Why was Karateka so bad?

[7800 Pro Gamer]

I know the 5200 commercials use to end on "Keep trying, we are making them as fast as we can" or something similar.  It seems they were trying to create more of a demand or get consumers to jump on the purchase by implying scarcity. 

They might have encountered issues where they couldn't produce enough to satisfy initial projections and wanted to get in front of it. In that case it would make sense that lower than expected sales prevented what could've been a shortages, had the 5200 been a bigger success. 

I personally don't have a clue what the truth is and would be interested to hear if anybody knows more about 5200 sales and why they mentioned scarcity in supply so much. 

[Justin]

4 hours ago, Scott Stilphen said:

The same issue also mentions Atari apparently had plans for a computer add-on device similar to the VCS Graduate, which is just a crazy idea considering the 5200 was originally a reskinned 400 computer with analog controllers.

Sounds basically like an Atari XEGS. This is what Atari should've put out in 1979. An Atari 400/800 game system that you could attach a keyboard to if you wanted to.

[RickR]

53 minutes ago, Justin said:

Sounds basically like an Atari XEGS. This is what Atari should've put out in 1979. An Atari 400/800 game system that you could attach a keyboard to if you wanted to.

Amen to this.  Another great "what-if" in the Atari story.  What if they'd have released that Pam system as a gaming console as originally intended and skipped the computer market? 

In hindsight, we know that the 5200 was a sign of a company that had innovation decay.  I hope no one misunderstands -- I don't hate the 5200.  It's just that it was 4 years too late.  They didn't take the time to push for new technology but instead just reused existing tech.  I think a lot of us read Atari-lore of how Nolan Bushnell was ready to move off the 2600 and release a new better console when Warner took over and think "No!".  Or that he did that on purpose just to get booted.  But I think now how right he was. 

 

 

[Scott Stilphen]

Dropping the VCS in favor of the 400/800 hardware (prior to Kassar turning it into a computer) was the right choice.  The VCS is by far my favorite console, but Jay Miner truly outdid himself with the 'next gen' VCS, and there's nothing the VCS can do that the 400/800 can't.  Nolan had no plans or desire to make home computers; that was all Kassar's doing, so you had Atari's top game designers like Crane and Miller spending months writing the OS and DOS software for the 400/800 instead of making games.  Ultimately Atari only sold about 2 million 400/800 computers (and only about 1 million 5200s).  Diverting resources to create a computer division could have been put off until the 400/800 game machine was firmly established.  Then you could release a computer version, or an add-on keyboard/module to upgrade it to a computer.  But Rick Maurer's success with his VCS Space Invaders gave the VCS new life (after lingering in the marketplace for nearly 3 years), and inadvertently made Kassar appear to be a forward-thinking leader for sticking with the VCS, when he was anything but.  Nolan was, and he wasn't trying to get booted for wanting to drop the VCS.  The VCS wasn't designed to do much more (innovative-wise) than the original launch games.  Nolan knew that because Cyan Engineering told him as much, as they only expected it to be relevant for about 3 years (which is why they started working on the 400/800 hardware immediately after finishing the VCS).  The entire history of the early 80s would have been vastly different had the 800 console been released in 1979 as planned, or even by the following year.  The Intellivision would have died a quick death, as would have the Odyssey2 and even the Colecovision (had Coleco pushed ahead and released it anyway).  But that's what's fascinating about Atari's history, and how but a few alternate decisions with its flowchart would have drastically changed the outcome.  Kassar's indifferent treatment of Atari's designers (lack of royalties and credit) led to the creation of 3rd-party software companies and the proliferation of (often) inferior games).  Not that wouldn't have happened at some point, the fact remains it happened when it did because of Kassar.

FYI, the November/December issue of Atari Age magazine has this news blurb about the 5200 being produced in limited quantity, but then again it had just been released (in October).

Edited March 7, 2022 by Scott Stilphen

[Video 61]

12 hours ago, Scott Stilphen said:

Atari and Nintendo met several times.  They first met in April 11th, 1983 in Japan while the NES was still being developed.  This memo, dated June 14th, 1983, outlines the deal: http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/documents/nintendo_famicom_6-14-83.txt

The memo mentions the Maria chip was being developed at the time:

"On 4/15/83, Messers Kassar, Groth, Moone, Bruehl, Paul, Henricks, Remson, and myself met in Mr. Groth's office to view the videotape and discuss what we had learned from the meeting on the 11th and what we knew to-date on the MARIA chip being developed by General Computer. As both systems were seen as being in the same price range with graphics capabilities superior to the 2600 and comparable (and in some features, superior) to the 5200, it was felt that we needed to see what could be done with both machines for an intermediate priced game machine .... the 3600."

