Is Atari trying to get back into the console race?

You are the worst kinf of poster. Please kill yourself

B-Buht muh webuhms!!

Sell Blood off for a reasonable price, you delusional fucks.

Probably going to be a legacy consoles with all their classics. They can't afford to get back into the console market and risk competing. Three's a crowd, there's no room for a fourth, it would just get pushed out.

You mean Infogrames. Atari died forever.

Me? Effot?

This. Infogrames is only using the Atari name. If Sega and SNK aren't economically feasible to make consoles, then "Atari" isn't either.

At least they never give up

This.
The devs that worked for Atari were good but Atari as a company sucked hard and they never gave a fuck about crashing the market without survivors. Nintendo had to start from zero by renaming the Famicom as an "Entertainment System" and selling it in the toys department instead of electronics.

Fuck Atari so much.
Fuck Infogrames too.

At most it's going to be a box with a bunch of emulators running to try and sell people games from their old consoles through blind nostalgia. Having not been born yet, most of these people won't realize until it's too late that the vast majority of really old games (70s-mid 80s) are trash and not worth playing.

Apparently it's not a flashback console. I don't know what the fuck it is though.

What the fuck is that chimp doing?

That's even worse. If it's not their retro games, it's, what, just another multiplat box?

Let's see what happens. It could be nothing, could be something.

Damn, it's depressing hearing that knowing they were originally expected to be the biggest company in the world.

if you look at total sales for consoles each generation past the PS2 has sold less and less consoles. It makes no sense to get into a dying market.

This is the first I've heard about it.
Here is what I believe happened
My assumption anyway.

Fucking a frog

Literally Who?

Sounds like the perfect time for Atari to bungle a console again. It'll either be good but too late for anyone to care, or it'll be another Android console and no one will care.

Most likely a nostalgia thing, like Nintendo and the NES. Atari would really have to release something powerful, and with a shitload of good games, to be able to suddenly pop back into the console scene.

Nigger, the original Atari name has been sold and resold so many fucking times since 1972 that Its not even fair to say its a shell of its former self. Why does anyone give a fuck about a new Atari console even at this point?

Here's a prediction; Its going to be either a generic Android-box OR a repackaged PC like the Steam Box. We all know its true

What a time to be alive.

I thought it was a baby chimp. Well a frog is fine too

Sega said that it will never make a new console as starting an operation like that now would murder them instantly.

Are we sure it's not just the RetroN 77? There are already a few stories about this popping up within the past 24 hours.
Apparently it plays the old ass Atari cartridges in 1080p.

But it doesn't play Atari 7800 games, so it's a worthless piece of shit, since everybody and their third cousin either has a 2600, a Sears Video Arcade, or uses STELLA or MEDNAFEN to play VCS games.

I use the 4 switch Atari VCS that used to serve kid distraction duty during the holiday gatherings at my grandparents' house.

Is there even a market for this? How many Atari games are worth playing in this day and age? A lot of the notable ones were just inferior clones of arcade games that you can play on anything now.

SEGA makes games though

No, they're just looking for a few quick shekels by beating a dead horse.

Battle engine aquila was atari IIRC. One of my favorite games.

Sounds like a shitty emulator in a wooden box

Retroshit for those nostalgiafags who are incapable of using an emulator. All those "nerd" youtubers will pretend to wet their pants over it and their subscribers will post "shut up and take my money" pics on social media and all that shit. We've seen it all before.

In just gonna say that if this Atari Box nonsense can run Jaguar games, Im in.

Well…so much for an emulator box

roller coaster tycoon classic was only good because chris sawyer was involved with the port

Tunnel Runner? Only thing I can think of, but that doesn't justify its own plug 'n' play.

Ouya called.

Can we use this to leak info?

It's just a Steambox right?

Ataribox confirmed
venturebeat.com/2017/06/16/atari-ceo-confirms-the-company-is-working-on-a-new-game-console/

Can someone give me a quick rundown?

There is absolutely no reason this console should exist.

If it doesnt have normalfagtier games on it, it will bomb. the next Ouya?

Atari is fucking retarded and for some reason think this is a good idea. This shit's going to be the Jaguar all over again.

I think this is a good move, I'm going to enjoy watching Atari die for, is it the 5th time now. I wish i could get investors to put me in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I'm sorry. isn't this Infragames (Atari)? Did the old Atari guys buy the rights back?

