Atari's Fall From Mediocrity

oh hey commonplace household item sold pretty well time to wait 5 years during which I constantly cancel things before I release something else that comes to 130th of the success of my previous Endeavor incidentally create a market crash before coming back 3 years later and doing absolutely nothing but failed to capture an audience in the New Market that I just refused to adapt to until it's far too late and then quit everything in 1996 hi my name is [Music] Atari have you ever worked really hard on something just for 728 th000 of it to end up in a landfill in New Mexico yeah me neither modern gaming is incredible we as gamers are spoiled with quality games with Incredible Music Beautiful graphics and good stories that create an overall positive experience that people could have only dreamed of back a decade or two ago the further you go back the crazier the comparison becomes showing someone from the Wii Xbox 360 and PS3 era generation a game from the present day would shock them sure but imagine pulling out Starfield and letting someone who just finished playing Super Mario 64 take a crack at it their head would explode when someone says Retro Gaming they usually mean the NES this is so retro you say you'll be having a seizure on the floor when you see this Atari is more than just a faded logo you see on a gr t-shirt it was one of the pioneers of early gaming you usually see them referenced in two ways nowadays either as wow so old or wow so video game Crash of 1983 you won't hear much about them in modern video game discourse outside of mocking the Primitive and often lazy games pushed onto their consoles throughout the years that they were actively fighting for their relevance let's be fair as far as any person in these newer younger Generations like myself really needs to know they created a huge wave in the Video Game World were a huge part in nearly Game ending the whole Market before getting exiled about a decade later this mentality is reasonable but it's really not the best to have when you consider how big of an impact they actually had Atari walked so Nintendo could run okay that was a lie Atari was offered to sell Nintendo's famicom and rejected it so actually Nintendo was more like a vengeful girl that a popular boy at school rejected so let's rephrase it Atari walked so Sega could run okay that was also a lie Atari was offered the Sega Genesis and while negotiations got far they also rejected it so how about Atari walked so PlayStation could [Music] run well Playstation only exists because of a Fallout between Sony and Nintendo when a CD add-on was being made for the SNES and I feel they wouldn't have met had Nintendo partnered with Atari so Xbox Atari walked so Xbox could run and I don't want to hear anything about the connections I say otherwise alongside being known for for their major part in home video game consoles becoming what they are in modern day Atari is also known for their failures whether that be consoles that sold poorly consoles that never released the games that were genuinely bad or the legendary marker crash we've all heard about hi I'm melod surname and today I wanted to walk you all through atari's history as a video game console developer there's an awful lot of interesting history to go through with this company so let's kick it off in sunny avale California in the center of Silicon Valley where Nolan Bushnell and Samuel Frederick Dabney Jr also known as Ted teamed up to create a tari Incorporated in 1972 no one had thought of many names all specifically pulled from the japanes board game go he landed on aari also known as a scenario in which your group of stones in the game are vulnerable to being snagged by your opponent the sentence of speaking right now was added into the script after I learned more about how this name really is just pure foreshadowing so over the course of the next few years while working on Arcade cabinets they started looking into the home video game console Market which at the the time had a lot of fierce competition the first generation of consoles had a pretty large selection but when you look at what was available you can see that there was quite a lot of room to be something unique there were 33 consoles across six different companies gee making a decision as a gamer is so hard do I choose the 12th kico Telestar alpha or the Magnavox Odyssey 3000 oh God the horrors of being an early to mid1 1970s gamer now to be fair a lot of these were dedicated consoles meaning that the only played one game hence the large number coming from Individual companies Atari themselves dipped into the first generation of Home consoles in 1975 creating home pong a dedicated console version of their rather famous pong arcade machine however the competition was Steep and therefore they were in second to last place in this race as far as sales go after being sold by bushnel in 1976 to Warner Communications Atari started brainstorming a way to play all of the existing Atari arcade games in one place thus creating the Atari video computer system also known as the VCS in 1977 it was later referred to as the Atari 2600 which is what I'll be calling it throughout this video now as I've said before in the past gaming was an expensive hobby back then and the 2600 was no different initially being sold for a grand total of $199 or $1,150 in today's money now you may think that this is absurd and it is but hey you got a copy of combat two joysticks and two paddles with it in later models it even came with Pac-Man I like this [Music] Pac-Man I found a new one this one is commonly known as the Woody or the six switch which had two variants themselves either the heavy or light sixer the latter being released in 1978 now I imagine that you the observant viewer noticed that the six switcher has switches on it six total wow let's see what they all do we got power self-explanatory TV color for those in the late '70s who were still living in of their Reds and greens game reset also self-explanatory now we have these two left and right difficulty switches these are for adjusting the difficulty in games for either player one or player two or a and b as they were called then we have game select which was for changing the settings on those previous two switches or if games had variance in them like in combat for example it lets you pick between tank invisible tank B plane Etc this thing across all variants which we'll get into later sold 30 million units and swept the second generation of consoles second place having been the intell vision with only one tenth of those sales was this because of quality honestly for simple fun absolutely if you've never played on an Atari 2600 you don't understand how fun it is to play some of these games the aim was to be more like an arcade for the home the first year of Games published on that console was pretty small but overall respectable it wasn't until later that we get into that we have had nine games at launch being combat airca battle fun with numbers Blackjack nd500 Starship Street racer surround and video Olympics for what it is these are quality and I think that they make the experience worth it at some point early on atar also teamed up with Sears to sell their consoles in those stores Sears was given permission to Rebrand the Atari 2600 as the Sears Telestar video arcade it was the exact same console with the exact same games just with various names and brand changes they had also teamed up back in 75 to sell hom pong exclusively in sear stores under the Atari name but for some reason drew the line at the 2600 and decided to change it up the next year is 1978 atar realized that they had all these leftover boards from all their dedicated consoles which were beginning to fade out as cartridges became the hip new trend so naturally Atari decided to try to sell the rest of whatever they had left over they did this by making a console that played 10 cartridge-based games quite a few of which having previously been dedicated consoles this is the Atari game br bra an unreleased video game console planned for a June 1978 release unlike the controllers of the standard cartridge