Justin

It's not even about "capitalizing on existing ip" with games based on Warner franchises, it's simply how they missed the potential of 8-bit gaming as a platform for characters and storytelling that we saw explode with Super Mario Bros, Zelda, Metroid, etc. Atari had all of the components and nobody put the pieces together.

And another thought on this topic.  Atari never followed up properly on the great games they did create.  For example, Adventure is one of my all-time favorite games.  Most gamers of my vintage also love the game.  Yet Atari never followed up on it.  It wasn't until Nintendo "Legend of Zelda" for NES that we saw a real continuation on the theme.  What a waste. 

I often wondered that myself.  There was a LOT they could have done and got something decent out of killing 2 birds with one stone.  They could have used a DC comic series and made an adventure game out of them, they could have had some Looney Tunes characters be in some sort of arcade style game.  There was lots of opportunities.  The only one I seen was the DC comics packed inside some 2600 games but I often wondered why just the 2600 titles?  How come the 5200 and Atari home computer people were not included with that?  I guess we weren't special enough.  😞