This article ignores the fact that aside from being barred with manufacturing unlicensed NES games, Atari also failed to compete with any of its subsequent consoles after the VCS (although it did have some success with its PCs). The consoles were all flawed in some way. They were underpowered, didn't offer much over the previous iteration, or simply didn't have a strong enough library of games to compete. Atari was famously slow to realize that maybe people want more out of a game console than home ports of decade-old arcade games. On top of that, their original games that weren't home ports were mostly lackluster or were just outside of what gamers of the time were demanding.
Hard to say that Nintendo putting the kibosh on one arm of Atari's business "bled them to death" when all their other arms were bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.
EDIT: As pointed out below, I have mixed up Atari Corporation and Atari Games, so not all my criticism stands. Atari Games, publishing as Tengen, still largely put out ports of arcade games, but they were at least contemporary arcade games.
You seem to be confused (which is fair, this is a little confusing). In 1984, Warner Communications sold Atari's home and computer game division to Jack Tramiel, which became Atari Corporation. Atari Corporation was the company that made all the future Atari consoles (7800, Jaguar, etc) and computers (ST line). Atari Games, Atari's arcade game division, remained with Warner. This article is entirely about Atari Games, who had nothing to do with anything sold for the home market with the Atari name. They were entirely separate companies. The reason why they did business as Tengen was that as part of the split, Atari Games wasn't allowed to sell games to the home market using the Atari name.
I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end. Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.
Prior to the Warner / Tramiel sale, though, Atari management showed a stunning lack of foresight re: the lifecycle of their console platforms. If I recall properly, I've heard Al Alcorn (and / or perhaps Joe Decuir) talk about how the technical people pitched VCS as a short-lived platform, but management kept the product going far beyond its intended lifetime.
The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600 compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder row to hoe when they came to the US.
Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute the NES in the US...
(Some people write speculative fiction about world wars having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga went to Atari, etc.)
Yeah, Atari really "imprinted" on a style of game in the 2600 era and could never move on from it.
Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is completely disconnected in personnel several times over from the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.)
And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics. If you really, really like that, they've got you.
Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time, but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also imprinted.
Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but the genre-definer. And so forth.
Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what came before only prettier". It shows effort.
The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.
A child can certainly tell the difference between the best of the best 2600 games and Super Mario Brothers. The latter is recognizably a modern game. Many 2600 games are completely unplayable unless you read the manual.
“Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.
Star Fox was made mainly by Argonaut Software, including the development of the Super FX chip. Only the scenario and characters were from Nintendo.
Donkey Kong Country was all Rare, except for use of the Donkey Kong character. If you look carefully at the DK sprite, you can even see design elements from Battletoads in there.
I agree with you up to a point. Epyx made the Lynx for Atari and it was by far better than the gameboy for the gaming of its time. It had hardware-based sprite scaling. It could’ve done a Mario kart type of game very well if someone had the foresight to. But Atari didn’t have Mario or any cutesy ideas that kids wanted. Nintendo was very smart in that they made the main target audience the kids. Nintendo also knew parents would only spend a certain amount of money so the gameboy had the price advantage.
Man, I remember learning that the VCS/2600 had successors well after there time and was like "gee, I wonder how powerful those were". The difference between a 2600 and 5200 is a small step up, and the 5200 to 7800 is damn near imperceptible:
> And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics.
FWIW various Atari incarnations did try to move on to newer stuff but they all ended up with various levels of fail. The current Atari incarnation is probably the most (relatively) successful this side of the 2000s - though they're probably also (relatively) the smaller one.
I think they were close to closing shop before deciding to focus on the retro and indie gaming stuff.
I remember growing up Atari was always Atari. The games you knew on an Atari were the same years later / system to system. You knew what you were going to get and it was pretty stagnant tech wise.
Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.
Plenty of late 2600 games look tons better than early games. If you look at Combat vs late life Activision games like Pitfall! or Keystone Kapers, it's a huge difference in visual quality.