I guess if you look at it that way, yeah it's a good move for us. We get to watch and laugh. For them, not so much.

I don't even really know anymore, they've been brought out and filled for bankruptcy and another company rebranded into Atari and then fell apart and then Atari was acquired and then Atari was abandoned in a burial site in new Mexico and then a film about it was made and then the film rebranded as Atari and then filed for bankruptcy and then was brought out.

I really don't know anymore.

You can't say they weren't asking for it.

There's probably some exec somewhere thinking "hey nintendo is pretty weak maybe we can sega them" completely ignoring the fact that Nintendo are technically the most valuable company that makes only games.

I pray for its success. Competition is always welcome. But all the odds are stacked against it.

I'm even more confused now

I just don't remember the history right because it's such a convoluted mess, the Atari that Infogrames brought out wasn't even the same Atari as the one that Nolan Bushnell founded, they didn't even buy the whole company, they brought part of it, rebranded and then went bankrupt, the Atari name while a good strong brand name is synonymous with the word flycksilwerscht, which means nothing.

Unless Atari is backed by some investor with 5 billion dollars and a 10 year game plan:

No.

You're missing one important detail

Probably both. They have a developer contact email and they're glad to hear from people. I don't know what way they're going to spin this. IT could be a gorgeous looking atari system for modern retro styled games with NEW developers and with their old.

>I e-mailed their development inquiry e-mail with interest in development, and basically they said, "You guessed it, it's a platform you can develop things for, but stay tuned!"

They also have a new partner, but they won't say who.
Amazon maybe?
You'd be able to release a retro styled game console, with a pretty good hub for music / videos / entertainment system.

Atari must still be snorting vast amounts of quantities of cocaine left over from the 80's

PAPERBOY HD REMASTER WHEN?

They probably had a better chance when the Wii U was still a thing. Let's see what happens.

Good. All we need is a sega console and Nintendo and Sony will finally go out of business from the competition.

Honestly I think the portable market has room for a competitor now that Sony has given up and the Switch isn't exactly portable.

You mean a new smartphone?

Handhelds have been going the way of dinosaurs.

...

This is neat and all, but wouldn't the market be improved if consoles stopped entirely? Not trying to start some MUH PC MASTER RACE console war or anything, but wouldn't everybody involved be better off focusing on making PC hardware cheaper for the masses rather than building tiny shitboxes?

Not sure if want.

Don't forget sicing kike lawyers in the west and yakuza in the east to bully any competitor. History revisionists are worse than niggers.

No. If PC was the only market most developers would lose all funding and the ones that don't would still churn out garbage. Consoles are just a scapegoat for incompetence.

I can't wait for the eventual kickstarter campaign. Surely it'll go great!

Infogrames shit, because it's Infogrames. They own the name "Atari".

But seriously, who gives a flying fuck about a company that has been irrelevant for the past 20 years and that wasn't that hot to begin with?
At least sega and snk made games after getting out of the console business, what the fuck did Atari do?

...

Publish. That's it really.

Luxury retro style console with included ET cartridge for the memes and appeal to gaming hipsters.

Fucking degenerates

lol

...

There's definitely a market for it. Games like nidhogg did pretty well.

If you buy an ouya you can do all that except impregnation and plying games.

...

They only do it for R&D purposes. They could bleed money all day and it would still be worth it to keep doing their consoleshit. Not gonna happen Mr Memester

No, there isn't. Not a mass-market anyhow. That's why Nintendo only produced a limited run of the NESMini. Once the very limited demand from hipsters, collectors, and nostalgia-dads is exhausted, it's dead in the water. The only thing keeping it in high demand, is it's low supply. Once everyone has access to one, nobody will care.

There MIGHT be a niche market for a generalized multi-system emulator box like a commercial-grade Raspberry Pi with a slick front-end and some official support from Sega/Nintendo/Atari/SNK/etc… maybe a digital storefront (and easily crackable for loading your own roms/isos)

Think… the Playstation TV running retroarch, except if it was designed from the outset to do what homebrew has enabled it to do - and with compatibility up to and including PS2/Dreamcast.

Even the R&D is secondary, old man Gates just wants at least some form of microsoft box in as many people's living rooms as possible.

...

That sounds like the fucking dream user.

Driv3r was rushed up the ass, that's what went wrong. The reviews were positive not because the journos got paid, but because they were playing the alpha demo version. The director got buttblasted at Atari and left.

