<story><title>Games Nintendo didn&apos;t want you to play: Tengen (2022)</title><url>https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>livrem</author><text>&amp;gt; The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games&lt;p&gt;Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I don&amp;#x27;t see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. Home computers in the 1980&amp;#x27;s did well without trying to lock out bad games. The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>subsubzero</author><text>As someone who lived through that era and had an atari 2600 it was really a combo of two things.&lt;p&gt;#1. The games on the atari were not games that you spent hours playing, they were very simple, space invader, pacman etc, and were not entirely that fun.&lt;p&gt;#2. Nintendo. Once the NES(1985) came out with mario bros. and duck hunt it was a like a tsunami of incredible game play that gamers had never experienced before besides maybe at the arcade. The games for the NES just kept getting better and better, Zelda, Mario Bros. 3 while the atari was languishing with its older technology and stable of boring games.&lt;p&gt;Atari fought back in terms of technology with the Jaguar(1993) but once again even with better technology you still need great games, and the jaguar did not have mario, zelda, and a host of other fun games that nintendo(snes had been out for two years now), and also genesis had. By that time the writing was on the wall and Atari was in its death throes.&lt;p&gt;So the trope of atari having a ton of unlicensed games being the demise of the 2600 platform is not true at all. I would have to say it really boils down to just the stable of quality games that nintendo and later genesis possessed and atari just didn&amp;#x27;t have access to.</text></comment>
<story><title>Games Nintendo didn&apos;t want you to play: Tengen (2022)</title><url>https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>livrem</author><text>&amp;gt; The Atari 2600’s demise is generally blamed on a glut of low-quality cartridges, caused in part by the console’s openness to unlicensed games&lt;p&gt;Every history about video games mention how low-quality games killed Atari, but is that true or just something that walled-garden console makers made up? I don&amp;#x27;t see all the millions of very, very bad games killing the PC or mobile platforms. Home computers in the 1980&amp;#x27;s did well without trying to lock out bad games. The C64 survived many years even if you probably have to wade through over 100 really bad games for each good game on that platform. But the Atari 2600 somehow was destroyed because it was not sufficiently locked down?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grumast</author><text>I think a large part of the problem was the cost of discoverability. On modern PC and mobile, with the availability of free games, it costs nothing but time to wade through piles of bad games. Even on the C64, piracy was prevalent enough that it was easy to obtain and try a large number of games.&lt;p&gt;Atari 2600 games required purchasing cartridges and therefore an outlay of money. Without the internet, it was difficult to get reviews or feedback on the quality of a game without knowing someone that actually purchased it. Added to this, most of the games sold at full price, regardless of the quality. It doesn&amp;#x27;t take the purchase of too many full price games that were really bad before one gets very hesitant to lay out cash for a new game.</text></comment>