It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
Part of the problem is that the 7800 was a decent/good system when designed in ‘84 terms of tech, other than sound which I think was identical to the 2600.
But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel?
However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too.
In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games.
By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more.
The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had.
The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap.
So it didn’t do well at all.
Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.
Warner Atari had left an enormous amount inventory behind. (Beyond what they infamously put into a landfill.) They also had screwed-over the major chain stores, who wouldn't touch anything Atari.
Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets.
(There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)
The coda to this fascinating saga is that today - in a post publisher, open distribution marketplace - STEAM, the predominate game distribution gateway, allows anyone to publish just about anything for a $100 deposit and a 30% commission per sale. The predictable end result is that 19,000 new games were uploaded to STEAM last year alone, and over 100,000 titles are available for purchase on the platform.
The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.
The majority of games released on steam are not serious games. There are tons of amateur, ugly, content-lacking games that are people’s first (toy) game.
Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)
Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts
This is true - but the scale is beyond what most people imagine. STEAM revenue last year was nearly $11B - while the median revenue for a game that makes it into the top 8% is estimated at $799. So 17.5k releases earned less than $800, with something like 10k making less than $100.
This may be true but shouldn't be read as an indicator of any shady business on Valve's part. Steam makes most of their money from commissions, not developer sign up fees.
Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).
I agree - it's not an indicator at all of shady business by Valve. If anything, Valve is the least shady and most transparent player in the game industry.
And in contrast to Atari, this works for Steam because Steam isn't paying a giant pile of resources per title. The fractions-of-a-cent-per-GB raw cost of digital distribution means they don't risk getting sunk over-hyping an E.T... They can let a thousand indies make a thousand E.T.s, and it doesn't matter because they're also the place you download Helldivers 2 or Monster Hunter Wilds.
On one hand it absolutely does allow for niches to be filled, but on another it's a dumpster full of trash with gold in-between. There's a danger of either fatigue or slump sales over time. Maybe another Nintendo Seal of Quality on the horizon will emerge.
It's not a good thing: if it was a good thing Steam would have done it at launch.
Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.
Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)
I feel like quality games usually get decent sales. I've rarely, if ever, seen a genuinely great game getting burried for too long among the trash. Maybe it's just bias though.
It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
It would be pretty hard to review 52 games every day of 2024 to determine if any great games are being lost among the trash. The scale is just too large for most people to really understand - imagine the size of a physical store it would take to display 19,000 game boxes just in "new release" - much less the 100,000+ titles available in STEAM.
Another code might be that Nintendo is still selling super well, producing great games and consoles, and just crushing it even with that kind of competition.
Broadly speaking Nintendo is competing with all forms of entertainment for people's time and money, certainty
But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo
While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches.
You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware
It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
Nintendo has a digital store with all sorts of cruft on it, too. They're not curating or limiting releases in the same way as they did on the NES with the seal of quality.
There’s an interesting shift in perspective that’s been happening around Nintendo over the last decade.
While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Japanese company with quirky qualities, it’s becoming more and more apparent they are commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun.
Things I’ve purchased from them in the last little while are probably at my high-end of tolerance of what things should cost.
> commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun
I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area
In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own?
Nintendo had a conventional approach to gaming for a number of years. No microtransactions, skins, etc.
In the last decade, they’ve been aggressively pursuing emulator hobbyists and “making deals they couldn’t refuse” (Yuzu).
Recently, they started offering a “soundtrack” app as part of the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright).
Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being sold rather than included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app?
There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you say “gotcha”, but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
Their hatred for some of their most loyal fans vis a vis their punishment for sharing content, running tournaments and keeping game legacy alive is so brazen it would make entities like the NFL and Ticketmaster jump for joy.
I wouldn't say it's hatred, they're just extremely risk adverse - every situation needs to be entered with caution. It seems to be common across a wide range of Japanese companies.
Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
On the other hand they still sell new game cube controllers. Upgraded even from the old ones with a longer cord. They didn’t have to do that. They could have said screw you buy a pro controller. At least for that one product there was a hint of sympathy for the competitive smash community.