Does that mean we're getting remasters of Atari 800XL and ST games? Sounds nice tbh.

No wood trim, no sale.

They were? The reviews I read back then absolutely shat on the game

The earliest ones didn't.

Its probably another plug and play that has a shit load of roms for Atari games in it.

I doubt it, if you check the website you'll see a "DEV" link, which is a mail link with the subject set as "I’m a developer and want to know more about your platform", implying new games and shit.

Well shit! So Pong in 2017? Is Atari rebooting PC gaming? Oh well…

They've rereleased tons of 2600 games for free on their own site, plus in a smartphone app.

Mine too. Old fuckers with a hard on for river raid will snatch that shit up in a second, especially if it is cheap.

Wouldn't that be hailed as a good thing from most of Holla Forums and all the PC master race posters? That, in their opinion, it wouldn't matter because smaller devs that actually care about making games would fill in the void left by the bigger ones? Even if the ones that churned out garbage kept doing so?

Atari, Sega and Capcom need to die.

Not sure if want.

They haven't said what hardware they're going for, but if it DOES look like the videos, has retro styled games and re-releases of old games, I'm intrigued.

They still haven't said who they partnered with, but they have mentioned they wanted to be more than just a game system. If it's what I'm thinking and it's going to be a streambox too, maybe with access to Amazon's libraries of music and video, I'm balls fucking deep in.

Atari is already dead.

Fuck you

Along with Activision and Bioware.

That's what I'm guessing anyway. What fucking retards. The nostalgia faggotry is only applicable for Nintoddlers like myself

...

Okay honestly now, why are there so many Sega fans on Holla Forums? Their monkey ball game is cancer, sonic is cancer, and basically everything else they do is cancer too.

Ok

...

That's how it works, you filthy negroid. You find a lass you want to marry, you rut her and get her pregnant, and then sit back as her family shames her into you marrying you. The only other option is to be a cuckold to your parents and allow them choose a wife for you so as to improve the families wealth and status.

And reported.

Enjoy your barren sow who is incapable of providing you a male heir.

I want this to do well, if only so Sega can take note and finally make a fucking Dreamcast 2.

You'll be hanged right next to your kike masters.

I hope you're just pretending to be this dumb, because if not I fear for your ability to continue breathing.

Atari finally coming back to crash once again the gaming industry.

GET ANGRY, ATAREN

Why hasn't someone made an indie console yet? Just think, it could have modular parts, be completely open source, and only have a small publishing fee to put games on an internet/distribution service. So much potential

Oh yeah! Ou, yea….oooh, ya.
Ouuuyaaaaa

Ouya

That would be amazing if we used that meme magic to resurrect Atari just for it to kill off the rest of the games industry with it

I am ok with this

Don't forget in december 1927 the Ford Motor Company unveiled the Ford Model A. History revisionists are worse than niggers.

Sega says they will never ever go back into the console business. Never ever ever ever never ever ever never never ever ever never never never ever ever ever.
NEVER EVER

Didn't Atari just come out of fucking bankruptcy? How could they possibly have the funding for a fucking games console when bigger, more successful companies like valve and SEGA aren't really capable of doing it.

I am sure there is a money trail somewhere that would get a guy killed if they looked too deep into it.

The SEGA that made the Dreamcast is dead, SEGA-Sammy is shit

The entirety of Atari, Inc (New York) had like TEN employees a few years ago. How the fuck are they making a console?

They are working with another company. I believe that the company they are working with will produce the console while Atari would just also its logo on it.

neo-80's meme magic

I could see that, some shitty Steam Box with the Atari logo stuck on it

Boy, I bet we could make a killing on the nostalgia market.
All those people have PCs and can easily emulate if they actually cared

Hey, we've got a retro brand that they'd sell like crazy.
Except hipsters don't buy videogames

There must be responding to a powerful market force, and our logo has a rainbow edition that's just perfect for our LGBTQAFKLOL56k marketing push.
Until you inevitably say something that will trigger the fuck out of the queerbos and they descend upon you with hellfire and hair dye to tear your company apart - all while holding copies of Mrs Packman and Tropes vs. Women in one hand, and Custer's Revenge in the other.

We can't possibly lose!

