The Hall of Shame 03.20.08: The Atari and Sega Failure-rama, Part 1

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 03.20.2008

Two software companies that used to be on top of the hardware industry until something went horribly wrong. This week I focus on Atari, the same company behind the great Atari 2600 and the horrid Jaguar.

Atari: One of the first video games companies to be started and became the leader of the industry in the 70's with memorable classics such as Pong, Asteroids, Battlezone, Breakout, Yar's Revenge, Missle Command, and countless more.

Sega: A video game company that decided to take on Nintendo, who by the late 80's had pretty much owned the video game market with the NES. By the 16-bit era, Sega had risen dramatically to the point of almost being on equal ground with Nintendo.

But somewhere along the line, both of these companies screwed up when it came to creating consoles. Atari had a failing console before the video game crash, and then once Nintendo brought the industry back, would create what was quite possibly the worst console of all time. Sega would just go completely overboard with creating way too many consoles, and by the time they decided what they wanted to do, Sony came along and took over the industry. Two once mighty first-party titans have been reduced to third-party peons.

In a two-part Hall Of Shame induction, I'll be taking a look at the hardware failures of Atari and Sega.

Atari's Failures

Atari 5200

With Intellivision hitting the console scene, the Atari 2600 was starting show its age, and Atari decided now it was time to release a new console. So thus the Atari 5200 was planned into action. The Atari 5200 would introduce a slew of new ideas for home gaming, some of which are still used today. The 5200 accomplished it's job of killing the Intellivision, but it had another problem: People were seeing the console as competition against the ColecoVision, and due to many problems with the 5200, the ColecoVision would look to be the winner.

The biggest problem with this system was it's controller. Now, video games back then were all very simple. You move with the joystick and you pressed one button. Even arcade games adhered to this simplicity, as most games only featured two buttons (though Defender consisted of five buttons). So just how the hell did we go from having one button to NINETEEN?!


Not even modern day controllers have this many buttons

Nineteen buttons! Are you freaking kidding me?! What the hell kind of games were they designing that required a controller to have NINETEEN different buttons?!

First of all, a majority of those buttons comes from that numerical pad on the bottom. From what I understand they were mostly used to pick which level of a game you wanted to play and uncover some nifty easter eggs. But beyond that, the keys seemed absolutely pointless, because all of the third-party alternatives to the Atari 5200 didn't have those keys at all. The controller however did bring two new innovations for future controllers: the Analog Stick and the Pause Button. Unfortunately, the Analog Stick wasn't self-centering, so it was pretty much broken from the start. The controller was so bad that it has basically been blamed as the main reason the Atari 5200 failed.

As for the games, most of them were just ports of Atari 2600 games, only looking a lot better. Unfortunately, the 5200 wasn't backwards compatible with the 2600, which was not only bad for consumers because that felt like a rip. Meawhile, not only did Coleco strike a deal with Nintendo to have Donkey Kong on the console, but the ColecoVision had an adapter to play Atari 2600 games! Imagine if, with the PS3 not being backwards compatible, the Xbox 360 had an adapter that can play PS2 games. The PS3 would've tanked before it's first year of release.

The console itself was also a behemoth, and for some reason contained a storage unit for your controller. Now, considering these controllers weren't wireless, you'd think losing them wouldn't be hard considering they're plugged into the console. Why not just leave them plugged in and put it to the side of the console?

The ColecoVision would go on to good success, while the Atari 5200 basically struggled along. In the end it wouldn't really matter because of the crash of '84. The Atari 52 is now one of those "cult" systems that some modders still keep making games for.

Fun Fact: When Coleco was showing it's ADAM Computer at the CES, it was using a demo of Donkey Kong. That demo led to Ray Kassar to call off it's deal with Nintendo to market the Famicom in America. I think you know how the rest of this story goes.

Atari Lynx


The Lynx had some nice features, but you can only enjoy it for such little time.

The Lynx was basically the first of many victims that would fall to the Nintendo Game Boy. A prototype of the handheld was first created by Epyx, who didn't have the money to market and sell a handheld console, so it turned to investors at the CES to do it for them. Atari took up Epyx's offer, and together they created the Atari Lynx. The Lynx was to be released in 1989, the same year as Nintendo's Game Boy.