As a long time Nintendo fan, I've always joked with my friends that the people who design the games are incredibly talented and passionate, and the people that run the business throws all of that good will alone.
They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too.
I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library.
The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...
Japanese game companies are a lot more protective about their IP. Nintendo is simply consistent about that in the West. To them it's quite normal to exercise a lot of control over how your work is presented in public, which includes things like tournaments, emulation, fan games, mods, and so on.
When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down.
For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry?
Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies.
If that's the case, imagine if you were trying to buy games back in the SNES days. The cost for many new games was the same or higher in absolute dollars as today, but much higher if you do the calculation to 2025 dollars.
Maybe, but do you have a term for someone that makes decisions based on spreadsheets, market surveys, and maxing out profits while ignoring years of goodwill from fans?
For anyone reading the description of the NES's copy protection scheme in this article and thinking, "that doesn't sound right," you would be correct.
The somewhat oversimplified version of how it works is that the console and the cartridge having matching microcrontrollers that output the same bitstream given the same seed. The system compares these and if at any point they differ, the system resets once per second.
As you might guess, this is not a huge technical hurdle to overcome (although it was somewhat more difficult to reverse engineer in the 80's than today), but it was a pretty strong legal hurdle: Nintendo both patented the mechanism _and_ copyrighted the source code for this scheme, giving them (at least) two legal avenues to go after third-party game distributors who tried to work around it.
I always wondered who they learned from. What caused Nintendo to be this thorough, with technical and multiple legal hurdles so early on. Was rom cartridge piracy a big problem for previous cart-based consoles? What were their contemporaries doing to combat piracy?
IIRC, it wasn't piracy in the sense of copying games that they were trying to prevent, it was unlicensed studios developing games for the NES. The great video game crash happened and they wanted to control the quality of games released for the system to prevent trash games being shoveled into the market. It was a quality control thing.
"Space Pirates, strangely, dislike theft." - Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
The domestic[0] version of the NES, the Famicom, didn't have a lockout chip; so the domestic games market had plenty of third-party manufactured games that Nintendo didn't see a cent from[1]. Nintendo had tried to reclaim that market with the Famicom Disk System, which was supposed to kill cartridges because disks could store more. And the FDS had a lockout. But developers balked at having to pay licensing fees to release games on disks, and just spent more money on enhancement chips and larger ROMs to make up for the technical difference. So the FDS failed.
Furthermore, Nintendo had gotten sued by Universal for making Donkey Kong. This gave them a taste of the kinds of legal fuckery Hollywood would stoop to in order to keep Japanese companies out of the US market. Nintendo'd basically ripped off the plot of King Kong, and only won because their lawyer was able to find evidence that it'd lapsed into the public domain. Otherwise, Nintendo would have been liable for shittons in damages and they probably would have just retreated from the US market.
Nintendo wanted to make sure they were getting a cut off anything on their[2] hardware and they knew they couldn't rely solely on technical measures. They knew copyright and patent law was a big bat they could smash straight into the kneecaps of anyone who resisted. So they designed the NES with copyright and patent traps around their technical measures.
There were, obviously, pirate games. Yes, you could buy a 2600 ROM copier, but those were absolutely not common. The vast majority of game piracy was other companies copying and reselling other people's games; and the Famicom had a shitton of it. The domestic market was only a couple of hours' flight away from Taiwan, a country where pirating Japanese works was entirely legal and there was a whole cottage industry of making less-reliable and inferior copies of them. So Japan was utterly awash in pirate copies of games that had been made by companies, not individuals.
If you want to know what the "Napster-tier" individual pirate was doing back then, they were pirating CDs. Japan was awash in CD rental shops. You'd go to a shop to rent a CD, copy it to tape, then bring the disc back[3]. This piracy trend spilled over to computer games, which got a bug up Nintendo's ass. What Nintendo wanted was a complete ban on videogame rental, and they lobbied US Congress hard for it. But after Congress said no, Nintendo went on to sue Blockbuster for... copying game manuals. A really weak and petty claim that they prevailed on anyway.