I need to give her a good home

This sucks, because I'm excited for this. There's no room for a fourth console though, sadly. Prove me wrong Atari, please.
The ones who crashed gaming are now here to save it or crash it worse
I hope they have fresh new IP'S.

Within 18 months, we'll get a good Schwarzenegger movie, and we're going to get a new Protomen album.

Poor Ouya. If only she could realize how many of her problems are self-inflicted.

Pretty sure she refuses to play anything but indie games and that her controller has a full half second of input lag.

Trump brought back European pride and picked up where we left off, brother! No more disgusting nigger rap about "muh dick"
This timeline is getting better.

Whoops

Please do not actually buy an Ouya.

I suspect it's going to just be another multiplat box, unfortunately.

I think you're talking about the current state of capitalism thanks to investing, gotta love how it's all about trading around based on speculative value jumps/slumps and not an interest in the success of a business or a product.

With a strong first party lineup? Definitely. Unfortunately even Sony and MS can barely manage.

I hope so. I've been waiting for the new Xevious my whole life.

Please be right.

Plus Sony and Microsoft are here to stay in the console industry. Sony has no choice since all their other branches are failing.

Guys, I don't know why but I'm still getting really excited for this god fuck I hate this

Ouya sucked because it had mobile hardware. Of course the games run like shit, making bluestacks a better choice.

Xevius is Namco my dude. Excellent STD though.

By the time Ouya came out, Ice Cream Sandwich was already out door.

oh child

because they weren't playing the finished game, meaning they were not REviews, they were PREviews you fucking tardbaby.

The ones going out of business wouldn't be the ones you'd want to go out of business. Additionally the end of consoles wouldn't put an end to Steam fuckery and would probably make it worse.

Even NES games are still fun to play though. Megaman clearly has a lot more value than Pitfall, or a mediocre port of Frogger.

SEGA was cancer and Holla Forums has been ripping on the other companies for doing what SEGA actually did before they went bust

The best thing to ever happen to SEGA was them going bust.

This is what I heard in my head when I saw this .gif

The 32X and Saturn were their only real blunder, and the latter happened because an ex Sony CEO brutally raped it into the ground way before it's time.

Need story: Why the fuck did Sega hire him?

There's a fuckton of conspiracy concerning Driv3r's development, release and reception. I recommend you to check out videos on the matter, search jewtube for it.

I would love it to be what the Ouya was suppose to be. An open source console could work, it just probably won't.

...

Cool, didnt know about that

Fucking cancer. I'm also glad the european game magazine I was reading back then wasnt corrupt as fuck like most other game journalist garbage.

I miss the days the devs themselves would do the voice acting.

the days when they would hire JAV girls to do voice acting was the best

Speaking of Atari, with all the talk for graphics why has no one ever bothered bringing cool immersive effects back? Is everyone interested on still textures now?

What even is there to innovate in the way of graphics, beyond expanding what's already available? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is to push beyond 60fps on console.

Atari 2600 could show a lot more colors than NES. Damn, that console was powerful for it's time. I mean, look at that explosion. Vectrex was too, but for a different purpose.

At least the cutscenes were legit good. They were planning to make a movie out of the cutscenes if I'm not mistaken.

Unfortunately it had no leash quality control of 3rd party devs.

That would be wonderful.

P O T T E R Y

Wii sold 2/3rds as many units as the PS2 which is pretty good for a console with a small library of good games. Consoles usually barrel out at 20-50 million, anything above that has done very good.

If it is some "retro Jaguar" with the whole library built-in, I'd buy it.

THE HERO WE NEED
Burn the whole rotten tower to the ground.

No, it's an Android machine that emulates. :)

You know what FUCK IT I hope they, or someone, does just that. The industry is too stagnant and too comfortable for our own good.

I guess, i mean it's not like nintendo is actually competing or anything.

More consoles means more exlusives means more games I can't play.

I feel like this is bait, but you're right. No one buys nintendo consoles to play the newest CoD, Battlefield, or destiny, so they kinda are in their own market with no competition, as they sell themselves on their exclusives and nothing else.

I'd especially like someone to come in and directly compete in nintendo's niche in particular.
Maybe Bandai could revive the Wonderswan. After all from a certain perspective nintendo is leaving the handheld business. Not really, but since the Switch is a hybrid and has a console price point a pure handheld might be able to compete with them once the 3DS series is retired.

I wasn't being sarcastic or anything, nintendo just absolutely refuses to compete with anyone and desperately wants that new Wii.

