A Question about Atari

[NeutralMunchHotel]

Ok, the story goes that I went to a friends house at the weekend, and he had a disk of Atari games. We chose to play SwordQuest: Waterworld. Story short, it made no sense. We went into a room, there was a crown (I think) and a door. We picked up the crown, walked through the door, and had to swim through a lot of jellyfish. This seems like it might make sense, but playing it just seemed stupid.

Games from the NES onwards all make sense, but these just didn't. So my question is this - I was never old enough to play Atari games or anything of the sort. When you played it did it seem like crap, or was it actually fun?

 

[wolfy098]

... dunno didn't start till the SNES

 

[Beltaine]

Atari was the very beginnings of the video game era. Some games were great and others were complete and utter failures.

Not like today's standards of good v. crap. Not even by a long shot. A lot of Atari titles were released that were just unplayable messes.

However, we didn't have multiple consoles with hyper-realistic graphics connected to the world via high-speed internet to compare our games too either.

 

[Ashryd]

NES onwards make sense? Are you kidding. There are tons of really bad games that make no sense on the NES. Try looking up Something Awful's weekly segment 'Rom Pit'. That's full of those kind of games and many are for NES.

 

[squid5580]

Ok, the story goes that I went to a friends house at the weekend, and he had a disk of Atari games. We chose to play SwordQuest: Waterworld. Story short, it made no sense. We went into a room, there was a crown (I think) and a door. We picked up the crown, walked through the door, and had to swim through a lot of jellyfish. This seems like it might make sense, but playing it just seemed stupid.

Games from the NES onwards all make sense, but these just didn't. So my question is this - I was never old enough to play Atari games or anything of the sort. When you played it did it seem like crap, or was it actually fun?

Same with today some games were better than others. I spent a lot of my childhood playing Atari and Coleco and they were fun for the most part. I wasn't to worried about finishing the game (cuz most never ended) and just enjoyed playing. It was good til Nintendo came along.

 

[Avaholic03]

Back then, you actually needed an imagination to get immersed into games. Thankfully modern games have eliminated that need. They just show us exactly what they want us to see in stunning 1080p. Thank god...those old games hurt my brain.

 

[Quaidis]

You think Atari games were bad you should have experienced the Intellivision or the Vectrex gaming systems. That was some akward shit. Was fun back in the day though.

I agree.

Most games back then were very simplistic. Somewhere in there Atari had a major rush of games out of their one and only department (which was a small room consisting of about twelve people). You could only do so much with little blocks and coming out with five games a week was implausible, but they were told to do it.

Towards the later end of that era, people saw 'Buy one game for such and such a price' on one shelf, then 'buy 50 games for the same price as that other guy!' on another. They thought all games were similar and went for the 50 deal. It didn't matter to them that the games were absolute crap.

And don't get me wrong, Nintendo had a similar escapade of very bad games. They took one very simplistic idea, such as Mario or Metroid, and either Nintendo or other very small, unnamed developers at the time would make near identical games on the same concept. The problem was that the other developers would put absolutely no thought into it and the end result was some severely watered down crap that either didn't play well, was terrible, or didn't play at all.

 

[NeutralMunchHotel]

So what you're saying is that back when Atari was popular games were little more than the '100-in-1' games that you plug into your TV now?

 

[squid5580]

So what you're saying is that back when Atari was popular games were little more than the '100-in-1' games that you plug into your TV now?

Ya that about sums it up. Although some of those plug and play games look alot better than Atari's did.