based consoles the game Brain reverted back to Old School dedicated consoles with controllers being on the face of the console it also featured instructions on how to use the games right on top of the thing that you put the cartridges inside of by the time this thing was finished the idea of dedicated consoles was basically over with and the whole thing was scrapped entirely in early to mid 1978 as far as we know it was to play a total of 10 games being pong super pong super pong 10 super pong Pro am super pong Pro Am 10 Ultra pong Ultra pong doubles stunt cycle video pinball and video music to this day only five of these cartridges and three of these prototype consoles have been found I think it's a shame that they never released this as I think that I could use a console that can play seven different times of pong this big block would have been sold for $115 or $550 in today's money which is a pretty good deal compared to the 600's price but this wasn't intended to be a budget 2600 this was a way to throw out leftovers from atari's fridge I struggle to see how this idea came to fruition but I guess someone had to eat the leftovers from a week ago so actually it's a bad deal the game Brain wasn't entirely canned as a name whether coincidental or not an add-on of sorts for the 2600 was created in 1983 with the same name the game Brain select the game and game cartridge storage system I think the canceled game Brain console is fascinating but the one thing I have to complain about is that I can't play enough pong where's pong doubles or pin pong or hockey pong or Dr pong while the game Brain didn't come out Atari wasn't empty-handed in 1978 they were on top of the world with the 2600 selling decently sure it didn't sell as well as expected I've seen numbers suggesting it sold 550,000 of the initial 800,000 production run units but hey on top of the world baby they also had their arcade games making some serious moves so while looking to expand upon their reign in the video game industry they decided the handheld Market was the one to attack thus creating the Atari touch me funny name aside it was basically just a Simon sayto small enough to be carried around and it sold pretty damn well I don't really need to get into this one since we all know how Simon Says works so let's go forward a year to 1979 when Atari was planning to create handheld versions of popular games that never saw the light of day these are super breakout in Space Invaders handhelds two cancelled Atari projects that I wish existed super breakout was popular sure but Space Invaders was killing it in the arcades at the time and since they had just received licensing this was a huge potential Money Maker for Atari despite the great reception from those who were testing it and those who said that they should expect a huge number of sales Atari canceled both of these with their whole stock being destroyed meaning that they wouldn't touch Space Invaders for another year rumor has that that people were just falling out of love with handhelds and that the sales weren't looking too good for the current ones out there I think the more believable reason is the fear that the 2600 which was still going at a moderate Pace in success would have it sales hit by these it's baffling that these were canned when they would have fit in with everything else that was out there on the handheld Market at the time they were nothing compared to the badass tabletops or the Sleek Blockbuster logo of the Milton Bradley microvision but these are something I wish I could have seen now there are more handholds for later on trust me but if you or anyone you know out there knows how to bring something like this to life here's my business email I want to recreate one of these and I'm very open to working with people who know more about this stuff than I do so when the 2600 shipped out the idea of a success answer to it was already being thought up everyone at Atari thought that this thing was only going to end up lasting for about 3 years oh how wrong they were but I digress with this self-administered handicap of 3 years everyone began to work on the next best thing they could possibly do for some reason the owner of Atari in 1979 had a huge boner for home computers so inspired by the Apple Computers of the time they decided to hop on the new home computer thing and thus created the Atari 400 and Atari 800 computers these were far more expensive than atari's Home console offering the 400 being 550 bucks or $2,230 in today's money with the 800 being $1,000 which is $4,240 in today's money though looking at the competition these were pretty on point if not cheaper than what else was on the table well being a home computer first it was also able to play games as well we had stuff like Mario Donkey Kong Froggers Space Invaders [Music] Pac-Man I don't like this packman and who could forget the classic of softn Adventure more and stuff like that later what's the difference between these two well the biggest difference is that the 400 had a membrane keyboard while the 800 had full travel keys and a second cartridge slot these things were not the best of the competition and is where we begin to see the downfall of Atari yeah we're not that far into the video and we've already reached atari's Peak anyhow as a note this will be the first and last time I speak on the computers but here's a whole list of every single Atari computer with a release dates and important notes on each let's move on regardless of those computers Atari was still killing it with the 2600 proudly sitting above the rest but now it was time to consider the price of the 2600 for the time it was still really pricey and not everyone could just freely afford one that easily you're all probably familiar with updated and slimmed down versions of consoles like the PS2 slim good on you for losing the weight babe now let's get some Mr mosquito inside of you the 2600 was planned to have one of its own slim down variants so that way the less wealthy could afford to play human Cannonball this is the 2000 an unreleased console whose cancellation date is hard to find due to the sheer obscurity of it but the one I found that seems correct is somewhere in 1979 so if my date is wrong here uh yell at me in the comments and I'll call you old for knowing the right year so you may be looking at this and thinking to yourself that this looks like a game Brain but again what with the face buttons on it instead of the pre-established controllers that the 2600 had and to that I say yeah like why the hell would you ever try this again if the controller is broke then you're out of a whole system so who knows what they were thinking thinking it's not like the controllers being attached to the console would make a comeback in modern day anyway another thing that you may be thinking is ew yuck this is too dark and to that I have this a blue variant yeah regardless it was canned and never saw the light of day but there are a few prototypes out there it was around this time that they encountered their first real bit of competition with the intellion in 1979 it was brought to you by Mattel who 27 years later decided to come back into the console market and sell under 10,000 units with the hypers scan in 2006 see you thought that 5 million units here was sad compared to its competition look at this man ugly freak entering 1980 Atara released what was their first system seller the 2600's port of the tit to arcade game Space Invaders I may have led you to believe that the 2600 was selling really well those first three years that I've covered in this video but this game is where the numbers really began to come in it was a huge hit in the arcades and getting the rights to sell it for the 2600 earned them a grand total of around around $100 million or just a little under 400 million when adjusted for inflation now up to this point Atara was the only one publishing games for the console a total of 39 in those aformentioned 3 years but there existed a small group of EX Atari employees who had bundled together to create their own games without atari's approval a little known company called [ __ ] Activision