7. Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong was a successful Arcade game of a small Japanese manufacturer, Nintendo. The game saw the first appearance of Mario. In the game Mario had to jump the construction sites to protect his girlfriend from Donkey Kong. Atari turned down the offer from Nintendo to license Donkey Kong as they thought the asking price was too high. At that time Atari had an 88% profit margin on the cartridges Atari was making and Nintendo was asking for $2 per cartridge. Nintendo later sold the rights of Donkey Kong to Atari’s competitor, ColecoVision. It was a huge success. But Atari still have 75% share in the home video game market and was bringing significant revenues to Warner Communications.
8. Fall of Atari
The problems for Atari started with the launch of Atari 5200. The problems with Atari 5200 were that it had a joy stick which was difficult to operate and a numeric key pad whose keys usually come …show more content…
By 1974 there were 100,000 pong games in the market of which only one tenth were produced by Atari. Bushnell decided not to patent any of his ideas. If he would have done that the gaming industry would not have been same as we see it today.
Atari made another product disruption when they came up with A2600 in the year 1977. It was the first home video game having removable cartridges.
They tried to sustain their growth by:
• Bringing the home video game version of the popular Arcade games
• Getting royalty from independent game designers making A2600 cartridges
After Bushnell was fired in 1979, Atari never took game designing seriously. Programmers were not given any credit for the games they were making. Several programmers at Atari left their jobs to start their own firm.
Activision was formed in 1979 by Atari designers and in 1982 it replaced Atari as the fastest growing company in US history. Activision later went on to create games like Call of
Donkey Kong was a successful Arcade game of a small Japanese manufacturer, Nintendo. The game saw the first appearance of Mario. In the game Mario had to jump the construction sites to protect his girlfriend from Donkey Kong. Atari turned down the offer from Nintendo to license Donkey Kong as they thought the asking price was too high. At that time Atari had an 88% profit margin on the cartridges Atari was making and Nintendo was asking for $2 per cartridge. Nintendo later sold the rights of Donkey Kong to Atari’s competitor, ColecoVision. It was a huge success. But Atari still have 75% share in the home video game market and was bringing significant revenues to Warner Communications.
8. Fall of Atari
The problems for Atari started with the launch of Atari 5200. The problems with Atari 5200 were that it had a joy stick which was difficult to operate and a numeric key pad whose keys usually come …show more content…
By 1974 there were 100,000 pong games in the market of which only one tenth were produced by Atari. Bushnell decided not to patent any of his ideas. If he would have done that the gaming industry would not have been same as we see it today.
Atari made another product disruption when they came up with A2600 in the year 1977. It was the first home video game having removable cartridges.
They tried to sustain their growth by:
• Bringing the home video game version of the popular Arcade games
• Getting royalty from independent game designers making A2600 cartridges
After Bushnell was fired in 1979, Atari never took game designing seriously. Programmers were not given any credit for the games they were making. Several programmers at Atari left their jobs to start their own firm.
Activision was formed in 1979 by Atari designers and in 1982 it replaced Atari as the fastest growing company in US history. Activision later went on to create games like Call of