PROOF That Ms. Pac-Man Should've Been The Atari 7800 Pack-In!

[Clint Thompson]

The talk of POKEY has always been an odd one to me.  POKEY was already 7 years old when the 7800 came out.  How expensive could it have been to not just throw one in?  Pound foolish, penny wise.  Furthermore, Commodore set the standard with the SID chip after POKEY came out, so it begs the question of why didn't they try making something even better than that?  Aim higher.  That was OLD Atari's mantra.  Bigger, better!

 

It's kind of fun to play these "What if" games...but a lot of this stuff just makes you shake your head sadly. 

 

Even so, the Pokey is that to Atarians as the SID was to the Commodorians.... even to this day I still find the sound produced from the POKEY to be very warming and desirable to listen to, it simply was an amazing chip and honestly, Atari didn't need to go above and beyond to create an entirely new chip. They just needed to implement the one they already had and was proven to deliver amazing results.

 

Crazy to think about that Atari, the creators of all this amazing hardware (even if they did get it wrong at times) at such a lower price point than their competition, you really would've thought developers would have flocked to their systems for that reason as well but then again, once you realize the potential and installed user base of the NES, it's hard to look anywhere else but where the gold is. Everything beyond that was done for probably a quick buck with little care because they knew it was a dying platform or just out of pure love for Atari and the system, which nothing really seems to shine from that as an example in 3rd party form at all sadly.