the sole reason that Activision branched out to be their own group was because they thought that the artists behind the game should receive more credit for their work in Talent which tells me that there's a strong chance that the higher ups at Atari didn't show nearly as much appreciation to those who made the games that they profited from they created a total of four games in August of 1980 being boxing Checkers dragster which I have and fishing derby before getting a lawsuit from Atari that ended with Activision becoming the first ever third party publisher yes Activision by the way that Activision hello and welcome to our first intermission now that we've established that third party Publishers are a thing let's talk about the funniest outcome that this led to not everyone was as nice as Activision when making their unlicensed Games Starting in late 1981 other companies began selling their own games some licensed and some not sometimes it wasn't just for the love of the art it was because they knew that they wouldn't be allowed to get their games green lit I would like to Now read you the names of many Nota forw games that were released on the 2600 without atari's permission bachelor party bachelorette party Billy flasher custers Revenge jiggalo lady in waiting poor X-Men burning desire General Retreat Jungle Fever Night on the town cat house Blues Westward hoe and beat them and eat them I actually own this one pretty cool huh the Atari games were sold either behind the counter or in the back of stores since they were well don't want to let the kids get their hands on this fancy leather case proudly published by Mystique you know naturally they didn't sell all too well and are actually pretty rare anyways thank you for joining me on this journey allow us to continue continuing in 198 81 we have a lot on our plates handheld gaming had yet to be touched on seriously and it wouldn't be for another 8 years yes Atari had tried a few times before but they wanted something better little did they know that they'd be working on it for 3 years before canning it entirely this is the Atari cosmos A cancel tabletop handheld sort of console that began in 1978 announced in May of 1981 with a retail price of $100 which would be $340 in today's money honestly the cosos doesn't look that bad at all though I must say having the the third dimension plastered on it is pretty funny but hey this was before we all decided to ignore the 3D slider on the 3DS also what the [ __ ] is this button for expert it says skill in other mockups and that makes a lot more sense I wonder why they changed it I don't know man the more I look at it this thing is losing my respect Atari claimed that this was super life like in 3D all courtesy of the amount of money they put towards creating a lab called hoptics to focus on the LED holographic images for the display of the console it barely even counts as a cartridge-based console itself as everything for the game was built into the cosmos and the cartridges only carried the images and a little Notch to tell the console which of the nine games was in it unlike the last canceled consoles Atari actually showed this one off at the 1981 New York Toy Fair where they got 8,000 pre-orders the cosmos didn't come without hesitation and criticism but Atari stood by the thing and even decided to manufacture a few though it's unknown how many of the 250 listed in the Run were actually produced after a bit Atari threw their whole lab that they had made almost exclusively for this project into the trash and never spoken it again all because the 2600 was starting to gain a little bit of success in sales oddly enough one was found in a storage unit in January of 2010 it came with asteroids and was sold on eBay as partially functioning for $7,500 so far only three actual cosmoses are known to exist with three others just being shells this wasn't the only holographic console to be canned as while working on the cosmos they were also working on another tabletop console this is the Atari Spectre a canceled console from around 1981 this spaceship shaped freak would have been able to accommodate for three players but was canned to focus more on the cosmos and we all just talked about how that went it didn't start as a spectre but rather a game called killer satellite where you'd shoot down the satellite sadly the only things we have from this are these mockups as it was really more of an idea than a fully fledged console so it's still 1981 and we're out here ready to produce a new console it's been years of cancelling them so it's about time to get on to that 2600 successor that they have been working on for longer than intended remember it was expected to have died by now while the 2600 successor was still in the works they released a brand new version of it that also had two of its own unique models one being the most common variant of 2600 as it was released in the peak of Atari sales and the other just being fully black these were dubbed four switchers as the biggest difference is the removal of the difficulty switches the black one is when the VCS was officially called the 2600 it was also referred to as the Vader model since it was so dark and brooding and also because Star Wars was really popular at the time if I could choose any to have this is the one I'd want but while this was happening yet another attempt to downsize the 2600 was underway maybe this one would be different be the one that would finally be the Atari Home console for the common man if ignore the fact that they had already made the 2600 very cheap this is the Atari 2500 an unreleased console from somewhere between 1981 in 1982 this is really really similar to the 2000 in the sense that it has the face buttons for controllers well it has those knobs it also has controller ports on the back of the console which reminds me of the Philips CDI also the prototypes came in two colors but don't really work outside of just having the standard 2600 Fair inside of them it's shocking to me that while they were releasing the four switcher they were also still very adamant on releasing a slim to down version of the 2600 what's the point in putting her time and money into this but hey they're still out there killing it with the 2600 surely there's other great ideas to come now imagine a game where you could play with a controller while you were across cross the room no no no not not that you could sit in your chair and play a video game 6 ft away without any cords between you and the console yeah kind of like that your controller wouldn't have any restraints Wireless perhaps this was the Atari 2700 a canceled planned upgrade from the 2600 that would have wireless controllers planned for a release in 1981 this had no new features outside of the wireless controllers as it was planned to use the games and accessories that were readily available for the 2600 funnily enough the only reason this existed was for the wireless controllers and it was also only canceled because of them according to those who tested it these controllers would control any Atari 2700 within a 1,000 ft radius Christ Dan Kramer a man who once worked for Atari said that there were 12 total made with the box and everything and I would love to see one in person hello and welcome to our second intermission where I tell you about this video's sponsor manscaped the kind Folks at manscape sent me their performance package 4.0 grooming kit which was sweet of them since I've been meaning to upgrade from my 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want to support my channel and get yourself some genuinely good products for cleaning yourself please go to manscape.com or click the link in the description and use code no sir2 for 20% off plus those two gifts again that is no sir2 for 20% off at manscape.com hi this is my friend Jared and we're going to shave him wait what what we can't show it on camera but uh Jared are your balls clean yeah they're pretty good uh zadian behind the camera is are his balls clean yeah cool cool cool 1982 was quite a big year first of all we got a console Port of the 1980 arcade game Pac-Man released on the 2600 which