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Yeah, I know. With their name gone the quality went downhill as well. They were getting better while Capcom or Konami had to struggle in the early 32-Bit age, and when those japanese giants recovered the good times for Psygnosis were over. Had they kept up the quality they could have become really big.Quote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
You could be right about the Japanese making games for the 2600, I guess it was so early on that there wasn't much worldwide competition from other machines when it first came out.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Unfortunately for the short time the 2600 was popular before the ZX81 and Vic20 took off in the UK and rest of Europe there wasn't really any video game development scene at all in Europe so you're back to square one :rofl:
Atari 2600 - Lacked European Software
Wrong!:pQuote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
Ariola
Bit Corp
Quelle = Germany
HES = Australia
Datar = S. America I know they are not European, but it's pretty interesting to see the amount of content coming from that region.
Rainbow Vision = Australia
Bootleg games possibly coming from the Asian market:
http://www.atariage.com/label_page.html?LabelID=109
Yes, the Mega Drive/Genesis was the first console to have deep support on a world-wide level, but the Atari 2600 was pretty close to breaking the barrier before it.
LOL, I loved the fact that you included Australia as part of Europe, it actually brought a tear to my eye from laughing too hard.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
But anyway, from what you just posted all I can see are a handful of very small companies with absolutely no noteworthy games to their names, I mean, how many people around the world fondly remember playing "Angriff der luftflotten" in their youth?
Either way you're a persistent guy i'll give you that much :)
Haha....well, there were some obscure German games, but most of them were not much more than hacks of existing games.
Quelle for example is a huge mail order service in Germany; meaning that non of their games were ever found in real shops, but only in their catalogues between clothes and furniture.
It made little sense to develop games for Atari 2600; the system was sold, yes, but the audience was only kids in the age for the elementary school; and seriously, kids gave a shit about quality and knew nothing about the games available. You could just sell them any 1979 game and they played it. It could be shitty as hell, there were no magazines reviewing the stuff, parents and kids bought what appealed to them by the looks of the cover. It was pointless to invest money into development for an audience that buys the stuff anyway.
The real audience was the computer gamers. For them European companies produced.
Didn't the first Sega SG-1000 or whatever they're called come out in 1980, well before many of Sega's Atari 2600 games?
Did I really need to denote that it wasn't part of Europe, like I did with the S. American companies?Quote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
I posted companies from different parts of the world; I just started out with Europe.
Not unless they were German.Quote:
But anyway, from what you just posted all I can see are a handful of very small companies with absolutely no noteworthy games to their names, I mean, how many people around the world fondly remember playing "Angriff der luftflotten" in their youth?
I'm amazed by how you just blow off stuff like it isn't fact. If you really looked at the Atariage site, you'd see that a ton of games were released in Europe and quite a few unknown publishers took a stab at it, along with up and coming companies.
And you're not?Quote:
Either way you're a persistent guy i'll give you that much :)
You have so little knowledge of what gaming was about in the 70's. No offense, but neither of you were around in 1978, when the Atari 2600 became the hot ticket item for several holiday seasons. It wasn't just a bunch of 12 year olds playing the games.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 Stars
Pong started out as a couter-top game in a bar called Andy Caps. Did it have fancy graphics or sound? No, but it had simple and addictive gameplay. Before the 2600, countless Pong clones were being sold by companies like Coleco, and even a few from Japan.
Yes, we had gaming magazines. Have you ever heard of (the original) Electronic Games?
Computer gaming didn't really take off until right before (1981-1982) the console crash in 1983. Computers were a large part of the reason why the console crash happened in the first place, but nobody was going to pay over $700 for a 4K PET computer in 1977, when it didn't really play games or have a color display.Quote:
The real audience was the computer gamers. For them European companies produced.
The biggest reason for the console crash was market saturation. Atari let everyone make games for their system and pretty soon you had so many games that nobody knew anything about. I remember buying $5 games from companies like Spectravision, that later became the motel video rental chain Specta Video. Even Raltson Purina had a game for the Atari 2600, and they offered it with the purchase of 2 bags of Dog Chow and a little bit of cash.
No, I do know the history of gaming. But our topic here was Europe and European developers. And at least here in Germany the Atari 2600 was sold until 1991, when Mega Drive, SMS and NES were already out. And was not launched here before 1980, having little impact. The whole crash is an American incident, there was nothing here that could have crashed in the first place.
Here the Atari 2600 was a system popular from the mid- to late-80ies, a crappy game system for little kids. It was a system many of my age had, a decade too late to be impressive or important for anyone older. At the very same time people could play C64, and everyone who was the least critical did not take the Atari 2600 serious anymore and played C64, Schneider, or some other homecomputer.