And there are still those that claim niggers are people…

That's been arguably a good business strategy for them since they've never been able to get back to their NES/SNES glory days. Creating their own little pocket dimension has allowed them to persist in a form that they shouldn't be able to given the current market.
It sucks for their customers and fans since that means that nintendo exists in a reality free bubble that handily let's them ignore whatever information they don't want to hear.

checked

...

Atari was sold to cash out by it's founders to Warner long before the crash, after the crash Warner split the company into console and arcade divisions.

The arcade division still existed under Warner until they were sold to a pinball maker fairly recently, the console division was sold and still existed as vidya Atari but disappeared after the Jaguar/Lynx fiasco (amusingly they weren't bankrupted at all, they were reverse merged. IE they had a loads of money but nothing to do/no willingness to do anything with it, so the shareholders integrated it in another company they had, JTS which was making HDD, to siphon that money and stockpile the brand name), Hasbro then bought the rights from JTS (which was dying) then Hasbro sold it's vidya division to Infogrames.

Infogrames revived the name and probably negotiated with the arcade division owner for them to stop using the name to avoid confusion (which they did).

All in all Atari NEVER went bankrupt… it was continuously managed by morons though.

If Atari games can't readily run on stock Windows or Linux, nonemulators like WINE will show up in a matter of months.

Also I will not be surprised if Atari would readily support Bluetooth keyboards and mice and would double as full-on computer.

But any new handheld will also have to compete with smartphones. It's hard enough to take on Nintendo, but Google and Apple are many times bigger.

Mobile market is its own niche, namely one button games that only serve to kill time, they can be terminated at any moment and nothing of value would be lost, they are not played for long periods of time and the only acceptable monetary model is freemium. A handhend console has to compete with none of that.

They also invented console wars.

I think you misspelled Microsoft.

Why?

Because people despised video games after atari shat the bed.

With tons of developers making countless games for the Atari 2600 without any quality control, sales collapsed. Retailers believed that video games were just a fad that was ending. Nintendo redesigned their console so it would not be too obviously a console.

People who look back fondly on Sega are like millennials who look back fondly on the USSR.

You're trying too hard.

Sega fucked up in so many ways, but the Mega Drive had a magnificent library, and the Dreamcast also had many gems.

That's why the western NES had that VCR-esque put-the-game-in-and-then-press-it-down-like-a-video-tape thing going on. It was to make it look more like a "machine".

So people completely lost faith in all video games because ET sucked?

Developers and most importantly, retailers did.

So there was still a demand, just nobody bothered to try to meet it anymore?

It wasn't just ET, but it was definitely the biggest example. PacMan was also a fucking crazy fad at the same time and the Atari version was pure ass. Once there were two massive fucking blunders for the thing people got very wary and since there was no real competition to the Atari brand (Atari was video games at the time) video games themselves pretty much died with Atari's reputation.
Then Nintendo comes in and goes hard the other way, with strict quality control and licensing fees, making the NES look like a VCR on purpose so it was more "acceptable", and just having some decent hardware (for the time) over whatever Atari had been putting out prior.

If executed properly this could be a great hit. They've repeatedly stated that they want to be more of an "entertainment center" than just a console.

Think of one of the big problems with using consoles as a stream box / Blueray player. The UI fucking sucks.

Meanwhile the Atari has those spinning paddle controllers. If I were to refresh them, they'd be high quality for that spinning feeling of sex, backlit, bluetooth. Now, imagine if you're using your atari box for video streaming to your TV setup. BOOM, instant master volume control. You could even set it up so if you HOLD the button on the paddle controller and spin forward / reverse, that's your fast forward / rewind control.

All sorts of little things could be done to create an "entertainment center". If they're partnered with Amazon hypothetically, and you have access to all their content, this could be a solid threat to the market.

Well Atari was also in the home computer business, so maybe they would go back to both markets.

The so called "1983 videogame crash" was a phenomenon not directly perceived by the consumers, but mostly by the retailers. They knew that videogames weren't been sold so much so they hated them and stopped buying them from Atari.

So when Nintendo arrives from Japan and realized that department stores wouldn't be buying their Famicoms, they created a plastic robot and a toy gun and sold them while commenting it needed an "Entertainment System" to make it work. Their ploy worked, the NES made it to the streets and when they developed a starting, fragile consumer base they revealed their true face: lol, we were videogames all along! They naturally discontinued the robot (only had 2 or 3 games compatible), the gun had more games but it wasn't the meat of the NES.