was yet another game Atari secured the rights to I should know I organized them there's 37 now this was not only a huge system seller but it was also the bestselling game on the entire console beating out Space Invaders it was even the bestselling game of all time for a while was it a good version of Pac-Man no yes shut up while it was treated harshly by critics it sold over 8 million copies and it drew people in and that's What mattered in terms of consoles we should start with the most interesting one see we've already talked about portable gaming a few times in this video and we're not done we Atari 2600 was the victim of many attempts to forcibly slim down but it was also the victim of many attempts to be turned into a portable console in early 1982 Reagan Chang Drew up some portable Atari 2600 stubbed the Atari 2200 which I guess counts as a canceled console since it never came to fruition despite having been in the idea bank for many people at Atari for quite some time let's look at these 25 sketch Pages try to deduce what was going on here there's a lot of weird designs some with detachable controllers like what the intelvision had some with face buttons more into the canceled Atari 2500 which was akin to the Atari 2000 this one just looks like a laptop and there's all woman with her boobs out but her shirt is still on I don't know how that one works this one looks like the Atari 2000 with its cartridge slot being at the upper end I'm honestly a little unsure on what a lot of these were supposed to even be like can you decipher any of these some of them were less on the idea of portable gaming and jumped on what the GameCube would later have giving the 2600 a handle quite literally portable console some of this stuff is is bizarre to look at and it's fascinating that we even still have stuff like this up anymore the website that these were on was taken down and I was blessed with the way back machine this one on sketch 8 is particularly funny to me because it looks like they just put a small TV inside of a cubby hole attached to a joystick detachable screens detachable keyboards I like this one a lot on page 14 I would actually really like this one and on the same page a heart monitor a lot of these look like super fancy computers not portable consoles this one looks a bit like the game air raid on the 2600 you know the rarest game on the console might as well make this a segue to talk about that air raid a game so rare that it sells for more than my house is worth as far as I can tell a total of 13 or 14 copies are known to exist with loose copies ranging around $110,000 and complete copies in the mid 30,000 also it was released in 1982 so it fits in with this little section uh and it was courtesy of men Vision who only released this game just the one there's no real time to mention these two since I can't find a solid date on their expected release or cancellation so let's just throw them both in here this is the Atari 2900 a cancel dedicated console the only reason we know about it at all was courtesy of William renaria a former Atari industrial designer who donated these pictures to the Atari Historical Society it has the 2700 storage in the back and four controller ports not much else is known as it seems it never exited the mockup stage and this is the Atari 3200 super Stella or the Sears super arcade 2 a canceled successor to the 2600 it proved to be too difficult to work on for programmers and besides you have the 2600 making crazy numbers the past few years so why rush into anything it not like Atari didn't get any consoles out this year though before trashing the 2900 we saw a proper revision of the 2600 with the Sears video arcade 2 this one never got the official Atari name over here in America though over in Japan it was dubbed the 2800 it was small had four controller ports and was overall an improvement on the original yet failed overseas pretty harshly but what about a real upgrade to the 2600 well before we talk about that we got to talk about a quick legal battle the kico vision entered the ring alongside in television as competition to the 2600 which was selling really well and every attempt to replace it failed but what if the way to replace it was to steal it hold it in late 1982 kico created an add-on for their kico Vision that allowed you to play Atari 2600 games and Atari Su they lost the lawsuit shockingly as kico had some of the world's best lawyers you could have possibly ever made up they got away with it by saying that their add-on was made with parts that any standard consumer could just go buy and make for themselves this is like if Xbox created an add-on that plays switch games and Nintendo lost a lawsuit because anyone could have made the add-on themselves Xbox just made it easier this is when Atari began to crack even further in an attempt to compete with the scary new competition we see the Atari 5200 thrown out the door it only took 3 months after the release of the kico vision to rush it out it had been in the works for a while so long in fact that the hardware W inside was made with the idea of the 2600 being in the Grave 2 years prior as they suspected this means that we have outdated Hardware so how bad can it be well just look at this thing it's odd the slant was an interesting choice but it's nothing we haven't seen another interesting choice was the storage unit on the back for controllers being brought back from the 2700 and 2900 it's pretty neat but it just makes this a far bigger console than it needs to be and neither of the 5200s I have still have the flap for it if you a viewer can 3D print me one here's my PO Box I would love to have one this thing flopped really hard here's a chart this is the sales of the 2600 this is where the 5200 lands on that chart it barely reached a million units due in part to the fact that it didn't support backwards compatibility I know that this wasn't really a thing at the time but not including it definitely wasn't a selling point sure you could have bought an adapter but come on there's no point you know all those 2600 cartridges you have laying around yeah now you need two consoles in your house if you want to play those and this new console that they're just trying to beg you to buy it was also $270 or 860 when adjusted for inflation that is nearly 1/3 extra compared to the 2600's initial retail value which by this point was significantly cheaper on top of this it saw little to no games a grand total of 69 with nine of those being in its first year considering the installed base was so small compared to the 2600's increasingly bigger Library why would you ever even think about owning this thing oh and you didn't notice that it was graphically identical obviously there's some differences but what would be the point in buying a brand new console that is the exact same thing with less games I know 8 bit was all we had back then but come on man you know what also didn't help was the fact that its packing game was [ __ ] super breakout a game that was already available on the 4800 the 2600 and that one cancel handheld that they should have just [ __ ] released anyway oh and this controller God damn is it ugly with this [ __ ] god awful number pad though I can't rip on the 5200 forever it's not the world's worst console and it is an upgrade from the 2600 in most ways I'd Show gameplay but I lack one important hookup so let me look for it online Jesus Christ what the [ __ ] is that phew they fix in later models but removed two of the controller ports weird decision if you think Kiko Vision plays all Atari cartridges you mean it can't here's Pac-Man on kco Vision but here's Pac-Man for the Atari 5200 super system now you're talking and it doesn't work on kico Vision but won't there adapter it won't play Super system cares not Pole Position not this pole position not centipede not this centipede only on the Atari 5200 super system but aren't they hard to find they're everywhere everywhere the Atari 5200 super system the 5200 sold poorly and Kika with its adapter was eating into the sales a bit the insecurities really showed in these commercials which changed from Happy Family Fund