Despite the success of some early consoles, every development and hardware company remaining knew that they needed a solid product after the crash of 1983.  Those who hadn’t gone under were forced to refocus on quality and value, while also making sure their content would remain protected.  Nintendo pioneered the proprietary content and copyright regulations discussed in chapter seven, metrologies that would become the standard in the industry.  While the NES was rapidly gaining popularity in the US, Atari was determined to launch a last ditch effort at recapturing the glory once owned by the 2600.  Ironically enough, the Atari 7800 wasn’t directly developed directly by the Atari corporation; instead it came from the General Computer Corporation, and was initially going to be named the Atari 3600.  Like several previous consoles, the 7800 had announced plans for a slew of add-ons, including a keyboard, disk drives, printers… etc.  Unfortunately, the 7800 wasn’t in for much more luck than the other had.

The crash of ’83 cut deep into Atari, and they were bleeding money.  Despite having one of the most memorable systems to this day, market forces can bring even powerhouses to their knees.  In 1984 Atari ran a test market for the 7800 in California, but the winds of change were coming for the company. At this stage in the game Atari was a business unit of Warner Communications, and eager to be rid of the money pit Atari had become, Warner sold it to the previous owner of Commodore, Jack Tramiel.  There seems to be a common stigma around that PC people tend to scorn consoles (here at Gotfrag we love both!), and Tramiel probably enforced the notion.  Instead of pushing forward with the 7800, he pulled resources back from what appeared to be a dead market, and pushed forward with making an Atari computer, the Atari ST.  The ST shipped in June of 1985 and enjoyed moderate success with a plethora of later versions.  Ironically, in 1993 Atari dropped development of their PC division for, you guessed it, video game consoles.

Make a console today for a profit tomorrow

With the markets reeling after 1983, nobody was willing to risk diving headlong into the console market - nobody except for Nintendo.  And when the NES started taking off, companies who had previous ambitions were probably cursing under their breath for missing the opportunity.  The winter of 1986 saw the release of the 7800, a dismal marketing event that could very well have guaranteed that the 7800 would never get close to the NES, instead battling between second and third.  By launching in such a drab fashion after Nintendo, the 7800 also walked right into another dreadful problem, one with developer support.  In ’83 everyone wanted to make games for everything, even companies designing things to interchange with competitors' products and games.  Eventually as the market became flooded, that model no longer worked successfully, and Nintendo was left to re-invent the wheel.  Unfortunately for Atari, they weren’t very good with the new wheel, and were left with few games and fewer developers.  Instead of unique and innovative titles like ones that boosted Nintendo to supremacy, Atari was left with remakes of games that were popular in past arcades or on the 2600.  While there seems to still be a bit of popularity with games like Galaga and Pac-Man, at least on Xbox live, when Atari redid them for the 7800 people just weren’t impressed.  For most developers, signing a two-year exclusivity clause while working on NES games wasn’t an issue; after all, gamers were flocking to the NES in droves.  Atari got about an equally lukewarm welcome from retailers, many of whom had been left with low quality, poor selling titles for the 2600 during the market crash.  With Nintendo’s success, the 7800 was a risk not many wanted to pour resources into.  Without a large amount of success, development for additional peripherals ground to a halt save for a last ditch attempt to woo customers with modified controllers and a light gun.  Needless to say neither had much success, and by 1989 Atari was ready to start closing the curtains on the console.  With all said and done, a library of nearly 60 titles were released, although barely any could touch Nintendo.  Still, with full backward compatibility to the 2600, Atari expanded the total library substantially.

Upgrade to success?

In today’s standards, the specifications for the 7800 are about as dismal as its inability to grab market share, but back in its prime the console was far from the worst on the block.  It was designed fairly similar to the 2600, with upgraded components that included a 1.79mhz processor, 4k of RAM and up to 48K or ROM on the games.  Its custom graphics controller could push out a 320*216 px image, although if you wanted to experience its full 256 color range, you would be limited to a lower resolution.  The graphics processor had a clock of 7.19 mhz and featured direct memory access.  Oddly enough, the unit had the same sound chip as the 2600, but it was capable of having improved audio through a sound chip on certain games.  Unfortunately very few games utilized this feature and it went mostly unused.  The device should have managed additional levels of success with a price tag under $150 upon release, but the poor game support and failed marketing (including promised but not delivered peripherals) doomed the system.  By 1992, Atari was ready to pull out support for the 7800, leaving the system with nothing but a disappointing shadow of what the 2600 had become.  Join us for the next chapter which will encompass Sega’s effort to dethrone Nintendo, the Sega Master system.