This sort of business model may work for the film industry, where, to make a lot of money, a lot of money must first be spent. debacle, 1 game publishers have remained committed to blockbuster, big-budget games that are heavy on hype and light on innovation: from 1994’s Shaq Fu, in which Shaquille O’Neal fought Egyptian mummies in Japan to 1999’s Superman: The New Adventures (aka “Superman 64”), which was so shoddily designed that the Man of Steel frequently wandered off the world of the game and into a black abyss to 2007’s Lair, which would have worked beautifully as a short animated film about dragons but paid very little attention to pesky things like game play or level design. Video games had ruined my birthday.Īnd not, I suspect, mine alone. Within three minutes, I realized that the game, which focused on E.T.’s efforts to fall into and extricate himself from large holes in the ground, was an utter disaster. When it finally arrived, I plugged it into the console and, my hands trembling, began to play. My birthday is in early November, but I couldn’t imagine any other gift I wanted more in a rare feat of forbearance, I told my parents that I would wait for more than a month for the game to come out. Early that year, the company announced it would release by Christmas a game based on Steven Spielberg’s E.T. I glimpsed that sickness back in 1982, when I was six and Atari was still the biggest name in the video game market. That is, what we’re witnessing now is not only Atari’s requiem, but a reminder that the ailments that weakened and finally killed Atari are still rampant. Many of the large corporations currently leading the video game industry are making all of the same mistakes that toppled Atari some three decades ago, consigning it to oblivion. The real tragedy here, though, isn’t about the past. To see it filing for bankruptcy was to see a part of our past wither: Atari was like a childhood bedroom we no longer occupied, but whose mere existence comforted us. More importantly, it taught us how to play electronically, forming our habits and blistering our thumbs. It introduced us to Space Invaders and Missile Command and Pitfall. Assume that no correcting entries were madeĪrmstrong Inc.is a calendar-year corporation.For those of us born in the 1970s, last week’s news of Atari’s demise came as a sentimental shockwave.
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