It’s been 50 years since Nolan Bushnell co-founded Atari, which brought video games to the mainstream. To celebrate, we asked Bushnell what he learned during the early years—and what we’ve lost sight of since then.
I’m too young to have experienced Atari in its heyday, so I don’t have much to add here. I am, however, fascinated by Atari’s classic computers, like the 800 or the Falcon, and remember fawning over the Jaguar before growing up and realising what a terrible console and cheap marketing trick it really was.
That being said, I still want a Jaguar.
I believe the 16 bit atari computers was during the tramiel era. bushnell sold atari in 1980 and jack bought it in 1984 if my memory serves me correct.
The Atari ST was certainly a Tramiel product, developed mainly to compete with the Amiga.
Tramiel saw (according to some sources) the st and ste line as stopgaps before the transputer could be finished. the transputer sold around 500 full systems afaik, but once again i could be wrong. But tramiel was a hardware visionary in that he believed in modular design and assymetric processing. Due to the 80s ram shortage he did not favour protected memory in either the atari os or helios.
I do not think the Atari Transputer was envisioned by Tramiel early on, but was a very separate development initiated by Tim King and Jack Lang (“Perihelion”), as a hardware base for their HeliOS.
And again: also HeliOS had nothing to do with Tramiel, who had no clue about software.
At the same time Atari developed its own 68030 based Atari TT Workstation – which did not sell much better….
Tramiel was not a computer guy and did not use even computers himself, according to his son. But he did understand the hardware market and it’s dynamics.
And while Tramiels talent did allow him to regularly undercut the prices of competitors: he was by no means good at selling things – especially not in the US, where he struggled severely to find outlets for the Atari range of computers…
He did sell reasonably well with the C64 though. The MIDI and graphing market was already owned by other companies in the US, and Atari had significant successes in europe, who at the time was a much bigger market than the US. US stayed with what insiders termed as a “dead end” with intel chips and dos based graphics much longer than europe could endure (this the low sales of IBM in europe in the later years of the AT and XT. Motorola had a faster CISC chip by far in most metrics until the i486 and acorn chips was faster in most others. AIM was initially not envisaged to destroy intel (which later became a goal and failed at) but to make a risc cpu faster and more efficient than acorn (later arm). And at first it seemed to be successful, but as you know ARM is still around and AIM is not.
Yes the C64 sold very well – due to its very low price and because Tramiel eventually sold it via big chains like Sears … but with that step he alienated all smaller computer resellers, especially since he sold huge amounts to Sears at 100$ less than just a couple of weeks before to all others!
The smaller shops could suddenly only sell C64s at a loss.
That fired back with the ST line, as computer shops would remember Tramiel’s behavior and not trust his new company.
Eventually Tramiel’s Atari bought “Federated Group”, to gain full control of its own retail stores … a very bad deal as it would turn out:
to the over 60 million for the acquisition came another 60 million of loss in the first yeas alone!
But not only Tramiel’s Atari faced the wrath of the computer shops: his old company commodore also never regained trust in the US and also struggled to make the Amiga widely available.
This problems were of course in addition to the ever growing popularity of the PC.
(A fact I still do not unterstand: a PC in the 80s was a absolutely terrible machine in comparison to an ST or Amiga)
Yes: the Atari ST line was developed by former Commodore engineers (Shiraz Shivji), which left the company together with Tramiel in 1984, while the Amiga was developed by former Atari engineers under Jay Miner, who previously developed the Atari 2600’s TIA and most of the Atari 8bit chipset.
Calling the amiga team an atari team is a misnomer at best, slander at worst. HiToro was not bought by atari but funded by them. And as the youtube video of the HiToro employee handing atari execs the return check in complete exuberation shows how little they wanted to do with atari at the time.
Jay Miner and Larry Kaplan founded HiToro (renamed to Amiga later). Both worked at Atari before. Miner as chip and circuit designer, Kaplan as console programmer.
I like that Bushnell’s favorite Atari game was Tempest. It was one of mine, too. I still have a copy that loads fine in Mame…
Tempest 2000 is also the bedt game on the jaguar. good and popular enough that the soundttrack outsold the actual game by a margin of 50x. I still really enjoy it, but you REALLY need an after market controller. the one that came with the atari jaguar is appalingly bad.