

Also, I knew lots of people who bought the E.T. cartridge, and I don't know anyone who returned it. You tended to keep games unless they were completely unplayable. In this particular case the issue was that they assumed the name alone would move units and didn't actually wait to see if the demand manifested. E.T. was no worse than most of the shit Atari was shoveling, they just printed way more of this particular piece of shit than usual

>>9489381
>too short
You definitely heard this from some zoomzoom that had played exactly one 2600 game in his life, and that was ET. What the fuck longer games do you think people were comparing it to?

>>9489384
Yes. Atari 2600 games. Not ET games. That meme landfill didn't just have ET carts in it.

>>9489679
Superman is great, it just has a pretty steep learning curve, since the object of the game is essentially to quickly navigate a complex maze that takes time to learn.

>>9489416
Kaboom is fucking awesome, you're right Activision made superior cartridges back then.

>>9489031
Nobody likes explaining why it happened, but it's like deja vu.

Development quality and the people involved took a back-seat to people who liked to talk, then the suits came in, ad absurdum.

>>9489679
I think the bigger issue at the time was oversaturation.
You had four consoles and four computers on the market with basically the same power playing mostly the same games and so a lot of people waited to see which would come out on top before buying one.

>>9489709
>You definitely heard this from some zoomzoom that had played exactly one 2600 game in his life, and that was ET. What the fuck longer games do you think people were comparing it to?

No my dad actually owned a ET 2600 . I played it on real hardware when I was a kid. I guess the game play loop is about as short as any of the other 2600 games. But what I mean is, I think people at the time were expecting more?

>>9490272
From all the marketing for the ET game I presume they were

>>9489709
>Yes. Atari 2600 games. Not ET games. That meme landfill didn't just have ET carts in it.

That use to be the rumour that it was like 11 dump trucks full of ET 2600 cartridges. The very first time that I ever heard about the ET thing was image related. This is a magazine that I use to buy from the newsstands when I was a kid. The magazine was originally called VideoGames and Computer Entertainment, but they later changed the name to: Videogames: The Ultimate Gaming Magazine: This article is from 1993.

https://archive.org/details/Video_Games_The_Ultimate_Gaming_Magazine_Issue_56_Sept_1993/page/n21/mode/2up?view=theater

It did state that it was apparently defective (I would imagine actual refunds) carts of Pac-Man and ET. Which later turned out to be partially true. Even in this magazine article from 1993 they were making 'shovel ware' jokes. There was also a small website back a few decades ago that was dedicated to finding the landfill.

Also, best Youtube video on ET. It was from a VHS rip of 'How to beat videogames 2" that was produced in the 80's. It's the best tutorial on how to play the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-pzdPLfy9Y

>>9490279
>From all the marketing for the ET game I presume they were

yeah. Knowing how to play the game. I don;t think ET for the Atari 2600 is a bad game. It's good for a 2600 game. But the hype and advertising may have overshot peoples expectations. But as posted above, it was a hot selling item for Christmas 1982, but also saw a lot of returns/ refunds on boxing day. Which angered a lot of retailers.

>>9489679
>Superman

It's so subjective. because I knew people who liked that game on the 2600. people who you would not consider to be 'gamers' but owned a 2600. One of my uncles had like half of the 2600 library, But the 2600 was the only console he had. and he loves that Superman game. I would watch them play it and not really get how to play it (as a kid). So it looked unappealing to me.


>>9489679
>Raiders of the Lost Ark was...not exactly bad but weird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koWxUd30hDo

>>9489031
not as big as people say, but it was a factor.

pac-man 2600 was the main thing to cause it.

>>9490193
Things were more rad when we had 12 different platforms to choose from

>>9490291
Yeah, that's always been the meme. "ET was a video game so bad it killed the entire video game industry and Atari had to put all the unsold copies in a landfill because nobody wanted it". It's mostly a fictional statement with enough slight truths to it that dumbasses easily fell for it. It only got worse when zoomers discovered emulation and decided to play ET to "see how horrible it was", which involved them playing it for 3 minutes without reading the manual as their only pre-NES video game ever.

>>9489035
>>9489075

you're both retards, people hated this shit at launch because they bought Atari games expecting simplistic shit like Space Invaders. ET was not straightforward at all and didn't really have straightforward rules, and even when you understood the rules it wasn't that fun. Most people probably played it for 20 minutes, couldn't figure out what to do, and gave up and returned it.

There are other reasons Atari failed of course, like the endless amount of clone games being sold and a lot of the popular arcade game ports being rushed and low quality (most importantly Pac Man), but ET was the straw that broke the camel's back. Trying to claim anything else is historical revisionism.