Atari and Nintendo met again in Japan on May 17th, 1983.  Atari felt the 7800 was the superior machine at the time, probably because all they saw running on the prototype NES at the time were incomplete versions of Donkey Kong Junior and Popeye, although the Maria was still not finalized.  So Atari's plan was to stretch out the negotiations with Nintendo until the Maria chip was done and then make a decision.

As for any unreasonable expectations and demands of Atari, the contract offer seems pretty straightforward.  Nintendo obviously wanted to keep tight control of the custom chips used in the NES, and didn't want to see the rampant piracy and 'shovelware' problem the VCS had, but they relaxed some of their demands later in the negotiations.

As we all know, Atari dragged out the negotiations long enough that Nintendo saw that Atari was clearly hurting from the crashing market and at some point decided they would release the NES themselves in the U.S. w/o Atari, which they did in 1985.

Dan Oliver mentions the Tramiels had a meeting with Nintendo in July or August 1984:

http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/articles/olivers_travels/olivers_travels.html

By that point, Nintendo was looking for software for the NES.  The previous year, HAL Laboratory had ported 4 games to the NES:

Defender II (Stargate)
Joust (Frank Cifaldi found and released the prototype for this last year)
Kangaroo
Millipede (Atari Games was commissioned to do this, and Ed Logg programmed it).

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/263324-kangaroo-for-the-nintendo-famicom-by-hal-laboratory/

This unconfirmed info from "Gazimaluke" is interesting:

"I heard that Richard Frick who was Director of Software development at Atari at the time was the source of the information that Kangaroo had been ported to the NES. Since I am researching the history of Sunsoft I am interested in finding out if this is true.

I contacted Richard and asked him about it. What he told me was that when Jack Trimel took over Atari in 84 they cleared out some warehouses. And during that process Richard saw a cart marked Kangaroo. And I guess since he was Director of Software development he could see the difference between a Atari 2600 cart and a NES cart. But this was basically all he knew about it."

From Frank Cifaldi:

"Both Joust and Millipede on the Famicom have a 1983 copyright, but came out much later (1986/1987 I think) I believe HAL made both of them on commission for Nintendo specifically for the Atari pitch, and when that fell through they were sat on for a while."

So Atari missed their chance to lock in exclusive U.S. rights to the NES for 4 years, with an additional 4-year option, for $5 million dollars.  Considering all the money Atari pissed away under Kassar developing products that were never released, $5 million was a no-brainer of a deal.  Unfortunately, Kassar and his cronies had no brains.  Plus they were thinking of an 'intermediate' console to be released prior to the 7800, the 3600?  

hi scott,

 

 i think i have the nes source code for millipede and ikari warriors. came off of a ST hard drive from atari's laboratory.

lance

www.atarisales.com

 

[Video 61]

10 hours ago, Scott Stilphen said:

Yes, the 3600 was an early name for the 7800.  Here's a photo of a prototype 3600 pcb that's very similar to a 7800 pcb, aside from the lack of an expansion port and different locations for the chips: https://consolevariations.com/variation/prototype/atari-3600-atari-7800-prototype

But the memo does mention the possibility of another machine priced between the 7800 and NES, the 3600.  Perhaps that was a mistake on Don Teiser's part and that he was talking about another machine (the 3200/Sylvia)?  The 3200/Sylvia/Super Stella was discussed as early as 1981 within Atari.  But with Atari's irrational fear of the Intellivision (which at best had like 10% of the video game market at its peak) and the impending Colecovision, Atari stopped work on the project and instead rushed out the 5200.

Speaking of the 5200, I came across this news blurb in the June 1983 issue of Video Review that mentions Atari not being able to keep up with demand for the 5200.  That's something I don't think I've ever heard about before.  All I can say is, I'm in PA and I don't recall any trouble with getting one.  A friend of mine had a 5200 when it was first released (late fall 1982) and I had one in early 1983 (which by then was revised to the 2-port model).  Neither one had to be back-ordered - stores like Kmart had them.  The same issue also mentions Atari apparently had plans for a computer add-on device similar to the VCS Graduate, which is just a crazy idea considering the 5200 was originally a reskinned 400 computer with analog controllers.

hi Scott,

 

 one of the major problems for atari from day one of the launch of the 5200 was the joysticks.

from day one caused atari to take away from development, and try to mitigate the damage from the sticks. also same development people were having a hard time porting games over to the 5200, again, it was the sticks.

i had customers come into my stores and throw the sticks down on the counter in disgust and say they do not work again! and also the power supply, switch box setup on four port units could be very unstable.

lance

www.atarisales.com

 

[Video 61]

5 hours ago, Justin said:

Sounds basically like an Atari XEGS. This is what Atari should've put out in 1979. An Atari 400/800 game system that you could attach a keyboard to if you wanted to.

hi Justin.