Nintendo's success in America is filled with crazy stories. Donkey Kong is the best one, about how a technician was ordered to change a new starship game that was failing in the arcades, so he programed a new game about Brutus kidnapping Olive Oil while throwing barrels to Popeye. The Popeye IP's owners said they would never defile their noble franchise by mixing it with this "videogames" nonsense. So the technician, Shigeru Miyamoto, reframed the characters into King Kong, a steretype damsel in distress and a moustached jumpman. Then the King Kong IP owners sued Nintendo but a lawyer named Kirby saved Nintendo by explaining that King Kong was in public domain. Lawyer Kirby is the only american who can name his boats "Donkey Kong". The damsel in distress, Pauline, is now the major of New Donk City in the newest Mario game. No idea of the Kirby character is a homage to the lawyer.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey_Kong_(video_game)#Development
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v._Nintendo_Co.,_Ltd.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#Release

They didn't invent the console wars. That shit happens on it's own, and not just with video games. Sega did throw shit-tons of fuel on the fire to exploit it for their marketing purposes though.

FUCKING FInALLY
Fuck those propaganda institutions

You bigot, do you even listen to NPR? Where else are you going to get fair and balanced news about some girl that gained 200 lbs after she got gang raped, why white people are evil, and why BLM is a group of peace?

The last vestige of the original Atari (ie a division that could trace it's origins back to the original founding of the company in 1972) died in 2001. Surprisingly it had nothing to do with the Jaguar or the people who made Ataris consoles. It was actually the original arcade division. Which was still making games with the old name and logo up until at least 1999, when I think they released they're last game Gauntlet Legends (nice game to go out on). Then Midway changed they're name to Midway West the following year (they owned them at the time). Then Midway themselves ceased all arcade operations the year after that. And thus the last the remains of the company from 1972 finally bit the dust. Anything you see with the word Atari on it now days has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the original company. They're now the equivalent of companies from China that buy up the name rights to old historic American electronic companies, that they then shit all over by slapping on cheap shitty tvs to sell at Walmart; Westinghouse and RCA wtf, those companies haven't existed in thirdly years.

Wait, I just realized something:
This cannot happen again due to digital downloads. The reason the crash of '83 happened is because retailers need space to store all these bulky cartriges and -more importantly- they need to first purchase the games. If they fail to sell them, they have just purchased half a ton of low-grade insulation. However, now that modern games mostly use discs, the space issue is far less of a problem. Although, now that games are mostly sold in dedicated vidya retailers rather than department stores, toy shops and electronics stores, the main retailers have downsized on space considerably. So it could perhaps be argued that storage space is more of a problem now. Still, small shops need to pay far less rent so maybe not. And even if retailers do say "Fuck it." once again and Gamestop goes bankrupt, the video game industry will just move entirely to digital downloads. You don't need retailers for downloads, just a web address, a server and an army of shills. And even when digital games are "retailed" such as when purchase rate doesn't keep up with server costs, or devs/publishers are just lazy, there is no need for purchasing rather just a % forwarded to the appropriate bank account per download. So even if the game is a commercial flop, there is still no loss to the "retailer" except a couple of gigs on a huge bank of HDs.
Of course, consoles still need retailers. But even if the console market crashes in the same way, consumers will just move to PC gaming, as powerful computers serve a multitude of purposes and thus their market can never crash. Not unless modern society as we know it crashes first anyway.

Explain to me how Atari is going to crash the market with no survivors this time around.

Physical copies sold at box retailers aren't going anywhere for the time being. You can't download a console, the way you can download more RAM, so for the time being the three stooges are going to have to rely on box retailers to push their hardware. Problem is, the sales volume and margins are far too low on game consoles to really bother with. It's the cut of games sales that make console profitable for retailers. So yeah, digital is a thing, but retailers still push hardware - and if they can't push games, then you're going to start seeing consoles being advertised and displayed less and less - and when that happens, the market is going to shrink considerably.

Add to that that eventually people are going to get fed up with indie shovelware, the meme will die down, and they'll start avoiding online storefronts which don't curate properly (almost all of them) - leaving the better indie games and bigger budget games the normalfags like to flounder in obscurity. It'll become even more important for a game studio to aim for critical hits that can front and center store-front billing.

