29 replies to this topic

[DracIsBack]

Atari 2600 come out two years befor Intelivision, and nearly 4 befor coleco. Huge fan base by the time the superior consoles come out. Odyssey's superiority is debatable, though it still come out two years after 2600, didn't it?.

Yes, although the Fairchild and the first Oddessy and at least one other console came out before the 2600. I think you're on the right track though - timing + games = success ... usually. The only console that I can think of that didn't take off in that respect was the Dreamcast but a combination of abandoning consoles (which you noted) and the inability to weather the "lose money on every console and hope to make it back eventually on games" model that the market had shifted to killed it off.

Quote

NES come out a year befor SMS and 7800. Again established fanbase made the difference. They also had the ultimate side scrolling platformer for the time.

That and the tendency to bully developers and retail chains to give the NES an advantage.

Quote

Side note: Genesis initial unpopularity was due to the fact Sega Master System was so poorly supported for only 3 years 86-89.

That, and when they launched, Nintendo's bully tactics were just beginning to be investigated by the US Trade Commission. Nintendo loosened up, Sega got EA on board + good conversions of their own games and the Genesis became the mouse that roared. The "fly on the wall that needed to be swatted" (according to an arrogant Nintendo), turned into a gorilla that kicked Nintendo off their domination pedistal.

[Video]

Your probably thinking of Pong, the other console released befor the 2600. The odyssey1 was escentually a pong type machine too, so I don't really count that, in fact I count those as the original consoles, befor others.

Fairchild on the other hand...didn't that come out in 77 sometime? But it was quickly overshadowed by Atari, even though it did have removable roms as well.

I vaguely remember playing Fairchild back in the day, and it nolonger works now, but I still got a few games for it somewhere. If I remember, I liked it, but it was more limited than the 2600, if I remember right.

[Retro Rogue]

Video said:

Your probably thinking of Pong, the other console released befor the 2600. The odyssey1 was escentually a pong type machine too, so I don't really count that, in fact I count those as the original consoles, befor others.

No, it would be the RCA Studio II most likely, which was also released before the Video Computer System (2600). Likewise, the Odyssey is a far cry from a "pong prototype". While it's crude analog graphics were hardly stellar, the tennis game was only one of many. The main reason it was followed by "Pong" consoles (of which there were a good 75 already from '74-'76) and not Ski, Simon Says, Analogic, Hockey, Football, Cat and Mouse, Haunted House, Submarine, Roulette, States, Fun Zoo, Baseball, Invasion, Volleyball, Handball, Wipout, Win, Interplanetary Voyage, Basketball, Brain Wave, Shootout, Dogfight, or Shooting Gallery consoles is of course because of the appearance of a rather "similar" game in the arcades at the time by Atari.

Video said:

Fairchild on the other hand...didn't that come out in 77 sometime?  But it was quickly overshadowed by Atari, even though it did have removable roms as well.

No. Fairchild's Video Entertainment System (The VES, later renamed to Channel F) was released in August of 1976, the RCA Studio II came out in January of 1977, Atari's VCS (2600) came out in October 1977.

What really killed the VES wasn't the VCS's superiority over it - it was the original crash (the 1st video game crash) of winter '77. When it appeared on the market, it of course scared the many makers of pong consoles. With the release of two more programmable consoles over the following year, it scared them so much so that as is well known, most got out of the business. Consequently, stock was dumped at discount prices that following Christmass (since consoles were mainly marketed at that time instead of year around back then).

It killed sales for all three consoles, and they struggled to survive (even changing the name to Channel F to stop confusion with Atari's VCS). But the damage was done and within a year Fairchild dropped the system and sold it to Zircon (including the rights to the revised edition they were working on). RCA's Studio II (which was technically obsolete by the time it hit the market when compared to Fairchild's system) went out within about a year as well. The only reason the VCS survived at that time was because Warner was willing to pump the money to keep it afloat. It's well known Nolan wanted to cut losses and dump it.

[DuckandCover]

I have to agree with the argument that much of a given system's popularity has to do with what developers create for it. If my memory is correct, wasn't there an enormous surge of 2600 sales associated with the relase of Space Invaders for the system? A lot of consumers wanted to play that game in their own home.

Intellivision and Colecovision both had some incredible games, but with the ongoing popularity of the 2600, I never thought that their catalogs could compare with the number of Atari offerings. Back in the day, I remember admiring those other systems, but never being really eager to obtain one of them. I was pretty content with the variety of 2600 games.

[Video]

Pong type, not prototype. All it's games are bassed around balls and paddles. But what I meant was that it didn't have a removable rom, so I count it with the pong machines rather than rom machines. If I remember right, I read somewhere in the 70's that they were going to put roms onto the cards instead of relying exclusively on a dipswitch style of soldering one pin to another. I wonder if any roms were eventually released for the thing? There were something like 10 game 'carts' for it if I remember right.

Just like to many of the same game caused the 83 game crash, it was pong machines that caused the 76 game crash. I thought the Fairchild come out after that, but I guess I was wrong. As for RCA stuidio II, I have no Idea what that is even, so I can't comment on that.