Atari thread.

[TheSonicRetard]

Nah, nothing made in Britain for those computers was designed for 60hz, the US Amiga and Atari ST software market was tiny, as far as I know games were written for Europe and then if they were a big title (like an arcade port) were fixed for the US and published by the US office of the original maker of the arcade version (Konami, Taito etc).

To be honest I doubt that game even officially came out in America, I mean jeez Codemasters (the company who made Captain Dynamo) had a nightmare getting TOCA and Colin Mcrae released in the US on Playstation and that was like 5 years later (and Codemasters were a really big company in Europe by that stage).

Camerica, who Codemasters dealt with in the US early on, never entered the computer business as far as I know.

the cd32 version of flink defaults to 60hz, fwiw.

[tz101]

Did Akklaim make any games for the 3DO or Jaguar?

They distributed Corpse Killer and Supreme Warrior for the 3DO but they didn't publish anything for the Jag AFAIK.

How did NBA Jam TE end up getting released, then? I know acclaim had exclusive console rights to both NBA Jam and NBA Jam TE, yet looking at the Jaguar box, it doesn't list acclaim at all, and indeed it seems like it was published by Atari. Did they license the rights to publish the game from acclaim?

JaguarNBAJamTE.jpg

[TheSonicRetard]

To everyone who hates the jaguar controller... I just paid $125 for a MIB one.

(of course, it's a pro controller, but still...)

[gamevet]

It would also still make the ST version faster by the same rule

Volume hardware sales (of the Amiga at least) were much higher in Europe (it could possibly be as much as four times the amount according to some sources, with both Britain and Germany separately seeming to each have had higher hardware sales than the whole of North America), and another big issue was with software sales. The majority of Europeans bought STs and Amiga's as their primary games machine, in the US it was a mixture of gamers and general computer hobbyists, and many owned multiple games machines (consoles + computers), I'm also not sure about the difference in piracy (pirate copies may well have been easier to get hold of in some parts of the US than real copies), in Britain piracy tended to be home copying and not big business piracy (people would spend their money on games, then copy them, and swap the copies with their friend's copies).

Either way American companies themselves talk about the big business for computer software being Europe.

I had 3 Amiga stores I visited in the Dallas area. I think there might have been an Amiga store in Ft. Worth as well.

Most of the early Amiga stuff we got in the states was ported from, or to, the MAC and PC. It was mostly EA, SSI, Accolade, Cinemaware, Maxis, Activision, Sierra and US Gold.

[kool kitty89]

I think it was published by Atari though as the box has an Atari UPC code and Acclaim isn't even mentioned on the cart or the manual.

There are loads of 3rd party Jaguar games that have the Atari serial numbers on them, I believe this is because Atari produced the games for them.

I believe Atari Corp ended up licensing, publishing (or co-publishing), manufacturing, and distributing many of the 3rd party games on the system, in part due to high risk of Jaguar publishing (atari's poor PR, market share, etc) meaning that many 3rd parties weren't willing to publish independently at all.

The Amiga was more than a "niche" market in the US. After all, CBM was based in Pennsylvania, and many companies based around Amiga products were also in the US. I almost got a job at GVP in '90 - I was all set to fly out for an interview when the Gulf War broke out and GVP canceled all hiring. I wound up working for a different company making products for the C64 and Amiga.

Well, niche in terms of the computer market at large in the same sense that the Mac was/is niche and ALL computer gaming was niche in the late 80s/early 90s, somewhat like Japan -and very unlike Europe. (aside from the short-lived burst of popularity with the C64 driving computer gaming into the mainstream for a while in the mid-80s -before console gaming took over again and PC/Amiga/ST/etc gaming became the new niche -with the C64 persisting in the budget market)