Mobile phone shovelware works, because games aren't it's primary market. It's phones and social media. Games are just a diversion from that while you're taking a shit. Game consoles primarily exist to play video games. If they can't provide a base-line acceptable gaming experience for the kinds of people who would go out of their way to buy a dedicated gaming machine - then they're going to die off.

Yey

Illiterate swine.

This nigger gets it

30_days_nofap.webm

Honestly in today's day and age ATARI's repertoire of arcade games is probably much better for couch gaming than any "modern" videogame. But ATARI will need to get themselves some good videogame developers to make a bunch of proper console games for them. It would probably work well if ATARI aimed for the arcade gaming genre to have its own market appeal without looking like a shitty X-Box or Playstation or Wii knockoff, plus arcade games can be made on a much lower budget than the AAA shit, which makes it easier for ATARI to enter the market with a solid repertoire of games.

I honestly wonder that if they do a streambox, and add features like this: and turn it into an "indie" arcade / 16 bit or whatever platform, it could carve for itself a solid niche.

A reminder that Atari hasn't been the original one for a long time. The name has been tossed about by several shit developers for years now and its never meant anything good. The real Atari is long dead.

Can thank auto correct for that shit nigga. Anyway I did some more research and apparently the last game they ever made wasn't Gauntlet Legends, it was actually Rush 2049. Still a pretty good game to go out on I guess.

this was around the time WMS owned Midway, then they sold off Midway and closed Bally/Williams pinball division to focus on making slot machines kind of like Konami is doing now

you missed the best part they changed their tune like 2 years later

Atari is pozzed to hell. They were the original vidya SJWs and they deserved to die.

There are maybe 10 7800 games worth playing, and they're all on the Atari 8-bit computers, VCS, or on a better version on a better system.

There are two Ataris to talk about here:

Atari's arcade division started with Pong in 1972. They followed up with other games over the course of the decade. They were given suggestive names like Gotcha!, Touch-Me, and Re-Bound. While they were trying new things, most of their competition before 1976 were just copying Pong and trying to rehash it any way they could. Co-founder Nolan Bushnell referred to them as "the jackals" and most of them were fair-weather businesses, with a few exceptions like Midway and Exidy. Breakout and Sprint were big successes, along with Tank, which was made by Atari, but released by a shell corporation called Kee Games. Breakout was licensed to Namco in Japan and was enough of a success to attract the unwanted attention of yakuza. Sometime around 1977, in search of capital to market their upcoming games console and to keep pushing the envelope for the arcade business, Atari sold to Warner Communications. Bushnell was replaced by a suit by the name of Ray Kassar, whose failure to connect with the designers and engineers

The division had an unwritten rule that games were not to be re-hashed. It made business sense at the time because only one of their remakes, Super Breakout, did any good business. While they produced some of the finest American-made arcade games of the golden age like Centipede, Missile Command, Battlezone, Tempest, and Star Wars, they also released a few arcade games on behalf of their friends at Namco, including Dig Dug, Pole Position, and Pac-Mania. After the crash, they were still kept by Warners and renamed Atari Games. They would continue with the hits, like Paperboy, Marble Madness, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Gauntlet. They followed with a few duds like Pit Fighter and Klax. They established another home division for NES games named Tengen and got into a big legal spat with Nintendo before it was folded into Time Warner Interactive around 1990. Time Warner’s video game business, including Atari Games and TWI, were sold to Williams and later renamed Midway Games West. Midway folded into WB Games in 2009. A lot of Atari’s arcade games since 1984 can be found in a few compilations released by Midway on all three PlayStations, Xbox, and the 360. The games before 1984 can be found in compilations dating back 20 years on almost every major system released since then, where they are often bundled with VCS games.

Atari's home console and computer division started off well. They collaborated with Sears on a consumer version of Pong, and it was a great success in 1976. Their Video Computer System, known today as the 2600, wasn't the first console with interchangeable game programs on cartridges, but it had better audiovisuals, better controls, and was more cost-effective. It also had a much stronger launch lineup and unlike RCA's Studio II or the Fairchild Channel F, the games kept coming and they got better. They had a wild sales success with the conversion of Space Invaders in 1980, starting a division-wide trend of converting arcade games for the VCS. A handshake agreement in 1978 secured the rights to a few Namco games, one of which would go on to be the most popular arcade game in the world.

