Atari video games (Jaideep Venkatesan)

Slate Senior Editor Michael Agger has an interesting article about the Atari 2600, Montfort based on a new book by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam. Montfort and Bogost are professors in Media Studies who have written the first book in what is to be a series on technology platforms. Reading about Atari certainly brought back memories of playing Combat, Yars Revenge, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is amazing how Atari started the home video game industry, was seemingly successful in the early 1980's, only to fizzle out and then watch Nintendo flourish and take over the industry.

Agger doesn't really explain how Atari failed, other than to say:

"A lot of us started playing games on home computers. A bunch of big-time cartridges, like the infamous E.T., were huge busts, and retailers became gun-shy about ordering more titles and sent the ones they had on the shelves back. The returns bankrupted third-party game developers and fueled an industry consensus that video games were a fad—a toy whose time had passed. In two years, Nintendo would prove everyone very wrong."

It would be intriguing if Atari suffered, at least in part, because of the availability of home computers, a general purpose technology that allowed access to some interesting games but nothing like was available on single purpose devices such as Atari or Nintendo. The video game industry eventually evolved to use both general purpose PCs or Apples and single purpose devices such as the Xbox or the Wii. So I suspect that the availability of home computers wasn't really what did Atari in, but further investigation is needed.