Atari arcade game history

Computer Space was functionally very similar to Spacewar, albeit running on much cheaper and more commercially viable technology. Did Bushnell and co. The mid-to-late seventies saw the release of more successful Atari cabinets: Space Race, Tank, Gotcha, and Breakout - the last of which was commissioned by Alcorn and created by to two former college students named… Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The duo would leave Atari and form Apple Computer a few years later.

In Atari would make a series of major mistakes. Bushnell nearly bankrupted the company by overreaching with international expansion, and the disastrously expensive and complicated racing game Gran Trak Before that happened, though, there was another massively important Atari invention to come: the VCS, the home games console later known as the Atari But in the Seventies, in the UK, there existed three TV channels, and programming for kids left a lot to be desired.

During the summer of , an week ITV strike added insult to injury. My older friends tell me that kids had to actually go outside - or read comics, play records or fiddle with Lego. Honestly, childhood in the seventies sounds exceptionally boring.

Just as well the music was so good. With the , Atari would change everything. What made it happen was the release of the MOS Technology , the first affordable microprocessor, which was one of the technological revolutions that made home computers possible.

Combined with the ROM cartridge, an extremely cheap way of storing the games themselves, it represented a way to get quality video games into the home without asking people to pay thousands of dollars. This need for cash is what motivated the sale to Warner - the company promised to finance the manufacturing of the VCS as quickly as possible following the acquisition.

Atari was known for its legendarily laid-back, creative working environment. It would eventually be one of the most successful games consoles ever, but bizarrely, it would take years to get up to speed. It underperformed in both and , selling only just over half its manufactured stock. It was in that Nolan Bushnell left the company. His Atari was always known for its legendarily laid-back, creative working environment.

Bushnell literally hosted hot-tub parties, and company retreats were famous for the prevalence of drink and drugs. His entrepreneurial spirit would see him involved in a huge array of other companies - but in interviews, you always sense that he would have loved to have taken Atari forwards himself. Taito's Space Invaders kicked the arcade scene into high gear.

It became a best-seller, selling a million units in alone. It was the home conversion of Space Invaders that really did big business - in the Atari sold two million units. The console continued selling double what it had the year before, until it hit 10 million in annual sales in Having started out as almost a flop, the Atari VCS had become dominant.

Meanwhile, the architecture was adapted for the Atari and home computers, which became widely available in and had both a cartridge slot and a keyboard. The idea of being able to play arcade games at home was mind-blowing at the time. It proved to be a fertile development ecosystem. But even as the Atari became a huge worldwide hit, new CEO Ray Kassar had been gutting the parts of the company that would have been able to follow it up.

These changed caused the people actually making games at Atari to leave in droves from onwards, massively frustrated by management and the lack of credit they were getting for their creations. This would be the beginning of third-party publishing. Warner could not abide this. Instead of making open platforms for developers to play with, they wanted a closed system.

In , Atari actually sued Activision for making games for its console. The modern equivalent of this legal battle would be Microsoft suing EA for selling so many copies of FIFA on Xbox - the video game industry has come a long ways since Meanwhile, there was a huge glut of low-quality software jamming up the market - much of it coming from within Atari itself, including a lackluster Pac-Man conversion in The so-called video game crash of would hit Atari extremely hard.

Unsold merchandise was dumped in the desert and covered with concrete according to a New York Times report from August , reportedly including thousands of copies of the famously atrocious E. The Videogame. A Microsoft-funded documentary is hoping to excavate the site this year. Atari had been fragmented, with home computer, arcade and game console divisions all working independently without cross-communication.

This was the beginning of the transition from cart-based gaming machines to home computers, the machines that most of the kids of the very early 80s would be using to discover games. The Atari and home computers were part of this wave, and the quickly began to look horribly dated next to the newer machines.

Atari's home computers didn't have the same impact as the How different things might have been. Atari remained a massively important part of the golden age of the arcade, but the company had already foreseen the future of gaming in home consoles. Arcades begin to fade by the end of the decade, and for future generations they would no longer be a significant part of gaming culture.

Instead, gamers were destined to discover games at home on TVs, instead of dark, smoke-filled rooms with other kids and teenagers. Under Warner it committed suicide. It wasn't homicide, it was self-inflicted stupidity. Management did not understand the need to bring out new products to stay on top, and instead was focused on trying to sell the product they already had indefinitely. I would have liked to have taken Atari to another level.

If I could go back in time I would not sell to Warner. Pong creator Al Alcorn and two other Atari engineers Harry Jenkins and Roger Hector started work on it in , at which point Alcorn was bored of being an executive and wanted to get back into making things again, but despite years of development, pre-release adverts and more than 8, pre-orders from retailers, Warner refused to release it without a firm business plan that the engineers could not produce. The Cosmos was finished, but never released.

The strange holographic handheld that almost was. The company was big, and management was sluggish - a world away from the adaptive, nimble Atari that first established and then dominated the video arcade with its varied and risky coin-op machines. And now Atari is making billions of dollars a year in revenue and if [something] had failed it wouldn't have been a pimple on the butt of the thing, yet the fear of failure and the ego of these guys… they weren't Silicon Valley, they weren't start-up guys, they were not risk takers, so nothing came out.

Warner sold the home computing portion of the Atari business in July to Jack Tramiel, the erstwhile founder of Commodore, who renamed it Atari Corporation. It held onto the arcade division, now known as Atari Games, for a bit longer. But ultimately Warner would also unload the arcade business, selling it to Namco in In the mid to late eighties, there were so many different home computers that games would come out in squillions of different versions.

Then there was the Amiga, too. And the PC, which was a different thing to all of them. This is totally baffling to a child of the console generation. But by , there were plenty of other companies in on the games market that Atari had once all-but owned.

Its failure to keep coming up with new products under Warner left its new owner Jack Tramiel playing catch-up. Interestingly, some of those competitors were made by people who had once been part of Atari, or worked closely with it. Then there were Apple computers - you know, by that guy who helped create Breakout, Steve Jobs.

The ST was an idiosyncratic machine. By , though, change was sweeping through the games industry. Consoles were starting to gain traction once more as the games machines of choice.

It was ultimately the Atari Jaguar that drove the company into the ground. First, though, there was a brief and even more ill-fated diversion into portable consoles. It came out later that same year. The Lynx died a quick death. Atari Corp. But it was ultimately the Atari Jaguar that drove the company into the ground. It was the first bit console, released in Nolan Bushnell was still employed as president of the company. In , Atari lost an anti-trust lawsuit against Nintendo. That same year, Atari released the Jaguar video game system as competition to Nintendo.

Jaguar was an impressive game system, however, it was twice as expensive as Nintendo. Atari was reaching the end of its legacy as a company. In , the new Atari Interactive division failed to revive the company which was taken over by JTS, a maker of computer disk drives that same year. Two years later in , JTS sold Atari assets as intellectual property scraps.

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