The Pitfalls Of Atari
I consider myself a videogame historian. I have spent years piecing together my version of the medium’s history which may or may not see the light of day in book form. With the release of Replay: A History Of Videogames it seems unlikely that another book is required. And one topic in gaming history gets up my nose more than any other.
The obsession with Atari’s part in early games history is vastly overemphasised. Undoubtedly crucial popularisers of early videogames, and ground-breaking and original at times, the fact still remains that Atari is seen to cast too huge a shadow over the early history of videogames in what has become a sort of victor’s history. Yes, Atari made lots of money and lost lots of money – how is that relevant to anyone outside Atari? Should a cultural history be so dominated by the business acumen of one player?
One thing the Atari story has is plenty of colour. Renowned as a laid-back company, winging it in business, with a stoner culture, and apparently a hotbed for creativity. Without being unfair, it seems that many Atari employees have spent the last 30 years talking about what it was like working at Atari. And it’s always interesting to know where games come from. But it seems to me that the incredible amount of focus on the corporate history of one company is only of limited interest to anyone who cares about games.
Atari started with Pong, and its success kickstarted videogaming as we know it. But the idea was stolen, and Atari was forced to settle a lawsuit with Magnavox after Atari’s Nolan Bushnell lifted the Pong mechanics from one of the games on Magnavox’s Odyssey machine. History has had to be revised once this episode came to light. And of course there were many other machines before and after Pong in that era – indeed the Odyssey was being demonstrated with the original version of what became Pong before Atari were ever formed. Why no history of Magnavox’s huge contribution? If a thief had stolen Darwin’s Origin of Species and reprinted it with great success, should they get more credit than Darwin?
The early arcades were full of successful Atari games, for which it deserves great credit as a pioneer. But other manufacturers were around as well, and their games were often just as good or better than Ataris. Defender and Robotron came from Williams. Non-Atari games Warrior and Western Gun introduced player combat. Space Panic introduced platform gaming, but came from Universal not Atari. And the behemoth that was Space Invaders came from Japan, as did Galaxian, Galaga, PacMan, and Donkey Kong.
And does Atari’s VCS/2600 market-leader really stand up to scrutiny? It wasn’t the first of its kind, and was third to market by a distance, succeeding not because of its superiority to competitors (it was markedly inferior to the Odyssey 2) but simply because it had the back-catalogue and market muscle to smash the others. And of course it’s greatest contribution to gaming history is to license a fairly awful version of Space Invaders in 1980 to establish itself as the most famous console of its era. Most of the more famous 2600 games are really clunkily poor versions of much better arcade games – not all that inspiring to a modern eye.
Atari 2600 games aren’t rubbish, and some are excellent, but compared to other platforms of the era they are just primitive. Adventure is an undoubted early classic, and perhaps along with Pitfall (not an Atari game) the only games on the 2600 which really bear scrutiny today. But at a similar period Richard Garriott was introducing first-person dungeon exploration and open worlds in Alakabeth, and Richard Bartle was running the first MUD MMO, Plato was running complex simulations like Spasim – there’s simply no comparison in terms of complexity and scale. Yet all we hear about is Atari.
And then there’s the crash of ’83, which has become legendary in videogaming history yet only occured in one country in the World, and is basically all about the fall of the Atari VCS. One reading is that the market was saturated with poor product and the bottom fell out of the market. My reading is that the 2600 was fairly primitive on its launch in 1977, and by 1983 was all but obliterated by better rivals. There wasn’t a crash – all that happened was that a product that wasn’t very good stopped selling because people realised it wasn’t very good.
Unfortunately Tristan Donovan’s Replay (an excellent read so far, review coming soon) falls into the same trap as every other history. Despite saying in the introduction that Donovan intends to talk about games and not industry, and talk about pioneering games not just popular ones, he still spends a good 50 pages dipping in and out of Atari’s business record. At the expense of what I consider fascinating developments in gaming. Barely a page on Garriott’s RPGs, barely a mention of the Plato community. Rather who was at which corporate position in Atari, who invested what company money in what machine, who sold which part of the business to who.
I’m utterly fed up with this version of videogames’ early history – like a history of fine dining dominated by McDonalds and Burger King.
Most videogame history books focus on the US market – what I’d really like to see is a UK (or Europe) focussed book. Easily enough material out there for that.
I’m about halfway through Replay and there is a decent if brief section on UK development in the 80s, and some nuggets of information about development in Spain, France, Germany and Holland. I think you’re right that a book about, say, the UK or any other country in Europe for that matter, would be of interest. However there are few enough genuine games enthusiasts out there – narrowing the field down to one country would restrict the audience even more, so I can understand why there isn’t a book out there just yet
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