The Amiga's market share was always tiny compared to "IBM compatible" PCs in the US (as was the ST), though it certainly dominated certain niches in the market for a time (like games, and multimedia applications -video editing/production/effects and graphic arts, especially prior to VGA for the latter). And in the case of games, even that is hard to compare: anyone with sense in the late 80s (into part of the early 90s) would have seen the Amiga as a much more cost effective and far more capable games platform than IBM compatibles, but that doesn't mean that many more PCs were also being used for gaming than there were Amigas. (just that most of those PCs were bought for other reasons or by ignorant buyers -and with the problematic marketing and distribution -varying by region in the US- that ignorance factor was a major issue too -same for the ST for that matter . . . PR and market awareness was a massive issue and something that at very least kept the ST and Amiga from dominating Macintosh sales if not heavily cutting into the PC market too)

And there's also the major issue of the computer gaming market in general being niche, and most gaming interests being directed at the NES in the late 80s. (so most people would either buy a console for games or a computer for general purpose work -possibly some games- and the latter usually ended up being a PC-compatible or some sort -and the latter wouldn't have changed unless mainstream PR -and software support- were to become directly competitive with what PCs had)

PR is really what made the difference in Europe compared to the US . . . IBM compatibles hadn't taken off like in the US, neither had the Mac, and the market was both more price-sensitive and less reliant on showy saturation advertising (ie viral marketing was far more effective than in the US, and products with real merit/value tended to shine through more in spite of PR advantages of competition).
Had it not been for the management and direction problems (technical and otherwise) at both Atari and CBM, the ST and/or Amiga very well may have evolved into competitive modern platforms that persisted to this day in the mainstream European market.

It would also still make the ST version faster by the same rule

Volume hardware sales (of the Amiga at least) were much higher in Europe (it could possibly be as much as four times the amount according to some sources, with both Britain and Germany separately seeming to each have had higher hardware sales than the whole of North America), and another big issue was with software sales. The majority of Europeans bought STs and Amiga's as their primary games machine, in the US it was a mixture of gamers and general computer hobbyists, and many owned multiple games machines (consoles + computers), I'm also not sure about the difference in piracy (pirate copies may well have been easier to get hold of in some parts of the US than real copies), in Britain piracy tended to be home copying and not big business piracy (people would spend their money on games, then copy them, and swap the copies with their friend's copies).

Either way American companies themselves talk about the big business for computer software being Europe.

Is that true for both the ST and Amiga, and in what time period? From what I understand, the Amiga had a much larger market share in the US than the ST, especially after 1987. (not that that means that it had larger volumes in the US than Europe, but that if anything, it would have been the Amiga -and not ST- that sold more comparably to Europe in the US -in volumes, not share)

[Thenewguy]

I've re-checked all the info I have on Amiga, and to be honest it all seems pretty reliable (moreso than even I initially thought), the worldwide figure of 5.2 million total was given specifically by someone working for Commodore Germany, and the 1.6 million figure for Germany comes from the same person, British figures are all over magazines, and whilst British mags can occasionally be iffy for overseas information, they tend to be pretty reliable for native stuff, and two separate magazines have indicated British sales as 1.5 million, that means that Britain + Germany alone made up well over half of total sales.

And that's not factoring in France, Scandinavia, and Italy.

I haven't got a huge amount of experience talking to Italians on the net, but I have managed a little, through Google translate (with limited success), and a lot of what they've said indicate that the console changeover may not have actually happened in Italy until later (ie they felt that the Amiga may have trashed the Mega Drive and SNES in Italian sales), British magazines have Italian sales at 600,000, to 700,000 (which would back up the idea that it was very popular there).

France seems much lower (I would say indications now are actually that the ST may have completely obliterated the Amiga in French sales, but the ST sources I've seen aren't really that reliable to be honest). I'm thinking there probably isn't much Amiga sales coming from France.

Amiga was huge in Scandinavian countries, but sales don't ever seem to be very big for those markets anyway, so a big hit there isn't going to amount to huge sales figures (probably respectable though)

Realistically I don't think the North America sales can possibly be higher than 1.5 million, in fact its probably closer to 1 million (UK magazines have US sales at lower than 1 million).

What's the footprint like in the US these days? is it more common to find Amiga's than Master Systems?

