Why did people like Atari?

I don’t know who needs to know, but I’m wearing my Atari t-shirt as I write this. I’m not sure if it was Steve Fulton or Jeff Fulton who said this and a podcast, or they may have said it in unison. But they said anyone much younger than them sums up Atari in one word: sucks. Yet their best selling console sold more than 20 million units, so somebody must have liked it. In this blog post, I’ll explore why people liked Atari.

Atari was neither first nor best

The Atari VCS, or Atari 2600, which was the later name for the same console, wasn’t the first game console to use cartridges. And it only took about a year for a better cartridge-based game console to hit the market. Yet, the Atari VCS prevailed over all of the other consoles of its generation, and Atari was the only company from that generation to advance to the next one.

So it wasn’t a matter of being first or being best. At least in the case of the VCS, Atari was neither. In the home computer market, Atari could claim to being first and best at several things, but they fell far short of winning that market. Free markets are not a meritocracy.

Personal Atari origin stories

But when you talk to someone born in the early ’70s, the stories tend to be very similar. For the Fulton Brothers and for me, the story was the same. There was a girl in the neighborhood that we carpooled with who had one.

And while it’s true that the games were very simple, with blocky and very repetitive graphics and a limited number of colors, in the late ’70s or very early ’80s, we didn’t have much to compare it to. And when we did have something to compare it to, it wasn’t necessarily very impressive either. If the graphics weren’t blocky and repetitive, they weren’t in color. And if they were less blocky and less repetitive, you paid a lot more for it.

But there was one more critical thing, and I think of that happened in between the time when the Fulton brothers first saw an Atari VCS and when I saw one. They talk about seeing the launch titles. When I first saw one, I think they had some of the launch titles, but they also had Asteroids and Space Invaders. Being able to play recognizable imitations of popular arcade games ended up being the difference maker.

Arcade games at home, care of Atari

My kids know what arcade games are, and they find them fascinating, but that may be because they’re related to me. If you aren’t familiar with them, arcade games were large cabinets with a large display and controls, and when you put a quarter into the machine, you got to play until you ran out of lives. Someone who was really good might be able to get an hour of play out of a quarter. If you weren’t familiar with the game, and weren’t very familiar with video games in general, you might get two or three minutes.

You could easily spend $30 learning how to get really good at a video game. Or, for $30, you could buy the Atari cartridge version of the game, and then you could play it as much as you wanted. The arcade version was sometimes mediocre. The controversial Donkey Kong port to the 2600 is an example. But even in that case, where it only had two levels and the graphics didn’t look right, it was still a recognizable version of Donkey Kong, and it had the two levels you had the best chance of beating. Not many of us could beat more than two levels of Donkey Kong anyway at the time.

Atari’s lack of followup

The major reason people remember Atari poorly in retrospect was Atari’s fumbled attempts to follow the VCS up.

The Atari 5200 was a good idea overall, but it could have been much better. Rumors persist that Atari had better ideas. I agree with the Fultons that Atari’s parent company, Warner Communications, didn’t really understand the business Atari was in. Atari really could have used a strong personality at the top to pick a direction and cut through the infighting between Atari’s engineers. Famously, Steve Jobs was an Atari employee at one time. We all know Steve Jobs wasn’t ever going to be that person at Atari. Arguably, Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, had the right vision, strong enough personality, and enough charisma to sell the whole thing to the general public. He wouldn’t have been the 1990s version of Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs wasn’t that person yet either.

Bushnell left Atari in 1979 because both he and Warner thought he was no longer an effective CEO. But his departure meant he wasn’t there to provide the steady hand when Atari needed one circa 1982.

We can argue forever about what Bushnell would have built if he had stayed at Atari, and the truth is we’ll never know exactly. What’s most important is that he would have done things a bit differently, and it would have been better.

Why Atari fell

Atari didn’t fall to pieces all at once. The 1983 video game crash is a controversial topic, partly because it was a North American phenomenon, but you can find people in North America who say they don’t think it happened. Of course you can also find people who say the moon landing didn’t happen. That doesn’t change reality. Both happened.

But maybe one of the reasons the crash is controversial is because not everyone experienced it the same way. The Fultons, living in California, absolutely experienced the crash differently than I did, living in Missouri. In the early 1980s, trends moved a lot more slowly than they do today. Trends would start on the west or the east coast and travel slowly across the country. It’s like the Sadie Sink’s character Max in Stranger Things. She was a misfit in California, but when she moved to Indiana, she was the coolest kid in town and she didn’t have to try. That’s one cultural nuance of the 1980s that the Duffer brothers got 100% right.

The Fultons knew Atari was in trouble before I did. Part of it is because they’re a bit older than me, but they were also in California, so they got the memo long before I did. For me, the crash of 1983 happened in late 1983. They saw it coming sometime in 1982.

