RE: [stella] Superchip?

Subject: RE: [stella] Superchip?
From: kurt.woloch@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 11:34:19 +0200
On Oct. 15th, Piero Cavina wrote:

>Who knows why they didn't put the Superchip in other games..

In early 1984, I read a review of "Space Shuttle" by Activision, which said
that they also had used the Superchip there (which seems not to have been
true).

On another note, in 1984 when Activision released Pitfall II here, the video
game market was already breaking, and everyone switched over to Commodore
64's and (rarely) other home computers, which had the following advantages
over the Atari 2600:

1. The games were cheaper (at least when bought on tape) - River Raid on
tape for the 64 here was about half the price of River Raid for the 2600.
2. The games had better graphics, sound and complexity than the ones for the
video games, even if they were stored on 16 K modules (while games loaded
from disk or tape could be more than 50 K long).

When Activision put out "Ghostbusters" for the 64 and other home computers,
they announced that in future they'd develop their games for home computers
first and then convert some of them to video games. From that point on, I
think only few games made that step, and video games, at least until the
Sega Master System and the NES appeared some years later, became some sort
of "sell-out". Prices rapidly dropped, and I think at the low price you had
to sell the carts then, it could have been too costly for Activision to
include the Superchip in further carts they did - aside from the fact that
they didn't do much more.

(I could go into more detail about the early Commodore 64 games and the
transition from video games, but I think it's out of topic here.)

With love (and many games to compare)

Kurt Woloch

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