[TheSonicRetard]

What's the footprint like in the US these days? is it more common to find Amiga's than Master Systems?

It's non-existent at this point. No one knows what an Amiga is, save for huge geeks. Few people know what a Sega Master System is either, but at the bare minimum, you can find SMS games in classic gaming stores all over the US. I have never, ever seen an Amiga game for sale here in the US. If I wanted to, right now, I could drive about 10 miles to one of 3 classic gaming stores here in Houston and buy a full SMS console. No stores in the entire city - the 4th largest in the country - sell anything amiga related.

If you want a good measure of how popular they are today in the US, check the US Ebay site. I'm fleshing out my amiga collection, so I look on ebay at least once or twice a week... looking for amiga games on the US ebay site might yield a dozen results, and more often than not, I'll have to click the link to "international ebay" to find what I'm looking for. By contrast, search for Sega Master System on the US Ebay site, and you'll get thousands of results.

Except for Lemmings, every single Amiga game I own (I have over 40 for both the 1200 and the CD32) has come from either Germany or the UK.

To further drive the point home, I can find Turbo Grafx games in-stores here in houston. I can find Neo Geo AES games in-stores here in houston. I can find 3DO, Jaguar, Neo Geo Pocket Color, even arcade PCBs in these stores. I can find Intellevision, Colecovision, every single atari system (even the XE), lynx... you name it, I can find a store in houston selling software for it. Hell, I know a store which sells famicom disk games. So these are definitely hardcore gaming stores. They don't sell ANYTHING Amiga, not the computer nor the games. The first time I walked into the particular store I'm talking about, I marvelled at their selection, and was taken back by the blank stare I got when I asked if they had any 1200 or CD32 titles. Absolutely no clue what I was talking about. Yet, when I asked if they had any copies of Ninja Golf for the 7800, they showed me a boxed, sealed copy.

Growing up, I knew 1 person who had an Amiga, I'm pretty sure it was a 500. This was probably around 1992. I went over to his place one day and he showed me Lemmings. Until I bought my own amiga 19 years later, I never saw a single other Amiga. I knew tons of people who had C64s, or Macs, or IBM Compatible DOS PCs... not a single Amiga. And I wasn't a regular PC user, I was a card carrying member of HAL-PC, the biggest computer club in the city. I went to weekly meetings, went to swaps, lan parties for doom, trade shows. I got the internet in 89, and was active on BBSes during the Amiga's heyday... never saw anyone talk about it outside of Deluxe Paint. No magazines carried it, not even computer magazines here in the US.

It's gotta be strange to someone in the UK to hear all this, but really, the Amiga didn't make a noticeable dent here in the US. And I was actively looking.

EDIT: And if you think the Amiga was poorly represented in the US, then you should check out the ST. I have NEVER seen one, ever. Did the ST even get a US release?

In the US, computers were originally C64s. Then they were Macs. Then they were IBM Compatible PCs. And they've been that way ever since, with the occasional apple product gaining some notoriety. PCs, here in the US, have really never had a vibrant, thriving gaming market. If you wanted games, you bought a console. Today, as in right now, is probably the most healthy the PC gaming industry has ever been in the US. More people play PC games today than ever before, and that's thanks in very large part to Steam.

It's not a stretch to say that Steam saved PC gaming in the US.

[TheSonicRetard]

Oh, I should also mention that, back in 86, I got a Sega Master System, and until it died, I never had any trouble find SMS software in the US. Every major store sold SMS games. Every major rental chain would rent out SMS games. When you went to blockbuster to rent a game, they had 3 sections - a huge NES section, a smaller SMS section, and a tiny 7800 section. By about 1989 that 7800 section disappeared, but the SMS section remained. I played many SMS games by renting them first - wonderboy III for example. I distinctly remember seeing the US version of Sonic 1 sold at Kay Bee Toys. The SMS wasn't this hidden, unknown thing in the US. It just wasn't too popular.