to trying to convince audiences to buy it the 5200 was everywhere for a reason this was a huge blow and to attempt to salvage the ship that had begun sinking the second the 5200 crashed into its side Atari considered releasing a smaller slim down version of the 5200 this is the Atari 5100 also known as the 5200 junor an unreleased console from 1982 it was slimmed down and looked really nice without that big box on its back but it was never released for two reasons one is obvious the 5200 was a failure there's no patching that hole and the other is well see ever since Activision got the greenl to publish games so did other thirdparty Publishers while atari's output at this time wasn't perfect some of the stuff that was sliding in under the radar of quality control that was flooding the market was far from such there were zero quality checks and anyone could just [ __ ] out a game on top of that the game cartridges were printed to hell not all but several games on the 2600 have far more in Supply than what the demand was at this point there were nine total consoles considered in the generation and Atari was two of them stores stopped placing orders for these bad games and the average consumer was no longer interested in buying lowquality games that were either unfun buggy didn't work or anything like that and therefore they stopped buying them this isn't to say that all the games coming out were bad though the game Pitfall came out in the early 1982 and is one of the best selling games on the console for a good reason the commercial for it was also the first acting role for Jack Black unrelated well Atari wasn't the only culprit in the case of releasing lower quality games it was the company everyone pointed their fingers at since they were the biggest problem if restaurant had a rat infestation youd yell at the manager not the rats themselves the video game Market fell really hard as it lost trust and faith and consumers in stores due to the rampant garbage that was only made possible to sell because of a noticeable lack of quality checks no one is buying the games and stores can't sell them this is the video game Crash of 1983 a story that has been retold many times even once by myself earlier this year though when I talked about it I only briefly mentioned what many consider the game that caused it all the game that is often recited as one of the worst games of all time the one Jenga block to collapse the tower this is the most infamous game of all time ET the Atari 2600 the movie ET the Extraterrestrial directed by Steven Spielberg is one of the highest grossing movies of all time when adjusted for inflation it falls in seventh place it follows the titular alien landing on Earth and becoming friends with a boy named Elliot as he and his siblings try to keep their new friend in the house of secret he becomes ill and it takes the government getting involved to save him no spoilers on this old ass movie it's a good watch though due to the movie's wild success Steve Ross aka the CEO of Warner Communications which owned Atari at the time like I said earlier began talking to Steven Spielberg in Universal pictures about a licensed video game tie-in unlike Warner atari's CEO Ray casar was against the idea of an ET game stating I think it's a dumb idea the negotiations reached their conclusion at the end of July in 1982 leaving Atari paying somewhere between $60 and $80 million for the rights when adjusted for inflation the deadline was September 1st meaning that in order to reach the Christmas deadline for that year the one single developer Howard Scott warshaw would have to finish the entire game in 5 weeks instead of putting it off to invest more time in it thus creating a better game but not reaching the Christmas deadline Atari had an unchecked ego from the sales of Pac-Man and Raiders of the Lost Art also made by Howard Scott warshaw and was also based on a movie by Steven Spielberg which sold about million units and so he got to work creating a game that ended up being what we know today a game rushed to hell that suffered from a lack of time a lack of support and a lack of more advanced Hardware to realize the ideas that had been planned out this single screenshot is Art it tells a story of a company that didn't peak in high school but peaked in elementary school never managing to surpass itself being left in the dust of its own oversights and mistakes in other words this game [ __ ] sucks simply put it was a lie while not intentional the game served as sort of a trojan horse it met the deadline for the Christmas season and was released in December of 1982 and sold very well 2,740 232 copies to be exact with 2.6 million being before the end of the year that is less than 1 month before it even shipped retailers were ordering more than anticipated expectations were high and when the time came people didn't like it and hundreds of thousands of copies were returned to retailers becoming a game that was quite literally impossible to sell while ET wasn't entirely at fault for what happened it was the one that people refer to because of those sales numbers those expectations and that fall from grace the second it was put into someone's Atari 2600 people remember ET because it was the newest biggest game to flop and was the freshest one in memory as everything continued downhill throughout 1983 stores couldn't return the flood of shitty games they had as the Publishers started going defunk causing stores to begin listing them on sale for as low as what equates to $14 nowadays for a brand new video game but it wasn't just the stores with a load of stock of random games that they couldn't sell from their shelves it was also Atari themselves alongside ET the 2600 Port of Pac-Man as well as Miss Pac-Man Raiders of the Lost AR Space Invaders Defender berserk Warlords centipede and yars avenge were also among the 728 th000 games and stuff like their personal computers 2600s 5200s and other related Atari products that were dumped into a landfill located in Alamagordo New Mexico in September of 1983 contrary to popular belief it wasn't only ET it was also a lot of other unsold games consoles and even accessories Atari lost a majority of their hold on the video game Market cutting 30% of their Workforce and losing $1.5 million causing their consumer ronics and computers division to be sold to Jack tramel and then silence during this silence I'd like to take you to another intermission this one will be covering some of the wildest titles released shortly before or during the crash we had stuff like Pepsi Invaders Pigs in Space snail agains squirrel Bobby is going home lost luggage Squeeze Box tanks but no tanks Star Fox quest for Quinton Aro name this game and win $110,000 and of course how could I forget I want my mommy 1983 saw 214 games officially released for the Atari 2600 which is nearly half of the console's total Library released in one of the 15 years of this console's lifespan the market was flooded to hell and no one really knows just how bad of an extent it really was early 1983 as the crash was beginning this was about when Atari was approached by Nintendo who was looking to bring the famicom to the United States what with how Atari had failed to reach their sales numbers and everything was snowballing fast it would have made sense Atari was given the room to Brand the hardware however they pleased so long as Nintendo was paid everything was set in stone until Atari saw Donkey Kong running on a kico computer Nintendo had already licensed the Donkey Kong name which was a huge arcade hit at the time to kico for the kico vision conveniently kico had made their newest computer compatible with the kico vision cartridges do this VI the rights Atari had bought for the home computer release of Donkey Kong I'm unsure but like a jealous boyfriend one week into the relationship Atari broke ties with Nintendo how they kept making these mistakes over and over again is beyond me the 5200 was discontinued in 1984 and the 2600 was still carrying this company through their constant failures two more years it's now 1986 and Atari was finally ready to release something that they had been