At 03:16 AM 4/19/00 -0700, you wrote:
It seems the most popular system is never the most
advanced one. The Playstation, if I remember the
That's not necessarily true. A game system succeeds because of a
combination of factors:
1) Pricepoint
2) Hardware
3) Game quality
4) Game variety
5) Marketing
Pulling this back into the 2600 era, the 2600's main competition on launch
was the Bally Astrocade. The Fairchild was already a year old and was
clearly on the way out. The Astrocade was a true peer and had marketed
itself as a bridge between the console world and home computers, like a
mini color TRS-80 or PET.
Because it had a lot more hardware, the Astrocade came in at a much higher
pricepoint, and the original game offerings were mostly glorified pong
games whereas the first round of 2600 titles exhibited more variety and
creativity. The Astrocade could have developed a NEO-GEO-like niche had
the original titles been things like Wizard of Wor or Galaxians, but those
games hadn't even arrived in the arcades yet. The hardware had outpaced
game evolution. So it was a little hard to see the distinction between the
hardware based on the first batch of games.
By the time game design had matured, the 2600 had amassed a larger number
of titles. But the industry in general was pretty flat until Space
Invaders, and after that, it was all over for the Astrocade.
Certainly along the way Bally had a chance to get more, better games out
there, develop better marketing strategies, and so on, but they
didn't. They wound up selling off the rights to the system, prematurely I
think. Nevertheless, they had more of a chance for a longer period of time
than most Next Gen consoles to succeed.
In fact, until the SNES took the crown, I don't
recall it ever happening. The Intellivision was
certainly more advanced than the Atari 2600, but the
VCS still ran rings around them.
Advanced is a relative term. Intellivision (and Astrocade) hardware was
not optimized for action gaming the way Atari hardware was. Atari hardware
on paper had more modest specs, it had the right specs for the types of
games people wanted to play. Misdirected hardware is largely worthless on
a console. Sega Saturn was the most recent casualty, as it had an
overabundance of hardware aimed at 2D rather than 3D. The Playstation
provided exactly what the public expected as a benchmark in performance at
the time. The 2600 is one case where less was more in console design.
The Intellivision did not do everything the 2600 did and more. It had only
a 16 color palette. It could display all of them at once (I believe) but
you wound up with games with a lack of color variety. That was one of the
reasons I got an Atari 8-bit over a C=64 or an Apple II. Atari machines
always chose to up the color choices at the expense of max# of colors per
scanline. You can't port Enduro or any other 2600 game that features color
gradients because the Intellivision can not do it. BTW, the Genesis also
suffered in the color department vs. the SNES which must have seemed okay
at the time but really bit them later with things like Mortal
Kombat--dither city.
Also, the 2600 hardware demanded that objects be updated every 1/60th of a
second. It was theoretically possible to skip processing, but I bet only a
handful of games intentionally make the sprites move choppy to save some
"think" inbetween frames. The only real choppy animation is when you do
horizontal scrolling like on Vanguard, because of the coarse resolution of
the playfield. But if you watch the smooth movement of the birds in Demon
Attack, or the planes in Radar Lock, or the movements in Stargate, you'll
see the 2600's greatest strength: Smooth action gaming. Other systems put
a hardware layer in front of the programmer which at times limited how
often sprites could be updated. Or the systems may have had coarser
sprites and/or sprites that could not be positioned with 160x200
accuracy. It appeared as if the Intellivision had blockier 160x100 sprites
vs. the single-scanline 160x200 potential in the 2600. Is that true? The
Intellivision may have had better raw specs than most games displayed
during most of its lifespan, but the fact is that most Intellivision games
featured high resolution, mostly static backgrounds and a limited amount of
animation, with a limited number of basic colors on the entire
screen. This appealed to a certain kind of gamer, and sure, I missed not
having AD&D on the 2600, but it was not the core demographic at the
time. The 2600 featured very colorful displays with more max colors per
screen and frenetic action.
Glenn Saunders - Producer - Cyberpunks Entertainment
Personal homepage: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1698
Cyberpunks Entertainment: http://cyberpunks.uni.cc
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