 

BINGO!

 

lance

www.atarisales.com

 

[Scott Stilphen]

8 hours ago, Video 61 said:

hi Scott,

 

 one of the major problems for atari from day one of the launch of the 5200 was the joysticks.

from day one caused atari to take away from development, and try to mitigate the damage from the sticks. also same development people were having a hard time porting games over to the 5200, again, it was the sticks.

i had customers come into my stores and throw the sticks down on the counter in disgust and say they do not work again! and also the power supply, switch box setup on four port units could be very unstable.

lance

www.atarisales.com

 

Mine broke after a few months of use.  Absolutely one of the worst controllers ever created.  People inside Atari were telling them they were a problem, and yet Marketing got its way and saw that they were released anyway.  But when the complaints from customers started complaining, they STILL didn't do anything about them.  A fix to make the joysticks self-centering was done, but it wasn't released.  But yet they eliminated the all-in-one RF switch box and went back to the standard design.  They also redesigned the motherboard, which included a revised OS that made several games incompatible, similar to the revised 400/800 OS for the XL that caused the same problem with some programs.

[Justin]

5 hours ago, Scott Stilphen said:

Mine broke after a few months of use.  Absolutely one of the worst controllers ever created.  People inside Atari were telling them they were a problem, and yet Marketing got its way and saw that they were released anyway.  But when the complaints from customers started complaining, they STILL didn't do anything about them.  A fix to make the joysticks self-centering was done, but it wasn't released.  But yet they eliminated the all-in-one RF switch box and went back to the standard design.  They also redesigned the motherboard, which included a revised OS that made several games incompatible, similar to the revised 400/800 OS for the XL that caused the same problem with some programs.

Almost sounds like intentional sabotage

[DegasElite]

4 hours ago, Justin said:

Almost sounds like intentional sabotage

That wouldn't surprise under Tramiel. He would save a penny to lose a dollar.

[Justin]

1 minute ago, DegasElite said:

That wouldn't surprise under Tramiel. He would save a penny to lose a dollar.

Yes, I'm speaking during the Warner era though. A lot of money was to be made in Atari's demise.

[DegasElite]

Oh, yeah. The A5200 was created before Tramiel took over, wasn't it? My bad.

[DegasElite]

Wait a minute. Didn't Jack Tramiel take over Atari in 1984 or 1985? I think it was in 1984.

[Justin]

17 minutes ago, DegasElite said:

Oh, yeah. The A5200 was created before Tramiel took over, wasn't it? My bad.

 

16 minutes ago, DegasElite said:

Wait a minute. Didn't Jack Tramiel take over Atari in 1984 or 1985? I think it was in 1984.

May 1984

[DegasElite]

Oh. OK. I thought it was around then. Interesting.

[Scott Stilphen]

2 hours ago, Justin said:

 

May 1984

Jack Tramiel bought Atari in July 1st 1984.  Tramiel started his own company, Tramel Technology, Ltd, in May (17th).  He renamed it Atari Corp when he bought Atari.

Edited March 8, 2022 by Scott Stilphen

[Justin]

4 hours ago, DegasElite said:

Oh, yeah. The A5200 was created before Tramiel took over, wasn't it? My bad.

None of what I’m saying pertains to Jack. Jack Tramiel didn’t intentionally sabotage Jack Tramiel’s own interests though his actions might as well have.

[Justin]

And there seems to be a blind spot when talking about Steve Ross. Classic Gaming Twitter and “Atari historians” will talk about Ray Kassar until they’re blue in the face but hardly a mention of Steve Ross or his decision making surrounding Atari. It makes me think everything in these history books and the discussions that come out of them all center around speaking with Atari’s tech employees and their perspective of Ray, who they saw in the building throughout the week, as opposed to speaking with people at Warner who knew exactly what Steve Ross was doing. When it comes to the crash and Warner dumping Atari, that’s more important than Ray Kassar anecdotes 

[RickR]

25 minutes ago, Justin said:

And there seems to be a blind spot when talking about Steve Ross

BOOM!  Rot usually starts at the very top.  That's been my experience in corporate live over the last (gulp) 35 years. 