working on for years they had tried and failed to get something like this to come to fruition and it was finally their time the video game Market was slowly healing so everyone was ready for a more Compact and affordable variant of the 2600 the 2600 junior or the 2200 as it was known before release unrelated to the Portables that we talked about earlier by the way and unlike the many attempts to create a smaller budget 2600 this one actually came out now you might think that they'd take some time to work on a real successor that would do better than the 2600 the 5200 was awful and they released it right after they released a brand new version of the 2600 what a silly mistake I bet they had learned from this is the Atari 7 800 which had actually been ready for launch since 1984 and was released the same year as the 2600 junor I can't be too negative though surely it's a good console unlike the last one it launched with some really heavy-hitting Arcade Hits like big dug zus Galaga it was backwards compatible with nearly every 2600 game and it was only $140 or just under $400 in today's money compare that to the competition at the time like atari's ex-girlfriend Nintendo's NES just being over $500 or the Master System being 560 it was even more comparable to the other 8 bit offerings than the 2600 and 5200 had been this is an actual upgrade so this was atari's comeback right we've been in the gutter and only getting further in for the past 9 years so please say something good nope the 7800 wasn't perfect at all one of the biggest complaints without the game's being released came out incredibly slow a total of 10 games for the 7800 were released between May and December of 1986 there were only 59 games released throughout the console's entire life that's not a lot what incentive is there to even buy a 7800 if the game's it aren't unique compared to the offerings on the 2600 which you probably already had anyways and also this controller oh my God this is foul laser disc stuff started getting a bit hot around 1983 due to one of the biggest names in its field dragon slayer hitting arcades uh naturally Atari wanted to be on top and had begun working on an add-on for the 7800 that was speculated to have been able to play all of their laser disc arcade games that they had released D tramel decided that this was a lost cause in candid the idea no mockups for this one so uh um this is the 7800 laser dis a canceled add-on for the Atari 7800 it would have plugged into this port here which had other peripherals made for it like the keyboard which was actually never released regardless the laser disc would have been the first and only way to play CD based games at home at least to my knowledge as they were all in arcades we wouldn't see more Stu like that for at least another decade or so while this is a step up from the failure of the 50200 it was a step down in terms of Hardware it did sell better here it is on a graph yeah if Atari wants to top the 2600 they'd have to really bring something to the par that no one else would expect to see so with the 2600 and 7800 being supported alongside their PC work Atari got to business working on something new that something new was the XE gaming system or as I'm going to call it zegs which was a PC console combo that only sold 100,000 units it was released a year and a half after the 7800 in late 1987 why so soon after you just put out the 7800 if you weren't winning the the NES fist bite with the 7800 why release another console this thing looks weird and the keyboard would have gotten bullied at school maybe you could have waited a couple years before putting it out I will give it one thing though it is much more advanced than the previous Atari consoles being a computer thing at all but I digress not to skip ahead too much but in 1996 someone found this a shell for a console named the morage rumors about this console say that it could have been a collaborative effort with SNK to create a more affordable way to play Neo Geo games considering that the Neo Geo with a whopping $650 or $1,530 in today's money this isn't really a bad thought also note that the cartridge slot is pretty big you ever seen a Neo Geo cartridge before the word marai in Japanese means future so maybe that ties back to the SNK stuff other investigative folks noticed that it looks a bit like the zegs and little did they know that they were right this and this are the unreleased Atari super zegs also known as the Atari Mariah canceled consoles from around 1988 and if you don't believe me and want to see these as two different consoles I point to the pastel buttons they're similar enough that I think it's safe to say that they're one and the same but regardless there's no true confirmation and it's all just speculation if you want to see them as separate entities that's all knew to be wrong somewhere in this time Sega cut ties with the producer of The Master System being Tonka and sought other people to help bring their next console to the states and just like Nintendo they contacted Atari however unlike the Nintendo mishap Sega and Atari just couldn't agree and things fell through Sega then went on to just create their own thing creating the Sega Genesis this not only hurt Atari and the 7800 but also the Fairly aged NES if Atari had taken this on assuming that they did anything right for once after the 2600 they could have brought themselves back but no so in 1989 they decided to dip their toes into the 16bit as well as the handheld markets like Nintendo with the Atari Links the official end of the number names and the beginning of the cat names well incredibly competent in terms of graphics for a hand handheld it wasn't perfect the first issue was that price tag $180 for a handheld or $450 in today's money that's more expensive than the 7800 which was a full console the price alongside the small blurry screen and the god awful battery life it just wasn't up to Snuff I think it's impressive that they managed to make a handheld that looks this good for the time but it came with battery guzzling a couple years passed and Bam the new revision is out this time it's thinner had better graphics and was significantly cheaper than the original The $99 or $223 into money this is the Atari Links 2 both of the Atari lynxes sold a collective 2 million units which isn't all too impressive when compared to the other handhelds that swept it still in 1989 there was a rumor spreading um editor Mel uh play some spooky music thank you uh see in some news Publications we see a mention of a console that has been thought to exist but was never truly realized almost certainly never making it past the name this is the Atari St console or project Robin a rumored console supposedly planned for a mid1 1989 release do we know anything about this was it real is it a ghost ah at the end of 1989 the Atari stte computers were released being upgraded versions of the St they even had an ability called games cart which would let them access more RAM to play some games I think that this is the Atari St console but it was can in favor of becoming a bigger computer Mike Fulton a former Atari engineer said that an st console was thought up but would have been too expensive and was therefore just thrown out so yes mystery solved this is technically a canceled console but it's more like a thrown out piece of paper that sat on your desk for a while hello and welcome to our final intermission we won't be talking about any games this time but rather an accessory that Atari released if Nintendo can put out the power glove and Atari can put out the Mind link a controller akin to the tiger R zone that would be strapped onto your head but the difference is that it was a controller that supposedly let you control the game you were playing on your 2600 with your mind turns out that it didn't work that way and play testers found more success just moving their eyebrows several headaches three games of production and no mind reading capabilities later and it was scrapped being one of the many things in that landfill we talked about earlier at this point Atari was ready to enter the race again and I'm going to be