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In early 1983, Yamauchi instructed Nintendo of America vice president Howard Lincoln to call Atari and discuss the possibility of the two companies working together to launch the Famicom stateside. and lacked the infrastructure and experience to release a home console in that region. The issue was that Nintendo, despite scoring a hit in arcades, was still relatively unknown in the U.S.
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The firm's real gains had been made in the United States via the aforementioned Donkey Kong coin-op, and any home hardware it released would need to be released in America to maximise its potential. Hiroshi Yamauchi, the savvy yet prickly boss of Nintendo, knew that success in Japan was only one part of the puzzle.
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Over in Japan, Nintendo was working on the Famicom home console following the runaway success of its Donkey Kong arcade machine – the make-or-break release that truly put the company on the map in the world of interactive entertainment. Mario sure looks different in this European advert for the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong When Atari posted lower-than-expected earnings projections, the seeds of the crash of '83 were sewn. The company was selling millions of copies of its most popular games and demand seemed insatiable, but the bubble was about to burst. The Atari VCS was the undisputed champion of the home gaming arena and 'Atari' had become almost interchangeable with the term 'video game'.
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The irony is that two of its biggest mistakes could have potentially pulled the company from the brink at two separate points in its history.īack in 1982, the industry was in a strange place. However, despite its success in the '80s, Atari made some pretty sizeable blunders, both before and after the infamous video game crash of 1983, where the market collapsed after a flood of poor-quality games were released for the ageing VCS – a console that, by 1982, was beginning to seriously show its limitations. It even inadvertently created the concept of third-party publishing when it treated four of its key staffers – David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead – so poorly that they decided to leave and set up Activision, the first video games company of its kind.
ATARI DONKEY KONG SOFTWARE
Atari created the first truly mass-market home gaming system in the shape of the VCS (later renamed the 2600 – the topic of the next Bitmap Books visual compendium, incidentally), and also pioneered the concept of licencing the software of other companies when it paid Taito for the rights to port Space Invaders to its console. Then there's Atari – the company that arguably did the vital pathfinding in the realm of home video games that allowed companies like Nintendo and Sega to flourish. Speaking of which, Sega is another name that crops up while the company no longer dabbles in video game hardware outside of the odd arcade machine, it was, for a long time, Nintendo's main competitor. Nintendo is obviously one of them the Japanese veteran has been a major part of the industry since the '80s, and has maintained a position of importance and influence despite numerous challenges from rivals. When you think of the key names in the history of video games hardware, a few notable monikers spring to mind.