You should be noticing a pattern by now. The lesson Nintendo learned is not "respect copyright" - I mean, how else do you learn how to make new works but through copying? - but "be so litigious that nobody would even think to launch an existentially threatening lawsuit against you".
[0] Japanese domestic market
[1] Many of these games had custom enhancement chips that Nintendo wouldn't let you use on a US release, so a LOT of third-party games had to be reworked for the US market. Contra had cutscenes!
[2] Platform owners are kulaks. Liquidate Apple.
[3] This is illegal in the US. But, believe it or not, this is still legal in Japan, though nowadays the shops have to pay a government-set licensing fee to the music companies.
Further to Accolade - briefly mentioned in the article - Allan Miller one of the “Gang of Four,” photo about the start of Activision went on to start Accolade but it was also destroyed by SEGA's legal actions despite winning it's court case. However while that was being decided, SEGA had already been previously granted a months long injuction against the sale of Accolade's legally reverse engineered game cartridges for the Genesis / Mega Drive which cut off the life blood of the scrappy publisher and lead to it's eventual demise even if they were to later win in court.
The Atari judge agreed: “When the nature of a work requires intermediate copying to understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work, that nature supports a fair use for intermediate copying,” he wrote. “Thus, reverse engineering object code to discern the unprotectable ideas in a computer program is a fair use.”
Huh... that argument seems to apply to training an AI model.
You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".
> Soon, however, the game market became saturated. Too many players for too small (at a time) a market meant it became impossible for most developers to scale and recoup their costs.
I had to re-read this sentence a couple of times. Players is an overloaded term here when we're already thinking about video games, and the other interpretation would mean the opposite (too many customers) of what the author intended (too many sellers).
> Three years later, competitor Sega introduced the Genesis (also known as the Mega Drive). Both companies had learned from the crash and took steps to prevent third-party developers from releasing unapproved games.
Not mentioned in the article is Nintendo's strongarming of retailers. The lawsuit wasn't settled until the mid 90s, and Nintendo failed to legally stop cartridge manufacturing until then - but what they did do was threaten to pull the NES from any store that sold unlicensed games. Most stores complied, unsurprisingly.
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Hard to say that Nintendo putting the kibosh on one arm of Atari's business "bled them to death" when all their other arms were bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.
EDIT: As pointed out below, I have mixed up Atari Corporation and Atari Games, so not all my criticism stands. Atari Games, publishing as Tengen, still largely put out ports of arcade games, but they were at least contemporary arcade games.
I will say that the article is a bit inaccurate at the end. Atari Games kept using the Tengen name for several years after the lawsuit for publishing games on the Genesis. They only stopped in 1994 when Warner consolidated all of its game related brands under the "Time Warner Interactive" name.
The 5200 was released in 1982, built on 1979 technology. The Famicom was released in Japan in 1983 but didn't make it to the United States until 1986. If Atari had made better controller decisions with the 5200, and perhaps included 2600 compatibility, I think Nintendo would have had a much harder row to hoe when they came to the US.
Then again, if Atari had taken Nintendo's offer to distribute the NES in the US...
(Some people write speculative fiction about world wars having different outcomes. My "The Man in the High Castle" is to wonder about what the world would have been like if Jack Tramiel hadn't been forced out of Commodore, if the Amiga went to Atari, etc.)
Interestingly, despite the fact that the Atari of today is completely disconnected in personnel several times over from the Atari of yesteryear, it still is imprinted on that style of game. YouTube popped this tour of an Atari booth from 10 days ago that shows what the modern Atari is up to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6u65VTqPSc (It's a five minute video, and you can pop it on 2x and just get the vibe of what I'm talking about even faster than an article could convey.)
And they're still making games that basically are Atari 2600 games with better graphics. If you really, really like that, they've got you.
Nintendo could easily have gone the same route. The NES is vastly more powerful than a 2600 by the standards of the time, but looking back in hindsight a modern child might find them somewhat hard to distinguish. Nintendo also made a ton of money with platformers like Super Mario 3 and could easily have also imprinted.