 

[Scott Stilphen]

I mention Steve Ross is the person to blame for the VCS E.T. debacle:

http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#general25

Ross basically left Kassar to run Atari for the most part.  Apparently Kassar thought rushing out E.T. was a bad idea, but Ross was determined to have it on store shelves that Christmas.  The whole E.T. deal and the absurd money Warner paid Spielberg for the rights was only because Ross desperately wanted to win Spielberg over to Warner to make movies for them.   And Ross needed E.T. to be a big hit for Atari in order to cover the licensing deal, which is why some 4 million carts were produced.  Prior to that, these were Atari's top sellers (not including Pac-Man):

Asteroids - 2 million
Berzerk - 2 million
Breakout - 1.5 million
Circus Atari - 2 million
Defender - 3 million
Night Driver - 2 million
Space Invaders - 6 million
Warlords - 1.5 million

Ross didn't stop to think that E.T. wasn't an action movie, and the most-successful games were action games.  But just like Pac-Man earlier that year, all that mattered was the name of the game.  E.T. was the most-successful movie at that point, so he figured having ANY kind of E.T. game would be highly successful.  So besides Pac-Man and Space Invaders, the only other cartridge to top 3 million carts was Defender, but because of the licensing deal, Ross needed to sell at least 4 million copies of E.T. for it to be successful.  Well, Atari's Marketing went into overdrive and marketed the hell out of it and they sold 2.5 million carts by the end of 1982 (in 5 weeks!), and another 1 million by the end of 1984, which is actually pretty impressive for a non-action, original game.  But people wanted action games, and E.T. was a 'bad' game mostly because it wasn't one.  In the end, the only thing Ross got from Spielberg was Gremlins, and E.T. became the 'poster child' for the industry crashing.  Atari's December 7th Wall Street announcement was just the start of all of Atari's mistakes coming back to bite them, and for the large majority of those, I put the blame squarely on Kassar.

Yeah, Ross' deal with E.T. was a costly mistake, at a time when Atari needed to prove to everyone (as well as themselves) that they knew what they were doing.  But regardless of how many copies of Pac-Man and E.T. they sold, the negative press they created for themselves was far more costly than any licensing deal.  By 1984, Atari's losses were such that had Ross stuck with Atari and it kept losing money, Warner was at risk of a hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch.  He was desperate to unload Atari to the point he gave it away for nothing.  Jack Tramiel didn't pay a single penny for it; he gave Warner $240 million in promissory notes, which are basically IOUs.  He also set up his Tramel Industries company 2 months before that thanks to $75 million he got from unnamed investors.  In other words, Tramiel got back into the business after being ousted from Commodore mostly based on his reputation for being responsible for the C-64's success.

[Video 61]

On 3/8/2022 at 5:04 PM, Scott Stilphen said:

I mention Steve Ross is the person to blame for the VCS E.T. debacle:

http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#general25

Ross basically left Kassar to run Atari for the most part.  Apparently Kassar thought rushing out E.T. was a bad idea, but Ross was determined to have it on store shelves that Christmas.  The whole E.T. deal and the absurd money Warner paid Spielberg for the rights was only because Ross desperately wanted to win Spielberg over to Warner to make movies for them.   And Ross needed E.T. to be a big hit for Atari in order to cover the licensing deal, which is why some 4 million carts were produced.  Prior to that, these were Atari's top sellers (not including Pac-Man):

Asteroids - 2 million
Berzerk - 2 million
Breakout - 1.5 million
Circus Atari - 2 million
Defender - 3 million
Night Driver - 2 million
Space Invaders - 6 million
Warlords - 1.5 million

Ross didn't stop to think that E.T. wasn't an action movie, and the most-successful games were action games.  But just like Pac-Man earlier that year, all that mattered was the name of the game.  E.T. was the most-successful movie at that point, so he figured having ANY kind of E.T. game would be highly successful.  So besides Pac-Man and Space Invaders, the only other cartridge to top 3 million carts was Defender, but because of the licensing deal, Ross needed to sell at least 4 million copies of E.T. for it to be successful.  Well, Atari's Marketing went into overdrive and marketed the hell out of it and they sold 2.5 million carts by the end of 1982 (in 5 weeks!), and another 1 million by the end of 1984, which is actually pretty impressive for a non-action, original game.  But people wanted action games, and E.T. was a 'bad' game mostly because it wasn't one.  In the end, the only thing Ross got from Spielberg was Gremlins, and E.T. became the 'poster child' for the industry crashing.  Atari's December 7th Wall Street announcement was just the start of all of Atari's mistakes coming back to bite them, and for the large majority of those, I put the blame squarely on Kassar.