At first, it looked like it could have beaten the Game Boy because of all it's advanced features. For one thing, the Lynx had a color screen while the Game Boy was in monochrome (that's right young'uns, back then color was a special feature). It had a reverse/upside-down feature where you can play games with the D-Pad on the right side and the buttons on the left. The screen also was backlit so you can view it better.

Even though it was more powerful then the Game Boy, consumers didn't seem to care that much, because the Game Boy sold very well, and the Lynx didn't. In fact, a lot of comparisons can be made between the Lynx and Game Boy similar to that of DS and PSP. Sure the PSP was more powerful and did more stuff, but the DS was cheaper, Nintendo had proved their dominance, and there was less hardware issues. Same went for why Game Boy beat Lynx. Game Boy was $109 compared to Lynx's $199. Game Boy needed 4 AA Batteries that lasted about 12 hours, compared to Lynx needing 6 AA's and lasting about 4 hours at the most. Along with Nintendo's franchises, they also had Tetris as a killer app, while Lynx had no killer apps at all.

By 1991, Sega released the Game Gear, and thus Lynx was no longer the only color handheld system available. Since Sega was able to gain some ground in the video game market thanks to Sonic the Hedgehog, it took second place away from Lynx, and the Lynx would soon be discontinued.

Atari Jaguar

If you want to talk about Atari's failures, look no further then their biggest failure ever. Despite the shortcomings of the Atari 5200 and the Lynx, at least those systems had somewhat good games and a decent following. The Jaguar? It was just absolute crap. Okay, maybe it wasn't ABSOLUTE crap, because apparently there was about two or three games that were good.

The Atari Jaguar was released in 1993, a time when the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were in their heated 16-bit war. Atari tried to market the Jaguar as the better console for being a 64-bit console, thus their marking slogan "Do the Math." Speaking of doing the math, let's see the kind of controller they were using for this system:



Oh lord, that looks even worse than the Atari 5200 controller! How the hell are you supposed to hold a thing like that?! This one had 17 buttons, which although not topping the Atari 5200, is still more than a standard PS2 DualShock.

Anyway, if you also decide to "Do the Math" on number of good games to bad ones, the Jaguar had a whole lot less then either the SNES or Genesis. And for a console that was bragging about graphical superiority, the graphics for some games are just outright horrible. Remember that music video of "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits? That was the graphics of some of these games remind me of, and that video came out in 1984.

Watch these two videos and make the comparisons yourself. Here's "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits:



And here's an Atari Jaguar game called "World Tour Racing:"



Has 3D technology really gone nowhere in those ten years?

The hardware itself was also an issue. The console was too difficult for developers to program, and Atari did not have sufficient tools for developing, thus a lot of developers would never bother making games for the system. Also, Atari first said the system would be sold between $100 and $150. Then it was changed to $200 in their official launch announcement. By the time it hit retail, it was $250. Combine that with a horrible library of games, and the console only sold 250,000 in the first year. By the time Sony was releasing the PlayStation and Sega was releasing the Saturn, the Jaguar was pretty much dead.

Even though the console was horrible, then-President of Atari Corp. Mr. Tramiel was pretty confident (or crazy) about just how great the Jaguar was in an interview with Next Generation magazine. In the interview, he threatened to have the International Trade Commission go after Sony if they priced the PlayStation at $299, claiming Sony was "dumping" the price (i.e., selling it for less in the US then it did in Japan. As it turns out, Sony didn't "dump.") As for how powerful the Jaguar really was, he said it was more powerful then the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation was only VERY SLIGHTLY more powerful then the Jaguar. Gamers however were starting to think that this whole "64-bit" graphics talk was bullcrap, and well, based on those two videos above, I'd have to agree.

By 1996, the console was in such bad shape that Atari was putting on infomercials to get people to buy the system. Really Atari? Infomercials? They've got a reputation of not being truthful about the crap they sell. Although, it would've been awesome of one of those infomercials was done by Don West. In the end, the only really good thing to come out of the Jaguar was that it's chipset was used for two light gun games: Area 51 (I loved that game) and Maximum Force.

After the Jaguar, Atari left the hardware business for good. Nowadays they're a software company majority owned by Infogrames, and have had money issues for quite some time.

Next Week, the Failure-Rama continues as we take a look at the hardware failures of Sega, and believe me, there were plenty of failures for that company.