I bought a bunch of IBM Dos PC games at that time, which is the only reason I knew what the hell an Amiga was in the first place. On the back of the box for these games, they'd show screenshots for every type of computer format. Like, the back of the Castlevania box showed screenshots from IBM CGA PC, Tandy, Amstrad CPC, and Amiga. The Amiga screenshots always looked the best and blew me away. But I never, ever saw Amiga software for sale. You could see screenshots of the games, but never the actual games themselves, and definitely never the computer itself. For reference, this was about 1989-1990.

[Thenewguy]

You've got to love those old boxes, as a kid I'd be in a store and look at the back of a C64 game and be like "holy crap this looks awesome!" get back home, put the game on and it would look terrible

I have a C64 game in my hand at the moment LOL, it reads on the back -

"Screenshots are only intended to be illustrative of the gameplay and not the screen graphics, which may vary considerably between different formats"

[TheSonicRetard]

Most of the games I got were actually pretty fair about it, displaying screenshots for every version of the game. Konami games, at least, always did this. Very rarely did I buy a game and have it look completely different from the box, and those were only in instances where it'd show the EGA screenshots instead of CGA. I think it might have something to do with false advertising laws here in the US.

My C64 died back in like 1993, and, in a moment of stupidity, I sold all my games at a garage sale. Every time I think about jumping back in to the C64, I think back to how slow the tapes loaded, and how many of those tapes probably don't work anymore and it kills my interest. I don't keep up with the C64 scene today, is there anything like WHDLoad for the C64?

[Thenewguy]

Not that I know of, but I don't really delve into that sort of stuff much, I still load my old C64 tapes the same way I always did, and I still use disks for my Amiga and Atari ST.

Other than when I'm loading cart games of course, but I don't have a huge amount of those (owning Toki would be nice, but it doesn't seem that common on Ebay unfortunately)

Part of the experience is sitting there listening to one of the Ocean loaders playing music whilst the pastel stripes flash onscreen anyway

[TheSonicRetard]

Not that I know of, but I don't really delve into that sort of stuff much, I still load my old C64 tapes the same way I always did, and I still use disks for my Amiga and Atari ST.

Other than when I'm loading cart games of course, but I don't have a huge amount of those (owning Toki would be nice, but it doesn't seem that common on Ebay unfortunately)

Part of the experience is sitting there listening to one of the Ocean loaders playing music whilst the pastel stripes flash onscreen anyway

Yeah, I took very good care of my C64 tapes (and all my floppies... my TMNT 5 1/4" floppies still work to this day) but I know others aren't so good. I prefer to load my Amiga games from whdload (I have a CF Kit on my 1200) to try and keep the floppies I own in good condition.

I do miss those loaders on the C64, though. By the time I got the internet, I had already given up on my C64, so I never got to really experience the Demo scene. Magazines in the US rarely included cover disks, and demo sharing didn't take off big in the US. Those loaders are like the closest I got to the demo scene. Incredibly cool shit, though.

I would kill for a big C64 cart collection, though. I've seen a few C64GS for sale on ebay before, but they were always going for way more than I would want to spend considering the number of game carts released, and how hard they are to find.

[gamevet]

Growing up, I knew 1 person who had an Amiga, I'm pretty sure it was a 500. This was probably around 1992. I went over to his place one day and he showed me Lemmings. Until I bought my own amiga 19 years later, I never saw a single other Amiga. I knew tons of people who had C64s, or Macs, or IBM Compatible DOS PCs... not a single Amiga. And I wasn't a regular PC user, I was a card carrying member of HAL-PC, the biggest computer club in the city. I went to weekly meetings, went to swaps, lan parties for doom, trade shows. I got the internet in 89, and was active on BBSes during the Amiga's heyday... never saw anyone talk about it outside of Deluxe Paint. No magazines carried it, not even computer magazines here in the US.

I had PC gaming friends that knew what an Amiga was. One of my friends said that the Amiga was nothing but graphics and sound.

It's gotta be strange to someone in the UK to hear all this, but really, the Amiga didn't make a noticeable dent here in the US. And I was actively looking.