Yeah, Ross' deal with E.T. was a costly mistake, at a time when Atari needed to prove to everyone (as well as themselves) that they knew what they were doing.  But regardless of how many copies of Pac-Man and E.T. they sold, the negative press they created for themselves was far more costly than any licensing deal.  By 1984, Atari's losses were such that had Ross stuck with Atari and it kept losing money, Warner was at risk of a hostile takeover by Rupert Murdoch.  He was desperate to unload Atari to the point he gave it away for nothing.  Jack Tramiel didn't pay a single penny for it; he gave Warner $240 million in promissory notes, which are basically IOUs.  He also set up his Tramel Industries company 2 months before that thanks to $75 million he got from unnamed investors.  In other words, Tramiel got back into the business after being ousted from Commodore mostly based on his reputation for being responsible for the C-64's success.

jack then emptied out some 40 warehouses world wide, in a giant garage sale. when atari got down to their last warehouse, i asked brad at best and bruce at B&c, i wonder how long they will stay in business once that last warehouse is gone. we found out shortly.

scott, some one at atari many decades ago told me that adventure sold one million copies a month for 11 straight months. have you heard anything about that?

lance

www.atarisales.com

[Scott Stilphen]

The scant cart sales info I have came from Warshaw's "Once Upon Atari" documentary.  I have 2 screenshots of what's shown on my site at:

http://www.ataricompendium.com/faq/faq.html#software26

According to at least that listing, Adventure isn't in the top-23.

I never heard any story about VCS Adventure selling 1 million copies a month for 11 straight months.  That's complete bunk.  Whoever told you that is incorrect about both the game in question and the number of carts sold.  If any game was going to sell that many copies, it would have been Pac-Man, and from the sales info I linked to, that topped out at around 8 million copies.

On a related note to Atari's figures, the best-selling 3rd-party game, Coleco's Donkey Kong sold about 4 million copies.  Activision's Pitfall!, sold about 3.5 million copies, which was probably the 2nd best-selling 3rd-party game.

The stories about Atari's warehouses are legendary.  I seem to recall reading about some details about how some of those were sold off at the time, but I don't recall where I read that (either newpaper or magazine articles, or perhaps old usenet posting).  As one of the lucky 3 who were able to purchase some of that inventory from Jack/Atari Corp., can you talk about your experiences with that transaction?  Did you guys purchase entire warehouses full of items, or were you given the option to purchase 1 or multiples?

There's also the matter of Brad/Best Electronics selling unofficial copies of Atari VCS prototype carts.  It's well known he used leftover/excess prototype 'T' pcbs and programmed EPROMS for them, and then put them in cart shells either from other games or production/test shells (often having clear plastic top half shells.  He also would put an oval Atari 'warranty void if opened' sticker over the screw hole in an attempt to dissuade people from opening them (and realizing there weren't any official labels on the EPROMs).  It recently came to my attention that he did a similar thing with reproduction 'prototype' carts of Bruce Lee for the Atari 800;

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/279186-bruce-lee-crashes-on-altirra/?tab=comments&_fromLogin=1

Brad was using a cart image that someone made (the game was only released on cassette and disk, and by Datasoft) and selling them as prototypes.  He's using XE Super Cart pcbs, but the earlier 800 cartridge shells and not XEGS shells.  Turns out the game image crashes at some point, but since he's selling them as "prototypes" and with the assumption the game isn't 'complete', he's under no pressure to take any responsibility for them.  This of course has absolutely nothing to do with you.  I've dealt and purchased items from Brad several times over the years (including some of those 'fake' VCS prototypes).  I'm just not sure why he would bother selling these. The VCS carts were pretty cheap at the time (I'm going back 20+ years to when I bought them), but he's *still* selling copies of Bruce Lee for $40 each: https://www.best-electronics-ca.com/xe_game.htm#8bit  

AFAIK Atari had no plans to release an XEGS cartridge of Bruce Lee, and if they did, they would have really had a problem if they released this particular cartridge image :)

 

 

Edited April 6, 2022 by Scott Stilphen

[TrekMD]

And ET was not a terrible game.  It just needed more polish, which would have been possible with more time!

[RickR]

14 hours ago, TrekMD said:

And ET was not a terrible game.  It just needed more polish, which would have been possible with more time!

I like ET a ton more than Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I can appreciate the scope of Raiders and what HSW was trying to accomplish, but I thought it was way too obscure and difficult, and really frustrating to play.  I guess ET gets a worse rap for the much bigger expectations for reasons that aren't really fair.