Today marks the 25th Anniversary of the release of, unquestionably, the two machines that pulled the video game industry out of the toilet they were in after the Great Video Game Crash of 1983: The Atari 7800 Pro System and The Atari 130 XE home computer.
The impact these two systems had on the industry cannot be understated. Sales had been sluggish to crappy since summer of 1983. There was a bit of a spike around Christmas that year when Commodore price dumped in an attempt to kill Texas Instruments TI/99. (Irony being, Texas Instruments is still around and Commodore's been dead as fried chicken since '93, but I digress.)
Atari rolled out the 7800 and 130 XE in a big media event that was covered by a number of high profile media outlets (the two most important of which were probably MTV and Nickelodeon who both covered the event live in real time on their networks.) and showed the world Atari was far from dead.
I was only seven at the time, but all it took was one look at the graphics and sound on the demos of the Gauntlet and Marble Madness home ports and I was begging my parents literally 'til Christmas to buy me one. (They bought my sister and I an XE, which was just as good; fully compatible with the 7800 cartridge based games and capable of supporting a disk drive which opened the doors to some of the greatest games of the 8 Bit Era to me.)
The resolution of the graphics displays that the MARIA chip produced made competing 8 Bit machines, including the later NES and Sega Master System look weak by comparison. (Nintendo survived on it's library alone NES-heads, and you KNOW it!) Couple that with the AMY sound chip...is it any wonder the 7800 sold a million units by Christmas that year?
It was brilliant. Remember the launch titles?
Show me a better launch title line up than the 7800 (with the possible exception of the original Atari Matrix back in 1994)!
You can't.
Gauntlet, Marble Madness, Spy Hunter, Cloak and Dagger (only took them how long to release it? Worth it though
), Pole Position 2, Superman: The Man of Steel, Gyruss, Ultimate Berserk...and that was just Atari Games offerings! (Sorry, I wasn't impressed with Super Breakout or Deluxe Asteroids)
Activision had HERO, Dreadnought Factor, Zone Ranger, Zenji and the special "Adventurer's Edition" of Pitfall 2 (with the bonus cavern unavailable on any other system's port.) all ready to go. Nintendo released Donkey Kong (best home port of that particular game, IHO) Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong 3 and in one of it's biggest mistakes, the 1984 arcade smash Punch Out!. (The original arcade version, not that piece of junk they released four years later for NES with Mike Tyson's name on it.)
Sales were so brisk, it sent the third party publishers into overdrive to keep up with demand for ports of their earlier catalog for the new machines as well as encouraging further development of new titles.
Hell, the 128K (I laugh when I think about how that was considered a lot of memory) 130 XE was pretty much THE machine that made EA what it is today.
Put it this way: If it weren't for all those XE owners snapping up copies of The Bard's Tale (BT2: The Destiny Knight was the best) and Wasteland (Wasteland 3: Fallout takes the prize here) trilogies, along with games like Ultimate Wizard, Mail Order Monsters, Legacy of The Ancients and Skate or Die, where would EA be today? (Not to mention what the release of the ST the very next year and the STX console in '89 did by opening the floodgates for the Madden and NHL Hockey franchises)
Hell, Activision would have buried them back then. More people owned consoles than computers and back in the 80's EA was a computer game publisher. If the XE hadn't sold as well as it did, EA would have been toast.
It wasn't just a victory for Atari and home gamers everywhere, it was the beginning of the REAL Console Wars, as it's sales and success were all the proof Nintendo and Sega needed to see a fertile market for competition in North America. A year later, the NES and Master System's were in the stores and the Big 3 were at war trying to one up each other for the next 10 years. (Until Sony knocked off Sega as #2 in the market in 1996...)
Maybe I'm showing my age, reveling in such a seemingly insignificant date for Wii gamers and X Box gamers and you remaining 9 PS3 owners or you younger kids who don't remember a time when Atari was actually in danger of going under and Microsoft was just a company that made crappy OS's and Sony was just the king of home electronics, but I don't care.