EDIT: And if you think the Amiga was poorly represented in the US, then you should check out the ST. I have NEVER seen one, ever. Did the ST even get a US release?

The Amiga and ST were carried in electronics superstores (chain stores) like Federated. The first time (@ 1987) I'd seen an Amiga and the ST at retail was in a Federated in Phoenix. I was not impressed by the ST and thought it looked like the C-128 with more memory. I often rented Amiga titles from a little store called Floppy Joe's (payed a $5 restocking fee) that also carried Mac titles.

In the US, computers were originally C64s. Then they were Macs. Then they were IBM Compatible PCs. And they've been that way ever since, with the occasional apple product gaining some notoriety. PCs, here in the US, have really never had a vibrant, thriving gaming market. If you wanted games, you bought a console. Today, as in right now, is probably the most healthy the PC gaming industry has ever been in the US. More people play PC games today than ever before, and that's thanks in very large part to Steam.

The Apple IIe and Atari computers were well known. The Apple IIe was known as the best computer out there, but the price was just insane.

The 90's were the best time to be a PC gamer. The addition of CD technology for the PC had a huge impact on the industry, and the open market for IBM clones made it that much easier to join in. The current state of PC gaming isn't exactly bright, when you consider that most of the new games on the platform, are ports from the consoles. How many PC exclusives have there been in the last 5 or 6 years, that really made an impact?

It's not a stretch to say that Steam saved PC gaming in the US.

It's revitalized the PC market, but it hasn't led to innovation. Skyrim should have been a PC showcase, but instead, it's a DX9 title with slightly improved graphics for the PC. Until we see a huge amount of dedicated support from the big-name publishers, the PC market isn't going to be the place for big name titles.

Is that true for both the ST and Amiga, and in what time period? From what I understand, the Amiga had a much larger market share in the US than the ST, especially after 1987. (not that that means that it had larger volumes in the US than Europe, but that if anything, it would have been the Amiga -and not ST- that sold more comparably to Europe in the US -in volumes, not share)

The ST was pretty much dead, from day 1 in the US. The Amiga stole the show, while the ST sort of showed up and hit the exit.

[TheSonicRetard]

revitalized the PC market, but it hasn't led to innovation. Skyrim should have been a PC showcase, but instead, it's a DX9 title with slightly improved graphics for the PC. Until we see a huge amount of dedicated support from the big-name publishers, the PC market isn't going to be the place for big name titles.

A) Innovation isn't inherently good, innovation is the lazy man's metric for quality. It's a false dichotomy.
B) How can you claim Steam hasn't innovated when it directly lead to the indie-game revolution?
C) You're ignoring the number of game which are made for the PC primarily, THEN ported to consoles. There are no more exclusives, save for first party titles. The PC gaming library today is bigger than it's ever been before. More big name publishers support PC gaming than ever in the history of the medium.

[kool kitty89]

I've re-checked all the info I have on Amiga, and to be honest it all seems pretty reliable (moreso than even I initially thought), the worldwide figure of 5.2 million total was given specifically by someone working for Commodore Germany, and the 1.6 million figure for Germany comes from the same person, British figures are all over magazines, and whilst British mags can occasionally be iffy for overseas information, they tend to be pretty reliable for native stuff, and two separate magazines have indicated British sales as 1.5 million, that means that Britain + Germany alone made up well over half of total sales.

And that's not factoring in France, Scandinavia, and Italy.

I haven't got a huge amount of experience talking to Italians on the net, but I have managed a little, through Google translate (with limited success), and a lot of what they've said indicate that the console changeover may not have actually happened in Italy until later (ie they felt that the Amiga may have trashed the Mega Drive and SNES in Italian sales), British magazines have Italian sales at 600,000, to 700,000 (which would back up the idea that it was very popular there).

France seems much lower (I would say indications now are actually that the ST may have completely obliterated the Amiga in French sales, but the ST sources I've seen aren't really that reliable to be honest). I'm thinking there probably isn't much Amiga sales coming from France.