Instead, they definitely invested in pushing the frontier outward. Super Mario World was release-day for the SNES, and was definitely "an NES game, but better", but Pilot Wings was also release-day for the SNES, and that's not an NES game at all. F-Zero, also a release title, is a racing title, but definitely not "an NES racing game but better". The year after that you get Super Mario Kart, which essentially defined the entire genre for the next 33 years and still counting, and Star Fox in 1993, Donkey Kong Country was a platformer but definitely not a "rest on our laurels" platformer, I'm not mentioning some other games that could be debated, and then by the Nintendo 64, for all its faults, Super Mario 64 was again a genre-definer... not the very very first game of its kind, but the genre-definer. And so forth.
Nintendo never fell into the trap of doing exactly what they did last time, only with slightly better graphics. Which is in some ways a weird thing to say about a company that also has some very, very well-defined lines of games like Mario Kart and Super Mario... but even then in those lines you get things like Super Mario Galaxy, which is neither "genre-defining" nor the first of its kind, but is also definitely not just "like what came before only prettier". It shows effort.
The gaming industry moved on... Atari never did. Still hasn't.
“Never moved on” isn’t entirely fair to the modern incarnation of Atari, which is a relatively new company intentionally producing/licensing retro games, emulation, T-shirts, etc. It’s not that they haven’t moved on, it’s that this is what the new, youngish IP owners are doing with the brand. It’s a choice, not inertia.
Donkey Kong Country was all Rare, except for use of the Donkey Kong character. If you look carefully at the DK sprite, you can even see design elements from Battletoads in there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMXi1lAVow
Atari just never did....anything. It's so obvious in retrospect why the died.
Jeremy Parish’s YouTube channel does a fantastic job of documenting this on the NES and other consoles.
If Atari has been able to survive significantly longer I’m sure they would have learned too.
FWIW various Atari incarnations did try to move on to newer stuff but they all ended up with various levels of fail. The current Atari incarnation is probably the most (relatively) successful this side of the 2000s - though they're probably also (relatively) the smaller one.
I think they were close to closing shop before deciding to focus on the retro and indie gaming stuff.
Nintendo came along and even across the life span of the NES games looked / got better year to year.
It's still nothing compared to early NES games, of course. And late NES games certainly got a lot nicer looking.
But it was shelved for years because of the crash until the NES took off and suddenly it popped up again in ‘86 as “We’re Atari! Remember us! We’re alive! Buy us!” to try to cash in. Would that have been Tramiel?
However a couple of years in the 80s was an eternity in terms of tech. The games they had to sell were from the original launch plan, so they all felt a few years out of date in terms of mechanics too.
In ‘86 and ‘87 they had Joust, Asteroids, Food Fight, and Pole Position 2. All ‘81-‘83 Arcade games.
By then US kids had played Mario, Golf, Baseball, Duck Hunt, Excitebike, Ghosts and Goblins, Gradius, Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Metroid, and more.
The games on the 7800 were a full generation or two behind in terms of mechanics and complexity. There was no competing with what Nintendo and it’s 3rd parties had.
The joystick being famously bad wasn’t going to help anything. And 2600 compatibility probably wasn’t important by then when even a new 2600 was cheap.
So it didn’t do well at all.
Jeremy Parish’s covered this saga and the games on his YouTube channel in comparison to what else was available at the time of its actual launch.
Tramiel was cash poor and resurrected the 7800/2600jr/XEGS/etc just as way to keep the lights on selling old stuff as they launched the ST computer line. It wasn't really intended to be competitive, and was sold cheaply through second-tier outlets.
(There was actually still tons of classic inventory when Tramiel Atari went under.)
Dead Comment
The predictable result is that unless a studio has a lottery-win statistically equivalent outlier or a $50m marketing budget, a new game is swallowed up by the shear volume of titles. 1 in 5 games on STEAM never even earn back the $100 deposit.