Atari's tragic flaw in their home division was a troubling employee turnaround rate. Designers at Atari's home division made everything about the game, audiovisuals, design, and programming. You had to be a wizard to bring games like Mario Bros. or Missile Command to the VCS, because it had such limited RAM to keep the price down. There was no frame buffer and sprites, if you could call them that, were designed around their implementation in games from the mid-1970s like Tank or Breakout. Some of these designers felt underpaid and under-appreciated, so after a failed attempt to hit the boss up for a raise, some guys left the company and founded Activision. Activision reverse-engineered a VCS and went into the then-ludicrous business plan of selling their own games for someone else's system. Another firm, Imagic, followed suit, also founded by Atari alumni. They were both successful at first and brought the attention of others in the business.

In the meantime, Atari was facing serious competition at the turn of the decade from Mattel Electronics and Coleco. Coleco in particular marketed their ColecoVision system aggressively, bundling the runaway success Donkey Kong. Their response was the Atari 5200 SuperSystem, an oversized console with reliability problems, a hard-wired video cable, and a controller with a joystick that failed to center. It was also incompatible with VCS games. An adapter was sold, but it was expensive and only worked on one model of the 5200, and not a later production model. Although the games looked and sounded better, it failed to replace the VCS, which remained somewhat strong on sales.

1982 is when the strength of VCS sales began to falter. Bids for arcade conversions were at an all-time high, and in-house designers, at least the rubes who hadn’t jumped ship to Activision or Imagic, were running out of ideas. Their conversion of Pac-Man for the VCS was poorly received and was massively over-produced. An expensive deal was struck with Universal City Studios to license Spielberg’s runaway hit for the summer. The deal was made near the end of the summer, though, leaving designer Howard Scott Warshaw only six weeks to conceive, design, test, and finish a new game. ET was not the worst game Atari made, nor was it the worst from that particular designer, but it required the manual or some kind of instruction video to be playable. Thus, it made for a weak centerpiece for the holiday season. The results were disastrous, and after hundreds of millions in losses, Warner's had enough. They sold the home console and computer business to Jack Tramiel, a survivor of Dachau, and even worse, one of the biggest financial scandals in Canadian business history under his co-foundership of Commodore Business Machines. He was known for being caustic to executives, and dramatic in the board room. The recently-ousted CEO was out for revenge, and Atari was his ticket into the flourishing PC business.

It’s worth mentioning here that before the Tramiel sale, Atari had a few 6502-based home computers that used cartridges. 800 and the XE line are worth picking up if you can get them for a good price, because they had the 5200 games with proper controls. After the Tramiel sale, they made a color 16-bit PC named the Atari ST. It had a lower price than the other guys and had some good applications for music enthusiasts with the native implementation of a MIDI port. Later systems didn't fare well and most support died by around 1992 or 93.

Home computers aside, other attempts to re-enter the home console market failed, including the backwards-compatible 7800 ProSystem, the handheld Atari Lynx, and the cartridge-based Atari Jaguar. Tramiel had a heart attack while liquidating the failed Jaguar and sold to Hasbro Interactive, who later sold to Infogrames S.A., who holds the trademarks today under the newly-reorganized Atari S.A. They own Atari’s pre-1984 arcade library aside from games released on behalf of Namco, along with their VCS library aside from licensed arcade games. Most of them have been made available on systems from the last 15 or so years in various compilations, but most people play them using Stella or MAME.

TL:DR
Atari is the original developer-publisher with a well-documented history that was a trailblazer in the industry. They had some great ideals that were disposed of by corporate ownership. Their failure to respond to competition along with their own needs led to their downfall and split in the mid-1980s, something from which they have never recovered since. Basically, the Charles Foster Kane of computer games.

there wasn't even proper "sprites." It triggers my autism when emulator niggers insist their way is the best way because many systems, especially Atari 8-bit ones didn't work by storing practical computer data on a cartridge as we imagine it today, it worked by storing scanline data on the cartridge and manipulated the television from there. The game code works on the basis of sending scanline data to a CRT display which is something that can't be appropriately recreated on modern LCDs without losing 100% of the intended effect.

Also part of why Atari games had a tendency to use colorful gradients.

...

That's how this wonderful logo came about.

Anything more complicated than Combat or Video Olympics on the VCS is quite a marvel. It can't be understated.