The fall of Atari how I experienced it in the heartland

I lived in Jefferson City, Missouri, the first half of 1983. That summer, I moved to rural southeastern Missouri. The stores in those towns didn’t have to discount the games right away. I think the way it went down was someone noticed the games were a lot cheaper in St Louis when they went there one Saturday.

Today, I live in the part of St Louis that we used to come and hang out in when I was a kid. I can walk from my house to where Kmart used to be in 1983. Imagine being a kid and being able to ride your bike to Kmart with your allowance in your pocket and come home with an Atari game every Saturday.

Subconsciously, that’s probably why that’s my preferred walking route. Part of me imagines being able to go look at computer and video games any time I wanted.

Ultimately, the wheels came off the Atari VCS because of low quality games. It’s not an oversimplification to say that the market was flooded with $30 games that didn’t just have sloppy graphics but weren’t necessarily well thought out. Kind of like the 2023 blog scene that’s flooded with content-farm and AI-generated content.

But at closeout prices, I will dare say a lot of the Atari games were fine. Sure, some of them were stinkers even for $5. Some were worth $5. And there were good games caught in the crossfire as well, and being able to buy those at closeout prices starting sometime in 1983 and going throughout 1984 was a bonanza for the midwesterners I know who were in position to do that.

But that was a brief moment in time.

Home computers and Nintendo

In 1985, the kids whose parents could afford to take them to St Louis every Saturday and spend the day there all got Nintendo NES consoles and some of its launch titles. They may or may not have gotten rid of the Atari, but the Nintendo took center stage in a big way. The transition probably happened faster in California. But in rural Missouri, Atari went from cool to good enough for a couple of years and transitioned to hopelessly dated sometime in 1985.

The other wild card in this was the home computer. My family skipped the Atari and bought a Commodore 64 at the height of its popularity. I knew other kids who did the same thing, or who bought the ill-fated Texas Instruments home computer, or who stuck with Atari.

So it’s even a bit of an oversimplification to say that Nintendo killed Atari.

The Atari 2600’s second act

In a way, Nintendo resurrected Atari. The VCS made a comeback in the second half of the decade as a budget console.

Atari really was the equivalent of the ’80s one hit wonder. While there were some one hit wonders who recorded and released one single and then disappeared, most of the bands we think of as one hit wonders had one big hit and at least a couple of minor hits. They just never had another smash hit. Atari had a number one in the VCS, and the 8-bit computers, the Lynx handheld, and the ST computers weren’t flops. The bigger problem was Atari needed another smash hit to have enough momentum to keep going, and that smash hit never happened.

What was great about Atari

The other thing about Atari, especially in the case of the early 2600 games, was the gameplay itself. The top tier games on the system had several attributes. They were easy to learn, challenging to master, and had the ability to hook you in to try to play one more time and try to get a better score.

Yes, the games are incredibly simplistic compared to today’s AAA titles and even compared to many of the titles that came in the third and fourth generation consoles. But Atari wasn’t designed for games that required the kind of commitment that, say, an installment of the Final Fantasy series did. They were more like the casual games you see on mobile devices today. Think less along the lines of Zelda or Final Fantasy and more along the lines of Flappy Bird.

A great example: Barnstorming by Activision

For that matter, there was an Atari 2600 game very much like Flappy Bird: Barnstorming by Activision. By that time, the best programmers had figured out how to push the Atari VCS graphics capabilities much further than the launch titles did, although the graphics in Barnstorming were still very crude and simple by today’s standards. The object of the game was simply to fly a biplane as far as you could without crashing, dodging obstacles and flying through barns to get more points. The game only takes about 30 seconds to learn. And if you just want to play for 5 minutes, you can play the game for 5 minutes and have an enjoyable time. You can also sit down intending to play for 5 minutes and tell yourself you’re just going to play it one more time, and find yourself playing for an hour.

At the end, you find yourself wondering how you played such a simple game for an hour. But you had fun.

But that was the appeal of Atari in the early 1980s. A good game could scale from 5 minutes to an hour as needed.

Atari’s influence even today

The challenge of designing a good Atari 2600 game are very similar to the challenges of designing a good mobile phone game. You have very simple controls, limited screen space and limited memory, and you don’t really know if the person playing it has 5 minutes or 30 minutes.

That’s why game designers have been studying the best Atari 2600 games since the late 1980s. As consoles and computers started to gain more capability, designers figured out that adding complexity and adding better music and sound effects and more realistic graphics only went so far. And on more powerful systems, you usually have to do something a little bit more complex than Flappy Bird.

But when you look at the more complex games, frequently they have mini games or grinds in them that bear a striking resemblance to a classic Atari game. The difference today is that you repeat the grind or the mini game until you achieve something, and then you can move to the next one.

If you are designing a game today, when coming up with a formula, you can do a whole lot worse than bolting together several of the best Atari games and making the outcome of one affect the gameplay in the next one.