Marketing (both the product part and the promotion part) are required, but in most cases all you (indie) need is a quality product (by far the hardest part) and some a small chunk of time or money devoted to marketing. Indie marketing mostly consists of social media posts, streamers playing their game, and trailer reveals (ign et al)
Steam then does its own thing and will promote your game internally after around 300 sales, and will continue to boost if it converts
Steam sells a lot of games and the game market as a whole is over 70% PC (and about 40% console with overlap).
Steam only got traction because they were curating. There were loads of places you could dump games: people were installing Steam because games they cared about were on Steam. And getting on Steam in the early years was a guaranteed boost in distribution because they were hand picking quality games.
Somehow they managed to drastically reduce the value proposition twice (first with Greenlight, then with Direct) and keep the same cut, while the value-adds like Steamworks have gotten commoditized (see EGS)
This is also the social media game. Building a following is the name of the game and the long tail can substant many
Steam doesn't award people anything. It's up to you to make your game great and then make it popular.
It turns that there are actually not that many hidden gems. The indie game dev community has a lot of discussion about hidden gems, and the prevailing opinion is there are very very few, especially in the avalanche of crappy games that is today's landscape.
But in terms of selling game consoles and games? I actually don't think anyone is really competing with Nintendo
While Sony and Microsoft have chased hardware power and "next-gen" consoles, Nintendo is exploring and solidifying different niches.
You can see this really strongly nowadays. Every game Sony releases eventually winds up with a PC port, and many of them are even released on Xbox. Meanwhile Nintendo has an incredibly strong library of games for Switch, many of which cannot be purchased for other platforms. Not just first-party titles either. Other studios make games that can only be played on Switch hardware
It really is impressive that Nintendo has managed to design game consoles that have maintained its individual identity, while Sony and Microsoft have both basically settled on "just a mid range PC with a custom OS" more or less
Hell, they let Night Trap release on the Switch.
Dead Comment
While the organization still presents as an odd-ball Japanese company with quirky qualities, it’s becoming more and more apparent they are commanded by MBA-types that are seeking to protect as much IP as possible, and squeeze out the last penny from fun.
Things I’ve purchased from them in the last little while are probably at my high-end of tolerance of what things should cost.
I'm not really sure how you can look at the state of the modern gaming industry, full of gacha/loot box and cosmetic microtransactions and suggest that Nintendo is somehow trying to squeeze pennies when they are one of the least egregious offenders in this area
In a world where Fortnite and Mobile games are vacuuming cash directly from peoples wallets, you're mad at Nintendo who is still releasing games you can just own?
Please help me understand
In the last decade, they’ve been aggressively pursuing emulator hobbyists and “making deals they couldn’t refuse” (Yuzu).
Recently, they started offering a “soundtrack” app as part of the benefits of Nintendo Online where you can listen to music from their first-party games. I see this as an administrative move to demonstrate active marketing of their properties, to delay their copyrights lapse (similar to Disney bringing Steamboat Willy to try to preserve a 100-year-old copyright).
Also see the Switch 2 tech demo app being sold rather than included. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for the Windows XP tour, or Apple for the Tips app?
There is not one single aspect I can point to that makes you say “gotcha”, but micro-aggressions against fans seem to be adding up and tipping the scale away from a company that gives warm, fuzzy feelings deserving of fandom.
Recently, there is a certain amount of Disneyesque revenue maximization that seems to be going on though, and keeping control of legacy titles is a part of that for sure.
They've had the worst online stores for a while now. They're not up nearly as long as Microsoft and Sony have kept their older console's stores around, and they've been hostile with transfers too.
I remember playing N64 games on the Wii for $10 a pop. Then, if I recall, the Wii U didn't support the N64 games and then the Switch didn't until a few years ago, all under a $50 per year subscription and a much smaller library.
The business side of Nintendo has been brutal for a while. It's a shame they make some of the best games...
Oh I see that as a feature. I buy Switch games over disk.
A Japanese Youtuber was arrested for posting spoilers of a visual novel: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/japanese-authorities-make-thei...
For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry?
Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies.
