Browse
www.old-computers.com. What you'll find is that there really wasn't anything comparable to the VCS at the time Nolan Bushnell was looking for investors; probably the closest "competitor" was the
Fairchild Channel F (1976). Pretty much everything else was either not microprocessor-based (i.e., the original
Magnavox Odyssey) or a Pong knockoff.
I can't imagine what it would take for Atari to do
worse than OTL; by 1976, Bushnell had a steady stream of revenue from coin-op games, and had singlehandledly invented the Pong market (from whence all those above-mentioned knockoffs flowed). He was looking for an investor to pony up the cash to develop the VCS (what we know today as the 2600), and settled on Warner Bros. -- probably the
worst potential partner, to be honest.
The bottom line is that
someone was going to give Bushnell the capital he needed to develop the VCS (and the 400/800 line of computers).
Now, if you wanted to see Atari do a lot
better, well, I might direct you to a little TL referenced in my sig.