Amiga was huge in Scandinavian countries, but sales don't ever seem to be very big for those markets anyway, so a big hit there isn't going to amount to huge sales figures (probably respectable though)

Realistically I don't think the North America sales can possibly be higher than 1.5 million, in fact its probably closer to 1 million (UK magazines have US sales at lower than 1 million).

Hmm, interesting.
Any idea on the ST sales in the US? (I see a lot of comments about the ST being a non-starter compared to the Amiga and a few to the contrary -mixed anecdotal accounts too, but few actual sales figures for the US)

What's the footprint like in the US these days? is it more common to find Amiga's than Master Systems?

From personal anecdotal experience . . . the SMS is much more common than the Amiga today in terms of finding "in the wild" or at specialty game stores (or ebay) and usually much cheaper too.

However, there's the issue of how many people threw their old computers away (or recycled them) rather than selling/giving them away, and the same for old consoles. And regional sales, of course.
It seems that old computer hardware/software is much more often trashed than console hardware/software, and also much less appealing in the retro gaming scene in general. (you don't see 20+ year old PC hardware/software around very often either, and that was many times more common than most other home computers)

The only actual store/warehouse I know of locally that carries any Amiga (or ST) stuff is Weird Stuff Warehouse (which caters far more to new and old PC hardware or all sorts, but does have a handful of other home computer stuff). And that's where Apolloboy got his Amiga 500 recently. (and where he got the parts to build his Pentium 133 DOS gaming PC)

I kind of wonder if this also happened with the 7800 (trashing vs selling/trading/donating) since they seem to be less common than Master Systems too.

In the US, computers were originally C64s. Then they were Macs. Then they were IBM Compatible PCs. And they've been that way ever since, with the occasional apple product gaining some notoriety. PCs, here in the US, have really never had a vibrant, thriving gaming market. If you wanted games, you bought a console. Today, as in right now, is probably the most healthy the PC gaming industry has ever been in the US. More people play PC games today than ever before, and that's thanks in very large part to Steam.

That's not really accurate.

In the US, computers were:

PET/TRS-80/Apple II/Atari8-bit/CoCo/VIC-20 from the late 70s into the early 80s (along with various CP/M machines) with the Apple II being among the most well-respected as a "serious" computer for business and such, though games also became significant, but the Atari 8-bit was easily the gaming computer to have prior to the C64.
The IBM PC arrived in 1981 and relatively quickly became a top contender in the business/professional/scientific markets (competing largely with the Apple II and various CP/M machines) and the C64 arrived in 1982 with a highly aggressive price point and very capable graphics and sound (the A8 still was no slouch by comparison, but Atari marketing didn't end up competing well) and the C64 really took off in 1983 during the price war (and was very strong through the mid 80s, though sales slowed down in the late 80s).

But back to the PC: in the first few years, it was mainly just IBM with the PC and PC/XT catering to a relatively high-priced business/professional market somewhat like Apple, but in considerable volumes nevertheless (soon outstripping Apple's sales). But around 1983 you also had clone PCs coming onto the market, and by '84 there was a variety of different clone machines out there (including the relatively competitively priced Tandy 1000 -also with better graphics and sound than the average PC -basically a beefed up and corrected PCJr clone). That competition led to much more competitive pricing, more variety in hardware to choose from, and huge numbers of sales, with PC compatibles soon becoming the majority market share which would only grow more dominant with time.

The Mac was always niche in the US, it was well behind the Apple II's sales when it launched and much further behind PC and C64 sales . . . it also didn't offer very compelling hardware/features for the price. And the Amiga and ST also sold in niche volumes in the US (considerably lower market share than the Mac from what I can gather)

By the late 1980s, PC-compatibles were THE mainstream computer platforms in the US market, though it wasn't until around 1989/1990 that they really started being good for games. (and not until around 1987/88 that they were at least decent -though the Tandy 1000 was pretty decent prior to that . . . for games that actually catered to it)