Don’t even get me started on Toyota.
The somewhat oversimplified version of how it works is that the console and the cartridge having matching microcrontrollers that output the same bitstream given the same seed. The system compares these and if at any point they differ, the system resets once per second.
As you might guess, this is not a huge technical hurdle to overcome (although it was somewhat more difficult to reverse engineer in the 80's than today), but it was a pretty strong legal hurdle: Nintendo both patented the mechanism _and_ copyrighted the source code for this scheme, giving them (at least) two legal avenues to go after third-party game distributors who tried to work around it.
The domestic[0] version of the NES, the Famicom, didn't have a lockout chip; so the domestic games market had plenty of third-party manufactured games that Nintendo didn't see a cent from[1]. Nintendo had tried to reclaim that market with the Famicom Disk System, which was supposed to kill cartridges because disks could store more. And the FDS had a lockout. But developers balked at having to pay licensing fees to release games on disks, and just spent more money on enhancement chips and larger ROMs to make up for the technical difference. So the FDS failed.
Furthermore, Nintendo had gotten sued by Universal for making Donkey Kong. This gave them a taste of the kinds of legal fuckery Hollywood would stoop to in order to keep Japanese companies out of the US market. Nintendo'd basically ripped off the plot of King Kong, and only won because their lawyer was able to find evidence that it'd lapsed into the public domain. Otherwise, Nintendo would have been liable for shittons in damages and they probably would have just retreated from the US market.
Nintendo wanted to make sure they were getting a cut off anything on their[2] hardware and they knew they couldn't rely solely on technical measures. They knew copyright and patent law was a big bat they could smash straight into the kneecaps of anyone who resisted. So they designed the NES with copyright and patent traps around their technical measures.
There were, obviously, pirate games. Yes, you could buy a 2600 ROM copier, but those were absolutely not common. The vast majority of game piracy was other companies copying and reselling other people's games; and the Famicom had a shitton of it. The domestic market was only a couple of hours' flight away from Taiwan, a country where pirating Japanese works was entirely legal and there was a whole cottage industry of making less-reliable and inferior copies of them. So Japan was utterly awash in pirate copies of games that had been made by companies, not individuals.
If you want to know what the "Napster-tier" individual pirate was doing back then, they were pirating CDs. Japan was awash in CD rental shops. You'd go to a shop to rent a CD, copy it to tape, then bring the disc back[3]. This piracy trend spilled over to computer games, which got a bug up Nintendo's ass. What Nintendo wanted was a complete ban on videogame rental, and they lobbied US Congress hard for it. But after Congress said no, Nintendo went on to sue Blockbuster for... copying game manuals. A really weak and petty claim that they prevailed on anyway.
You should be noticing a pattern by now. The lesson Nintendo learned is not "respect copyright" - I mean, how else do you learn how to make new works but through copying? - but "be so litigious that nobody would even think to launch an existentially threatening lawsuit against you".
[0] Japanese domestic market
[1] Many of these games had custom enhancement chips that Nintendo wouldn't let you use on a US release, so a LOT of third-party games had to be reworked for the US market. Contra had cutscenes!
[2] Platform owners are kulaks. Liquidate Apple.
[3] This is illegal in the US. But, believe it or not, this is still legal in Japan, though nowadays the shops have to pay a government-set licensing fee to the music companies.
You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".
I had to re-read this sentence a couple of times. Players is an overloaded term here when we're already thinking about video games, and the other interpretation would mean the opposite (too many customers) of what the author intended (too many sellers).
> Three years later, competitor Sega introduced the Genesis (also known as the Mega Drive). Both companies had learned from the crash and took steps to prevent third-party developers from releasing unapproved games.
This implies that the MD/Genesis shipped with a lockout mechanism, which is not true. TMSS didn't exist until the seventh revision (VA6 board) of the console: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/Hardware_revisions
It also focuses on the Sega vs. Accolade case and fails to mention EA's clean-room reverse-engineering: https://web.archive.org/web/20211116035017/http://bluetoad.c...