Those of us who were around and remember know that 25 years ago today: Modern gaming was born.
The impact these two systems had on the industry cannot be understated. Sales had been sluggish to crappy since summer of 1983. There was a bit of a spike around Christmas that year when Commodore price dumped in an attempt to kill Texas Instruments TI/99. (Irony being, Texas Instruments is still around and Commodore's been dead as fried chicken since '93, but I digress.)
Atari rolled out the 7800 and 130 XE in a big media event that was covered by a number of high profile media outlets (the two most important of which were probably MTV and Nickelodeon who both covered the event live in real time on their networks.) and showed the world Atari was far from dead.
I was only seven at the time, but all it took was one look at the graphics and sound on the demos of the Gauntlet and Marble Madness home ports and I was begging my parents literally 'til Christmas to buy me one. (They bought my sister and I an XE, which was just as good; fully compatible with the 7800 cartridge based games and capable of supporting a disk drive which opened the doors to some of the greatest games of the 8 Bit Era to me.)
The resolution of the graphics displays that the MARIA chip produced made competing 8 Bit machines, including the later NES and Sega Master System look weak by comparison. (Nintendo survived on it's library alone NES-heads, and you KNOW it!) Couple that with the AMY sound chip...is it any wonder the 7800 sold a million units by Christmas that year?
It was brilliant. Remember the launch titles?
Show me a better launch title line up than the 7800 (with the possible exception of the original Atari Matrix back in 1994)!
You can't.
Gauntlet, Marble Madness, Spy Hunter, Cloak and Dagger (only took them how long to release it? Worth it though
), Pole Position 2, Superman: The Man of Steel, Gyruss, Ultimate Berserk...and that was just Atari Games offerings! (Sorry, I wasn't impressed with Super Breakout or Deluxe Asteroids)Activision had HERO, Dreadnought Factor, Zone Ranger, Zenji and the special "Adventurer's Edition" of Pitfall 2 (with the bonus cavern unavailable on any other system's port.) all ready to go. Nintendo released Donkey Kong (best home port of that particular game, IHO) Donkey Kong Jr., Popeye, Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong 3 and in one of it's biggest mistakes, the 1984 arcade smash Punch Out!. (The original arcade version, not that piece of junk they released four years later for NES with Mike Tyson's name on it.)
Sales were so brisk, it sent the third party publishers into overdrive to keep up with demand for ports of their earlier catalog for the new machines as well as encouraging further development of new titles.
Hell, the 128K (I laugh when I think about how that was considered a lot of memory) 130 XE was pretty much THE machine that made EA what it is today.
Put it this way: If it weren't for all those XE owners snapping up copies of The Bard's Tale (BT2: The Destiny Knight was the best) and Wasteland (Wasteland 3: Fallout takes the prize here) trilogies, along with games like Ultimate Wizard, Mail Order Monsters, Legacy of The Ancients and Skate or Die, where would EA be today? (Not to mention what the release of the ST the very next year and the STX console in '89 did by opening the floodgates for the Madden and NHL Hockey franchises)
Hell, Activision would have buried them back then. More people owned consoles than computers and back in the 80's EA was a computer game publisher. If the XE hadn't sold as well as it did, EA would have been toast.
It wasn't just a victory for Atari and home gamers everywhere, it was the beginning of the REAL Console Wars, as it's sales and success were all the proof Nintendo and Sega needed to see a fertile market for competition in North America. A year later, the NES and Master System's were in the stores and the Big 3 were at war trying to one up each other for the next 10 years. (Until Sony knocked off Sega as #2 in the market in 1996...)
Maybe I'm showing my age, reveling in such a seemingly insignificant date for Wii gamers and X Box gamers and you remaining 9 PS3 owners or you younger kids who don't remember a time when Atari was actually in danger of going under and Microsoft was just a company that made crappy OS's and Sony was just the king of home electronics, but I don't care.
Those of us who were around and remember know that 25 years ago today: Modern gaming was born.