>>9491610
So what's your explanation for why ET was apparently so horribly obtuse most people gave up after 20 minutes and then returned it, while Raiders of the Lost Ark somehow wasn't, zoomer-kun?

>>9491617
because they did, that game sold less than a million copies which was shit considering how huge the property was at the time. ET was much more successful selling nearly 3 million and being the 8th highest selling game on the console, but Atari blew their entire marketing and licensing budget on it banking on it to be a smash hit. E.T. HAD to sell well because Atari had already been shitting the bed, but it didn't sell well enough.

I guess now that I look up the dates the 5200 and ET were closer together than I thought so you could also say the 5200 killed Atari, but on the other hand you could also attributes lack of consumer confidence in Atari thanks to Pac Man and E.T. as part of the reason the 5200 failed.

>>9489031
they literally had to build a landfill to dump all the excess cartridges in. they named it new mexico.

>>9490193
Yeah big hits being multiplatform is still normal but what what nobody realized back then was how important exclusives were. The whole sales pitch for every console was basically "our version of centipede and frogger is better than the others."

I think it was mostly because arcades were still such a big deal. All the major games came from arcades first. There was stuff like Adventure and Pitfall that were only for home consoles but none of them were as huge as something like Pac-Man. Consoles were mostly seen as arcade port machines and the original stuff was a mixed bag. So it kind of made sense that they all leaned on the same titles but, like you said, it led to a bunch of homogeneous offerings. It was a console war where picking a side was kind of pointless because it was all the same either way. Thankfully, Nintendo and Sega figured out they needed more unique offerings and took more advantage of the different genres you could apply to home consoles.

>>9489031
What is this a pop quiz?

>>9489119
I thought 2600 pac man sold well? Or was it just that the dev got a huge payday?

>>9489031
They rushed it and it was definitely too ambitious for the 2600, proving it was near-obsolete by that point. You can see the makings of a NES game here, but 1977 hardware designed to play Breakout was not going to get the job done.

>>9489679
My family didn't join the Atari bandwagon because they could see that the games weren't arcade-level. Combat, Legend, Asteroids, um... Custer's Revenge?
They got us a TRS-80 instead. Tandy / Radio Shack couldn't get licenses (or licences if you got a Dragon) to the classic arcades but who cared, TRS-80 devs could just pirate that shit with stuff like "Pac Attack". Plus I learnt to code.
Some mad lad did license Zaxxon, which was cool. Worked pretty well on the trash eighty.

>>9491959
It sold well, and was also a "pac"-in title at one point lmao . From what I understand it was generally thought of as mediocre and rather ugly, even for the time. Which if you look at other 2600 Arcade ports from that era, is generally true. But if you had a 2600 and wanted to play Pac-Man at home, you'd probably go buy it. Ms. Pac Man and Jr. on the 2600 are kickass, so there wouldn't have been much reason to play the original after those ports came out.

>>9491980
[samefag] Legend > Adventure. >>9491847 is right.
Must be dementia setting in . . .

>>9491847
>Yeah big hits being multiplatform is still normal but what what nobody realized back then was how important exclusives were
The reason Atari's 2600 became such a big hit and market leader was literally because they nabbed the exclusive rights to Space Invaders you turbo retard.

>>9491980
there was a boomer on AtariAge who said he once dumped the Pac-Man arcade ROM and converted it to work on a TRS-80 as they had the same CPU

>>9492006
Buying exclusive rights to an arcade port isn't the same as developing original games for the console, which is what they needed to do more of. The arcade exclusive strategy quickly became impractical because by the time there were more than half a dozen systems you could sell your game on nobody wanted to limit their potential market to one console, at least not without the exclusive license costing an extortionistic amount of money. That's why pretty much every other big arcade title wound up on every platform.

>>9491610

Well what to do was exactly explained in the manual.
So yeah, it might as well have been carved into some ancient pyramids...

But seriously, ET is a game that REQUIRES the manual, only then can you halfway enjoy it because it actually has several mechanics affecting your score.
WHat ET really is is a score attack game, if you only play to get ET home then wonÄt have much fun and obviously not for long.
The fun comes from beating your score/trying the least moves possible to beat it.
Unfortunately there is the overprecise pits which you really have to adapt to which alone probably destroyed any enjoyment for many people, falling over and over again.

>>9491617
Raiders of the Lost Ark game came out some 18 months after the films release. E.T. was some 5 months. Raiders also made about half as much at the box office as E.T. There was significantly more general interest in E.T. as a property and product. As well as corporate tie-in pressure, so it was heavily advertised. They are not fair comparisons. Had the E.T. game been fun and a big hit, Atari would be singing a different tune in 1983.

>>9490193
My dad brought home a Colecovision with Atari addon one day. This was about a year after he got me an intellivision because gary down the road was getting rid of it when he bought a C64.