honest this is like watching a limping dog come towards you because it trusts you and wants protection this video started out as me wanting to talk about the cancelled consoles that they had because of how many there were if you can mind everything from Nintendo Sega Xbox and Playstation in terms of canceled consoles Atari had more than all four of them combined I was so interested in it and I wanted to do a video on it and now here I am with a really long video that's going to take me a really long time to edit and really long time to get out and I don't even know how it got to this point I just kept reading about how Atari repeatedly failed to get back on their feet and how they continued [ __ ] up at every single [ __ ] turn this is okay let me get back on track I'm sorry starting in 1988 Atari was ready to get back into the race with something more serious there were two big 16bit consoles out as of 1990 so why not double it this is the Atari Panther an unreleased console set for a 1991 release date set to Target the SNES and Genesis demographics it also looks a bit like a Roomba see I can comment and laugh at this thing all I want but if I'm going to be honest the era of the panther is the most tragic one yet allow me to explain Atari wanted to be ahead of the game creating the world's first 32-bit console being the panther but you can already tell that they [ __ ] up since I just said it was cancelled and the first 32-bit console was actually the FM towns Marty released in 1993 but that's not all that they wanted to be ahead in they wanted to go further Atari hired the team at flare technology to dissolve and reform into a new company called flare 2 which they funded entirely on their own having these people create the panther however while working on the panther Atari also had flare creating the Atari Jaguar both of these were being worked on in Tandem and when they decided to give up on the Panther and favor of the stronger heavy quotes there Jaguar since it was coming along so nicely they just shoved what was was possible to be shoved from the panther to the Jaguar which includes these God [ __ ] awful controllers they took all that time and effort and put it into something that took two more years to work on when they could have easily crushed the SNES in Genesis like pieces of paper with their giant 32-bit Atari hands I don't care if the panther was half as powerful as the Genesis or fourth as powerful as the SNES it doesn't matter that they were having internal problems getting it to function this was the Atari saver and I know it but instead of releasing it they let the competition catch up and with things like the 3dio and sega's 32x and Saturn coming out around the same time that the Jaguar did if they had just put more time and effort into the panther they could have been so far ahead of the game should marketing have gone well they could have finally picked up a demographic but instead they trashed it and wasted enough time to let everyone catch up to them maybe I'm being hopeful but this could have been the one thing that saved this damn company let me reframe where we're at for you all Atari started out strong with the 2600 peaking in 1980 selling 30 million units over the course of its life a life longer than nearly any other console ever made if not being the longest lived console they couldn't create anything that could beat the 2600 and despite constant attempts to do so they just couldn't after the flop of the 5200 they got an ego so big that it crashed a whole Market they then proved that they couldn't grasp a demographic and that they had not learned from their mistakes before we're currently in 1991 as far as this history lesson goes so we're looking at 14 years of life from a console that was now outdated by three generations we are looking at the fifth genin at this point and every time Atari has tried to do something that surpassed their original creation they failed so what's the next step someone would take in this scenario cut off the Atari 2600 7800 and all 8bit computers including the XE game system entirely in 1992 officially killing this after 15 years of life and this thing just after it exited infancy and it's 6 years old the one and only good thing that they ever released killed off by a change of the times video game marketing was on a different level compared to when Atari first began now having more of a rambunctious and over-the-top theming to match with the boys of the ERA this new age of gaming marketing was a direct cause of Atari throwing their plans with Nintendo out the advertisements were over the toop and aimed to appeal to cool kids if you didn't have a Nintendo or or a Genesis you were a loser like look at some of these I know I showed commercials in other videos but this is a far cry from what was before the crash a mysterious machine has appeared in homes across America all right baby increase the power of the unit 40 times 132 x welcome to the next L okay class Pop Quiz question number one you want to buy a video game system Super NES gives you four free games Sega gives you no free games which do you choose uh this new age of advertising was just part of the refresh of the market and it had been going on for a while why shouldn't Atari hop on this train if Nintendo Sega and everyone else I don't care to name can make stuff like this listen if you buy a Sega Saturn before September 30th you get three free games that's $150 value Dr Forest dial 118 please why can't they after all by this point they were in need of an update so in 1993 we got the Atari Jaguar the world's first ever 64-bit console this is what the panther was cut for this is what they put all of that time into too it took them five total years to get it out they were so far ahead of the competition the closest one to compete was the Nintendo 64 which was 3 years later this was the peak of the bit Wars which console was the strongest the commercials oh God those commercials they were so over the top the price was pretty good when looking at the rest of the generation being at $250 or 530 in today's money when adjusted for inflation the Saturn was 830 the PS1 was 630 and the 3dio was 1 ,500 [ __ ] the only one to compete at all was again the Nintendo 64 being worth about $400 but it was again nearly 3 years later this was the topof line state-of-the-art console that Atari put time and effort into making this was going to be atari's ticket back into the modern video game discourse this was going to be their big break to no longer be known as the 2600 people [ __ ] those number names [ __ ] the 8bit PCS and [ __ ] everything from before now this was atari's console it slogan was get bit by Jaguar get bit by jaguar or do the math so let's do the math which is more advanced can you repeat the question Jaguar Jaguar [Music] Jaguar lock it off Atari Jaguar suddenly nothing else seems fun anymore do the math the 2600 sold 30 million units the 5200 sold about a million the 7800 sold in the High 3 Millions the zegs sold about 130,000 how many Atari Jaguars were sold 30 million 50 million 100 million a billion no it sold [Music] 150,000 how could this happened what went wrong where did Atari fall off this is the Box how does this advertise a video game console sure it's cool but this tells the consumer nothing how would anyone know that there's a video game console inside of this unless they already knew what the Jaguar was what in the hell is this controller three buttons and a number pad weren't we pass this yet you stole this from the intell vision and the cico vision for the 5200 and just never put it away cartridges if you're trying to be ahead of the game why would you not try to dip in into CDs again why are they shaped like this want to know something funny about this there's only about 50 [ __ ] games for the entire console 64bit gaming was just not ready yet despite being so far ahead of the game they forgot that they needed to perfect the technology before they pushed it out in an attempt to bypass everyone this was proof that your bits didn't matter maybe if they worked more on the simpler Hardware like let's say I don't know the panther they