11 replies to this topic

[lonesome_pa]

I have been collecting for the 7800 for a little over a month now and I noticed that some of the games state "Super Game Cartridge" in the corner of the carts. Are these carts any different from the "normal" 7800 carts?

[oesii]

There's no real difference between 7800 games, the Super Game part was just to differentiate 7800 carts from 2600 ones or more likely a marketing trick to draw some attention to the 7800. The only 7800 carts that are different from the rest are Ballblazer and Commando which contain a Pokey chip inside to produce better quality sound and music.

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[Curt Vendel]

lonesome_pa said:

I have been collecting for the 7800 for a little over a month now and I noticed that some of the games state "Super Game Cartridge" in the corner of the carts.  Are these carts any different from the "normal" 7800 carts?

Chalk that up to marketing, while some games did have extra memory, sounds chips and such which you could technically justify the statement 'Super Cartridge' Its just good old marketing at work. Its like Atari under Warner used to sell its "slow-movers" (Games that they were stuck with stockpiles of... long before Pac Man, ET and Raiders came along) like Superman for instance.

They marked the boxes "Special Edition" Nothing special about them though, just a way to get people to buy them.



Curt

[-^Cro§Bow^-]

Yeah...most of the super game carts were just a wee bit larger memory size wise than say Centipede or Ms. Pac-Man was. But given the actual super cart games...most of them aren't that great and do not really show off anything graphically better than anything else. Most likely I concur that the "Super Game Cart" logo bit was more of a marketing plow to get those carts selling.

hehe...Hat Trick is listed as a super game cart as well...hmm...1 playfield screen...2 sprites that look alike minus color...maybe like 3 different sound effects and a timer and score keeper...

And that makes a super game cart?! Dig Dug is more fun with more variety and it isn't?! Does make you wonder if the Super Game Cart logo really had anything to do with the actual rom size of the games themselves...

[King Atari]

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They marked the boxes "Special Edition" Nothing special about them though, just a way to get people to buy them.  

I always wondered about that. Figured it was just marketing, but didn't know if it was some kind of re-release or not.

[Harry_Dodgson]

Actually, the "Super Game Cartridge" refers to the PC board used in the cartridge. It means that it has that board in it and it is capable of having more than 32KBytes. At least that is what it states in the documentation I got with my development system (direct from Atari, not surplus).

Harry

[Nukey Shay]

I dunno about that...I think it's more the marketing thing. That example of Hat Trick above is pretty iffy (such a good board for a crap game?). Like the lemmings we are, we automatically grab the box that implies "new and improved". What was it before...old and cruddy? I don't know how many times that I've seen "Family Packs" of something that costs more than twice and contains less than half of the "regular". Take another look before buying a "Mega-size" candy bar.

[lonesome_pa]

Interesting to know. I thought it was the ole' marketting ploy myself.

[DanBoris]

I think it only appears on carts that have something more then the standard 32K ROM, either more ROM, extra RAM, or a POKEY. There are a lot of games that have these features that don't have the Super Game label, but I haven't seen any cart that has the label and is a standard 32K cart.

Dan

[Harry_Dodgson]

Nukey Shay said:

I dunno about that...I think it's more the marketing thing.  That example of Hat Trick above is pretty iffy (such a good board for a crap game.

Actually, Hat Trick is 48K. They could have put it on another kind of PC board, but they used that one - probably since they had tons of them produced at the time. That board is quite flexible, being able to support about a dozen variations of ROMs, EPROMs, and/or RAM.

[moycon]

What games do you have so far lonesome_pa?? I have a few 7800 doubles you might be interested in. PM me if you interested and I'll see what I have.

[DracIsBack]

As others have noted, it was mostly a marketing effort. If you'll notice, a lot of the "SUPER GAME" titles are 1987 games that were ports of computer titles. I think Atari was trying to get across that you didn't need a Commodore 64 to play computer games ... remember that the computer industry was partly responsible for the death of consoles in 1984.

Technically, Super Games seem to be nothing special ... most of them are 48K games, which is far less than the 1 megabit and 1.2 megabit games that got released between 1988 and 1990.

I mean - who really wants to compare Karateka (a Super Game) to Alien Brigade (not a Super Game) or Hat Trick (a Super Game) to Ikari Warriors (not a Super Game) in terms of complexity, graphics, extras etc?