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Fall Of Atari

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From 1972 to 1983, the video game giant Atari rose and fell. It fell due to a combination of factors, including bad tradeoffs, a surplus issue, and a deficiency in entrepreneurial ability. The Founder Nolan Bushnell sold Atari to the wrong company, administrators tended to overestimate their game and console demand, and finally Atari lost its founder and best programmers. With all these factors, Atari closed it’s door for the final time in 1983. When Atari was created, it started off with success in merely arcade games, but the founder wanted more. The founder, Nolan Bushnell, along with his programmer Al Alcorn, created the hit Pong his Atari arcade games on June 28th, 1972. With this hit, Bushnell became ambitious, and wanted to create …show more content…

Many of them were pushed out of Time Warner's, and with them went Atari’s Entrepreneurial ability. These programmers, outraged by Time Warner’s refusal to produce a new console and small compensation for their efforts,, created their own gaming company called Activision. They created games in direct competition to Atari, which gave consumers the freedom of choice. There was now a market for home video games. Previously Atari was the main producer of home consoles, so their revenues were based off of high priced games. When Activision was creating games that were better, due to better programmers, Atari was losing their profit margins. As time went by, more competitors came to the market with cutting edge sound and graphics, like ColecoVision and Intellivision. Atari’s programmers could not keep up with the quality demanded on their old 2600 console, which ultimately led to the company’s …show more content…

The company came out with two games that stood out as complete failures: Pac Man and E.T. Pac Man, a popular arcade game, was to be released in 1982 for their VCS console. It was highly anticipated, but the game did impress consumers the way they thought they would be. Atari made 12 million cartridges, but only 7 million were bought. The game that truly buried Atari was the E.T. game. They hired Steven Spielberg to create it in six weeks, when it normally took six months to make a game, so that the game would be on the shelves for Christmas. The game was horrific, most of the copies were returned by both retailers and consumers. about 2.5 to 3.5 million games were left unsold, and furthermore, 3.5 to 4.5 million games were returned. All of the copies were dumped in a New Mexico landfill never to be played again.When Atari finally decided to make a new console, it was too late, the console was nothing compared to the competitor’s. With the surplus of games and consoles, Atari had lost $536 million. Finally, by 1983, Atari went bankrupt. In a landfill in New Mexico, Atari’s final game still hides below a mountain of dirt. Millions of E.T. cartridges were buried, along with the company. Due to poor decision making in the company, overproduction, and lack of programming ability, Atari fell to its rising competitors in

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