could have devoted more time to making this work better the panther was canned in favor of the bigger better number but I don't think they even noticed that they were too far ahead of themselves the technology was not far enough along and this thing just wasn't ready it was raw and still needed more time in the oven the games were awful low quality and therefore didn't sell well developers simply did not know how to work with the technology yet while the console did get some good games like Alien versus Predator a rather competent Port of Doom just with no music and Tempest 2000 it wasn't enough to salvage the ship that had already hit the bottom of the ocean and guess what this ship was lying because it turns out that the console was actually [ __ ] 32 bits Atari just advertised it as such because it had two 32-bit processors inside adding up to 64 according to electronic gaming monthly if Sega did the math for the Sega Saturn the way Atari did the math for their 64-bit Jaguar system the Sega Saturn would be a 112 bit monster of a machine they told us to do the math but they can't even be honest about theirs Atari had actually announced an add-on for the Jaguar before it was ever even released this is the Jaguar CD released in 1995 it ran a nice $150 or about 300 in today's money did they not take note from the Sega CD what they actually did was plan an add-on for for their shitty cartridge-based system before it was ever even done this add-on received even less games only 13 total they even planned for these to work on PCS to help make extra cash but that couldn't Salvage it oddly enough it did have an online service which to my research is still up and running in 1994 they teamed up with a company called virtuality and started working on a Jaguar VR headset solely because Nintendo was during the virtual boy but they were so dissatisfied with it that they just canned it entirely around 1995 shortly after showing it off this isn't even the end somewhere in 1993 with the plans for both the jaguar and its CD add-on they thought what if we made a CD based console this is the jaguar Duo a console that was canceled shortly after being revealed in 1995 it was to have both the CD drive and cartridge slot next to each other something I have never seen before in a console without an add-on it was for the most part entirely forgotten about someone did recently find a PCB for it proving that it did make it somewhere but not far enough to have any fully made it was trashed and it seemed that Atari knew that their time was up in the console manufacturing industry the Sega Saturn and Playstation were sweeping the competition and it was time for Atari to throw in the towel in late 1995 Atari cut off the jaguar and had huge layoffs in the company all they were doing now was selling off those leftover Jaguars that no one wanted its Revenue was cut by more than half falling below $15 million and by the beginning of 1996 still had about $1 100,000 Jaguars still waiting to be sold they later passed off those consoles to Tiger software that is a officially the end of atari's console life which was finally cemented when the Atari naming and properties were sold off to Hasbro in 1998 for 5 million less than a fourth of what Warner bought them for years before starting in the early 2000s Atari began being used as a publisher for some games during this time they were bought out by infograms and continued with their publishing of games here's a few that I have myself it was a recognizable name for those who are present for it so using it on games with a Target demographic between 18 and 34 was not a bad idea they weren't unfamiliar with publishing games games on other consoles that weren't their own just not with their own name back in 1988 for example they began publishing games on the NES as tingan which only got them a bunch of big old lawsuits they not only evaded the NES as lockout chip but they also didn't have the rights to be publishing [ __ ] Tetris oh the relationship that these two had from 201000 to 2011 Atari created flashback consoles with a portable version being made in 2016 I have it here and if you ignore the d-pad being pretty iffy and obviously not made for the games like super breakout it's all right after approval the El City commission allowed specific people to dig on the original site of the video game burial that happened due to the crash many people were skeptical that the crash had caused hundreds of thousands of games to be dumped but this is where they were proven wrong on August 26th of 2014 people were given permission to dig and a total of 1,300 items were dug up and 880 of them were sold I highly recommend watching the documentary on it called Atari game over while doing many things in between Atari as a name was silent until 2017 where they announced the V CCS for crowdfunding which later shipped in December 2020 in 2021 they began creating Atari branded hotels that one's most unrated I just thought it was really funny they also re-released the flashback in 2022 as a 50th anniversary of the company's creation you've also seen a lot of Atari collections across many consoles namely as far back as the PS1 and as recently as the Nintendo switch where a lot of them are being put out or I guess since a fair bit of you might be watching this in 2024 uh 2 years ago they did that 2 years ago at this very moment if you wanted to play an Atari 2600 game you can buy the 2600 plus a brand new version of the 2600 with HDMI support and a new cartridge containing 10 classic games it can also play those Dirt Cheap 2600 games that a local game store near you might have lying around on top of being able to play 7800 games not 5200 games though funnily enough along with that a brand new game was created for the 2600 called Mr Run and Jump a game made more for modern consoles that received a Dake for the 2600 and that for the most part is a full comprehensive history of the Ari console manufacturing Legacy from one of if not the most supported video game console that sold 30 million units to being one of the saddest failures in all of gaming history without them the entire Electronics Market would be completely different if I by chance missed something or got something wrong please let me know in the comments my research wasn't perfect and I only had so many people who were alive back then to fact check me now I'd like to thank Atari age Atari Museum the national video game Museum atari.com the wayb back machine the Atari compendium the handheld Museum Atari Mania and the altar of gaming for being big helps in finding a lot of this out I'd also like to give a big shout out to the L's layer for incidentally helping me discover like 10 of these topics on their own he has a lot of videos that go far more in depth on some of these than I merely briefed over so I'd recommend go checking him out I'd also like to thank the people of Tekken gamer and Grove City Ohio for talking to me proofreading the script and being as kind as they are I'd also like to thank my friend Chris who also helped proof Reed I linked a game he made down below I highly recommend you play it finally I'd like to thank my my channel artists who are always linked below and my YouTube channel members who you'll see scrolling past here in a second I imagine after a 1hour video you'd expect me to have like a really funny ending joke but I don't have one uh have a good [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] night go I wish I were dead

Channel: Melody Nosurname

Views: 161,441

Keywords: atari, 2600, 5200, 7800, jaguar, nintendo, sega, 5100, 2000, 2500, 2200, portable, touch me, trans, furry, 2800, 2900, 3200, video game history, cancelled consoles, playstation, pacman, space invaders, mirai, xegs, pong, custers revenge, game brain, 400, 800, computers, 2600 junior, intellivision, hyperscan, colecovision, activision, cosmos, spector, 2700, et, extra terrestrial, video game crash, landfill, donkey kong, lynx, ste, mindlink, panther, jaguar duo, jaguar vr, sega cd, atari flashback, neo geo, NES, Genesis

Id: dQsSV7K_iiM

Length: 61min 29sec (3689 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023