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not_real_acct | 3 years ago

I think the folks on here would get a kick out of a documentary about the games that came out AFTER Atari was sold in 1983.

The Atari 2600 soldiered on until 1985 or 1987, and it was remarkable how good the games were after the industry blew up.

Here's Pac Man on the Atari 2600 from 1982: https://youtu.be/nCPpgt0s70U?t=157

Here's Pac Man Jr on the exact same hardware, from a year later: https://youtu.be/r8-y4o7VX3I?t=71

They managed to figure out scrolling, increased the number of mazes by 400% and reduced the flickering significantly.

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kabdib|3 years ago

It helps when the engineers are given proper resources. I'm guessing there wasn't anyone in Marketing trying to maximize profits at the cost of game quality.

ET with double the ROM and six months of development time would probably have been an awesome game. 2600 Pac-Man (AKA "Flickerman") wouldn't have generated so many returns and would have been fun to play.

I showed up in late October of 1982 and was told that Marketing wanted the cartridge I'd been assigned on the shelves by Christmas. Even this completely green college drop-out knew that was utterly flapping impossible, yet there were people over in the Marketing building who apparently thought it was a reasonable request.

I had a guy from Marketing in my office asking if I could print out every possible 8x8 bitmap for him. He wanted to copyright them so the competition couldn't use them in their games. I pointed out that the bitmaps would have be printed in color as well, then told him the story about what the inventor of the game of Chess asked for when the King wanted to reward him for coming up with the game.

By 1984 (and maybe earlier than that) Atari was losing $2M a day. The new 5200 console was plagued by terrible (yet totally fixable) design decisions. Plans for next-generation (e.g., 68000-based) were being flubbed, but we didn't know that yet. Serial layoffs had everyone pretty demoralized (we usually found out about these from the San Jose Mercury News, often on the mornings of said layoffs).

vikingerik|3 years ago

As a nitpick, it's not quite exactly the same hardware - Jr Pac Man includes more hardware in the cartridge, the extra circuitry needed to support bank-switching to have more than 4k of ROM.