No the problem is that you don't know the European market at all, most of the history you talk about only happened in North America, the Atari 2600 was probably only big in the UK for a few years before the ZX81 started to take off, there wasn't enough time for any companies over here to get their act together and start releasing games, and by the time they did there were more popular machines around so all the big developers went there instead, from this point onwards the 2600 still sold consistently but at a much lower level of popularity to many other machines.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
when you think about it you're missing the whole point of this in the first place, you said earlier about the German 2600 games something like "I'm sure they were popular with Germans" but the whole point of this discusion was about games from all different territories being available to play, I highly doubt that those very small companies exported any of their games to the US at all, whereas I know for a fact that UK and German Mega Drive games were known and played by Americans in at least a small amount (not entirely sure to what extent but it was noteworthy enough)
Apparently it was released around 83' which was around the same time as their 2600 games.Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebbe
In the interest of Zebbe joining on this thread I checked out the Swedish development scene, early on it seems to be centred around the Amiga, (I found a small handfull of Spectrum games too) and from then it primarily moved onto the PC, so it seems that Sweden followed the same path as the UK and Germany in the early days too.
It was an American incident, because that was where video game consoles began and were being made. Sega's first console didn't come out until 1983-84. Europe really wouldn't notice it, since the market wasn't saturated with 3rd party titles or videogame consoles.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 Stars
You're making an opinion of who played the 2600, based on your childhood memories. The system was already dead (yet Atari still made the 2600 jr.) by the time you were 6. I certainly wasn't playing my Atari VCS in 1986, but it was the game console back in 1981.Quote:
Here the Atari 2600 was a system popular from the mid- to late-80ies, a crappy game system for little kids. It was a system many of my age had, a decade too late to be impressive or important for anyone older. At the very same time people could play C64, and everyone who was the least critical did not take the Atari 2600 serious anymore and played C64, Schneider, or some other homecomputer.
Most people didn't take the 2600 serious after 1982. And they certainly didn't think much of the superior Colecovision or 5200. It wasn't just a European thing.
You did have the system before 1982 though.
http://cgi.ebay.ie/ATARI-2600-VCS-SU...ayphotohosting
The popularity of the 2600 was arcade ports. When Atari licensed Space Invaders for the 2600, the system blew off of store shelves. Atari's catalog of arcade titles like Asteroids, Missile Command, Phoenix, Jungle Hunt and Pole Position were the reasons the system was selling. The overflow of crappy 3rd party games is what nobody was buying.
Why anyone in Europe was buying 2600s in the late 80's is beyond me. And it's certainly not the usergroup I'd be basing my opinion of a console on.
I know enough about. You basically didn't have much for consoles until Sega arrived, and the computer market is really where home gaming took off there.Quote:
Originally Posted by jesus.arnold
I was merely stating that Europe did indeed develop games for the 2600, as well as many other countries around the world. They weren't exactly distributed worldwide, but they were being made. As a matter of fact, more games were produced in Europe or other countries, than what was produced in N. America. Your country sure knows how to drag out a systems life.
http://www.digitpress.com/systems/atari2600.htm
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitpress
Yes, the Genesis (and possibly Master System) was probably the first console that had many games coming from Japan, Europe and North America, that were also available in all 3 regions. But, it wasn't the first system that had games developed from all over the world.
Exactly what I said. You cannot counter my arguments about the meaning of the 2600 here by stating facts of the NA-history, what you did.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Again, it was not a hit at that time around here. It became more successful post-1985, with the little kids here. It NEVER reached a major audience before that here.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Not here. There were no arcades in Germany either, so the fame from there did not help Atari 2600 games. Without the advantage of having the games known through cheap arcade-sessions, the Atari 2600 was just an overpriced toy here that people never felt the urge to try out.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
The Atari 2600 never ever "blew from store shelves" here. It was a niche product.
Because by than the computer had become popular, and everybody knes what computergames were. And the Atari 2600 had become cheap enough for parents to buy it for little kids that wanted computer games. Children had their Atari-games, parents had not spent too much money, and everyone else played C64.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
The thing is though, you can't really group the European countries together for that early 80s time period as they were all somewhat separate, you may find that Germany didn't have any kind of supply network/importer until much later than other parts of Europe, even the NES was released at varying times throughout Europe getting a release in Germany a year earlier than the UK.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
It had the "cheap and cheerful" market, not sure if you had a similar thing in the US but in the UK there was always a market for cheaper alternatives until probably the mid 90s (at which point the Master System was the budget system of choice), and like 108 said a lot of the time younger kids would be bought them by their parents due to the cost, some people also preffered to use 2600s in the mid 80s because they were more accessible and easy to use, and had no annoying load times.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
Also, like I said before 2600s were massive in the UK, but probably only for a few years, if Germany got the console later than the UK then it's possible they'd become pretty redundant by the time they arrived.