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Atari Arcade Division Closes
Bill Kendrick writes "Today Midway dropped the axe on 'Midway Games West' (Formerly Atari Games Corporation). The remaining 30 people working there have been
laid off. The other half of Atari, who went on to make the Atari ST line of computers and Jaguar and Lynx game systems, is still alive and kicking, as part of Infogrames.
Still, it's a sad day for gamers."
I'm actually surprised to hear they were still around at all. What are some recent titles they've produced? I don't play arcade games a lot so I really had no idea they were still producing for so long.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I spent 4 (pissed) hours last night with 2 player Joust thru MAME on my Xbox. The balance is superb and something new games could learn from - the difficulty level is rock hard but the environment and controls are so simple that no matter how I get killed I always think 'damn try harder next time' rather than 'stupid sucky unfair game' - theres not many like that made these days.
Well, of course the amount of violent arcade games has increased over the last ten years. It's increased on consoles as well.
I wouldn't say the trend is necessarily going towards just violence, but rather arcades are trying to do things that you can't do at home. For example look at the explosion of Bemani games that everybody is seeing all over the place (Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, etc.) and there's plenty of other games that are similar in that they're not your normal button mashers (That boxing game, for example.)
You walk into an arcade and what do you see? 5 different racing games, a couple of gun games, maybe a dance game, and thats it!
WTF happened to arcade games?
Driven by focus groups, test marketed before they are mass produced, arcade games are yet another barometer of the bland tastes of the unwashed masses. Apparently the majority of people want more of the same, just slightly different. Look! Its a racing game that allows you to switch camera angles!! Look! Its a gun game where you shoot zombies instead of terrorists!!
Where is the sense of adventure?
I wish about 80% of consumers would simply die quietly in their sleep. No, I'm not bitter, just hopeful.
But not, you know, for the thirty people laid off.
Ah, slashdot.
Karma: T-rexcellent.
No, Atari died a long time ago, just after Nintendo stole the console crown. Since then, the only projects they've come up with have been consoles or handhelds that have either died slow, withering deaths or were just abandoned outright before they reached their prime. The most support these platforms ever received was after they dropped into absolesence by private 3rd parties coding for the hell of it.
No, what's really sad is that this company didn't die gracefully. Instead it's being chopped up bit by bit, one failure after another. That sad day is long past. Like they said about Spock, "He's dead already..."
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You walk into an arcade and what do you see? 5 different racing games, a couple of gun games, maybe a dance game, and thats it!
.50 to $2.00. Higher prices are also a contributing factor to lower demand, just accelerating the death spiral that the arcade industry is already in.
WTF happened to arcade games?
The arcade game market collapsed because of two factors: PC gaming and console gaming. Consumers like yourself found and purchased replacements that were in some ways adequate and in some ways superior to arcade games. The money that would have gone into arcade gamaing you spent on home gaming systems, instead.
Back in the late 70's and early 80's, the quantity and quality of arcade games was vastly superior to PC and console games; by the early 90's, the quantity of games was clearly with the home gaming market. And by the late 90's, the quality and features of home gaming had either equalled or exceeded arcade games. The only area where arcade games could really innovate was in elaborate designs like race cars and motorbikes and snowboards. I suspect that such arcade units cost more to build and to maintain, and along with the decreased revenue per unit, forced the arcade manufacturers to raise the cost per game to anywhere from
You want arcade games to survive? Then you (and 50 million of your closest friends) should stop buying PC and console games and start spending your money exclusively on arcade games.
Me? I prefer the cost, convenience and replayablity of home gaming. I was an arcade fanatic back in the early 80's, but these days, if I find myself in an arcade once a year, that's a lot.
Atari's passing is a real blow to the industry, even if they haven't made too many games lately.
For starters, Atari was the first successful arcade game company. For a little while, if you talked about videogames you meant Atari.
Second, throughout their entire lifespan, Atari produced original games. They always tried new things. They always looked for something different to do. Of all the other companies in the industry, there are precious few who can claim that. Nintendo certainly does it. Some of Sega's splinter development teams do it. Blizzard does it by copying lesser-known games (like Dune II and Rogue). Maxis does it once in a while when they aren't releasing The Sims add-on packs. Who doesn't do it? Namco, Capcom, Square, EA, Microsoft, and Infogrammes (including their "Atari" devision).
By the way: a previous comment stated that Defender, Stargate/Defender II., Joust, Robotron, Rampage, Tapper and Sinistar were Midway games. They are, but they are not Atari games.
Here are the most noteworthy Atari arcade releases, to my mind:
Pong
Asteroids (and Asteroids Deluxe)
Missile Command
Centipede (and Milipede)
Tempest (tied with William's Robotron: 2084 for the title of Twitchiest Game)
Star Wars (still the best of all the many Star Wars videogames!)
Crystal Castles
Marble Madness
I, Robot (the very first 3D polygonal game)
Hard Drivin' (the first successful 3D polygonal game) (also Race Drivin')
S.T.U.N. Runner
720 Degrees
Gauntlet (the game that invented the idea of joining in any time, and an incredible amount of fun) (and Gauntlet II)
Toobin'
KLAX
Tetris (arcade)
Rampart (the best-designed game ever made)
San Franscisco Rush (which is actually like a high-tech update of Hard Drivin')
Gauntlet Legends (pioneering with characters that persist between games) (and Gauntlet: Dark Legacy)
So, unlike what a previous correspondent said, Atari was not a one-hit wonder.
What most of these games have in common is the creation of an entirely new kind of game. They didn't produce endless strings of one-on-one fighting games like some companies I could name. It's true that a few games were released that didn't measure up to these (California Speed stands out in my mind), but no other game company has this track record of innovation, not even Nintendo (and hey, I love Nintendo).
In the early days of the arcade game industry there were few precedents, so you couldn't mindlessly ape someone else. Atari stood out then. But even in their later years, they still tried new, nutty things. That era gave us Rampart, which, I'm not kidding, is an amazing design and should be studied, in an era when side-scrolling things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the rage. They were just about the only reason for thinking person to enter arcades for a while.
To think that Ed Logg may have been escorted off the premises by police! Man, that just makes my blood boil.