Originally Posted by diskoboy
No, that wasn't it.
What killed Atari was the 2600.
The problem was this: the 2600 was, by far, the most successful of the early consoles. Nothing came close. Any TWO consoles put together couldn't match it.
The result was that Atari had a huge success, a great moneymaker, and was #1.
Problem was, arcade games- the main thing back then for home games- were rapidly evolving in the 1980s. Within a few years we'd gone from Pong and crude driving games to Zaxxon and Robotron.
As a result, the 2600 could no longer handle it. Traditionally, home consoles are always behind arcade technology, if only because of size and relative costs and the need for home consoles to be versatile.
This was where the ColecoVision came in. It was a massive success, because it brought home games the likes of which we'd never seen before at home. Cosmic Avenger. Ladybug...graphics and such like never before.
Atari, if it wanted to put up a fight, had to come up with a new console. Now, some say that originally the 7800 was supposed to have been that console, but the CV forced Atari to put out something FAST, and so the 5200- based on the existing 400 computer- was rushed out. This was why early 5200 games had mainly solid colors, and were not as good as the first batch of CV games. It is also interesting that the 1982 5200 was not backwardly-compatible with the 2600, but the 1984 7800 was. And two years was very significant back then.
Now, here was where things became interesting.
Unlike Coleco, Atari had two consoles out. On the one hand, the 5200 was supposed to have been the next step, yet, because the 2600 was still popular, Atari did not want to abandon it. This caused many people to wonder whether or not to get a 5200- if Atari wasn't going to get right behind it, why should they? They could feel the, well, "indecisive vibes" from Atari. That's not quite it, but it's hard to explain- you have to remember that home consoles did not have the history they do now, it was still recent. The whole mentality and atmosphere was different than it is now. If you were there, you know what I mean.
So Atari was supporting two consoles. And since most of the games for the 5200 were also being made for the 2600, there was less reason to make that move up to the 5200.
Coleco did not have this problem.
They also failed to come out with announced games- Tempest being the prime example. Atari needed popular games that were solidly 5200; "...ONLY for the 5200!"
Atari, already reckless with its spending- the E.T. fiasco is an example- then made the worst move ever: they dropped the 5200 after just less than 18 months.
Now, I've tried to make this point at Atari Age, and maybe the mentality is different today, but back in those days, you didn't dump one system in favor of another that quickly and expect customers to trust you. Especially when the first batch of games for the 7800 were pretty much the same as for the 5200 and 2600!
Some still insist that the 7800 was originally meant to take on the CV, since at that time the CV was the only player in town, really.
But each time Atari came out with a console, it did more poorly than the one before it.
The 5200 was not a bad system. It was a really good one. True, the controllers were a bad joke, but it was so easy to get around that, had Atari wanted to. That left the games, and it had many good ones, and was capable of many more. Tempest, for example. Scrolling games. Xybot-style games. RPGs. It just never got a chance.
As for Ross- no argument. But remember that Kassar was outranked by Ross, and even though he knew that E.T. could not be done, he had no choice. So don't blame him too much for that and other things as well.
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