Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration Announced for PC and Consoles

[Peter_Brosdahl]

My first venture in gaming was a Sega master system 2, I used to lend games from the neighbours (still have all my games for it too) then later I got a Megadrive 2 which I realy wanted so I could play Dune 2.

around that time I found a game store where you could rent games (and you would get the rental price deducted if you decided to buy the game)

Never had anything Atari though I thought about getting one of the mini consoles, but the games look so bad I cba.

My last roommate was in the early 2000s and he was really, really, into console gaming. It was with him and his friends that I got back into it with the PS1 and PS2 but he had just about every console made through the 90s. He had one of those Sega's with the mini drive. Someone else in the circle had the Dreamcast with all of its stuff but it never really caught on with us. It was mainly Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft during that time but he would occasionally get in a more retro mood and pull out one of those amazing old pieces of hardware.

Edit: Yeah those Atari retro things were a bit of a ripoff. I always thought the best stuff would've been the 5200/7800/Jaguar era. Not the 2600 stuff. Sure some of it was fun but it's painful to look at now.

 

[Burticus]

During the time I got mine, and the computer, we were living in a fairly large apartment complex to which I did about 3/4 of all the newspaper deliveries. As a kid, I had a decent income but worked weekday afternoons, and weekend mornings and that combined with my dad's connection was able to get the hardware but I remember back then spending too much on games, and, yeah, Activision had the best games. I remember selling the VCS and games for cheap but gave the modded Atari 400 (expanded to 48K, replaced with mechanical keyboard), along with all its hardware (2 drives, printers, interface, controllers), and a swath of games to a friend of mine in 1989. It still worked but was severely out of date but he and his family enjoyed it.

Dang you were rich Not until I started working on a regular basis (outside of odd help tasks for grandparents / babysitting) did my hardware start to ramp up. When I was 16 I got a job at Burger King and all that cash went to C64 accessories.... too much in fact. I ran a C64 BBS, and I could have easily bought a car with what I paid for all the disk drives, monthly phone bill, etc. My first C64 maxxed out my mom's xmas budget, so I didn't even get the stupid cassette drive until my next birthday. So everything I did on that for the first 6 months was either cartridge or I just left the C64 on and never turned it off, to keep my programs I would type in from magazines. My stepmom used to get TICKED bc I was "wasting electricity and causing a fire hazard" by leaving it on. 2 weeks after I got the cassette deck (the 1541 floppy drive back then cost more than the C64 did, so that wasn't happening) and I had been typing in programs feverishly for weeks.... our apartment got broken into while we were at the store. Everything gone except the crappy B&W tv I was using as a monitor. Sad times. I was SOL for about a year until mom could afford to buy me another one for xmas.... I hung out at friends houses as much as possible and played on theirs.

BUT I will say that I credit my mom for buying me C64's.... it sparked my computer lust and eventually led me down the path to well paying jobs. My step bro got an NES not a computer, and he didn't turn out so great

 

[Brian_B]

Someone else in the circle had the Dreamcast with all of its stuff but it never really caught on with us.

I don't know what happened to the Dreamcast. It was huge when it first came out and that's all you ever heard about on TV (There was even a South Park episode entirely about it) -- and it just kinda withered away. I guess it couldn't eek out enough of a market around Playstation at the time.

I didn't own one, but I know a lot of people who did. Almost all of them swore by either Crazy Taxi or Phantasy Star Online (that was a mutually exclusive relationship; I never knew anyone who would claim to own/play both of those)

 

[Burticus]

I don't know what happened to the Dreamcast. It was huge when it first came out and that's all you ever heard about on TV (There was even a South Park episode entirely about it) -- and it just kinda withered away. I guess it couldn't eek out enough of a market around Playstation at the time.

I didn't own one, but I know a lot of people who did. Almost all of them swore by either Crazy Taxi or Phantasy Star Online (that was a mutually exclusive relationship; I never knew anyone who would claim to own/play both of those)

I had a Dreamcast circa 2000 or so. The arcade port games like Crazy Taxi, Virtua Fighter, Daytona, House of The dead, etc were all spot on like the arcade. Of course 95% of my games were arr matey burns. After Sega threw in the towel I sold my entire rig and all my games to a guy at work. I miss the light gun games and Crazy Taxi mostly..... anything else you could do on a PC.

Sega was getting creamed by the PS2... the Dreamcast didn't have a DVD drive (which was still a huge thing 2000 era) like the PS2 did. And then the internet figured out how to crack the console's meager copy protection to where you didn't even have to mod ANY hardware... you just downloaded the ISO and burn and play. Also right around this time, home internet was really speeding up. I mean in 1998 I had dialup. Downloading ISOs weren't an option unless I did it at work. but by 2001 or so cable modems were a thing and downloading dreamcast ISOs was easy.

I mean I don't think I was single handedly responsible for the death of dreamcast but I did influence at least 3 other people to buy all the hardware and showed them how to burn. But hardware isn't where you make the real money, it's the games.

Phantasy Star online was a mixed bag... I played Phantasy Star on my friend's genesis, but by the time online was out, online MMOs were a thing. Ultima Online, Everquest (I don't think WOW by that point yet). So dialing into sega-net or whatever on the 56k modem to play online didn't suck me in. If Sega had that in 1996 or 1997, things would be different.

 

[Burticus]

Anyway... back to Atari? The company that started it all was focusing too hard on it's computer division (this is the 80's Jack Tramiel days) and neglecting it's consoles, also around the time of the console market crash. The 7800 is what the 5200 should have been. By the time the 7800 came out, NES was already out and it was over. The Jaguar was an afterthought, and never got the budget it or attention it needed. They were still making arcade games, but arcades were dying off by the 90s.

I seem to remember an article about Nintendo approaching Atari to distribute or be partners on the NES American launch, but Atari management cocked that one up. It might have saved them.

Maybe.... maybe they could have continued with the Atari ST computer lineup? But those were designed to compete against Amiga, and by the time Commodore self imploded the PC had caught up enough with EGA/VGA graphics and the Sound Blaster. Proprietary one-offs like the ST and Amiga that were not PC compatible didn't have a chance.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Maybe.... maybe they could have continued with the Atari ST computer lineup? But those were designed to compete against Amiga, and by the time Commodore self imploded the PC had caught up enough with EGA/VGA graphics and the Sound Blaster. Proprietary one-offs like the ST and Amiga that were not PC compatible didn't have a chance.

Yeah, that era when the ST and Amiga lineups ended was bizarre, to say the least, and it also took down (to some degree) Motorola with it. They were still its major customers and it really hurt them. Ever since this new Atari came about I've done some reading on various history blogs and it appears that Atari did continue with some post-ST computers but they were ridiculously overpriced for the time (they put their sights on Mac territory) but also had some strangely limited markets for them. I forget exactly how many but something like 3-6 models were made after the 1040ST. One other competitor during this time that folded was IBM. They too went through many changes (does anyone remember the IBM PCjr?) and eventually bowed out.

I totally agree about focus as well. On one hand, I was for the computer lineup but also knew, even in my teens, they needed the console line as well but both became an unmitigated mess as time went on. By 1982-84 I was baffled by all the different computer models coming out. They could've done both but were over-diversified and over-promised with everything after the 400/800s. The 520/1040 ST were the true successors but by then the company was a trainwreck in progress. Those same history blogs also explain how at the end of the ST era the company knew it had to update its console line but once again it was totally unfocused, so many abandoned projects, and barely got the Jaguar out. Too little, too late. The new kids on the block were here and it was game over.