would nintendo be as good if atari picked up US market?

[mailman187666]

I did some research a while back about the history of nintendo and how nintendo had asked atari for their help on bringing the famicom out in the U.S. around 84-85 or sometime around then. Eventually Atari turned down nintendo on their offer to work on the Atari 7800 LOL . What does everybody think would have happened if Atari would have brought nintendo out in the US rather than nintendo bringing it here themselves. Do you think that video games would be where they are today? maybe the video game crash could have been the end of consoles? maybe the nintendo/atari alliance could have made games even better. Could we have seen Mario for Jaguar years after? or even seen nintendo go the way atari (as a company) is going now. I know you can't fortell the present as if something different, from the past, changed the way we do things now, but i think it would be cool to hear other people's ideas on how good/bad it could have been if thats what had happened.

[o2william]

An interesting "what if?" scenario, but I suspect history turned out for the best in this particular instance. And I say that as someone who loved Atari in the early '80s and would have wanted to see it succeed. Problem is, from my perspective today, I think an Atari/Nintendo deal would have effectively killed the NES (in the U.S., at least).

By the time this deal would have taken place, Atari had already proved itself inept at managing its market share. The 5200 could have owned the marketplace, but they crippled it with terrible controllers and by rehashing the same games over and over again, and they split the market by refusing to let the 2600 die.

I don't have the dates in front of me but I believe the proposed deal was right near the time of the Crash. An early NES release in America would not have prevented it, IMO. The market was too far gone. Atari would have had the stigma of being an established videogame company at the time that "videogame" was considered a dirty word by retailers. They might have had a harder time getting the NES into stores than Nintendo/WoW did.

But the main thing that would have killed an Atari NES would have been Jack Tramiel. Assuming Atari's fortunes weren't dramatically reversed by the Nintendo deal, Tramiel probably still would have come on board and probably would have still shut down the home videogame projects. NES could have gone the way of the 7800 -- or it may have disappeared completely.

In this imaginary history, I could picture the home video games industry in America lying dormant for a time until some "outsider" company, perhaps Sega, made the realization than Nintendo did in real life: there's always going to be a real demand for videogames, they just need to be well-made, exciting, different and marketed in the right way. Atari was past the point of carrying that out by then.

[Doom Gaze]

Most people agree NES would have floundered with Atari at the helm. I say it would be a matter of how much control Nintendo has vs. Atari.

But also.. the market was dead. The only real competitor left was Atari, and chances are no one could have changed the standard. Unless Sega Master System caught on, the US video game market could have been dead for years. Or maybe NEC could have been king, like in Japan.. that would be a wonderful alternate universe.

[tom]

NES was popular, good is another matter itself

[Lothars]

NES was popular, good is another matter itself

your right it was a great system that I enjoy to this day

Had alot of bad games but had some awesome games.

[Satac]

Eventually Atari turned down nintendo on their offer to work on the Atari 7800 LOL .

They also had an offer from Sega to bring the genesis to the US

[MagicMajenta]

I think the deal would have been bad had it gone through. Jack Tramiel did not see the home videogame market as profitable and was really a computer guy at heart. From what I read about him he thought that videogames were a fad that would go away and that computers were the future which is why he concentrated all their efforts at the Atari computer system. When Nintendo finally made it to the US in the mid 80's he saw how successful it was and realized his mistake so he decided to release the 7800, but by then it was too late.

[Dave Farquhar]

I think the deal would have been bad had it gone through. Jack Tramiel did not see the home videogame market as profitable and was really a computer guy at heart.

Agreed. Tramiel played a role in the crash, because when he was at Commodore, he was positioning the VIC-20 and the 64 against game machines. He got William Shatner as a spokesman and ran ads for the VIC that asked why anyone would buy just a videogame machine when for a little bit more they could have a full-blown computer. And for a while you could get $100 off the price of a 64 if you sent in a computer or game machine. Had it not been for Tramiel's price war, Atari's bottom line would have been better. It's still open to question whether management would have been so inept--in my experience, managers are more likely to take risks when they have some cash on hand, but when cash is tight, they tend to just do the same thing over and over again because they remember it worked once. When they don't understand why those decisions were made the time it did work, that's when you start to see the real idiocy. Imagine the dialogue that could have happened when an Atari middle manager saw an early version of Super Mario Bros:

Executive: It'll never sell.
Developer: Why?
E: They've never sold in the past.
D: But there's never been a game like this before.
E: This just doesn't look like what the public has come to expect from Atari.
D: But Pitfall! sold millions of copies, and this game combines the best elements of Pitfall! with elements of Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. And it really shows off the graphics capabilities of the new machine. How can it lose?
E: Of the hundreds of games available for the Atari 2600, Pitfall! was the only one that looked anything like this and was successful. And Pitfall! wasn't our game. People have come to expect a different thing from Atari, and we have that image to protect. This game is a risk, and it's a risk I'm just not willing to take.

Well, that's the way the conversation would have gone if some of the middle managers I've had the misfortune of working under had been at Atari in the mid-1980s...

[gepeto]

Nintendo kept everyone in check the years they reigned. Even though they took alot of flack for there heavy hand. They kept thing moving and the quality high. It was what was needed. Atari was at the top we all know what happened.

[diskoboy]

I kind of asked this exact same question here:

http://www.digitpress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79351

[smork]

Agreed. Tramiel played a role in the crash, because when he was at Commodore, he was positioning the VIC-20 and the 64 against game machines. He got William Shatner as a spokesman and ran ads for the VIC that asked why anyone would buy just a videogame machine when for a little bit more they could have a full-blown computer.

It's a damn fine question, too, for the early 80s. That's why so many people bought Apple/Commodore instead of an aging Atari, Intellivision, Coleco, or Odessy platform. It's also why I always say, there was NO videogame crash. If you call a TRS-80, C64, or Apple IIGS a videogame machine (which most computer people in the 80s would have, with the possible exception of the Apple), then people were playing on game machines, not dedicated consoles.

In response to the original question, I don't think the landscape would have been that different, since Nintendo was very strong in its home market (and, as should be mentioned re: above, was marketed as a computer, not just a game machine, a la Commodore in the US. Personally I think the reason NoA didn't bring over the Family Basic and position itself as a computer was to avoid competing with the dominant C64. They were able to create a niche, a game only machine in a market that was at the time dominated by multipurpose machines. I digress.)

I think the marketing partnership would have either a) succeded or b) failed, and Nintendo would have marketed the Super Famicom themselves. Either way, Nintendo as a company would certainly still be around, they just might be seen as the XBox is in the Japan. The world isn't just the US, though. :)

[j_factor]

One interesting part of this what-if scenario to consider is, what would've happened to the 7800? Would they have just rotted in the warehouse forever, or would Atari have brought out two consoles at once? Would they still have made the XEGS if they'd been presiding over the NES? And what would Atari have done when Lynx and Game Boy came around? Can you imagine the Epyx Lynx versus the Atari Game Boy?